hiding on them backstreets...

One of the things that always fills me with joy and hope and so much more is watching a true artist deepen their creation. I've seen it with dancers and musicians and poets: sometimes an orchestra can almost reinvent a classic composition while a jazz ensemble can take the basics and find a new way to play it every night. And what the cubists did with traditional still life in art... fascinating.

When it comes to reinterpreting a song, one of the masters is Bruce Springsteen. His live performances almost always find a way to take a few old songs and lift them into something transcendent. At the same time these same songs also evoke a bit of our common humanity and feet of clay. Take his rendering of "Backstreets" from the 1975 classic album, "Born to Run." When Springsteen wrote this 34 years ago, he was a 26 year old punk poet from Jersey who had broken into stardom in the nick of time just before his record company dumped him. He was wild and innocent and fully aware of what it meant to grieve a heart broken.

In 1975 this song was a romantic ode to the tragedy of lost love. Griel Marcus spoke of the opening instrumental as "music so stately that it sounds like the rock'n'roll Iliad." And in the middle of the tune - as he does from time to time - the Boss would improvise stories and singing that evoked loss better than anyone this side of Otis Redding. Here's what it used to sound like in the old romantic days...

Jump ahead 34 years and all of us have lived through so much more loss, pain and tragedy both personally and as a community, yes? Springsteen just turned 60 years old and we're still fighting many of the same stupid, worn-out battles for dignity and hope we thought we might win back then. So you can't sing this old song the same old romantic way... it has to mature and resonate with the truths of THIS moment in time. Many of us can't stand to hear the old anthems sung in same old ways... so he reworked "Backstreets" for his most recent show at Giants Stadium in New Jersey and simply grieves what has been lost. No words - just his anguished moans - and in that instant he tell us something important about struggle and abiding faith. Very, very different from the street poet days, yet equally true and powerful.

To me, this new version sounds like the opening of Ecclesiastes where Qohelet the preacher reminds us that not only is there nothing NEW under the sun, but that most of what we give our time and talent to amounts to nothing but dust and ashes and smoke.

There's nothing to anything—it's all smoke.
What's there to show for a lifetime of work,
a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone?
One generation goes its way, the next one arrives,
but nothing changes—it's business as usual for old planet earth.
The sun comes up and the sun goes down,
then does it again, and again—the same old round.
The wind blows south, the wind blows north.
Around and around and around it blows,
blowing this way, then that—the whirling, erratic wind.
All the rivers flow into the sea,
but the sea never fills up.
The rivers keep flowing to the same old place,
and then start all over and do it again.
Everything's boring, utterly boring—
no one can find any meaning in it.
Boring to the eye,
boring to the ear.
What was will be again,
what happened will happen again.
There's nothing new on this earth.
Year after year it's the same old thing.

The challenge for Springsteen - and for all people of faith - is finding the community and spiritual depth to face this smoke and ash with courage and honesty. To be sure, as the preacher says later in the same book, "to everything there is a season... a time to grieve and a time to dance and sing... and refrain from it all, too." I am regularly nourished by the way Springsteen - as wisdom preacher and shaman - helps ground me in the truth while urging me towards community.

credits: love cubed @ www.iktshop.com/madrid-travel-news/love-squared-a-cubist-wedding-theme.html; born to run @ /sunonthesand.net/?p=6026; ecclesiates @ theosproject.blogspot.com/2006/08/what-is-meaning-of-life.html