The River - Springsteen, Bruce (CD 1987)

First things first: i'm writing this review knowing, full well, that The River is probably the last Bruce Springsteen solo album you would ever consider buying, assuming, of course, that you don't have The River and that I'm trying to sell you on it. First of all, it's not one of Bruce's real "hit" albums, at least not in the sense that Born to Run and Born in the U.S.A. are-- it *did* provide Bruce with his first number-one hit in "Hungry Heart," but the rest of the album isn't quite as legendary, nor the songs quite as ubiquitous. The River is big, and The River is awesome, but The River is not the pop-culture landmark other Springsteen albums are.

And so it is with confidence that, as a longtime Bruce Springsteen fan-- since birth, practically-- I find The River to be more purely enjoyable than Born to Run, or Darkness on the Edge of Town, or Born in the U.S.A. Nothing to do with the inferiority of those other albums-- I mean, if you wanna get right down to it, Born to Run and Darkness are, when evaluated on their technical aspects alone, probably far superior to The River, and streamlined and concise in a way that The River isn't-- but sometimes you want escape via emotional catharsis, and sometimes you want escape via cool and fun music. Which is where The River comes in: it's long and unwieldy, but not in that unpleasant, masturbatory The Wall kind of way; it's full of fun and life and vibrance and humour. Bruce hasn't taken himself this unseriously since "Rosalita".

Of course, The River is still a Bruce Springsteen album. Which is why the lightheartedness is broken up with patches of sobering reality a la Darkness (which, while always professing the slimmest glimmer of hope, was downright dour at times); "Jackson Cage" is a distillation of all things Darkness, a bitter narrative about a character struggling to escape her small-town life ("you been judged and handed life/ down in the Jackson cage"), and "Independence Day" reads as a slower, less angry, more sympathetic reiteration of Darkness's fiery "Adam Raised a Cain". The title track is told ten times as beautifully as anything on Darkness, but is tragic all the same, another narrative about another set of fringe characters, these ones small-town sweethearts forced into a shotgun marriage after an unexpected pregnancy.

Songs like this make The River the first Bruce album to tell both sides of the story. Sprightly adolescent romanticism rubs up against stark pessimism (think the title track following the lovely, romantic throwback "I Wanna Marry You"), but the two never clash-- if anyone lacking Bruce's charisma and boundless energy and empathy attempted something like this, it'd read like a collection of songs that never really fit on any other album, so were haphazardly tossed onto a sprawling, money-grubbing double-disc endeavor. But because we all know that Bruce is a consummate artist, as capable of an electrified rock n' roll barnburner as a muted, acoustic lament, and because Bruce had already, with previous albums, exhibited his willingness to artfully articulate optimism and pessimism, The River comes off as broad and accommodating, and keenly versatile.

Look at the songs that are nestled in the intermission between depressing, big-issue songs: "Ramrod," a roadhouse rocker that springs for a big car innuendo; "Crush on You," quick and good-timey and rockin', and discussing the eternal struggle of fantasizing about the woman next to you at a red light; "I'm a Rocker," swift and to the point, and more than a little hokey, but fun and that's more important; "Sherry Darling," the best of the weightless lot, humorously (and with the help of oodles of pleasant saxophone noodling and fun, shouty background vocals) dissects the narrator's disdain for a grumbling mother-in-law. These songs are airy and inconsequential, but also double as fun escapism from the more dour tracks; it's as if Bruce realized that another Darkness on the Edge of Town would be too weighty to cut the mustard.

On other tracks where Bruce plugs in and jams out, he manages a middle-of-the-road sound not unlike some of Darkness's most crucial, interesting tunes (i'm thinking "Badlands" and "the Promised Land"): "Out in the Street" speaks volumes about a working class narrator who looks forward to his weekly release while exuberantly rocking; super-hit "Hungry Heart" narrates the story of a rat bastard who casually abandons his family while swinging to a neo-r&b groove that had to have been swiped wholesale from some long-lost Temptations hit; "Two Hearts" and "The Ties That Bind" persuade a paramour to debunk her practices of cautionary, guarded love and just, as Madonna would later articulate, open your heart. In that sense, despite more than a little bit of adolescent regression, The River represents a maturation on Bruce's part-- it is, for example, the first of Bruce's albums to mention marriage, much less openly advocate it. "I Wanna Marry You" is most explicit about this, but "Two Hearts" plainly says "two hearts are better than one" in a fun update of "It Takes Two," and "The Ties That Bind" reminds that "you can't escape the ties that bind."

The River isn't even without the requisite epic. "Drive All Night" caps off at over eight minutes, and manages to justify its runtime with a simple tale of intense devotion:

i swear i'll drive all night again just to buy you some shoes
and to taste your tender charms
and i just wanna sleep tonight again in your arms

Springsteen relates this in that throaty yelp he breaks out every now and again, and the effect is actually quite beautiful. It's the best song on The River, and, assuming you're just as much of a wuss as I am, will probably... no, nevermind. Not that.

All right, fine. It'll make you cry.

**

Where you have to compromise here is Bruce's lyricism; once legendarily wordy, the Bruce of The River largely reflects a newfound sense of lyrical economy that is as alienating as it is accessible. And if you're willing to make the trade-off-- and realize that fast, silly-but-fun rockers don't really require the cinematic, widescreen lyricism of "Incident on 57th Street" or "Thunder Road"-- it's my professional (personal) opinion that you'll be rewarded. Granted, rhyming "i gotta crush on you" with "ooh ooh" might not reflect the heights of Bruce's lyrical creativity, nor is "i'm a rocker, baby, i'm a rocker" quite as affecting as "the highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive," but it's not supposed to be. The River gets complained about a lot for this, but usually from people who don't realize that Bruce is poetic where it counts. "Tonight there's fallen angels and they're waiting for us down at the street/ tonight there's calling strangers, here them crying in defeat," from "Drive All Night," is as evocative as anything the mighty Boss has ever penned. Even more intensely lyrical is "Point Blank," where the following verse routinely causes my nips and arm-hairs to stand upright:

well i saw you last night on the avenue
your face was in the shadows but i knew that it was you
you were standin' in the doorway out of the rain
you didn't answer when i called out your name
you just turned, and then you looked away
like just another stranger waitin' to get blown away, point blank...

It's a trade-off, and if you're willing to make it, The River is intensely rewarding.

So, yeah, there are two albums to be found in The River, the meaningful, pessimistic, panoramic, poetic one, and the superfluous, catchy, lightweight one. With the magic of the CD burner already making good on its threat to become ubiquitous, it's even totally possible now to edit The River into two more cohesive, streamlined albums. But that's just no fun, and The River has the artistic prescience to structure itself as the ebb and flow of human emotion, always fluctuating and bobbing and weaving. Not quite as artistically viable as Springsteen's "big event" records, The River is nonetheless one of his most essential-- and, within its schizophrenic playlist, manages to encompass enough emotions to make it the sharpest indicator of the human condition and the human spirit in Springsteen's canon to date.

**

GROWIN' UP SPRINGSTEEN REVIEWS:
- Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ
- The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle
- Born to Run
- Darkness on the Edge of Town
- The River
- Nebraska
- Born in the U.S.A.
- Tunnel of Love
- Human Touch