I like Hunter, The Wall, Frankie is okay. I also like the Morello version of Joad. Dream Baby Dream was much better on the download from the 2005 tour. More stark, more betterer. Reminds me of Down In The Groove. A couple of great cuts, a bunch of covers, some embarrassing stuff, no real reason for any of it. The tour had some real good moments, though. Wish he recorded a studio Staying Alive instead of High Hopes. Better album title, too.
I LOVE that version of Stayin' Alive. Tried to persuade the covers band I was in some years ago we should do it. They wouldn't bite. High Hopes... Just Like Fire Would is fine but not as good as Chuck Prophet's version from 1993. Others have covered this album very efficiently. There is no coherence, it is thrown together, it's warmed over leftovers. Frankie Fell in Love is a sudden, unexpected pop gem. The vocal is what tips it for me into the cache of a dozen or so tracks I would bother to look up and listen to in the 15 year period from after Devils and Dust to just before Western Stars. The Wall is pretty good but the metre frequently stumbles. Too many syllables. Stresses in the wrong places. I am too much of an amateur as a songwriter to figure out precisely what has gone wrong, but the words simply do not sit comfortably in the lines, and I find myself cringeing at it. But I can hear what it might have been with more work. I really like Dream Baby Dream. It's not really a song. It's an incantation. You have to surrender to it. It's an encounter with the eternal or with annihilation or both. But I agree the live version is better.
This is really Tracks Disc 5/6/7 ..take your pick. Some really good stuff though in The wall , Hunter , Down in the Hole, FFIL and the covers were generally good too . Love DBD but it had a few stinkers and pointless repeats . Agree with anyone who prefers live 41 shots . Odds n Sods come to mind though not as good but a decent disc of later career outtakes. Don’t consider it a proper album but why did pass on releasing WS for this ? To tour with the ESB ? Maybe. A contract filler if ever there was one . It won’t get off lightly here I’d say.....
I haven't heard this album more than once or twice since listening to it a few times around the days of it's release. Never understood what it was for. There were two things I really liked on here -- "Hunter of Invisible Game" and the cover of "Dream Baby Dream." Nothing else on the album made an impression on me to the point where I couldn't even call to mind a single lyric or melody from anything else on the album (other than that bombastic, overly dramatic Morello Tom Joad arrangement).
A waste, even as a new chapter of Tracks (Disc 3 of Essential is 1000 time better) I save “Down In The Hole” (which I add to my revisited “The Rising”), “Frankie Fell In Love”and “Just Like Fire Would”. “The Wall” don’t hit me as others Viet related songs did. “Hunter...” is boring and the video is embarrassing. “Heaven’s Wall” a serious contender as worst Springsteen song ever. The reworking songs are overproduced and inferior to the originals. The cover is pathetic
So why do you think Bruce has been paying his bills for 40 years? He's had plenty of opportunity to get rid of him if he'd wanted to.
I enjoy High Hopes every time listen. Of course it is not a great album, but it is certainly enjoyable. I don't think there's a bad song on the album. The Wall is the standout. My kids enjoyed This Is Your Sword, so I have good memories of driving them to school with that one. I think Harry's Place could have easily been used in the title sequence on The Sopranos.
In this case I agree with most of what you said. Also some copies came with a "free" live DVD of Born in the USA performed in London. I enjoyed this very much and even found that I appeared to get something in my eye at one point. If you have seen it then you know what I mean.
IMHO based on the limited public or quoted statements I have read... Steve has no greater perspective than the frequent contributors to this thread. I mean ... he improved 57 Channels but dissed Ain’t Got You. At best he is right 50% of the time. Has he ever waxed on about The River or Racing In The Street? I suspect not.
I just played the album again this morning for the first time in I don't know when. My impression hasn't changed much -- I still really like "Hunter of Invisible Game," actually I like that one more and more every time I hear it, one of my favorite latter day Springsteen songs, and "Dream Baby Dream," which is a song I think Springsteen took from its almost Lou Reed-ish monologue origins and made into a real prayer. The live solo performances definitely worked better live vs. this recording, as trance-like ritual music always does, and the stripped down solo arrangement delivered on the spiritual power more effectively, but I'm glad he captured this arrangement of it. Everything else on the album is at best meh to me. Though I must say I enjoyed "High Hopes" this time around. It's the kind of song Springsteen in his later years has often tried to write as an album opener and has struggled to do so convincingly, so he just took a song by another writer that did the job and used it. Works for me. Great arrangement and performance. Better than "Radio Nowhere" or "Letter to You." I'm surprised to see people praising the disposable and forgettable "Frankie Fell in Love." (There must be a lot of Frankies in NJ.) Also surprised at the praise for "The Wall." It's OK, but it's kind of a Springsteen paint-by-numbers piece of work. And it's the kind of written to be performed at some kind of public event type of song that Springsteen seems to get criticized for all the time around here. "41 Shots" is, to me, is probably his least well crafted, least effective topical song of his career. No reason to have revisited that. Really, a lot of the album feels like an exercise in barrel scraping. Interestingly there was some other stuff apparently under consideration at the time -- like "American Beauty," and "Hurry Up Sundown" for two, that to me are stronger than a lot of the stuff that wound up on High Hopes (though material that was all over the place in arrangement). With a different kind of consideration and focus -- the consideration here seemed to be a lot of songs Tom Morello liked and arrangements that would work with Morello -- there might have been a better project in there than the one we got.
