Time was when you could make a pretty good living imitating Bruce Springsteen. In the mid-1970s, when post-Born to Run legal problems were keeping Springsteen out of the recording studio, acts such as Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band, and even the obese yowler Meat Loaf all had some success in meeting the pent-up demand for Boss-inspired product.
These days, sadly, the most successful Springsteen imitator is Springsteen himself.
I've given a couple of listens this week to Radio Nowhere, the single from Springsteen's forthcoming album, Magic. It's eerie - it sounds just like Springsteen. Except that the guitars are too robotic, the lyrics too cliched and repetitive, the arrangement too simplistic. This couldn't really be Bruce, could it? Alas, it certainly could.
As an (Almost) Original Springsteen Fan, I never thought it would come to this. But the prospect of Bruce revving up the E Street Band for one more wheezing journey through what he calls (I wish I were making this up) "the last long American night" fills me with dread, not anticipation. Nostalgia is just another word for "nothing left to say". At nearly 58 years old, Springsteen is now wallowing in it.
I know exactly when I attended my first Bruce Springsteen concert: October 30, 1974, the night of the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman fight in what was then Zaire. Springsteen was playing in the old Music Hall in Boston, and I was up somewhere in the balcony. Dr John opened. And at 9pm, Springsteen took the stage.
Bruce began with Incident on 57th Street, accompanied only by a young woman playing an electric violin. An early version of the E Street Band emerged from the shadows. The boys (and girl) took three and a half hours to work their way through just a handful of songs, stretching out Kitty's Back, for instance, to a shimmering half-hour jam. At 12.30am, after a series of encores, they finally brought matters to a cathartic close. The last thing I remember was the promoter walking out to announce that Ali, against all odds, had defeated the mighty Foreman. Pandemonium.
Now, more than three decades down the road, Springsteen's image is that of a rock-and-roller who never really lost whatever it was he had, and who has managed to age gracefully with ever-more-mature songs and performances. But image is one thing, and reality is another. And the reality is that he was king of the universe through the early 1980s, but has been pretty much sucking wind ever since, lurching back and forth with mixed results between hard rock and acoustic-tinged pseudo-folk.
His last album with the E Street Band, The Rising (2002), a tribute to the victims of 9/11, is such an embarrassment that it makes my skin crawl. The one decent song, My City of Ruins, was written before the terrorist attacks. The rest is an overly loud, overly busy mess aimed at his dumbest fans - the ones whose only other Springsteen moment was Born in the USA, his 1984 crowd-pleaser. Last year's collection of traditional folk songs, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, was terrific, but mainly because they weren't his songs.
When Springsteen burst on to the scene, he was promoted as the latest "new Dylan". He turned out to be more than that, but less, too. During the 1970s he almost single-handedly saved rock and roll from the synth-heavy pretensions of bands like Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer with a series of great albums and a live show that had to be seen to be believed.
Yet Springsteen never caught up to Bob Dylan as a songwriter or an innovator. And it's more than a little ironic that, today, Dylan himself is all the new Dylan anyone needs: At 66, he's in the midst of a career revival that no one would have dared predict a decade ago. Would that Springsteen regain his own creative powers when he hits his 60s.
Give Springsteen this: he's kept his integrity and ideals, and is doing the best he can. But the magic has diminished considerably, even as Magic is upon us.
