Review: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Feb. 27, 2023, Climate Pledge Arena, Seattle

Two weeks shy of seven years. That’s how long it’s been since I last saw Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert. To say “a lot has happened” since then would be an understatement, so I won’t go there. But here we were on a wintry Monday night in Seattle, in a sold-out Climate Pledge Arena, me and 17,000-ish of my people, carrying all of our memories and expectations of Springsteen shows with us. It’s a lot of weight to place on an artist, our need to be taken back to the magic of the epic, blow-out shows we saw in our youth, whichever decade that happened to be. But at 73, Springsteen has figured out just how much weight he can carry.

The Seattle show, like the others in this 2023 tour, was basically a greatest hits concert, 27 songs, two hours and forty five minutes of a carefully assembled emotional arc encompassing all the things that Bruce fans need from an E Street Band show. The signatures were there (“Rosalita,” “Born to Run,” “Thunder Road”, “Glory Days”) and the anthems (“Land of Hope and Dreams,” “The Promised Land,” “The Rising”). Springsteen clowned as usual with guitarist/foil Steve Van Zandt, and posed with saxophonist Jake Clemons in stances evoking the dynamic of Springsteen’s relationship with Jake’s uncle, Clarence Clemons — except now Bruce is the wise old soul master and Jake is the adoring student. House-lights-up, dance party atmosphere down the homestretch? Check. A good representation of new-ish songs from Letter to You, the 2020 late-career masterpiece album that never got its own tour due to the pandemic? Yes, finally. There were a couple of tour premieres in “Land of Hope and Dreams” (which I expected) and “Trapped,” Springsteen’s Jimmy Cliff cover (first played and recorded on the Born in the U.S.A. tour) which I honestly did not expect, and which sounded flat-out majestic augmented by a four-piece horn section (plus Jake) and a choir of three backup singers.

What wasn’t there: no handmade-sign song requests from the audience, no fans invited up for “Dancing in the Dark,” no audibles called in a departure from the setlist, and thankfully, blessedly, no little kids brought up from the pit to sing “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day.” All of those things may come as the tour rolls on, but I gotta say, I didn’t miss any of them. (Well, maybe an audible would have been nice.) As a result, this show didn’t have the unpredictable, rambling quality of previous shows, but it was a keeper all the same. Lordy, did Springsteen and the E Street core and their added friends look and sound fired up! The 17-piece (give or take a revolving door of Covid absences) band is firing on all cylinders. The big band brought a jazzy elasticity to “Kitty’s Back” and “E Street Shuffle” (Max Weinberg has never looked so happy onstage as during his drum-off with percussionist Anthony Almonte on the latter song) and a joyous bluesy stomp to “Johnny 99,” with Springsteen and the five horn players parading New Orleans style across the lip of the stage. And most of all, this tour has a structure that helps to tell a story, the story that Springsteen has been telling since his first album. It’s all about growin’ up.

If you grow up enough, of course, you grow old. Spending a year doing Springsteen on Broadway, a summational, confessional solo show adapted from his autobiography Born to Run, seems to have helped Springsteen figure out how to give E Street Band fans what we need from him while carving out room to take what he needs from us. And I think what he needs from us is commiseration. Growing up (and old) can be terrifying and depressing. It brings loss, pain, ghosts, all of which are represented in the current show by the songs “Ghosts,” “Wrecking Ball,” “Last Man Standing” and “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” and by the videos of Clarence Clemons and original E Street Band organist Danny Federici that have floated above the audience during “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” in every show since their passings.

And there were ghosts among us in the audience, too, the friends and loved ones we’ve lost over the years and carry with us as we move through our lives. To grow old is to say goodbye over and over. Springsteen articulated this in his introduction to “Last Man Standing,” which he wrote after the 2018 passing of his friend George Theiss, with whom he formed his first teenage band, the Castiles, leaving Springsteen as the lone surviving member. Springsteen performed “Last Man Standing” solo on acoustic guitar, with a trumpeter taking up the repeated melody line at the end, its lonesome blare conjuring “Taps.” Then the band reassembled, seamlessly launching into “Backstreets,” and the inspired pairing of these two songs about friendship and loss broke the show open in a catharsis of grief.

Springsteen has never been afraid to display big, unabashed emotions in his performances. Those big emotions are part of what drew a lot of us to him in the first place. You go to a Springsteen show for the emotional liberation, whether happy or sad. You go to let yourself go, knowing that you’re among friends. And that communion and kinship is why you keep going to see him, come hell or high ticket prices. “Backstreets” endures as one of Springsteen’s most gigantically emotional songs, an operatic, melodramatic piano-driven ballad powered by its betrayed narrator’s howls of longing. One of two set pieces of the Born to Run album (the other is “Jungleland”), it’s a song steeped in the ache of youth, a time when the world revolves around you and every rejection is the end of the world. When Springsteen played it live during the 1970s, trying on his whippet-thin, smoldering Scorsese-misfit-hero stage persona, the song evolved into theater, psychodrama even; he used to insert a monologue into it, known on bootlegs as “Sad Eyes,” that could have served as his Actors Studio audition. In “Sad Eyes,” Springsteen’s character talk-sings directly to an old girlfriend, using strands of lyrics that would eventually be recorded as “Drive All Night” on The River. He starts out softly, cajoling and begging her to come back, slowly working himself up on some versions into a startling rejected lover’s rage, screaming “You lied!” over and over before breaking into the climax of “Backstreets.”

On “Backstreets” at the Seattle show Monday night, Springsteen resurrected the “Sad Eyes” interlude in form, but not content. Instead of an agitated plea to a former lover, he spoke with tenderness to a departed friend or loved one, paraphrasing lines from “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” another lovely song of mortality from Letter to You. He told the departed soul that he has their books and their records and their picture in a frame, but all the rest “I keep right here,” patting his heart and quietly repeating “right here.” And then “Backstreets” resumed and the lyrics about how the characters “swore we’d live forever” hit like a gut punch. In 1978, “Backstreets” was about melodrama and self-centeredness; in 2023, it’s about making peace with ourselves and our ghosts. That’s what it means to grow up.

I don’t want to give the impression with all this talk of death and grief that this E Street Band tour is a downer. Far from it. I think we all learned from the past few years how quickly life can turn upside down. I have never appreciated a Springsteen show more, and I think the Climate Pledge Arena audience, pumped, primed and losing its collective mind, would agree. So what if I’ve heard most of these songs a gazillion times live — shoot them directly into my veins, please. Joy is as big an emotion as despair. Or, as Springsteen tells us in “Badlands,” it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive. There’s a TikTok video going around of Springsteen touring Seattle’s Pike Place Market (home of the famed salmon-tossing fishmongers) during his free time in town. Clad in a sensible puffer jacket and a flat cap, Springsteen has a deer in the headlights look as he stands with arms outstretched waiting for the throw. But when he makes the catch and that salmon plops safely into his arms, he gives a yelp of utter delight. As an old lady myself, I can relate. Sometimes, you just need to take joy in the dumbest little things. You have to catch that fish when it comes at you.

©Joyce Millman, 2023

Special Delivery

Bruce Springsteen on the cover of “Letter to You” / Photo ©Danny Clinch

In the summer of the plague year, my other half and I moved from San Mateo, California, where we had lived for 33 years, to Seattle, Washington, to be in the same city as our only child. We loved the Bay Area. We had friends there, family, purpose. But the pandemic came and with it, the clear, overriding imperative to reunite our family and weather this together. We sold the house that we had lived in for 17 years and embarked on a surreal 13-hour road trip on eerily empty highways. Every gas station rest stop felt like coronavirus Russian Roulette. The anxiety of feeling COVID lurking all around us was so overwhelming that I think I was in a trance for most of the drive.

