Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band – ‘Hammersmith Odeon London 1975’ (Sony BMG) Released 27/02/06

How should a reissue be judged? Purely on the music alone as it sounds now or with some contextualisation, locating the enclosed sounds within the time of their creation to help explain away or justify. Reviewing a Rock’n’Roll live album from 1975 in February 2006, what criteria does the reviewer use. If it sounds dated, is it a write-off to be consigned to the bin? Bruce Springsteen, The Boss, represented a last blast of authentic Rock’n’Roll. A plea to believe, the cynicism and melancholy of Dylan was rerouted into an ultra-masculine escape. ‘Born to Run’, Bruce and the E Street Band want to flee the claustrophobic death trap of small town America.

This has been referred to as one of the best concerts of all time, a typically ridiculous remark made by people for whom music stopped mattering to years ago. The typical post 60s generation of journos who relentlessly try and class music as classic is less savvy than Alan Partridge’s play list. Bruce offered up a last blast of Rock’n’Roll but the rest of the world just moves on. So, ‘Hammersmith Odeon London 1975’ is 9 years after Tim Buckley’s ‘Starsailor’, 8 years after ‘Bitches Brew’, and the same year as Kraftwerk’s ‘Radioactivity’. Also, that same year, down the road from where this was recorded, a nascent Sex Pistols played live for the first time. Their demented howl embedded itself so firmly in the public psyche that you couldn’t not have an opinion. It was that important- you loved or hated them. Hating them was nothing to do with aesthetics either, this was Hatred- a threat to moral, political and religious values. Springsteen’s representation of the American working classes was easy to co-opt and misrepresent in the Reaganite 80’s, despite Bruce’s own intentions. This could never be said for God Save the Queen. And maybe it’s not fair to make comparisons with the above mentioned innovators and hell raisers and maybe we should take it on its own merits.

Well, there is no denying the energy or the virtuosity. ‘Kittys Back’ moves like fury, but even as the speed and overload threatens to become something other, something special, the band evokes trad. jazz memories lapsing into solo virtuoso flourishes each one being granted with applause that now to these ears just seems bloody embarrassing. Again, authenticity rears its illusory head. Coltrane, Coleman, Davis, Ayler, in fact too many to mention, had done away with all this. Bruce brings it back, sends it earth bound and just extends the already over pompous bluster of this white soul-boy rock. Jools Holland will cream himself over this album. But it’s been done before. Bigger, better, faster and more relevantly and from a much much earlier time.