HE IS THE ENTERTAINER: So commenter Chuck and I were talking about our respective Springsteen experiences last week, seeing him
crowd-surfing during "634-5789" both nights and
chugging a fan's beer in the seats during "Raise Your Hand" on Wednesday, and we couldn't help but wonder: what other entertainers of his generation have that level of trust/comfort with their fans that they'd go out into the crowd and have such unmediated interactions with them? Mick Jagger, no, Neil Young, no, Bob Dylan, no ... and then we thought, Billy Joel, yes?
Bono's not *quite* the same generation, but close enough. Many shows during the Elevation tour in 2001 would end the main set with "The Fly", and Bono would leave through the crowd. (And since the floor was all general admission, it's not like there was an aisle for him to walk down.) (And yes, he had security with him, but still.)
ReplyDeleteAlso, Bono often brings people on stage - the "With Or Without You" gimmick of singing it to a pretty female audience member; bringing a kid on stage during "City of Blinding Lights". Best of all: bringing a random audience member on stage to perform an unplanned song. When I saw U2 in Denver in Nov 2001, a guy in the audience had a sign that said "All Along the Watchtower + Me". Bono brought him on stage, Edge gave him his guitar, and the five of them performed the song. It was very cool.
<span>Definitely Billy Joel. He'll drive right to your front door.</span>
ReplyDeletePaul Simon's been bringing people on stage lately:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/v/xCwQOhZppx8" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="170" height="140
Bringing folks up on stage is a lot easier than wading through the crowd. Can you imagine Paul Simon going into a crowd and, gasp, shaking the public's hands?
ReplyDeleteJust to be the guy that always does this: Do only certain types have to apply for inclusion in the question? What about Al Green, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, or Prince? The answer for them to your question is also probably "no", but they belong in the conversation and, lord knows, are more indelible than the wan Billy Joel. And I bet the answer for George Clinton would be yes.
ReplyDeleteA fair point. Clinton, yes. Prince lets crowds on stage, but I don't know about him walking into the crowd himself.
ReplyDeleteMay favorite Billy Joel-related comment of all time:
ReplyDelete<p><span><span>I don’t “get” Billy Joel. At all. Sometimes I think he might be a spy from an alien race who, for whatever reason, has to maintain a very high public profile. On his planet, inexplicable brass sections are very popular and everyone cares about New Jersey. Sometimes I think he might be part of some plot by a particularly tone-deaf illuminati to bore America to death. How is “Big Shot” a song? Who likes hearing that Bam-Bam-BAMBAM rhythm over and over again? Or “Moving Out”? It’s all so bad Broadway, including “Piano Man,” the only stupid song whose stupidity still pisses me off. I’ve forgiven “Jar of Hearts,” I never had a problem with “Ironic,” but for some reason the laziness of rhyming “Davy” with “Navy” still makes me howl with anger.</span></span></p>
The William Joel that Gwyneth Paltrow knows would never mingle with the riff raff.
ReplyDeleteI briefly dated a girl in college who was just about the sweetest, most unassuming, non-malicious person you could possibly ever meet -- so much so that my own roommates were mad at me for finding her boring. My point is that I never had any reason to disbelieve anything she said. She was from Rumson, NJ. One day she was jogging in her home town, and she fell in with a very pretty woman who was jogging at the same slow pace, and they struck up a slow-jogging conversation. And then Bruce Springsteen pulled up in a convertible and yelled at the pretty woman (who turned out to be Julianne Phillips) that he had told her not to talk to the neighbors (which I sometimes translate in my head to "people on the street"), and made her get into the car and drove away. College girl's conclusion: Bruce Springsteen is a jerk. So since I heard the story in about mid-1991, I have suffered from extreme skepticism whenever people say anything about the deep bond between Bruce Springsteen and his fans or the locals or whoever. A concert is a place where an artist puts on a show of being the person he wants his audience to think he is. It is not necessarily a place where the artist reveals his true self.
ReplyDeleteShaking their hands, yes. Crowdsurfing and chugging a beer, no. But that has more to do with their personalities than their willingness to interact.
