Jesse Malin looked like he’d just won the lottery.
His performance at the eleventh Light of Day had already been going well — he’d told the audience to stand up and get boisterous, and the crowd at the sold-out Paramount Theater in Asbury Park was happy to oblige him.
And just before the New York rocker’s set concluded, Asbury Park’s own homegrown superhero emerged from the shadows, strapped on a guitar (slung low for maximum hip-swinging effect) and launched into the high harmonies on Malin’s “Broken Radio.”
Bruce Springsteen was back home. And he was just getting warmed up.
Malin’s good fortune was shared by everybody who held a ticket to the annual concert, held Saturday night to benefit the Light of Day Foundation for Parkinson’s research and patient support.
As usual, the Boss was not an announced performer, but he made the evening his own anyway. Springsteen followed up his guest performance on “Broken Radio” with equally inspired “surprise” appearances during sets by Willie Nile and Alejandro Escovedo. Joe Gruschecky and the Houserockers were, theoretically, co-headliners; in practice, they became Springsteen’s backing band. Supported by the Houserockers, the Boss charged through an engaging 90-minute set that drew substantially from the re-released “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” The veteran rocker closed the evening with a singalong version of “Thunder Road,” one of several pop standards he’s written.
Even as he drew the brightest spotlight, Springsteen was characteristically humble throughout the show. He told the audience that they’d heard some of the best songwriting in the United States, and he wasn’t talking about his own.
That said, either through emulation or patronage, all of the other performers at the Paramount have had their careers touched by the Boss.
The rest of the Light of Day cast shared Springsteen’s aesthetic values: drama, lyricism, an Everyman approach to sophisticated concepts, and, to be fair, a tendency to belabor points and draw out songs longer than they really ought to go.
Bruce Springsteen remains an energetic showman, and he knows the evocative power of a shouted count-off and a snare slam. Because he can give voice to basic human anxieties in concise, poetic language, his songs will continue to resonate for millions for as long as rock and roll is played. At his best, Springsteen’s performances channel the
richness and romance of being alive.
On “Atlantic City,” the single from 1982’s grim “Nebraska,” he sings about the inevitability of mortality, and the hope that everything that dies might somehow come back. At the Paramount, the song became a meditation on Asbury Park resurgent, and a rallying cry for longtime fans thirsting to stay forever young.
The Boss is also a terrific guitar soloist, and his Telecaster leads at the Paramount were dynamic. He added licks to Nile’s “Heaven Help the Lonely,” and strutted through Grushecky’s “I’m Not Sleeping,” a song he co-wrote. On a fiery version of “Adam Raised a Cain,” Springsteen matched the intensity of the story with a hailstorm of high notes and frantic slashing strums. The Boss hasn’t appeared in public too often since the end of the “Working on a Dream” tour in 2009 (an intimate performance at the Carousel House in Asbury Park was a notable exception); the intensity of his Light of Day set strongly suggested that this one-man carnival is ready to take the show on the road once again.
Springsteen’s pugnacious optimism was echoed by the performers on the undercard. Local favorite Joe D’Urso, who sings with a noticeably Boss-like growl, condemned cynicism during his tough, entertaining set. Nile, a superb, underrated folk-rocker whose acerbic verse is often anything but hopeful, assured the crowd that he believed in the human race. Malin introduced his “All the Way from Moscow” as a song about world unity. Escovedo left his band at home, appearing with guitarist David Polkingham; their twin-acoustic arrangements were startling in their complexity and exhilarating in their execution.
One of the many lovely things about Light of Day at Paramount was that the music never really stopped. In between set breaks, solo performers came to the lip of the stage to sing a song or two.
Following a stinging rock and roll set with a coffeehouse delivery was a daunting assignment – but Queens singer-songwriter Lisa Bianco was up to the challenge. She strained her voice from time to time in order to reach the back of the theater, but her song construction was inventive enough to hold the attention of most of the crowd. Bianco was also a real rarity on the Paramount stage: a female voice. All of the mainstage attractions, and their backing bands, were boys-only clubs; many times during the evening, there were six men or more onstage at once, all swinging around their guitars. The seven-hour blast of testosterone was, at times, fatiguing, and it’s something the Light of Day organizers should think seriously about balancing in 2012.
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