In this photo released by Shorefire Media, a young Bruce Springsteen performs at New York City's Bottom Line in 1975.PETER CUNNINGHAM/The Associated Press
Forty years ago today, Bruce Springsteen released his seminal record Born to Run. To mark the occasion, we dug up a Globe review of one of Springsteen's first Canadian concerts, at Seneca College in Toronto on Dec. 21, 1975.
Bruce Springsteen is not God. Despite the hysterical adulation of fans in some parts of North America, his picture on the cover of Newsweek and continuous coverage of virtually every bodily function by Rolling Stone magazine, Springsteen is most emphatically not the new pop messiah.
Last night Springsteen performed for the first time in Canada [his first Canadian show was actually in Montreal two days prior, followed by one in Ottawa] at the field house at Seneca College. It was suitably symbolic, since the place was essentially an overgrown gymnasium and Springsteen plays the sort of music that used to be found at high school dances in gyms back when.
The walls and ceiling of the gym had been draped in cloths to eliminate echoes and soften the sound and the result made the place look rather like a set for an exotic film like Son of the Sheik.
That fits Springsteen, too, for he is also something of an exotic creature, a man who combines the innocent rebellion of the fifties with the sophisticated poetic lyrics of the sixties, all played in the context of the advanced technology of the seventies.
That mean that technically, the concert was excellent. The lighting was brilliantly orchestrated and precisely coordinated to every fluctuation in the temp and mood of the music. The sound, too, given the limitations of the hall, was also much better than might have been expected.
But the whole feeling, the ambiance, of the concert was wrong. For a man who supposedly played basic rock'n'roll that celebrated the agonies of adolescence and cried out for freedom from them, the audience was all wrong. It was not composed of young people who were sharing an experience with one of their number who had managed to articulate their feelings through music.
The house was full of university students and young adults who looked as though they wanted Springsteen to lead them back to some innocent and half-remembered youth, in which freedom really could be found in a beat-up car and an endless highway.
Springsteen and his music might be believable, first, if his audience were young enough and second, if he addressed himself to the problems that young people have today.
Springsteen didn't do that. Instead, he addressed himself to some mythical never-never-land of adolescent romanticism that justified his appearing on stage in a tight black T-shirt and a pair of baggy pants. Who has seriously worn such a costume in the past 20 years?
Who does Springsteen hope to represent? Who is he talking to? Is it aging rock critics like Rolling Stone's Jon Landau, who proclaimed him the future of rock'n'roll and quit his job as review editor for the magazine in order to produce Springsteen's third album, Born to Run?
Who is listening to him? There were 3,100 people at the field house at Seneca College last night. Is their present so unbearable that they will settle for the supposed past that Springsteen represents?
Some of Springsteen's songs, lest they be overlooked in the philosophical foofaraw, are decent enough rock songs. She's the One is a driving song. Born to Run, a little overblown on record, was handled very nicely and with some restraint by Springsteen and band in live performance.
The six-piece band, by the way, was tightly orchestrated and highly supportive of Springsteen's efforts but in the end, I was left wondering if the band's efforts were worth the trouble or was Bruce Springsteen really just a one-man Sha Na Na?