Complex Numbers

B minus 1 Day!

At this time tomorrow, I will be at Verizon Center in DC, most likely waiting for Bruce to take the stage (everyone takes the stage late these days, including Bruce).

This is getting to be a familiar feeling for me. After the Richmond concert and the Philly Vote for Change set, Bruce came out with a new album, Devils and Dust. It was a solo album, pretty much just Bruce and a few instruments, a departure from the E Street Band sound to something more spare and raw.

He'd done this before, of course: Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad. The former was a demo tape recorded in his basement, and was meant to be the beginnings of another Band album, but apparently the producers decided it sounded just fine like it was and released it with minimal edits. The latter was an album of social commentary released after the popular flops of his early 90s collections, and (in my opinion) it suffered from shitty engineering and lousy production: on the title track, for instance, you can't hear anything until the harmonica part, and then the harmonica splits your ears open.

So Devils and Dust got past all that, and moreover deals with more varied themes. The concerts for that album were intended to be run at smaller venues, for a more intimate, almost nightclub kind of feel. Of course, we're still dealing with Bruce here, so it's the difference between playing 50,000 seat arenas and 20,000 seat arenas.

I got tickets to the Fairfax show - managed to just get two, this time. And the atmosphere was totally different: darker, almost like the set of Phantom of the Opera. With just Bruce on stage, there was no interaction with the rest of the band: just Bruce and his audience.

And he ended the set with something odd: a cover of a song by an obscure New York punk group called Suicide, a haunting melody called, "Dream Baby Dream." He started out on the Hammond organ, but partway through the song got up while the instrument played itself, and walked slowly off the stage singing.

For some reason, that image will always stick with me.

Especially since I got to see it again, when they announced more tour dates and we ended up back in Richmond for another show.

But then, something different: eschewing the E Street Band, solo work AND original material, Bruce produced an entire album of traditional folk songs, in the spirit of Pete Seeger. And it was the polar opposite of D&D as he took the stage with over a dozen sessions band musicians - with only two from E Street, one of them his wife.

Saw that concert in Northern Virginia, and wrote about it in my previous blog. Here's a link: "It Came from New Jersey"  (someone challenged me to write a blog entry in verse...)

We won't have awesome seats tomorrow like we did then - but those weren't really "seats," more like "stands," and by the time the concert was over all either of us wanted to do was sit the hell down. Still, I wouldn't have traded that experience for anything.

Well I sought gold and diamond rings
My own drug to ease the pain that living brings
Walked from the mountain to the valley floor
Searching for my beautiful reward
Searching for my beautiful reward

From a house on a hill a sacred light shines
I walk through these rooms but none of them are mine
Down empty hallways I went from door to door
Searching for my beautiful reward
Searching for my beautiful reward