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[pauls4thoughts]

Film Review: ‘Asbury Park: Riot, Redemption, Rock ‘N Roll’

The coastal New Jersey enclave of Asbury Park was pinned firmly to the pop-cultural map upon the release of Bruce Springsteen’s debut album Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, in 1973. 

Frontloaded with testimony from Springsteen himself, in his role as rock’s plain-spoken elder statesman, ‘Asbury Park: Riot, Redemption, Rock 'N' Roll' is a documentary from director Tom Jones. who does a haphazard job of digging around the region in a bid to uncover how his sound – and a wider Asbury scene – emerged. 

Trailing some distance behind Bruce's 2016 autobiography Born to Run and the stage show Springsteen on Broadway, there’s little doubt that what much of the audience will be hoping for from this documentary is Bruce, the whole Bruce and nothing but the Bruce. 

The film satisfies a good portion of that craving with its illumination of the club scene that formed the star’s early musical life, but Springsteen gradually becomes less of the focus in a doc that nobly aims to tell the story of a New Jersey seaside town’s rise, instant fall and very gradual comeback through the prism of music.

The middle portion of the film could be subtitled “Born to Be Run Down,” or maybe “Blinded by the Blight.” Ironically enough, Asbury Park’s trajectory became pretty much the exact opposite of Springsteen’s, right about the time he made both of them jointly famous. 

The film’s most useful feature is its opening history of an area that served as a genuine East Coast melting pot: the only spot along the Jersey shore where African Americans could bathe in public – partly, it transpires, as the sea met the county’s sewage output there. 

That laissez-faire party-town air has traditionally accounted for the utopian mix of white and black musicians within Springsteen’s E Street Band, yet, as many of those performers testify here, their early recordings were born out of the July 1970 unrest that turned neighbours against one another, and were aimed at restoring unity to a divided community. 

I left “Asbury Park: Riot, Redemption, Rock ‘N Roll” wishing there was just a bit more of Springsteen’s own latter-day relationship with the area incorporated into the film. 

But you’ve got to admit that, as story arcs go, between Bruce and Asbury Park, the town has the more dramatic one.Springsteen once had an instrumental track called “Paradise by the C,” and whether or not he had Asbury Park in mind when he came up with it, the city certainly is made to sound paradisiacal for much of its existence, at least for anyone with a fondness for the intermingling of black and white music forms. 

Asbury Park literally had a right and wrong side of the railroad tracks, with the end of town closer to its seaside attractions being the privileged one. Yet, as Springsteen and several past and present members of the E Street Band tell it on camera, white kids felt fine going to see jazz greats like Kenny Burrell and Grant Green at the Orchid Lounge on the predominantly black west side in the ’60s, and black kids went east to join the rock bands playing original music in the all-ages Upstage club. 

Director Tom Jones has done such a good job of painting Asbury Park as a rock-meets-soul heaven on earth that it comes as perhaps more of a jolt than it should when the film gets to Asbury Park’s nationally news-making riots in 1970. 

A lot of the city’s residents who hadn’t taken up instruments apparently never got the all-is-harmonious memo, and fostering resentments resulted in burning businesses, with the poorer west side being hit hardest — the film says 75 percent of the retail space on Springwood Ave. burned or closed down and never came back. 

The movie isn’t quite sure how to treat this imbalance of fates. However, it can’t just be false hopes fueling a sound as warm as the E Street Band’s or Joe Grushecky’s or “I Don’t Wanna Go Home,” the Steven Van Zandt-written, Southside Johnny-performed anthem that inevitably plays out in full over the closing credits.

Without any footage of Bruce's original band Steel Mill to work with, director Jones intercuts all these expert witnesses in a way that does a surprisingly effective job of making you get the gist anyway. 

And it doesn’t hurt that Springsteen is being interviewed in the dilapidated remnants of the Upstage, vacant for 48 years now. The movie’s last post-credits shot is a poignant one of the star coming down the creaky stairs, saying, “Last man out. … Time for something new.”

[pauls4thoughts]

Bruce Springsteen – ‘Letter To You’ review: a powerful synthesis of past and present

I have now had Bruce's new album for two days and played it on repeat for several hours. 'Letter To You' finds Bruce Springsteen full of wisdom yet still young at heart. Fast and live, the The Boss and the E Street Band rescue lost tunes and toast lost brothers. 

Bruce Springsteen’s twentieth studio album, was the sort of cinematic end-scene it sounds like, it’d feature our hero gazing up at a neon sign reading ‘Welcome To Fabulous Las Vegas’, having an unspoken inner epiphany, climbing back on his motorbike and roaring away in the direction of New Jersey. 

Last year’s Western Stars saw him single-handedly piece together a plush, orchestral masterstroke of a record, summoning the 60s spirits of Gene Pitney and Burt Bacharach to tell tales of Hollywood has-beens in the sort of retro Californian pop styles that suggested he was preparing himself for a pre-retirement residency on the Vegas Strip.

Instead, recoiling once more from the stench of slickness, he got the E Street Band together in his New Jersey home studio for four days, let the tape run and let rip.

There is not a weak track on the album. Personal favourites, 'Letter To You' title track, 'Ghosts', 'Rainmaker', 'If I Was The Priest', 'Last Man Standing' and 'Burnin' Train. 

Recorded completely live, right down to the vocals, the result is the E Street energy bottled. The 71-year-old Springsteen’s concerns – grief, nostalgia, reactionary anger – might reflect his years, but this is a band that can make the act of writing out a lifetime’s worth of wisdoms in the title track sound as wild and noble as any last chance power drive. Another great album from the main