ReplyDeleteGoing back to your original question of 'entertainers', I'm amazed every time I see them at how much Penn & Teller thrive on meeting and speaking with their audience, both during and after thier shows.
I think one can agree with all of that, especially the conclusion (and lord knows I'm shtick-sensitive on Springsteen), and still believe that going out into the crowd like that is something that artists don't have to do and can't really fake enjoying. If you're a multi-multi-millionaire and don't like being touched by strangers or the risks involved, you don't have to do it and no one would think twice about it. So, yes, being Man of the People is to a large extent a pose, but he's going beyond the call of duty in authenticating it.
ReplyDeleteAlso, there may be a line between fighting for privacy for one's family, versus the amount of self one's willing to reveal. I don't think Bruce's kids have ever been interviewed, photographed in People Magazine, etc.
Yeah, okay, but (1) Phillips (an actress of at least some fame at the time) had a right to decide for herself who she wanted to talk to -- she wasn't a child, she was a grown woman and theoretically an equal partner in their marriage; and (2) College Girl wasn't the press; she was, at the time, an 18- or 19-year old girl with a ponytail jogging on the sidewalk in suburbia. There may have been a million layers of weird tension in the Springsteen-Phillips relationship at the time, so who knows why he lashed out, but the fact is that at that precise moment, away from the fans, he was not a man of the people -- he was an extraordinarily rich douche yelling at his wife for mingling with the locals.
ReplyDeleteAnd I just disagree about whether it's possible for the crowd-surfing and the beer-drinking to be an act. It's certainly possible that it's not, just like it's possible that it's just an artistic flourish by a particularly dedicated performer. I admire Tom Cruise for going beyond the call of duty in doing a lot of his own crazy-ass stunts, but that doesn't mean that I think he's an actual spy.
I have to admit when it comes to Prince not being able to walk out into the crowd, I am part of the problem, not the solution.
ReplyDeleteGive the tiny sexy man to me!
"To"? I think you meant to type "through."
ReplyDeleteWe're also talking about a period of time when Springsteen, self-admittedly, WAS a jerk. His relationship with Phillips was indeed a disaster (as loosely chronicled in Tunnel of Love), and he eventually sought out professional help before settled down with Patti Scialfa and eventually became a dad (as loosely chronicled in Human Touch and Lucky Town). All while loosening up his famously obsessive control over his work product (for better or worse, at times).
ReplyDeleteJust saying, not inconsistent for him to have once been a man of the people, gotten too full of himself and gone down the road to dickdom, then later gotten back on track and back to man-of-peopledom. As much as a multi-gajillionaire rock star can.
Fair point. But one caveat: even with the "loosely" qualifier, music is closer to fiction than to journalism. You don't have to believe something a guy says about himself just because he put it in a song.
ReplyDeleteI'll be able to balance the testimony of one heresay encounter with all I've heard and read about Springsteen, while fully understanding that we don't live in a black and white world and we all have dimensions.
ReplyDeleteI consider myself a decent person, and yet I bet that anyone can reach into my past and come up with several dozen instances when I behaved dickishly. I imagine that I am not unique. All of which is to say that no one is perfect, and the people that I admire are not the ones who never act dickishly, but those who recognize when their behavior falls short of their ideal and work consistently to do better.
ReplyDeleteRichard, I don't know you, so forgive the familiarity, but, darling, I don't know why I go to extremes; too high or too low there ain't no in-betweens.
ReplyDeleteFine, fine. It's hearsay, FOAF stuff, and even if it happened it was one event and it was a long time ago, and people change. I'm entitled to believe it because I knew the source; you are entitled to reject it because it is at odds with the Springsteen you know and love. My point is not that Springsteen is a dick; it is that this whole "Bruce has a deep relationship with his fans that is unlike that of any other artist" thing is just as likely to be artist schtick as it is to be true. I'm not sure I understand why Brucelovers are so offended by that notion -- or are there people who still believe that Courteney Cox was not a plant in the Dancing in the Dark video?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I see the connection between Springsteen acting like a dick to his wife and having a deep connection to his fans.