And now we’re in Seattle in a rented house where I feel like a guest, where I miss the Bay Area’s singular quality of light. “I left my heart in San Francisco” is not just a line from a song. The positive: our family is intact. But I feel neither here nor there. Sometimes, the body memory of living in the same place for 33 years is overpowering; I swear I could walk outside and smell the roses in my old backyard, or drive over to the grocery store where all the clerks knew us. I think too much about all the things we used to do in the Bay Area, and how, when we did them for the last time, pre-COVID, we didn’t know it was the last time. The last Giants game. The last walk by the ocean in Half Moon Bay. The last Saturday night on Clement Street for books at Green Apple and dessert at Toy Boat. I feel like a spirit trapped between worlds who can’t move on. I’m trying to love Seattle, but the better part of me is still in San Mateo.

II. Somewhere high and hard and loud

My story is far from unique and far from awful. Normal life stopped for everyone in March 2020. This disease has been catastrophic for millions of others. I’m just offering my story, for what it’s worth, to explain why Bruce Springsteen’s new album “Letter to You” hits me the way it does.

The leadoff track, “One Minute You’re Here,” is an unexpected opener to Springsteen’s first studio album with the E Street Band in six years. It’s a short, quiet song — a prelude, really — that begins on an image of a “big black train coming down the track.” The train is one of Springsteen’s favorite metaphors; on “Land of Hope and Dreams,” the train carrying saints and sinners, losers and winners did triple duty representing the E Street Band, rock and roll and America. On “One Minute You’re Here,” that locomotive is both a rush of memory and life itself speeding toward its final destination.

The song’s production is airy and clean, no extraneous frills. Springsteen’s voice is front and center, big, clear and more intimate-sounding than it has been on a studio album in years. The song is a meditation on mortality conveyed through a succession of reveries — boyhood at the end of summer, young love in autumn, an ominously starless sky “black as stone.” All of it is suffused by the sense of imminent endings, impermanence, the fragility of existence. “Baby, baby, baby, I’m so alone” goes the bridge, and, in the end, aren’t we all?

“One Minute” was written before COVID came. But like the rest of “Letter to You” (the album was recorded in five days in late 2019), it lands as a song for these lonesome and death-shadowed times. We’re all alone with our thoughts too much these days, and so, when I first heard “One Minute,” I connected it to my own particular existential circumstance of living here while longing for there. The way Springsteen’s mind jumps from memory to memory, I’m convinced the title phrase means, “One minute you’re here, fully present; the next minute, you’re gone to some other place and time in your mind.”

And that reading of the title, or misreading, cracked the rest of “Letter to You” wide open for me. This is another summational project from Springsteen, but unlike his Broadway show and his last solo album, “Western Stars,” he brings the E Street Band along on his deep dive into memory, revisiting his life in rock and roll, the choices made and the losses incurred along the way. Two exquisite guitar rockers, “Last Man Standing” and “Ghosts,” pay tribute to bandmates long gone from this world and convey the unbridled communal joy of playing music together. Three songs — “Janey Needs a Shooter,” “If I Was the Priest” and “Song for Orphans” — were written and discarded by Springsteen in the ’70’s.

The journey through the past is not chronological (sometimes it isn’t even logical), but “Letter to You” is a thematically cohesive record. It’s also a stunningly generous one, Springsteen’s generosity extending not just to the E Street Band, who are in their element playing live on the record, but also to his younger self. All of Springsteen’s recent soul-searching has come to fruition. It takes an artist who knows who he is to be able to make a record like “Letter to You,” an artist unafraid to revisit and honor the headspace he was in when he made the music of his earlier days.

This is not a nostalgia piece. Springsteen at 71 isn’t trying to be Springsteen at 21 or 31. On “Letter to You,” Springsteen brilliantly demonstrates, and embraces, the idea that we contain ourselves at all of the ages we ever were, right now. The record is a celebration of life in full and oh how we need it in one of the darkest years humanity has ever known. Resurgent and sure-footed, “Letter to You” is Springsteen’s late-middle (early-late?) period masterpiece.

“One Minute You’re Here” is like a slow dissolve in a movie signaling a flashback. And then, on the second song (the title track), the E Street Band kicks in and hearing them feels like home. Springsteen and the ESB haven’t played live together in what seems like ages, and hasn’t cut an album live in studio like this (some songs were done in one or two takes) in longer than that. Springsteen and co-producer Ron Aniello refrain from the layers of strings and samples they’ve used on previous albums. Songs like the thundering, joyful “Ghosts” (the moment when the whole band shouts “By the end of the set we leave no one alive!” slays me) is as close to the stop-on-a-dime sharpness of the ESB live as has ever been captured on a studio release (you’d have to go back to parts of “The River” to match it). The band sounds big as life and blazing with purpose.

The clarity and intimacy of the sound is the reason a song like “Letter to You” can transcend corniness and deliver straightforward humility. The “You” of the title is us, Springsteen’s audience: “The things I found out through hard times and good/ I wrote ’em all down in ink and blood/ Dug deep in my soul and signed my name True/ and sent it in my letter to you.” Fans have always felt Springsteen speaks for and to them; this song makes it clear that Springsteen values our part in the conversation. (Springsteen’s extraordinarily personal pandemic DJ show on Sirius radio “From My Home to Yours” sound like an outgrowth of “Letter to You”.)

It’s probably the pandemic isolation talking, but, to me, this album feels like the barrier between artist and audience, and between listeners, is gone. It feels like we’ve all materialized “somewhere high and hard and loud” (as the chorus of “Last Man Standing” goes) to meet at a justifying, death-defying E Street Band show — to be sanctified, as Reverend Springsteen says, in a rock and roll baptism.

Just don’t think about whether live music will ever happen again and you’ll be fine.

III. Somewhere deep into the heart of the crowd

The loss of live music makes the centerpiece of the record, “House of a Thousand Guitars,” almost unbearably poignant. Again, this song pre-dates the pandemic, but it’s eerily on-point for a time in which we can only burrow into memories of finding our tribe at a live show and feeling the music together: “So wake and shake off your troubles my friend/ We’ll go where the music never ends/ From the stadiums to the small town bars/ We’ll light up the house of a thousand guitars.” The song’s nimble, repeating piano riff and the line “bells ring out through churches and jails” echo “Jungleland.” But the exhilarating battles of youth that Springsteen chronicled 45 years ago on that epic have given way to the grinding reality that there are evils in this world that can’t be vanquished by guitars flashed like switchblades. The song ends with the guitars, drums and organ falling away, leaving the piano riff and Springsteen repeating “A thousand guitars, a thousand guitars” like a wobbly-voiced mantra. I promise, this song will destroy you, so plan accordingly.

“House of a Thousand Guitars” seems like it might have been specifically written about the healing power of live music as a refuge from the cruelty and chaos of Trump’s America: “The criminal clown has stolen the throne/ He steals what he can never own/ May the truth ring out from every small town bar/ And we’ll light up the house of a thousand guitars.” On the album, “A Thousand Guitars” is followed by “Rainmaker,” twangy and booming and reminiscent of parts of the “Wrecking Ball” album. “Rainmaker” is about the con man hired to bring rain to parched fields, and about the darkness within people’s souls that drives them to fall for the con: “Sometimes folks need to believe in something so bad, so bad/ They’ll hire a rainmaker.” Springsteen spits his contempt for demagoguery like watermelon seeds through gritted teeth.

When I wrote about “Western Stars” last year, I expressed my disappointment that Springsteen had chosen an inward-looking work for his first album of the Trump Era and not the call to arms I wanted to hear. But I will concede that Springsteen’s lack of interest in putting out an overtly political album might be the right call. On “Letter to You,” the oblique yet effective barbs on “A Thousand Guitars” and “Rainmaker” suffice. Springsteen saves his ammunition for his radio show, where he speaks eloquently about the unspeakable atrocities of this moment. “Letter to You” is a stronger album for its restraint.

