Bruce Springsteen: How The Rising (2002) helped America heal after 9/11

From loudersound.com

(Image credit: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images)

Like countless millions of people around the world, Bruce Springsteen watched the dreadful events that unfolded on Tuesday, 11 September 2001 on his television. Ten days later, Springsteen took a call at his New Jersey farmhouse from his long-serving manager, Jon Landau. A telethon had been organised to raise money for the victims of the first terrorist attacks on mainland America and Springsteen had been asked to open the show.

He quickly wrote two songs, Into the Fire and You’re Missing, each of which explicitly referenced the event, both lyrically and in their downbeat mood. However, Springsteen, habitually a slow, prevaricating worker, didn’t feel either was complete enough yet to unveil in public. Landau suggested he perform instead a song he’d written a year earlier about the economic decline of his adopted hometown, Asbury Park, but which also fit the moment. 

That was My City of Ruins, an urgent, pleading gospel track that drew its inspiration from Sam Cooke. Alongside those two more recent songs, it was the starting point for The Rising, the 12th and perhaps most affecting studio album of Springsteen’s career.

A second catalyst occurred right around the same time and as Springsteen was walking back from the beach one late-summer afternoon. A passing motorist happened to spot the local hero and, speeding by, shouted out from the open window of his car: “We need ya, man!”

“That made me sense, like, ‘Oh, I have a job to do,’ ” Springsteen told Rolling Stone in 2002. “Our band, hopefully, we were built to be there when the chips are down.”

Just then Springsteen was emerging from his own long, dark tunnel. Following the phenomenal success of the Born in the USA album, he’d broken up the E Street Band, the bedrock of his sound for more than a decade, gone through a painful divorce and suffered a sharp decline in his commercial fortunes with the Human Touch and Lucky Town albums of 1992. 

His only record since then, 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad, cut almost solo, was hushed, haunted and marginalised him still further from the mainstream. Bloodied, in 1999 he’d revived the E Street Band for a tour that was triumphal, but through which he had the air of a fighter swinging from the ropes.

The Rising, though, was a different matter altogether. In total, it was as if, as Springsteen noted, when his audience, and even his whole damn country, needed him the most, he was again able to stand tall. And by seeking to staunch America’s psychic wounds, he also made himself strong once more. It was not so much an album of great, impassioned rock’n’roll, though it was that too, as an act of healing, a re-affirmation of faith and a road out of the bleakest of times and towards a sort of redemption.

For the first time in 18 years, he had the E Street Band at his side to give heart, soul and heft to his songs, and crucially, a new producer. Brendan O’Brien had made his reputation working with, among others, Pearl Jam and Rage Against the Machine. He was a natural to harness the E Street Band’s elemental power and also give them a more contemporary feel. 

It was no accident that The Rising was Springsteen’s freshest and most vibrant-sounding record since Born in the USA. Springsteen’s, Steve Van Zandt’s and Nils Lofgren’s guitars were here hard as diamonds; Max Weinberg’s drums like blows to the solar plexus.

Outside of such surface details, though, the crux of the record was its sense of purpose, its thematic coherence – several of its 15 songs were written pre-9/11, but none was not evocative of it – and the manner in which Springsteen chose to deal with such a raw, complex and so painfully recent happening. For while his President, George W. Bush, and America’s government were driven by a kind of crazed bloodlust, Springsteen sought instead to bring not just solace, but also to find a common ground with his country’s perceived enemies.

Nowhere was this more apparent than on the album’s centrepiece song, Worlds Apart, which explicitly featured the intense wailing sounds of Qawwali, the vocal music of the Sufi sect of Islam. Springsteen used this and a propulsive, turbulent, shape-shifting rhythm to extract, rather than inject poison. ‘In the beating of our hearts,’ he sang, voice bruised and cracking at the edges, ‘may the living let us in, before the dead tear us apart.’

Elsewhere, time and again, he used sombre blues, rustic folk and keening gospel as his musical palette, whilst his lyrics were littered with images of fire, smoke and darkness, loss and grief, but also love and tenderness. And at its end, with its surging, uplifting title track and the closing My City of Ruins, The Rising resoundingly offered the comfort that light could be found even in the cruellest, most impenetrable-seeming blackness. And almost evangelising, Springsteen brought the song and album to an end invoking the highest power. ‘With these hands, I pray for the strength Lord,’ he sang and then re-joined his listeners: ‘Come on, rise up. Come on, rise up.’

The mere fact that he should have been bold and big-hearted enough to want to put his country back on its feet remains his own very singular achievement.

Bruce Springsteen – The Rising (2002)

From allmusic.com

“Yes, life is very confusing, we’re just trying to get on with it.” — Art Carney as Harry Coomes in Harry and Tonto.

The many voices that come out of the ether on Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising all seem to have two things in common: the first is that they are writing from the other side, from the day after September 11, 2001, the day when life began anew, more uncertain than ever before. The other commonality that these voices share is the determination that life, however fraught with tragedy and confusion, is precious and should be lived as such. This is a lot for a rock album by a popular artist to claim, but perhaps it’s the only thing there is worth anything.

