There
were lots of wonderful records on the radio as I approached (chronological)
adulthood, few more wonderful than the breakthrough international hit by The
Easybeats, sort of the antipodal Beatles. At the beginning, as the singer
bitches and moans, as the very young will, about being a wage slave, it’s
fairly earthbound. But then, as he begins contemplating ever more voraciously
the weekend to come, the music begins to soar. The Beatles and Hollies sang
thrilling harmonies? Neither had anything on the Easies. “Friday On My Mind”
was one of the three or four most exhilarating pop records of the 1960s.
On
his 2014 visit to Australia, Bruce Springsteen performed the song, presumably
as a special treat for his fans in Sydney, where the Easies were formed, though
performed isn’t quite the right word — brutalized is more like it. I have never
heard a worse vocal performance by a professional musician. It isn’t that he’s painfully
out of tune — his atonality made all the more vivid and embarrassing by the
lovely entrance of his four African American backing vocalists (white folk
can’t jump, or sing backing vocals) — or that he seems to be stuck on Bellow.
It’s also that he stomps around like an irate orangutan, gesticulating like a thwarted
toddler. In this latter regard,
one is reminded, unpleasantly, of Mick Jagger, who in his own dotage, has taken
to gesticulating in exactly the same way 4000 times per song.
It’s
OK to just stand there for a moment or two, fellows.
When
he first emerged, I perceived Springteen as a hammy, vocally affected, musically banal, logorrheic blowhard,
though there was no denying that his own breakthrough hit, “Born to Run,” had
its thrilling moments. Strap your hands across my engine, indeed! Then I saw
him live, where he exuded joy as no other performer I’d ever seen — a prisoner
of rock and roll, pleading for a life sentence, in Greil Marcus’s wonderful
phrase — and became an avid fan. I thought “Dancing in the Dark” might have
been the best song about depression I’d ever heard, and I am the composer of "Falling Off the Face of the Earth."
The
more popular he became, though, the more grandiose. He committed the rock
superstar’s cardinal sin, of inviting his wife, with her alarming proclivity
for singing in the key of H, to join his ever-larger band on stage. Apparently
embarrassed by how exhaustingly bombastic he’d become, he unleashed his inner
folk singer, complete with a twang that made his soul man affectations seem authentic
in comparison, and it made one long for the old grandiosity. “Anyone who will
claim to listen to Nebraska for
pleasure,” a writer for Creem
cogently noted, “will lie about other things too.”
In
this century, he’s taken to showing up on TV nearly as relentlessly as Dave
Grohl, but TV is so not his medium;
that which looks really cool to someone 50 yards away in a stadium looks
foolish or even obnoxious in close-up on TV. He is no less relentlessly passionate than in the old days, and
entirely too fucking passionate. He
grimaces horribly. The veins in his neck bulge ominously. Will the guy sing
himself to death? Will he cause himself to explode before our very eyes?
His
self-mocking turns alongside Jimmy Fallon nearly got me back on his side. But then
there was Sydney. If I’d been a member of the audience there, “Friday On My
Mind” would have made me more inclined to try to tar and feather him than to thrust
my fist in the air and bellow, “Broooooce!”