There are many treasures for fans to sift through here, the most delightful being the trio of songs Springsteen wrote as a young man, and how he approaches them now. For decades, “Janey Needs a Shooter” existed only as a song title that Springsteen gave to Warren Zevon; it appears on Zevon’s 1980 album “Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School” as “Jeannie Needs a Shooter.” The two songs share only a chorus. Springsteen’s version tells a different story, about a man in love with a woman who gives (sells?) her body to other men. It’s a grown-up version of “Candy’s Room” (from “Darkness on the Edge of Town”), sung not in the cocksure voice of the kid who thinks he can save the girl, but the weathered one of the man who knows he can’t. Springsteen and the band return to the muscular grandeur of their “Darkness” sound on “Janey,” propelled by Max Weinberg’s thundering drums, Charles Giordano’s Danny Federici-like washes of organ and Springsteen’s raw, titanic wails of longing. (Listen to “Janey” back to back with “Something in the Night.”)

“Song for Orphans” is a never-recorded rarity from Springsteen’s early days, a song fans have been chasing forever. Unabashedly Dylanesque in its verbiage and structure (the verses call to mind “Chimes of Freedom” or “My Back Pages”), it would have been at home on “Greetings from Asbury Park”. I have no idea what all that stuff about the axis and the aurora and Big Mama are all about, but it sure is fun.

My notes made listening to “If I Was the Priest” consist entirely of this: “LOVE IT LOVE IT LOVE IT.” “Priest” is another song that looms legendary in fan lore. Influenced by Dylan and The Band and reflecting the country blooze of Springsteen’s hippie band Steel Mill, “If I Was the Priest” is wholly of its time, with a vintage late-’60’s-early ’70’s fixation on outlaws, bootleggers and yonder mountains. Springsteen sings this song with a twinkle in his eye; he leans into his youthful choices with humor and grace, fully committing to the period piece by channelling his idol Dylan with a question mark uplift in his voice and singing lines like “If my lady was an heiress and my Mama was a thief” with relish. The band cooks on this song, with chunky organ and guitars, gospel piano, bluesy harmonica, and a smoldering guitar solo on the outro. And, oh man, the kettle drum roll that rises up out of the hollow just before Patti Scialfa swings in to lead the band’s makeshift choir as if she time-traveled to the studio from a 1970 Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour: LOVE IT, LOVE IT, LOVE IT.

The final track, “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” forms bookends with “One Minute You’re Here.” Although it shares thematic elements and part of a title with Roy Orbison’s matchlessly spooky “In Dreams,” it’s as reassuring as a lullaby. Springsteen has said the song is to be taken literally — he regularly dreams about Clarence Clemons, George Theiss of his teenage band the Castiles and other departed friends and family, “for death is not the end,” as the lyric goes. ( I can’t help wondering, though, if the verse “I got your guitar here by the bed/ All your records and all the books you read” could also be about reuniting with one’s younger self, becoming whole again, which would also be a fitting way to tie up this record.) The song canters along until the band drops out on the last line, leaving Springsteen alone, the last man standing. “I’ll see you in my dreams,” he sings, unaccompanied.

And what is there to do anymore but share his faith? We will meet again on the other side of this thing, my Bruce family. Until then, we’ll be together in dreams.

” … and miles to go before I sleep.” Photo © Danny Clinch

©Joyce Millman, 2020

 

Music and TV favorites, 2019 (Part 2): Originals

(Courtesy of Netflix)

As I wrote in Part 1: The President (such as he is) of the United States is a liar. It’s no wonder the music and TV that mattered most to me in 2019 was all about the search for what’s true and real. All of my most-played and most-pondered favorites featured some variation of authentic selves breaking free from suppression, performers grappling with the limits of persona and the soul-truths that can sometimes only be revealed through the act of striking a pose...

(Continue reading Part 1 here.)

“Rolling Thunder Revue”: Dylan goes electric

“Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story,” Martin Scorsese’s magic trick of a Netflix mockumentary, had me hoodwinked for an embarrassingly long time. I finally twigged to what was going on more than halfway through the film when Michael Murphy appeared in character as former presidential candidate Jack Tanner, the role he played in Garry Trudeau and Robert Altman’s celebrated 1988 HBO political mockumentary “Tanner ’88.” And then I laughed out loud.

“Rolling Thunder Revue” is a carnival midway attraction of a movie, in keeping with the traveling circus atmosphere of Dylan’s shambolic 1976 Rolling Thunder tour of North America. Scorsese’s film is mostly recycled from concert and behind the scenes footage for “Renaldo and Clara,” the movie Dylan directed while on tour, in which he, Joan Baez and a horde of musicians and traveling companions played themselves but also not-themselves. (The original footage was shot by Howard Alk, David Meyers and Paul Goldsmith.) “Renaldo and Clara” was a critical flop when it was released; “Rolling Thunder Revue” is basically that movie reassembled by Scorsese with a wink and a nod.

I’ve watched “Rolling Thunder Revue” twice and I still can’t make up my mind whether Scorsese’s smoke-and-mirrors additions work. For instance, he plants ringers like actress Sharon Stone, purporting to have been on the tour as a teenager, and performance artist Martin Von Hasselberg as Stefan Van Dorp, the disgruntled alleged director of the original footage, among the interview segments with real-life Rolling Thunder participants. Was piling an extra-level of trickery onto the already tricky “Renaldo and Clara” overkill, like TP-ing a house on Halloween and egging it for good measure?

Maybe. But it doesn’t get in the way of the film’s main event, its exhilarating concert footage. Dylan is a wild man in the concert scenes, as he leads a rotating roster of musicians (the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn, Bowie’s guitarist Mick Ronson, a young T-Bone Burnett, and violinist Scarlet Rivera, working her Gypsy queen persona to the hilt) through stomping rock versions of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” and “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” as well as sweeping cinematic narratives like “Isis” and “Hurricane.” The camera often tight on his face, Dylan is incandescent with desire and rage, shouting out lyrics like they’re his last will and testament.

For me, watching “Rolling Thunder Revue” was like opening a time capsule and rediscovering things I’d forgotten and never fully appreciated, like how astonishingly sexy and charismatic this stage incarnation of Bob Dylan was. And the gender-fluidity of his ’70’s rock-star look — eyeliner, scarves, fresh flowers rimming his wide-brimmed hat — is startlingly modern. His face smeared with white mime’s makeup (remnants of “Renaldo and Clara”), “Rolling Thunder Revue” becomes one trippy masquerade.

The greatest singer-songwriter of our time has always managed to remain a changeling and an enigma; you were never truly sure if the Dylan you were seeing today would be the Dylan you’d see tomorrow. He pops up as one of Scorsese’s present-day interview subjects in the film, polishing his myth by giving characteristically flinty answers. But watching “Rolling Thunder Revue” again, I realized that in one of his faux-interview answers, Dylan is handing us a clue to the game he and Scorsese are playing, as well as summing up the theme of the movie (and Dylan’s career): “Life isn’t about finding yourself … Life is about creating yourself.”

***

Bruce Springsteen: Like a rhinestone cowboy

In his 2016 autobiography “Born to Run” and the long-running “Springsteen on Broadway,” Bruce Springsteen tells us that the Boss was a character that he created, and that the Bruce Springsteen we think we know is a figment of our collective imagination. The soul-searching and naked confessions that make up Springsteen’s output since 2016 flip that Bob Dylan quote on its head: lately, Springsteen’s life has been about un-creating himself in order to find himself.

