Dan Patlansky won’t soon forget 1 February 2014. It’s the day he opened for Bruce Springsteen at Johannesburg’s FNB Stadium.
“That was fantastic, even though it was one of the most daunting things I’ve ever done,” he remembers. “The scary part wasn’t the actual number of people, it was that none of those 80 000 people were there to see me,” he chuckles.
Something’s wrong with Bruce Springsteen.
“Is there anybody alive out there?” he recently demanded on ‘Radio Nowhere’; now it’s a repeated “Can you hear me?” on ‘Outlaw Pete’.
The man must be going deaf, because it’s sure as hell not insecurity. Within two years of the chest-thumping ‘Magic’ he’s released the even ballsier ‘Working On A Dream’ which, despite its title, is no boring state of the nation address set to pomp and circumstance. Instead, The Boss’ 16th studio album is a muscular rock record that sidesteps politics to bask simply in the hope of the ‘yes we can’ generation.
There are two Bruce Springsteens. One, let’s call him Bombastic Bruce, went through 15 months and marathon 16-hour recording sessions to produce just eight overblown rock tracks. The other, Bare-Bones Bruce if you will, made some bitter, morose songs at home with just a guitar, harmonica and his old tape recorder before bunging them on an album as is.
Both Springsteens are hugely talented – ‘Born To Run’ and ‘Nebraska’ aren’t considered rock classics for nothing. But you only need two fingers to count the number of times they’ve actually met up to share a bottle of whisky. There was ‘The River’. And now there’s ‘Magic’.
Nils van der Linden