The Rising, Joe

Here's my 9/11 story: It was the fall of 2019, and I'm down in Wildwood for Irish Weekend (same weekend as this). It was like 1 AM. Most of my family is still out at the bar (Pam, being very pregnant, is back at the house). We're at #1 Tavern, drinking Tully Nuts, getting pretty tipsy. And my dad starts going on about what he was doing on September 11, 2001. I dutifully listened to the story, and then asked, "Are we really talking about September 11th right now? Here? Now? At this bar at one in the morning?" It was then that I knew that I don't need to hear another 9/11 story for the rest of my life.

And yet here I am, contemplating it once again, all because our lord and savior Bruce Springsteen has forced me to. There's no getting around the fact that The Rising was inspired by, and is a tribute to, those lives we lost on 9/11/01, and all the grief-stricken ways that our country responded. You don't even have to have been watching TV on December 4, 2001 (like I was at my buddy Ryan's house, asking myself "Who the fuck is Bruce Springsteen?") to know that the songs on The Rising are intimately entwined with the day that terrorists attacked New York City. You can just look through the titles and it's very evident—"Empty Sky," "Lonesome Day," "Nothing Man," "My City of Ruins," like, c'mon. (I'm actually more surprised that this album was actually released in 2002—for some reason, my mind placed it as being released on like September 12th.)

Finally listening to The Rising in full for the first time in my life this week, I'm both surprised and not surprised how vital and energetic Bruce and the band sound on this album. Surprised because this is notably Bruce Springsteen's first "legacy years" record, and typically those types of albums don't pan out very well; not surprised because this is Bruce fucking Springsteen we're talking about, an artist who looms so large over American musical history and my own personal musical history that I've already talked about him at length in another Record Club review.

I actually have a theory as to why Bruce Springsteen sounds more alive here than he does on many other of his latter day records (that claim being relative, of course). Okay, so we watched the Springsteen on Broadway special on Netflix a few months ago, and one of the most striking moments is when Springsteen says something like: "I've never held an honest job in my entire life." It's a line that catches you off-guard, because the man has been singing about the "working man" and blue collar life his entire career, but he makes you stop and say—wait a minute, I guess Bruce Springsteen doesn't actually know what that's like. It's a mark of how convincing he is as a storyteller, that he can filter stories about, say, his factory worker father, and make them feel true coming from a musical artist, and feel real coming to this temporary office drone.

But anyway, my theory is this: if Bruce Springsteen has always contemplated the irony of how he tells these stories while not actually being a part of these stories, then The Rising is him finally shedding the distance between the characters of his stories and the real self. Bruce Springsteen—like you, and like me—is part of the story of September 11th. He is finally singing about himself. He is finally part of the fabric of society whose tales he weaves, as opposed to being a simple observer of it. 

 

And that's gotta bring him some joy on some level, right? That's the joy that is so clearly coming through in these songs. It's obviously not joy from any of the horrific violence and death that happened on 9/11. It's a joy that he was able to connect to his audience in a completely new way, and that these trying circumstances truly did bring everything together.

The Rising, of course, is not a perfect album. I could talk about tonal discrepancies—for one example, what in the world is the (excellent) song "Mary's Place" doing on an album about September 11th?—and we could talk about some of Bruce's weirder production decisions that tend to crop up the most in his 21st century work—the drum machine on "Let's Be Friends (Skin to Skin) is so bad—and we could discuss how insanely laden with strings this whole machine is—I mean, I would be on the PRO side of that argument, but I could see an argument against it too.

But it really comes down to how much fun this record, and all E Street Band records, usually end up being, despite whatever trying circumstances bring the gang together. There's a new September 11th story for you—Bruce Springsteen saw the towers crashing to the ground and decided to basically remake The River. As someone who wouldn't mind if Clarence Clemons, Steven Van Zandt, or Max Weinberg played at his funeral, I find this to be a good thing.

Next time anyone tries telling me their goddamn September 11th story while we're at a bar, I'm going to give them a quarter and ask them to go play "The Rising" on the jukebox instead.

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5