The solo studio album he released in 2019, “Western Stars,” didn’t move me. With its narrow focus on aging solitary men reaching the end of the line, “Western Stars” revealed Springsteen’s head as a claustrophobia-inducing place to be at the moment. I also thought the recreations of lushly orchestrated Jimmy Webb-style country-pop of the ’60’s and ’70’s were pretty but airless. I wanted something more from Springsteen’s first studio record since 2012, some acknowledgement that we woke up one day and everything had changed. I wanted him to articulate my pain and grief over the state of our country. Instead, he released this.

I missed the concert movie built around “Western Stars” when it had a short run in theaters. I set my sights on a rumored E Street Band album and tour on the horizon and moved on. And then one day I was driving in the car and heard the live version of “Sundown” from the “Western Stars” soundtrack album and I had a small epiphany. Played live with a band, string section and backup singers, “Sundown” came buoyantly alive. Springsteen’s singing was looser and warmer, freed from the constraints of the studio version’s fussed-over production. In my original review, I said that the “The Wayfarer,” “There Goes My Miracle” and “Sundown” (songs on the record that I actually like) could have been sung by Sinatra in the ’70’s. And sure enough, the live versions from the “Western Stars” soundtrack really swing, Jack.

So here’s the epiphany. I still don’t love the studio album or the precious years spent on solo introspective confessions and summations, but the “Western Stars’ soundtrack clicked something into place for me. I can finally appreciate what Springsteen is doing with all of this, and why.

Here’s a guy who has spent the better part of his career being “Bruce Springsteen,” who, as he tells us in the autobiography and the Broadway show, isn’t really him. He has tried to speak to us as plain old Bruce Springsteen before, most notably on “Tunnel of Love,” “Lucky Town” and parts of “Devils and Dust,” about his flaws and failings, his struggles, his love for his wife and kids. But now, at 70, his desire to tell us what he needs to tell us, to show himself, seems to have become more urgent. The “Western Stars” live album helped me understand that I was focused on the theme and sound of the songs, when the act of Springsteen singing them was the main point. This is grown-up music. And doesn’t Springsteen deserve to have some time to be his grown-up self, singing swinging grown-up songs with his baby by his side, and not having to get up on stage and conjure the “Bruce Springsteen” he used to be at 25 or 30 or 40? Springsteen will tour with the E Street Band again and for those three hours, we’ll all be transported back to 1975 again. Until then, we owe it to him to let him work out what he needs to work out in order to be at peace.

The “Western Stars” concert version ends with a cover of Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy,” an irresistible sing-along as well as a fitting homage to one of the inspirations for the album. It’s my choice for cover of the year. And in a way, Bruce Springsteen is the Rhinestone Cowboy, the larger-than-life, star-spangled hero, “getting cards and letters from people I don’t even know.” Springsteen sings the song with a self-deprecating smile in his voice. His performance is jovial but not jokey; he sounds like he’s having a blast, but the choice of this song carries an echo of the message he puts forth more somberly in “Springsteen on Broadway” — the person we see on stage isn’t always the person we think we’re seeing. And at this point in his career, he’s earned the right to take off those heavy rhinestones once in a while.

***

Prince “Originals”: Album of the year

(Courtesy of Virginia Turblett/The Prince Estate)

Three years gone and Prince still manages to put out an album that blows away what most living artists released this year. OK, so Prince had nothing to do with the conceptualizing or release of “Originals”; it’s a well-chosen and sequenced project of the Prince Estate, consisting of Prince’s demo tracks of songs that were ultimately recorded by other artists. If he was still with us, Prince might never have consented to let this corner of his vast trove of unreleased work see daylight. But now that it’s out, “Originals” has the impact of a flex from beyond the grave; it’s equal to the diminutive genius tossing his guitar into the air after owning that all-star Rock and Roll Hall of Fame performance of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” as if to say, “Y’all see what I just did?”

By now, none of us should be surprised by Prince’s eternal ability to surprise us. And yet, “Originals” does exactly that. Only one of its 15 tracks, “Nothing Compares 2 U,” has been previously released in Prince form (a live version appeared on his ’90s greatest hits compilation “The Hits/The B-Sides”). These demos of songs Prince gave away to other artists date from the ’80’s, his most fertile period. Most of the tracks went to acts he produced under his “Jamie Starr/Starr Company” moniker, like Sheila E., Vanity 6, Apollonia 6 and Morris Day and The Time. Others went to outside acts like the Bangles (“Manic Monday”), Martika (“Love … Thy Will Be Done”) and — well, why not? — Kenny Rogers (“You’re My Love”).

“Gave away” doesn’t really get to the heart of what Prince did with these songs. He may have let others record them, giving several careers the kiss of life, but in return he breathed his presence and influence into every note of their performances, every inch of the recording tape. His original Warner Bros. contract allowed him to recruit and produce artists for the label. But he did even more than that. Prince was like a nonthreatening version of Harry Potter’s nemesis Lord Voldemort. Voldemort guaranteed immortality by secreting pieces of himself into seven objects and living things; Prince produced other artists in his own image, magnifying his sound and extending his influence beyond his home studio in Chanhassen, Minnesota. He was always thinking big.

We always knew Prince was the wizard behind the curtain of so many acts, but it’s a jolt to hear just how much influence he had on the finished recordings. As “Originals” reveals, these tracks aren’t demos so much as blueprints. The Morris Day and The Time song “Jungle Love” exactly follows Prince’s demo, every “o-ee-o-ee-o” and squawk, right down to the shout of “Somebody bring me a mirror!” (Prince, Morris Day and original Time guitarist Jesse Johnson get co-writing credit on “Jungle Love.”)

Likewise, there’s little breathing room between Prince’s demo of “Gigolos Get Lonely Too” and The Time’s version (although Prince sounds like the lonelier gigolo), or his “Wouldn’t You Love to Love Me?” and Taja Sevelle’s or his “Sex Shooter” and Apollonia’s. For “Manic Monday,” the Bangles gave Prince the keys and let him drive; he arranged the backing vocals and they kept his flower-power-y piano riff from the demo. It’s a kick to hear his lead vocal here, and his keyboard-playing stands out as lighter and more joyful in this draft of the production.

Prince’s demos for Sheila E. in particular — “The Glamorous Life,” “Noon Rendezvous,” “Dear Michelangelo” and “Holly Rock” — are a fascinating glimpse into their symbiotic relationship. Sheila E. receives sole or shared credit on all of these songs, but her finished vocals strictly adhere to Prince’s emphases and inflections from the demos. On his crackling version of “Holly Rock” (a close sibling of the smoking jam “Housequake” from “Sign o’ the Times”), Prince becomes Sheila E., singing out lines like, “Sheila E’s my name/ Holly Rock’s my game/I’m funky as I wanna be/Line up a hundred I swear to God/I rock ’em till they just can’t see.” Performing the song in the movie “Krush Groove,” Sheila’s vocal again follows Prince’s guide vocal. And with her peek-a-boo lace suit, pompadour hairdo and hip thrust/kick split dance moves, Sheila E. becomes Prince.

The Sheila E. demos aren’t the only songs here that reveal their gender-fluidity when Prince sings them. On “Make-Up,” recorded by Vanity 6, he narrates a cosmetic routine to a repeating Kraftwerkian technofunk riff , his monotone at once signifying dominatrix and sex robot. The performance gets sexier as the gender identity of the singer gets blurrier (“I guess I’ll wear my camisole”). I always assumed that Prince’s blended male-female Love Symbol stood for the sexual communion of his music. So “Originals” was a “holy shit” revelation for me about what Prince might have really been saying when he adopted that symbol as his own. Then again, maybe I should have taken the hint when he sang “I’m not a woman/ I’m not a man/ I am something that you’ll never understand” in “I Would Die 4 U.”