ReplyDeleteAnd Springsteen's connection to his fans, schtick or not (again, not really an either/or situation, most likely both, which is understood by most fans), is a main reason they are so dedicated.
You are not allowed to destroy my childhood like that. That's the first ever romantic fantasy I remember formulating - that someday Bruce would pull ME out of the crowd and I'd make Keds look sexy and short hair would actually flatter me.
ReplyDeleteLALAICAN'THEARYOU
Oh, absolutely. But my use of "loosely" there is, I think, fair - if anything, Tunnel of Love paints more of a picture of a man conflicted about his relationship than of a man who was really in a bad psychological place, so the truth was probably a good bit harsher than the songs.
ReplyDeleteSo most Bruce fans understand that Bruce doesn't really think that he's like them, but there is something endearingly relatable about the way that Bruce pretends that he is just like them, and that makes them like him more?
ReplyDeleteBecause he's a multimillionaire who's willing to do this for the fans.
ReplyDeleteI've written -- either on this blog or in my imaginary journal -- about how part of fans' connection to the ESB is that the Bruce-Clarence "relationship" -- whether authentic or similacrum -- represented the kind of longterm brotherhood-like relationship with a black man that they wish they all had. I think that's part and/or parcel of what you're saying.
Isaac, you keep refuting arguments not being made. Nobody said they didn't think that Bruce's act wasn't part schtick; after all, it's called an act. And nobody said that crowd surfing or downing a fan's beer indicated that Bruce or the fans think that Bruce is "just like them." That's you setting up strawmen. The initial post was about trust/comfort with fans. About which you have yet to comment.
ReplyDeleteIsaac, I think you're parsing too much. I suspect most fans will stipulate to his not being "like" us, in the sense that he's wealthy enough not to have to give a shit about anything, if that's where he wanted to be. Of course there is a remove, and of course he and we acknowledge that remove.
ReplyDeleteThat said, he certainly does appear to give a shit about the quality of his live performances and giving the fans their money's worth (right down to the sound mix, which was outstanding in Philly), and he appears to be enjoying the hell out of it, if the show I saw last week is any indication. I would go so far as to say - because I have seen these types too - that there are plenty of other performers who, by contrast, don't put effort into their live shows, couldn't care less about constructing a meaningful (God-forbid unique) setlist that their fans will remember a week or even a day later, don't give a crap about the acoustics of the venue, and go out and perform by rote and move on to the next city.
So I guess it might depend on what you mean by "connecting with the fans" - I have no illusion that if I hang around after the show, I can flag down Bruce and Patti and invite them over for dinner or out for beers. (A guy can still hope, of course.) But I do feel that all the energy and sweat and care and thought and craftsmanship and precision and even, sometimes, joyful messiness that goes into a Bruce show isn't all for Bruce. It's for us.
Maybe it's because I'm a nice Jewish girl from Long Island, but I just do not get the Billy Joel hate. Sure, "Davy/Navy" is a lazy rhyme, but I'm sure there are far worse lyrics out there. But he writes music that's fun to sing out loud to, that tells stories, that can often be beautiful. And hell yes, he knows what to do with a great sax part and has a great ear for writing about his region (which is more NYC/Long Island than Jersey). His music is the soundtrack to my childhood, and one of his songs is my wedding song, so I guess I take him personally, which is sort of what this post is about. Not every song works, but for what artist working for decades does it?
ReplyDeleteHmm. That's selective reading.
ReplyDeleteWhen I saw Prince last year, he did walk through the crowd. Yes, he used aisles, but he did some handshaking. My husband then went to the Greensboro, NC show two nights later, made friends with the roadies, got floor seats, and was part of the handshaking.
ReplyDeleteMan, I wish I'd gotten a baby-sitter for that night.
Sue, I'll stand with you in unabashed love of the music of Billy Joel, particularly his work up through the early 80s.
ReplyDeleteAmen, literal sister. Amen.
ReplyDeleteIt's either sadness or euphoria.
ReplyDelete