On this reunion with the E Street Band, Bruce Springsteen offers 15 meditations — in grand rock & roll style — on his own way of making sense of the senseless. The band is in fine form, though with Brendan O’Brien’s uncanny production, they play with an urgency and rawness they’ve seldom shown. This may not have been the ideal occasion for a reunion after 15 years, but it’s one they got, and they go for broke. The individual tracks offer various glimpses of loss, confusion, hope, faith, resolve, and a good will that can only be shown by those who have been tested by fire. The music and production is messy, greasy; a lot of the mixes bleed tracks onto one another, giving it a more homemade feel than any previous E Street Band outing. And yes, that’s a very good thing.

The set opens with “Lonesome Day,” a midtempo rocker with country-ish roots. Springsteen’s protagonist admits to his or her shortcomings in caring for the now-absent beloved. But despite the grief and emptiness, there is a wisdom that emerges in questioning what remains: “Better ask questions before you shoot/Deceit and betrayal’s bitter fruit/It’s hard to swallow come time to pay/That taste on your tongue don’t easily slip away/Let kingdom come/I’m gonna find my way/ Through this lonesome day.” Brendan O’Brien’s hurdy-gurdy cuts through the mix like a ghost, offering a view of an innocent past that has been forever canceled because it never was anyway; the instrument, like the glockenspiels that trim Bruce Springsteen’s songs, offers not only texture, but a kind of formalist hint that possibilities don’t always lie in the future.

In contrast, “Into the Fire” seems to be sung from the perspective of a deceased firefighter’s remaining partner who, despite her/his unfathomable loss, offers a prayer of affirmation, and the request to embody the same qualities he or she displayed in paying the ultimate price for selflessness. A Dobro and acoustic guitar bring in the ghost of a mountain melody, and Max Weinberg’s muted snare and tom-tom rhythm offer the solemnity of the lyric before Roy Bittan and Danny Federici shift the gears and offer a nearly symphonic crescendo on the refrain: “May your strength bring us strength/may your faith give us faith/May your hope give us hope/May your love give us love.” The second time through, the last line subtly changes to “May your love bring us love.” While the band is in full flower, the keys are muted under sonic ambience and the snaky lone acoustic guitar and Weinberg’s thundering processional drumming.

Likewise, the revelatory rock & roll on “Worlds Apart,” complete with a knife-edged wail of a guitar solo by Springsteen that soars around a Sufi choir is not only a manner of adding exotica to the mix, but another way of saying that all cultures are in this together, and it unwittingly reveals that great rock can be made with virtually any combination of musicians. It’s a true scorcher. “Further On (Up the Road)” is a straight-ahead rocker complete with knotty riffs and plenty of rootsed-out, greasy guitar overdrive — most of the album does, but that’s one of O’Brien’s strengths as a producer — that are evocative of Mike Ness and Social Distortion’s late efforts.

Lest anyone mistakenly perceive this recording as a somber evocation of loss and despair, it should also be stated that this is very much an E Street Band recording. Clarence Clemons is everywhere, and the R&B swing and slip of the days of yore is in the house — especially on “Waitin’ for a Sunny Day,” “Countin’ on a Miracle,” “Mary’s Place” (with a full horn section), and the souled-out “Let’s Be Friends (Skin to Skin).” These tracks echo the past with their loose good-time feel, but “echo” is the key word. Brendan O’Brien’s guitar-accented production offers us an E Street Band coming out of the ether and stepping in to fill a void. The songs themselves are, without exception, rooted in loss, but flower with the possibility of moving into what comes next, with a hard-won swagger and busted-up grace. They offer balance and a shifting perspective, as well as a depth that is often deceptive.

The last of these is a bona fide love song, without which, in rock & roll anyway, no real social commentary is possible. The title track is one of Mr. Springsteen’s greatest songs. It is an anthem, but not in the sense you usually reference in regard to his work. This anthem is an invitation to share everything, to accept everything, to move through everything individually and together. Power-chorded guitars and pianos entwine in the choruses with a choir, and Clemons wails on a part with a stinging solo. Here too, the chantlike chorus is nearly in symphonic contrast to the country-ish verse, but it hardly matters, as everything inside and outside the track gets swept into this “dream of life.” The album closes with “Paradise,” a haunting and haunted narrative offered from the point of view of a suicide bomber and a studio version of “My City of Ruins.” These songs will no doubt confuse some as they stand in seemingly sharp contrast to one another, but in “My City of Ruins,” all contradictions cease to matter. With acoustic pianos and subtley shimmering Memphis soul-style guitars that give way to a Hammond B-3 and a gospel choir, Springsteen sings “rise up” without artifice. In this “churchlike” confessional of equanimity, Springsteen reaches out to embrace not only his listeners, but all of the protagonists in the aforementioned songs and their circles of families and friends. The album ends with an acknowledgement of grace and an exhortation to action.

With The Rising, Springsteen has found a way to be inclusive and instructive without giving up his particular vision as a songwriter, nor his considerable strength as a rock & roll artist. In fact, if anything, The Rising is one of the very best examples in recent history of how popular art can evoke a time period and all of its confusing and often contradictory notions, feelings, and impulses. There are tales of great suffering in The Rising to be sure, but there is joy, hope, and possibility, too. Above all, there is a celebration and reverence for everyday life. And if we need anything from rock & roll, it’s that. It would be unfair to lay on Bruce Springsteen the responsibility of guiding people through the aftermath of a tragedy and getting on with the business of living, but rock & roll as impure, messy, and edifying as this helps.