Wholly inhabiting these songs, Prince slips easily into different skins, different personas — the horny jester of “Jungle Love,” the working woman of “Manic Monday,” the transcendent spiritual being of “Love … Thy Will be Done.” It’s as if we’re hearing facets of personality, complexities of self, all of Prince’s contained multitudes. And then we come to the final song, the “Nothing Compares 2 U” demo that’s so sparsely orchestrated and intimate that the burbling electric piano chord may as well be a pulse, the percussion a clock winding down. “Nothing Compares 2 U” sounds like a voice and a soul, existing beyond space and time and skin and bones — the voice of Prince, the one and only, and that’s the God’s honest truth.

Music and TV favorites, 2019 (Part 1): Got to be real

The President (such as he is) of the United States is a liar. It’s no wonder the music and TV that mattered most to me in 2019 was all about the search for what’s true and real. All of my most-played and most-pondered favorites featured some variation of authentic selves breaking free from suppression, performers grappling with the limits of persona and the soul-truths that can sometimes only be revealed through the act of striking a pose.

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(Courtesy Elektra Records)

The Highwomen: A seat at the table

The name is a pun on and a tribute to the Cash-Kristofferson-Haggard-Jennings Mount Rushmore of country supergroups. But The Highwomen — Brandi Carlile, Amanda Shires, Maren Morris and Natalie Hemby — see their project as more of a collective than a supergroup. And that’s exactly what this debut record sounds like. Their group singing conveys a whole, a sense of sisterhood and community to which all are welcome and all belong. In a genre where women artists have to fight for airplay (a 2019 study showed that women artists comprised only 11.3 percent of the country radio airplay on 2018 year-end industry charts), “The Highwomen” feels as much like a movement as it does a musical happening.

The title track is a rewrite of Jimmy Webb’s “Highwayman,” in which the male archetypes of rugged adventurers (outlaw, seafarer, dam builder, astronaut) are replaced by women protectors, activists and healers. The Salem witch, the migrant mother trying to cross the Southern border, the civil rights Freedom Rider (sung by Yola, an Americana/soul artist from the U.K.) are all portrayed as a threat to the patriarchal, misogynistic societies in which they live. In the migrant and Freedom Rider verses, the women are doubly persecuted for race as well as gender. Sung in unison, the final chorus — “and we’ll come back again and again and again and again and again” — conjures women as a resilient force through time, determined to right wrongs and speak truth in a world that underestimates and fears us. If that sounds corny, think of Christine Blasey Ford, Marie Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill testifying before Congress at personal and professional risk. Highwomen, all.

The two other statement songs on “The Highwomen” are similarly lifted by the sisterly blend of the group’s voices. “Redesigning Women” is a sparky country-pop homage to the way Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn and Reba McEntire made “women’s lib” acceptable for their fans in past decades.The women in the song go to work, race home to breastfeed the baby, take on their families’ emotional burdens and drink a lot of wine. “How do we do it? /How do we do it? /Make it up as we go along,” goes the bridge. The message here is that there is no “right” way to be a woman, so we need to stop beating ourselves up trying to be perfect.

“Crowded Table” glows with a similar generosity. It’s a song of hope at a time when hope is defiance: “I want a house with a crowded table/And a place by the fire for everyone/Let us take on the world while we’re young and able/And bring us back together when the day is done.” The hearth and home imagery both calls to mind and undermines the traditional notion of “a woman’s place.” Women are doing most of the labor of resisting the Trump regime — working in groups, organizing protests, sitting at kitchen tables calling elected officials and writing postcards to voters. The “house” of “Crowded Table” is America. And while the song’s warm folk-rock vibe reminds me of “Our House,” by Crosby, Stills and Nash, it conjures no cozy retreat from the world. It welcomes the world in.

The smaller, more personal songs on “The Highwomen” pack an emotional wallop as well. “If She Ever Leaves Me” was written by Shires and her partner Jason Isbell (who plays on the record) for Carlile to sing. And Carlile’s vulnerable, full-hearted wobble on the declaration “I’ve loved her in secret/I’ve loved her out loud” tells you all you need to know about the cost of loving in secret and the liberation of loving who you’re meant to love.

One song that’s not on the record but should have been is The Highwomen’s version of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” (it’s on the soundtrack to the film “The Kitchen”). It’s a faithful cover, but with a crisper beat than the original. The song is an incantation, a curse ex-lovers level at one another. But when “The Chain” is liberated from the sexual merry-go-round that was the Mac and sung by four women joined together in righteous anger, it becomes something more dangerous and thrilling. As part of Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks’s crystal-vision sorcery was often misinterpreted as air-headedness by the male rock critic establishment. On “The Chain,” the Highwomen sound like a whole coven assembled to avenge Stevie Nicks and how she gave voice to the power of women’s love and rage. They are the daughters of the witch the male-driven music industry couldn’t burn.

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The category is “realness”: “Pose,” Lizzo and “Schitt’s Creek”

“If you feel like a girl, then you real like a girl,” Lizzo sings in “Like a Girl” from her unstoppable 2019 album “Cuz I Love You.” Her body positivity and self-actualization anthem “Juice” is the dance song of the year, but every track on the record slams, makes you move. And on the album’s other giant hit, “Truth Hurts,” she asks the question that’s been on a lot of people’s minds since the circus came to town on Election Day 2016: “Why men great till they gotta be great?”

Lizzo is the definition of exuberance, from her rich, sunny voice (reminiscent sometimes of Chaka Khan’s) to her boasts (“I just took a DNA test, turns out I’m a hundred per-cent that bitch“). Taking her stage cues from Queen Bey’s swagger, Lizzo commands you to respect her as she is, a self-made woman who has no time for your body-shaming. Lizzo is not too much, she is everything. Her odes to “self-partnering” like “Soulmate” (“They used to say to get a man you had to know how to look/They used to say to keep a man you had to know how to cook/But I’m solo in Soho, sippin’ Soju in Malibu/ It’s a me, myself kinda attitude”) alternate with songs reading unworthy men the riot act. “Cuz I Love You” could be titled “Cuz I Love Me,” a message she puts across in every performance, every glam shot, every pep talk about knowing your own worth. If it’s a pose, it’s a great and a joyous one, because it pulls her listeners into a place of celebration for the messy realness and the shining possibilities inside all of us.

***

(The Rose family of “Schitt’s Creek”)

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Affluent jet-setting poseurs lose their fortune and are reduced to living in the hinterlands among their plaid-clad inferiors — that’s the premise of the Canadian sitcom “Schitt’s Creek.” It’s a seam that “Green Acres” and “Newhart” mined well (except that the urban sophisticates of those shows willingly relocated to small town USA in search of “real” folk). What “Schitt’s Creek” brings to the genre is a big-hearted view of humanity at a time when political tribes are actively avoiding each other. On “Schitt’s Creek,” the spoiled Rose family — video-store magnate Johnny Rose, his soap opera actress wife Moira and their pampered adult children Alexis and David — gradually develop humility and empathy as they discover their true selves.

Created by comedic treasure Eugene Levy (who plays Johnny) and his son Dan Levy (who plays David and is also a writer and producer on the show), “Schitt’s Creek” began life on Canada’s CBC and on the mid-tier cable network Pop in the U.S. It broke big when Netflix picked up existing seasons. I was slow to take notice, but once I did, I blasted through it with increasing astonishment and delight. It was my antidote to Twitter this year, and I wish I had had the will power to morsel out the 2019 season when it hit Netflix in October. But I didn’t, and now I have to wait for its sixth (and final season) to hit next year. That’s OK, it gives me more time to re-watch season five, which culminates in an amateur theater production of “Cabaret” for reasons unknown (but it totally works).

“Schitt’s Creek” is often burstingly funny. That magnificent, elegant clown, Catherine O’Hara has the role of a lifetime here and she slays it; her Moira is a bewigged, bedazzled fish out of water, clad in black-and-white haute couture and accentuating her lines in a bewildering speech pattern somewhere between pretentious thespian and Jiminy Glick. As for her longtime comedy partner Eugene Levy, I could write a thesis on his expressive eyebrows through the years, from “SCTV” to “Best in Show” to “Schitt’s Creek,” but for now, I’ll just say that his Johnny is a master class in comedic reacting as the optimist amid his family’s chaos.

