With full respect to the solo acoustic tour Bruce Springsteen just wrapped up, nothing has electrified his old-time fan base lately like this month’s DVD release of a full 1975 concert with the E Street Band.
Now comes an added and unexpected bonus: This Sunday night, PBS is offering a big old free sample of that concert: “Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band: Hammersmith Odeon London ’75.”
The nine songs in this special, about half the show, include the marquee items: “Born to Run,” “Thunder Road,” “Rosalita.”
They’re interspersed with comments from Conan O’Brien bandleader Max Weinberg, who in 1975 was the rookie drummer in the E Street Band.
There’s still some mild irony in this kind of Springsteen show being promoted on public television, since the skinny and scruffy kid on that 1975 stage was no more a candidate for a PBS special than for an invitation to accompany Queen Elizabeth to a polo match.
But the 2005 model Bruce is a guy who also does cool interviews with Terry Gross on National Public Radio, and one of the things he always does in forums like that is link his present music to the music of his past.
What the viewer gets Sunday night, however, is a double shot of pure 1975.
The filming, by present standards, is vintage. It’s dark and grainy. The sound is good. Occasionally, it seems to be slightly off-sync, which could suggest some lost element has been spliced in. If so, so what? The sound is authentic, which is to say, astonishingly compelling.
If the drum-and-guitar runup of “Born to Run” are the most familiar riff to many viewers, they will be pulled just as surely here into a swelling miniopera version of “Jungleland” and a funky take on “Tenth Avenue Freezeout,” with the signature salute to saxman Clarence Clemons.
The music opens strong with “Thunder Road,” a song so durable it sometimes gets overlooked in the Springsteen catalog. The interludes for instrumental riffs, like in “Rosalita,” build the anticipation for Springsteen’s next vocal explosion.
Jiving around the stage, fooling with a big wool hat, he looks like a guy who’s getting away with being paid to do the thing he likes the most – a suspicion reinforced when PBS wisely lets the show close with Gary U.S. Bonds’ “Quarter to Three.”
Bruce played that all the time because, one assumes, he loved it. Who didn’t? What white ‘60s rock ‘n’ roll kid would pass up a chance to sing “Quarter to Three” to a houseful of ecstatic dancing fans?
Is there something here not to like? Nope, there isn’t.
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