From today's Asbury Park Press

Going back for more
Michael Riley • STAFF COLUMNIST • December 14, 2007

There are those who attend a concert and want to hear a note-by-note re-creation of the music they've already, by God, bought and paid for.

I'm not one of those people. If I wanted to hear that, I'd stay home in my jammies with the earphones.

Of course, you can get too much of a good thing. As somebody who attended a few Grateful Dead concerts bereft of 'shrooms, those jam sessions could go on a week or so too long.

But sometimes, a reinterpretation of a familiar song gets closer to the truth of the music. A couple of examples from Springsteen on the road:

For years now, Springsteen has subtly changed the lyrics to the song "Darkness on the Edge of Town" when he performs it live.

The original lyrics are "I lost my money and I lost my wife/Them things don't seem to matter much to me now."

And that's powerful just as it is.

But when he sings that line now, it's "I lost my faith when I lost my wife."

So, the singer is no longer reciting a list of things that are gone but telling a story of the doubled loss of cause and effect. And he sings it now with a pinched, strained voice, as if the distant memory has once again overtaken him, as if telling the story means to live it again. And that means that when the protagonist bellows out the following lines — "Tonight I'll be on that hill 'cause I can't stop/I'll be on that hill with everything I got . . ." — it's less youthful bravado than it is a life-or-death promise one makes to oneself in desperate times. And if the times are always desperate, well . . .

Consider, as well, his reworking lately of the song "Reason to Believe." Originally, a loping folk tune, the lyrics depict a series of vignettes in which people continue to have faith when evidence and common sense suggest that something more hard-eyed and hard-edged is called for. A dead dog is not going to get up and run; a faithless lover is not coming back; a runaway bride is not simply running late.

On "Nebraska," the singer is bewildered and slightly bemused at the continued faith — "Struck me kind of funny, sir," he says, "seemed kinda funny, sir, to me/That at the end of every hard-earned day/people find some reason to believe."

It's 25 years later, and blind faith has taken this country into some pretty nasty places. Befuddlement is replaced by stuttering rage.

The E Street Band kicks into some sort of Texas blues stomp. Springsteen picks up the harmonica and starts stomping the beat, and practically spits out the lines. He sings the last stanza through a bullet mike, which distorts his voice, and he stammers out the lines — "ssstruck me kind of fffunny," practically banging his head against a wall of sound and fate.

This is why I go to concerts. What's more and what's next for the music I love is as important as the memory of the original.

Staff writer Michael Riley is an ordained Baptist minister. His column appears on Fridays. E-mail him at mriley@app.com or go to www.app.com and click on Staff Blogs for a link to his blog.