What makes “Schitt’s Creek” perfect escapist viewing is it’s relentlessly positive depiction of people’s capacity for change; the longer the Roses stay in Schitt’s Creek — they bought the town as a joke when they were wealthy, and it’s their only remaining asset — the closer they become as a family. And as we get to know them and their neighbors, we’re constantly being surprised by every character’s slowly revealed strengths, kinks and aspirations, the depth of their emotional lives.

If this sounds treacly, it’s not. Every grandly sarcastic line from the mouth of bitchy fashionista David lands as invigoratingly as a cold dip after a hot sauna. And as Alexis, Annie Murphy has created an entire language out of variations on the exclamation, “Eww!” The most singular and wondrous thing about “Schitt’s Creek,” though, is its treatment of David’s queerness (Dan Levy is himself gay). Take the following exchange between Johnny and the town’s mayor, Roland Schitt (Chris Elliot). Roland is a passive-aggressive weirdo, but in keeping with the show’s theme that you should never assume you know what’s going on with people, he completely gets it:

Johnny: My son is pansexual.
Roland: Uh huh. I’ve heard of that. That’s, uh, that cookware fetish.
Johnny: No. No, no. He loves everyone. Men, women, women who become men, men who become women. I’m his father and I always wanted his life to be easy. But just… pick one gender and maybe everything would have been less confusing?
Roland: Well, you know, Johnny, when it comes to the heart, we can’t tell our kids who to love.

Near the end of season five, there’s a lovely episode where David’s adorably unflappable boyfriend Patrick (Noah Reid) comes out to his visiting parents. The parents are visibly uncomfortable and you’re waiting for the worst, but it turns out that they’re happy for him, just melancholy that Patrick kept his true self from them for so long. By design, there is no homophobia on “Schitt’s Creek.” This is Eugene and Dan Levy’s world, and we should all be so lucky to live in it.

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MORE SPOILERS!

FX’s “Pose,” the Ryan Murphy co-created drama series about ball culture and trans and gay life in New York City of the ’80s, set itself a daunting goal for its second season: Tell the story of how AIDS ravaged a generation of gay and trans people while President Ronald Reagan took no action. How do you document the terror, the demonization, the loss upon loss of those years without driving TV and streaming audiences away? Murphy, co-creator Steven Canale and writer-producers Janet Mock and Our Lady J did it by alternating the focus from the personal to the political, drawing parallels to the criminal indifference shown toward the lives (and deaths) of LGBT people by a Republican administration and its powerful religious allies, then and now.

Season two of “Pose” gave viewers a living history lesson of the plague years, from ACT UP die-ins to the terrors of living with the disease that (in those days) meant certain death. The show’s most beloved characters, House of Evangelista mother Blanca Evangelista (MJ Rodriguez) and drag ball emcee Pray Tell (Emmy winner Billy Porter), both developed full-blown AIDS during the course of the season, reacting with their usual resilience (Blanca) and anger (Pray). Yes, “Pose” was often difficult to watch this season without shedding tears. But, as Pray Tell is fond of saying, the older members of the community have to educate the youth. Here is a major TV series with a cast, producers and writers that is majority trans and gay (and majority black- and brown-skinned), exploring the fullness of LGBT lives at a time when the faction in power is doing everything it can to erase them from public life.

Some of the characters’ experiences were horrible: the murder of Candy Ferocity, an African American trans woman; the many characters’ backstories about being banished by homophobic and transphobic parents; Pray Tell’s bone-chilling AIDS-fever dream where he wanders through the hospital ward singing “The Man That Got Away.” But this was all necessary to make the essential point — “Pose” shows you what people will risk for the freedom to live an authentic life.

For all the heartache and sickness this season, “Pose” still gave us plenty of music, dance and ball-walking (a through-line astutely showed the attention Madonna’s “Vogue” brought to the ball community, and the debris after mainstream interest faded). And when the emotional highs came, they were soaring. Pray finally letting himself act on his attraction to a much younger dancer led to a long, skin-to-skin bedroom scene of pure ecstasy. And Rodriguez continues to infuse Blanca, the head and heart of her ball family, with poise, grit and an endless capacity for maternal love.

In an indelible scene from the season finale, Blanca turns up for the “Mother of the Year” ball competition still weak from AIDS-related pneumonia. From her wheelchair, she radiantly lip-synchs to Whitney Houston’s version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” This land is our land too, the choice of music proclaims. Blanca’s House of Evangelista, her crowded table, her chosen family, is a vision of a welcoming, inclusive America that was just a dream in 1990. We’ve come so far in 30 years, the writers seem to be telling us, even as they invite us to consider the forces that threaten to drag us backwards to the time of outcasts and plagues.

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Coming in Part Two: Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Prince

From the Desk of Ms. Katharine Hepburn

(Originally published on the launch of The Reject Pile, a now-defunct humor website, June 1, 2015.)

Dear Readers,

I’m as pleased as punch to welcome you to my new lifestyle blog, HEP. Each month, I’ll deliver my tips for healthy living right to your in-box. Why anybody would need instruction in living is beyond me, but this is all the rage I’m told. You have to dispense advice whether you’re qualified to or not. I’m an actress, not a bloody pharmacist!

Our theme for this month is “Gratitude.” Oh, I’m grateful for many things. I’m grateful that I never had to make a movie with Sylvester Stallone, I’ll tell you that. He called me up once, he and the other lunk, Arnold What’s-His-Name, and they said, “Please Miss Hepburn, please be in our movie, The Expendables 3,” and I said, “Go sit on a tack!” I don’t know what the hell Hollywood is thinking with all the filth and the spaceships.

I’m supposed to tell you to follow us on Twitter. Hell of a waste of time, if you ask me. “Dear Twitter, I’m making a sandwich.” Well, sound the trumpets! If you see a Tweet from @KatetheGreat, you can bet your bottom dollar it’s written by Lance from the marketing department. I wash my hands of the whole foolish business. You’re on your own, Lance. Do you hear me?

Our fitness section is called BURN. Why BURN? Oh, for heaven’s sake, do I have to spell it out? Hep-BURN. Well, don’t blame me — I told Lance it was too subtle! Oh, I’ve been athletic my whole life. Nowadays it’s just a fad, you see, thanks to Jane Fonda. She irritated the hell out of me when we were making On Golden Pond. Always lugging that big pink step stool around, doing scissor kicks at the drop of a hat. And those preposterous shin warmers! I don’t believe in getting all gussied up like a circus trapeze artist just to do some calisthenics. All I’ve ever needed is a gray sweat suit from the army surplus store and a hobo bandanna to mop up the sweat. (Editor’s Note: She doesn’t mean that! Buy our exclusive HEP THE BURN yoga pants and running gear at Lululemon! — X0X, Lance)

I have a strict exercise regimen, and believe you me, I stick to it! That’s a quality sorely lacking in people nowadays, stick-to-it-iveness. I jump into the ice pool and swim 150 laps before dawn every morning, come out as invigorated as could be. Go to BURN to learn how to make your own ice pool. It’s common sense, for heaven’s sake! Blocks of ice, swimming pool, done! Then it’s time for the medicine ball. Young women today have never even seen a medicine ball, and it’s a goddamned shame. We’re selling them in the HEP shop for $299. The marketing people claim they’re handmade by women in a village in the Andes. The Andes! Snort! I made my own medicine ball out of a sack of rice and an old oilskin and it cost me forty-two cents! That’s Yankee ingenuity.