I am not able to write as eloquently as some people here, so I keep using the same words to describe these songs and albums. I find Frankie Fell in Love to be a fun or even funny song. I love the bit about Shakespeare and Einstein. It captures the different personalities that people have and the way that artists see things as opposed to intellectuals. Obviously The Wall is not a fun song. I was born just after the Vietnam War ended. But I did go to the Vietnam Memorial with my dad who served in the army at that time, but got sent to Germany instead of Vietnam. I remember him standing at the wall looking for names. I don't remember if he got emotional or not, but at 10 or 11 years old, I could feel the importance. So the song connected with me.
I like the version of Dream Baby Dream ok, but it's a great example of his inability to leave something the way it is. The tour version is dark and affecting, but the HH version has everything but a marching band added on. It doesn't need it and it waters down the song.
Sorry for all this being out of order - playing catch up. I broadly agree. This is not a great album but it has some quality tracks. I saw Morello on the Melbourne leg of this tour when SVZ was unavailable. It was an electrifying show and Springsteen had the venue eating out of his hands. Then... Morello just blew the place apart with some amazing transformative solos on Darkness and Youngstown. I left thinking ... I have seen the future and it is is Springsteen and Morello.... Less than a year later we had High Hopes and another world tour including Morello. I understand that Morello had engaged Springsteen to the extent that he wanted to work in the studio with him and High Hopes was the result. I think all the albums in this period are patchy but I love the Morello influence.
“High Hopes” is a superior take than his earlier one, and I enjoy “Frankie” a lot and like others am still surprised how a pop gem like that one just fell out of the sky. About half of these are keepers, and “American Skin” turned out better than I anticipated and is one of his finest late works. The rest are meh as chervokas said; “Hunter” is obviously a Boss fave but I can’t get into it. So...I’ve come from bitching about how anal Bruce was about thematic importance and withholding so much music, to bitching about him just putting random stuff out for the hell of it. But I’m a fan, so being contradictory is not only expected, it’s required.
I agree, the most effective part of the original arrangement, both in Suicide's hand and especially in Springsteen's, was the nakedness of his musical element allowing it's prayer-like power and the trancelike power of repetition to do its work. Any filigree seems to diminish that.
It's like a River outtake. It's OK, but really, it's not something I'd really even listen to twice. I've listened to it now probably around a dozen times in my life, including just about an hour ago, and I still can't remember the words or music. To me it's just kind of empty air. I grew up in the Vietnam War era. I was too young to be drafted in those years, but I knew older brothers from around the nabe who served, later I would work with many vets who had returned, or wound up with other Vietnam vets in my family through marriage. And the turmoil of the war and anti war culture and counter culture certainly shaped the America I grew up in. I have no issue with the subject matter of the song. And the song is fine, there's nothing particularly I find wrong about its sentiment or form other than that it feels like a kind of warmed over collection of Springsteen sentiments and details. I think someone said they felt that way about some of the details in "Long Walk Home." I feel that way about "The Wall." Seems rote and kind of like a fill in the blanks Springsteen readymade.
Went back and listened to HH. Frankie. Ok, good fun rocker. Hunter of Invisible Game. An exercise in Bruce being pretentious. Help yourself if you like that kind of thing. Heavens Wall may be the worst thing he’s put on wax. Dream Baby Dream. I experienced it once in concert. It was good, but once was enough. High Hopes. Why select this song as a cover? Hope it made the record company happy.
That is exactly what I meant. If you look at the UK for example by and large their politicians are just that. They have not been hosting TV programs or acting in movies, fronting rock bands. We did have Peter Garrett (Midnight Oil ) as a cabinet minister for a while but otherwise broadly the same in Australia. In the US and some parts of Europe, TV personalities seem to attract credibility that entitles them to somehow command a following despite the lack of any prior responsibility or decision-making ability. I would not want these guys making my coffee without some training.
If you are referring to my post then I think you overstate the nailing and the devotion. I’d just like you to be less repetitive and more objective.. Your world view is already understood by all.
Springsteen is a very good traditional rock guitarist in the 1950s Link Wray tradition. If you go back and listen to tapes from when he was in Child and Earth, he was a typical young hotshot guitarist...lots of notes and pizzazz. (Someone mentioned Steel Mill earlier...they were a different kind of band, more in the Deep Purple vein). Regardless, as good as he was, Springsteen wasn’t going to scare Jeff Beck or Eric Clapton. From the people I know who saw him way back then, it was his performance magnetism that stood out.
Did Van zandt play in the post 84 period? He played BITUSA and then next arrived for The Rising IIRC in Australia. No wonder we queue and don’t complain about Badlands, Promised Land etc.
He absolutely loves electronic percussion and effects. He can’t stop fiddling with them. If he had had a really strong producer in the 2007-2014 period, this string of albums might have been substantially better. “No Bruce, you don’t need to add a drum loop/ handclap/thud/gospel choir/bagpipes there. Just leave it alone..”
