As coincidences go, Tuesday`s is a doozy.
That`s the day when Bruce Springsteen`s first studio albums since 1987 will arrive in record stores. That night, U2`s first national tour since `87 will stop in Chicago to play the Rosemont Horizon.
Both the New Jersey rocker and the quartet from Dublin, Ireland, entered the year with something to prove-as much to themselves as to their fans, because for both acts, commercial considerations rank a poor third to personal and artistic ones.
It was largely because of that integrity, combined with enormous record sales, that Springsteen and U2 were the dominant rock acts of the 1980s. But both finished the era in a state of turmoil, if not disarray: U2 singer Bono hinted from a stage in Dublin on New Year`s Eve in 1989 that the band was calling it quits; meanwhile, Springsteen was ending one marriage and beginning another, and breaking up his longtime band.
Both were increasingly perceived as millionaire acts who had lost touch with their audiences, and as they took their time fashioning new albums, their relevance to popular music in the `90s was seriously in doubt.
In recent weeks, however, U2 and Springsteen have responded to the challenge.
Columbia Records is releasing not one, but two Springsteen CDs on Tuesday, ”Human Touch” and ”Lucky Town” (see the accompanying reviews).
It`s rare for any artist to release a double CD these days, much less to release them separately. But unlike Guns N` Roses` precedent-setting ”Use Your Illusion” CDs, released simultaneously last year, the Springsteen discs are thematically and sonically distinct.
”Human Touch” is a big, bold rock album with soul-drenched vocals, similar in its expansive sound to ”Born in the U.S.A.” It explores the impermanence of love, and implies that sometimes temporary sanctuary is salvation enough in a world where nothing lasts.
Compared to ”Human Touch,” ”Lucky Town” sounds scaled down and more intimate, bluesier and twangier. Yet its emotional reach is vast and far-reaching, with songs of redemption and renewal that have the mythic universality of those by Hank Williams Sr. and Robert Johnson.
U2, meanwhile, has put together a tour that more fully explores the aural and conceptual possibilities implied by its latest album, ”Achtung Baby,”
released on Island Records last November.
The album hinted at a new direction for the band: grungier, grittier and more introspective, rather than the grand, cinematic, we-are-the-world bent of its earlier releases. In songs such as ”Zoo Station” and ”The Fly,” the quartet pushed fully in this new direction. But these punkish, slightly menacing tracks were balanced by other songs (”One,” ”Tryin` to Throw Your Arms Around the World”) that wouldn`t have sounded out of place on the earlier albums.
As a result, ”Achtung Baby” has a schizophrenic, unfinished feel: a collection of sparks and shots that is frequently exciting but which doesn`t quite cohere as a great album. It`s reminiscent of U2`s 1985 release, ”The Unforgettable Fire,” a transitional album that opened the band to new possibilities without fully consummating them.
U2`s ”Zoo TV Tour,” which opened a few weeks ago in Lakeland, Fla., also at times looks and sounds like it doesn`t know what it wants to be. But it glories in the ambiguity, taking the audience-and the band-on a thrill ride that ranks with any arena show in recent memory.
U2 brings a sense of play to the concert-cum-celebration that belies the band`s reputation as flag-waving anthem rockers with perpetually furrowed brows. There`s a deliciously decadent atmosphere to the first half of the show, with eight songs in a row from ”Achtung Baby” accompanied by a multimedia blitz of sight and sound: junked, spray-painted cars hang from the rafters, television sets transmit alternately dire and humorous messages, while Bono struts around in wrap-around shades and neck-to-toe leather.
For the encore, U2 verges on campiness as Bono wiggles like a resurrected Elvis in gold lame and brandishes a mirror. ”You`re beautiful!” he mocks as he kisses his image.
In years past, Bono has been the band`s spokesman, eager to offer his opinion on almost any issue, from music to world hunger, the state of his marriage to the bombings in Belfast.
But he has played it cautious on the first leg of the band`s world tour, granting only a handful of interviews. The quartet`s California publicist says U2 prefers to let the music do the talking for now, and the strategy has worked: at record stores and ticket booths, U2 is as hot as ever. ”Achtung Baby” has surpassed 3 million sales, and the band`s 31-city tour is playing to jam-packed arenas (the Rosemont show sold out in two hours), setting the stage for a more ambitious outdoor tour in late summer.
Springsteen also is expected to tour at that time, and though it remains to be seen whether his new albums will be as widely accepted as his earlier releases, the early indications are good.
The new albums` first single, ”Human Touch”/”Better Days,” opened at No. 29 on the Billboard charts, the highest-debuting single by any artist in more than a year. What`s more, Springsteen has never been perceived as a singles artist. His fans know he conceives of his music in terms of albums rather than individual hits, so there`s reason to believe his new CDs will sell briskly.
If so, it will mean that both U2 and Springsteen have become exceptions to the rule of rock-star burnout. While `60s acts such as the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton have been hard-pressed to match their earliest successes, U2 is heading into its second decade and Springsteen into his third with their artistic integrity very much intact.
It has not been an easy challenge to meet.
Springsteen`s 1984 release, ”Born in the U.S.A.,” and U2`s 1987 opus,
”The Joshua Tree,” were pivotal records that defined the times and established both acts as superstars. They were showered with Grammy awards and critical praise, while racking up multiplatinum sales (10 million-plus) second only to Michael Jackson`s ”Thriller.”
Soon after those triumphs, however, the mountains of goodwill on which Springsteen and U2 stood began to erode.
U2 released an album and movie in 1988, ”Rattle and Hum,” that seemed to magnify only the band`s worst traits-its sanctimony and humorlessness-as Bono and the boys strutted through America ”discovering” the blues and early rock `n` roll.
It was as though U2 had started to believe its own hype, creating a big-budget movie that came off as a ”Spinal Tap”-like self-parody.
In Springsteen`s case, it was his private life that caused most of the fuss.
Diehards couldn`t believe he had the gall to marry a Hollywood actress, Julianne Phillips (instead of, presumably, one of the Jersey girls he always sang about), or to buy a $14-million mansion in Beverly Hills (instead of, say, a bungalow on the Jersey shore).
Then there was the tabloid-press feeding frenzy that erupted when Springsteen took up with a singer in his band, Patti Scialfa, before he was divorced from Phillips (he and Scialfa were later married and now have two young sons). Even more troubling to some of the Boss` followers was that he had stopped working with his longtime E Street Band, in favor of hired guns such as Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro.
To his audience, Springsteen not only wrote about working-class lives, faith and camaraderie, but seemed to embody that lifestyle and those ideals. After living vicariously through their hero for years, fans felt let down when Springsteen proved himself mortal after all.
U2`s followers harbored similar illusions: that the band was what it sang, concerned with and consumed by spirituality and love. The aggressive marketing of ”Rattle and Hum,” however, showed the quartet as denizens of the material world, just like everyone else.
Without their halos, the Boss and Bono have been freed to put the emphasis back where it belongs. Springsteen`s new albums and U2`s current tour prove that it is the music, after all, that matters.