Lance wanted to include a parenting section called “Bringing Up Baby,” but I said, “Absolutely not!” I never felt the need to reproduce. I had my career and that was enough. Nowadays, there’s so much guilt. Women freezing their eggs, parents letting children make all the decisions. Have you seen the bicycle path in Central Park? It’s all gummed up with tricycles! Move to the right if you can’t pedal any faster! When I was a child, Mother taught me to be self-sufficient, and that was the greatest gift I’ve ever received. I birthed myself, not many people know that. Decided I’d had enough, slipped right out, chewed through the umbilical cord with my teeth and made myself a cup of hot cocoa. Self-reliance is a wonderful thing.

Now, I never gave a fig about fashion. A good pair of khakis, a black turtleneck, a starched white shirt — what the hell else do you need? You can buy all of those things at our advertising sponsor, The Gap. I personally haven’t shopped there since the time I got into a tug-of-war with Woody Allen over a half-priced bucket hat. Persistent little man. But that’s neither here nor there. A good sturdy clip to hold my top-knot in place and a splash of lipstick and I’m out the door. I have one tube of Max Factor Tru-Color that’s lasted me for sixty-three years. Does anyone know the meaning of thrift anymore?

I suppose you’ll want recipes. Well, I’m not a cook, you see. I don’t get the point of this hoopla over gluten and pampered chickens. And the Mason jars! Every time I see lemonade served in a Mason jar I think of Howard Hughes and it puts me off my meal. Plain food is the key. I’ve had the same cook for forty years, a dear man. He was once employed at the prison in Ossining. Lance thinks that readers want to be told what to eat. Well, that’s bunk! If you’re smart enough to operate a computer, then you’re damned well smart enough to feed yourself! Breakfast — a bowl of muesli and prune compote. What’s so hard about that? Lunch — same thing every day: a hard roll and a wedge of good sharp cheddar. Dinner — steamed cod, a potato and a parsnip.

Oh, I’m not without my vices, mind you. I enjoy a shot of Jameson’s in the evening. But all the trends that people go crazy for — the In-N-Out Burger and the Fiddle Faddle — well it’s a national disgrace! Food should be sustenance, not a hobby! Good riddance to all of that junk, I say. Except for Popeyes Fried Chicken. They do an exceptional Louisiana coating and the Combo Meal is good value for money.

I’ve had enough of this. Come back next time, or don’t, it’s all the same to me.

Kate

From the Vault: Morris Day and Prime-Time

Hey, who remembers that Prince’s Court Jester, Morris Day, once starred in his own NBC sitcom pilot? I didn’t, and I was one of the few TV critics who reviewed it when it ran as summer filler in 1988. Here’s a nugget from my clippings archive, currently under construction. Many artifacts to come. (Stretch photo to enlarge.)

From the vault: Bruce Springsteen on video

Is it me baby, or just a brilliant disguise?

With Bruce Springsteen’s “Western Stars” movie opening in theaters this weekend (I will see it if the Bay Area power outages permit), it got me thinking about a now-ancient VHS video anthology he released in 1989, comprising his MTV-age videos and clips from live performances at the 1979 “No Nukes” benefit and at Neil Young’s Bridge School benefit in 1986. In this anthology, you can see Springsteen’s early evolution as a performer in front of the camera and as a visual artist behind it. There’s a whole world of changes between his awkward dance steps on “Dancing in the Dark” and the stunning emotional nakedness of “Brilliant Disguise.” Here’s my review from the San Francisco Examiner in 1989. Expand image to read.

The birth of cool: Miami Vice, 35 years later

I can feel it comin’ in the air tonight, oh lord …

In the money scene of the premiere episode of NBC’s “Miami Vice,” Detectives Sonny Crockett (Don Johnson) and Ricardo Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas) cruise the midnight streets of Miami in Crockett’s shiny black classic Ferrari on their way to a showdown with the drug dealer responsible for the death of Tubbs’ brother and Crockett’s partner. The scene is thick with portent, new partners Crockett and Tubbs warily eyeing each other. The wind blows through Crockett’s dark blond hair. Tubbs checks his gun. The scene keeps cutting to caressing shots of reflected streetlights breaking like waves off the Ferrari’s hood. In the background, Phil Collins’ atmospheric “In the Air Tonight” builds and builds. It’s the most erotic depiction of platonic buddies since Paul Newman and Robert Redford smoldered at each other in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”. And then Collins hits the drum riff heard ’round the world and a pop cultural phenomena exploded.

I came of age as a TV critic with “Miami Vice”. A review of that September 16, 1984 premiere episode was one of the first pieces of TV criticism I wrote for the alt-weekly newspaper the Boston Phoenix:

“Not only is it easily the season’s best new show, it features some of the most sophisticated direction and editing and some of the most visually sensual, and downright gorgeous, photography ever seen on a network action series. And I’d bet NBC wouldn’t have let it see the light of prime time if rock video hadn’t already eased cryptic kinkiness and art-school flash into the mainstream. … [Michael] Mann and [Anthony] Yerkovich use rock-video style as a foot in the door that enables them to sneak in all the fancy film theories and techniques that used to be considered too outre for the average TV series — or rather, considered too good to waste on the average TV viewer. Miami Vice is the most groundbreaking prime-time show since Hill Street Blues, not just because it isn’t afraid to be different, but because it isn’t afraid to be brilliant.”

The series that was commissioned by then-NBC programming chief Brandon Tartikoff  with two words — “MTV cops” — became a standing Friday night obsession for its first couple of seasons. It influenced ’80s men’s fashions (linen blazers, pastel T shirts, no socks) and men’s grooming (stubble). It busted Phil Collins out as a solo artist and made Jan Hammer’s electronic instrumental theme song a radio hit. Musicians lined up to act in it: Willie Nelson, Little Richard, James Brown, Leonard Cohen, Suicidal Tendencies, Glenn Frey, Vanity, Sheena Easton. Phil Collins. Miles Freaking Davis. Anything “Vice”-related sold, even Don Johnson’s album “Heartbeat” (17 on the Billboard 200 album chart). Well, almost anything: Philip Michael Thomas’s album “Living the Book of My Life,” which was released before Johnson’s, failed to chart.

But the show’s contributions to television were hardly superficial or ephemeral. Reverberations of its seductive, shades-of-gray depictions of good guys and bad guys could be felt in cult-cool broadcast TV series that soon followed it, like NBC’s “Crime Story” and CBS’s “Wiseguy.” Its dark portrayal of governmental lies and malfeasance cleared a TV path for “The X-Files.” The grown-up storytelling and MTV flash of “Miami Vice” brought people who thought they were too smart and cool to watch TV back to the medium. In doing so, it was an important link in the chain that eventually brought us “The Sopranos” and “Mad Men,” “Deadwood” and “The Americans.”

And your humble critic was there to chronicle all of it, from the blazing first two seasons to the flame-out years when the ratings dropped and the threat of cancellation loomed. She even dutifully reported on Don Johnson’s post-Vice career (although now she can’t remember why).

And here I am, on the 35th anniversary of the show’s premiere, still marveling at how thoroughly “Miami Vice” defined its time, both pop culturally and politically, while proving to be so far ahead of it.  I continued covering “Vice” when I was TV critic for the San Francisco Examiner. Here’s the appreciation and eulogy I wrote for the series when it aired its May 21, 1989 finale, “Freefall.” (Click images to enlarge.) I wouldn’t change a word of it today.  The plot of the finale depicts Crockett and Tubbs uncovering the shadowy alliances between a lawless executive branch, scoundrels-for-hire and anti-democratic regimes in another part of the world. Only the fashions have changed.

(Reruns of “Miami Vice” can be streamed on NBC.com. They also air on the premium cable channel Encore/Starz. Thanks to Dan Brekke, for his help retrieving the Examiner piece.)

©Joyce Millman, The Mix Tape, 2019

Hey, who wants to hear my voice?

