Springsteen & Mellencamp

 I have seen Springsteen twice in Indianapolis and I saw Mellancamp only once. I would have liked to have seen Mellancamp more, but never was lucky to do so.

Bruce the Builder - Mike Pesca (The Dispatch)

The disappointment in not reaching our national ideals is, to baby boomers, a promise unmet, a dream that, though not currently coming true, is nonetheless not a lie. Still, Springsteen builds. He does so, in the figurative sense through his music, through the conscious construction of his backup band as a community, and through the connection with his fans. But I also mean that Springsteen has a commitment to building and to physical buildings. The people of Springsteen’s generation believed in building. They believed in structures. Their landscape is one of edifices, their monuments were of the concrete and steel variety, not the conceptual or the electronic. This is why Springsteen has sung about: towers, churches, jails, tunnels, skylines, reservoirs, bridges, trestles, risings, mansions (of glory, of fear, on the hill), sidewalks, roads, streets, avenues, boulevards, girders, promenades, railroad tracks, rafters, and in at least three different songs, refineries. If Springsteen’s catalog were an infrastructure bill it would bring down unemployment to the Fed’s target of 2 percent. This is a performer who has mentioned “highways” more often in song lyrics (406 times according to SpringsteenLyrics.com) than there are highways in New Jersey (117 active state highways according to Wikipedia).

The people who built our country, according to Springsteen, are to be praised for their industry rather than decried as despoilers or thieves of stolen land. Springsteen himself is a sometimes disappointed but never cynical citizen of an America that builds. He is a steady purveyor of a message that might not always be uplifting, but is always, sometimes literally, constructive. He is an artist whose function is not to convince you to tear it all down, but to craft the case that there is a reason to believe. 

Scott Ramsey moved to Anderson; I met him in Tenth Grade. He introduced me to Springsteen by way of Born to Run. You would think that Springsteen would have been more popular in Indiana, but he was not. The first concert I saw was during The River Tour. Indianapolis was the only show of the tour not to sell out. Rush sold out a month later. Springsteen turned up the lights at the end and played on, and people danced in their seats. Based on bootlegs I heard, I'm of the opinion that he never gave Indy one of his better shows but gave us shows deserving of the audience. He lost me when he ditched the E Street Band (as Seger did when he moved away from The Silver Bullet Band).

John Cougar Mellencamp Will Fight You: On the Rock ‘n’ Roll Rise of a Combative Heartland Leftist (Literary Hub)

Mellencamp grew up modestly but comfortably in the idyllic town of Seymour, Indiana, the son of a mother who was an artist and nascent beauty queen, and a father who worked a white-­collar job with a local electrical contracting firm. Like much of his heartland rock cohort, Mellencamp wrote from his life—­the people and places of his formative years burrowing into his lyrics as an adult. Though Mellencamp had a comfortable upbringing, he saw the hardship endured by his extended family and rural neighbors, the farmers and other laborers. If Bruce Springsteen’s greatest gift was mythologizing the existential open graves swallowing up blue-­collar workers, Mellencamp’s was his piercing ability to at once celebrate and dismantle agrarian fantasy. 

I agree with the piece about Mellencamp up to a point. It may be a bias of mine that the following song from the John Cougar album set out what he was really about and remains. But then it was a favorite of me and my friends as soon as we heard it. This was the Indiana we knew. 

 What really changed was his sound. “Great Midwest” is like many of the songs on his first album that I would like to hear played in his later style.

When I was in New Jersey, it was rare to hear anything of his music past “Hurts So Good,” and that was sad. He has continued to push himself in a way that I do not think that Springsteen has. It may be Bruce is a little more affable than John.

But then these songs may undercut that opinion:

 

 

sch 5/4