It was through the most famous of these bootlegs, known as Brixton Night on seedy forums (not really, everyone seems super nice!) that I encountered the music. Despite being one of history's best documented musicians, for a long time, the tour was a lone blackspot, and bootlegs flourished. On the entirety of the internet, there remarkably seems to exist only four grainy clips from across 128 whole shows. This final instruction became the de facto nickname for the tour amongst Springsteen diehards. Don't make me come out and start slapping people around, ruining my nice guy image… Put your cameras away and shut the fuck up." He had always maintained a clean-cut, crowd pleasing persona which endures to this day, but on this tour, Springsteen sounded freed by the lower-stakes of his commercial situation, opening the show by saying, "It's a night where the music's quiet so I need quiet. He was "Bruce Springsteen And The E Street Band," but the band was long gone and Springsteen appeared alone with just an organist providing ambient backing off stage and out of view. It was an inversion of everything he had come to be known for. It was his least commercially successful tour since his first, and saw the American Hero looking like the lead in a Gaspar Noé film. The Ghost Of Tom Joad's tour ran over 128 dates between 19. One programme director famously answered by saying, "Oh yeah, that'll get everybody up and dancing." If Springsteen's 1992 albums aimed for more radio success and flopped, with Tom Joad, Springsteen revelled in the lowered expectations. Springsteen knew that he wasn't filling stadiums with this music no singles were released from the album and 'Youngstown', the song which Columbia Records tried to pitch to radio stations, was met with derision. The Americans on the album are homeless or crushed by Reagan's war on the poor. There is a focus on characters who weren't born in the USA at all, including Mexican immigrants and Vietnamese refugees. The songs are delivered in a whisper, often without a chorus. The Ghost Of Tom Joad is a fascinating album which contains absolutely no hits. But the 1996 tour is a fascinating moment in the history of an enormous artist one which asks whether, when it comes to musicians on the level of Springsteen, commercial failure can actually yield artistic liberation. The man has a podcast with Barack Obama and has now scored more number one albums this century than the last. Twenty five years later, we know the end of this story. By the time he arrived at the Brixton leg of his 1996 tour, promoting his second acoustic album The Ghost Of Tom Joad, the man who had played to 3.9 million people between 19 was struggling to fill a 5,000 seat venue. With Darkness On The Edge Of Town, Bruce might have been able to weather a transition out of peak superstardom with his image untouched but – crowded out of the charts by R.E.M., Nirvana and Sonic Youth on the rock end and rendered outdated by the flourishing of bicoastal hip hop on the other – this man never stood a chance. He released his ninth and tenth studio albums ( Lucky Town and Human Touch) in 1992 on the same day: records with zero reason to be released simultaneously aside from their shared unimpressiveness.
Ten years on his star had fallen considerably. Every track from the album had been released as a single and, alongside The Rolling Stones, he and the E Street Band became one of the first acts to tour sports stadiums rather than arenas because demand was, essentially, bottomless. It was the fifth biggest of all time, grossing $85 million in a little over a year ($200 million in today's money). This isn't a Steve Earl show, or Richard Shindell's this is Bruce Springsteen's 1996 world tour.Ī decade earlier, Springsteen was wrapping up the Born In The USA tour. He'll play in this silence for two hours, talking as much as he sings. After performing the first song, he finally addresses the audience simply to ask for quiet throughout. He walks out alone and sits in a blue spotlight, with a greaser moustache and a shirt straight out of a Billy Joel music video. You find your place amongst the seats of the Brixton Academy – the place isn't even close to sold out – and sip a beer as you wait for a forty-seven year old man to take the stage. England creaks under the rust of seventeen years of Conservative governance The Prodigy's 'Firestarter' has been sat on top of the charts for three weeks and flannel shirts are very cool indeed.
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