For the first time ever, I said yes to a podcast interview. Jesse from Set Lusting Bruce, a Springsteen podcast, caught me in a sharing mood and we talked about how I came to be a Springsteen fan and lots of other stuff about my childhood and my career path and whether or not I think Mary gets in the car at the end of “Thunder Road.” If you’ve ever wondered about the mystery that is moi, here’s your chance. I don’t open up the Fortress of Solitude every day, you know.

Listen to my episode of Set Lusting Bruce here.

The tide is high

I need a better phone. ©Joyce Millman

Blurry, sorry! ©Joyce Millman

It seemed only fitting to spend the night after my “officially eligible for the senior discount” birthday seeing a double bill of Blondie and Elvis Costello at a summer shed venue in the outermost suburbs of the East Bay. After a 2 1/2 hour crawl to the Concord Pavilion through perpetual Bay Area traffic, the consort and I had just enough time to wolf down our picnic dinner in the parking lot, while watching our peers being golf-carted up the mountain from a more distant lot. How can these senior folk be our age cohort? I mean, just look at us! We could pass for … uh … never mind.

It takes more energy to get out to a show these days, but for Elvis, the consort and I will go anywhere (this trek proves it). Costello’s cancer scare a couple of years ago only hardened our determination — he plays anywhere near SF, we’re there. My first Elvis show was in 1979 — I’m so old, I reviewed it for my college newspaper. I’ve seen him so many times over the years that I’ve lost count. By contrast, I last saw Blondie right before the Parallel Lines album hit big, in a small Boston club called the Paradise. She was the diamond-cut visage of New Wave, with a voice like a candy cloud. Musically, Blondie laid the blueprint for the blend of arty pop-punk and Eurodisco that would be followed by artists as diverse as Franz Ferdinand and Lady Gaga.

I mention all of this because attending an Elvis-Blondie concert one day after turning 62 was so on-brand, if you know me, as to be comical. The only thing more perfect could have been a Springsteen show, but, sadly, Bruce would not oblige.

I have no illusions. I’m not a kid anymore. I listen to new artists, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to go stand in a field at some summer festival to see them play live. So pretty much the only concerts I go to these days are ones where I have a seat to fall into when I can’t dance any more. Usually, that means “legacy acts.” Hence the trek to this outdoor venue on top of a sun-bleached mountain in the land of gated subdivisions. Long story short … I’m glad I did. This was no ’80’s nostalgia package. This was a doubleheader of titans.

Elvis Costello was last in the Bay Area just this past December for a long and varied show at the Masonic that revolved around the swell orchestral pop of his latest album Look Now. The co-headlining summer tour with Blondie had each act playing for under two hours. It’s asking a lot of Costello to edit his set down for curfew — with a catalog as deep as his, how do you choose?

The setlist favored the greatest hits  (“Radio Radio,” “Alison,” “Pump It Up”) but also worked in a couple of slow-burning wild cards not played before on this tour, “Party Girl,” from Armed Forces, and “Come the Meantimes,” from his collaboration with the Roots, Wise Up Ghost. The latter hit a blues-funk groove that you wished could have gone on all night. Costello was in strong voice (especially at the piano for a soaring ballad “A Face in the Crowd,” as yet unrecorded,  from his upcoming Broadway musical adaptation of the movie of the same name) and even stronger guitar form  — his crackling solo injected the oft-performed “Watching the Detectives” with new life.

The Attractions — pianist Steve Naive, drummer Pete Thomas and bassist Davey Faragher –were, as always, impeccable and limber. Backing vocalists Kitten Kuroi and Brianna Lee add a crucial element to live performances of Costello’s songs of love and revenge — the woman’s presence. Like Steely Dan’s backing vocalists, they serve as Greek chorus, counterpoint and a breath of youth. The interplay between Costello and his vocalists was at its most fun on the Supremes-inspired “Unwanted Number,” in a long riff where Costello shouted out titles with numbers in them (from “One is the loneliest number” to “Ninety-nine and a half won’t do”).

Costello was cheerful and chatty, even up against a curfew. He performed an impersonation of Elvis Presley covering Blondie songs (well-mannered Presley would never have sung the “pain in the ass” line from “Heart of Glass,” Costello assures us), and tossed off some dark topical humor in a remark about an earlier tour stop in Gettysburg, and wanting to see the site of the last Civil War before the next one breaks out. The by-now standard, cathartic finale “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” (with a stunning new video backdrop display of Costello’s artwork flashing “Thou Shalt Not Kill”) came much too soon and we were filing out to the wonderfully wicked selection of the 1956 British kids’ tune “Nellie the Elephant,” with its chorus of “Trumpety-trump, trump, trump, trump.” I couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed in the necessarily shortened set; as Elvis’s shows go, it was a mere snack. But it tasted so good.

Blondie was the opener on this tour, and the audience at Concord seemed to tilt more toward their fans than Elvis’s. Debbie Harry (whose memoir Face It will be published in October) is 74, and her voice is lower than it used to be and showing signs of end-of-tour overuse (she sipped tea throughout, and talk-sung some of the lyrics). But goddess bless her, she is an inspiration to all of us women of a certain vintage who are trying to figure out what “act your age” means. She shows us that it means whatever the hell you want it to mean.

Harry doesn’t give an inch. She took the stage clad in the following: a silver-threaded short-sleeve turtleneck sweater; a black, sparkly high-low-hemmed wrap skirt tied over black leggings; a chunky black belt (possibly containing a fanny pack, it was hard to see from where I was sitting); a black helmet-type hat like those worn by equestrians or possibly London cops; oversized sunglasses; and a billowy silver Mylar-looking anorak. Before the encores, she disappeared from the stage and re-emerged wearing a black and silver ruffled cocoon that was probably designed by Rei Kawakubo for all I know. Her platinum blond signature coif was perfect. She pranced and danced and clowned, all with a big smile on her face. The love traveled both ways.

A white-haired Chris Stein sat to her left throughout the show, wearing dark shades. Clem Burke, who, along with the Attractions’ Pete Thomas is one of the greatest drummers to ever drum, was set up behind Plexiglass baffling. Burke is the only other original member of Blondie in the band besides Harry and Stein, and he looked exactly how you would expect Clem Burke to look. Has he been preserved in amber? (The three original members are joined by bassist Leigh Foxx, lead guitarist Tommy Kessler and keyboardist Matt Katz-Boher.)

Blondie’s set was one glorious hit after another (“Call Me,” “Hanging on the Telephone,” “Heart of Glass,” “Rapture”), with a deep cut or two (“Fade Away and Radiate” from Parallel Lines and “Atomic” from Eat to the Beat were a pleasant surprise).  And the band played two absolute genius covers, the Lil Nas X/Billy Ray Cyrus hit of the summer “Old Town Road” and the James Bond theme song “From Russia with Love.” Covering “Old Town Road,” a marriage of rap and country, was a reminder that Blondie’s “Rapture” served a similar purpose of taking the sound of one genre and culture into untested territory. “Rapture” was the first (and, for years, only) hip-hop song to be played on MTV. As for “From Russia with Love,” Harry purred it, deadpan, in front of that notorious prank Presidential seal (a Photoshop with the two-headed Russian eagle holding golf clubs), to whoops of solidarity from the crowd.

The highlight for me was Blondie’s reggae cover “The Tide Is High,” which Harry prefaced with a remark about the tide being high for some of us. At the time I took that to be a reference to the climate crisis (Harry is a longtime environmental activist). But this morning, I remembered her shout to the audience at the song’s end, “I’m holding on. I’m not the kind of girl who gives up just like that. Are you?” Tide and time. Sea levels and the number of candles on the cake, both rising. Fight on, Debbie, you eccentric, irreplaceable diamond.

©Joyce Millman, The Mix Tape, 2019