This time around it was an exposition about toilet technology he claimed to have never seen before, and the man is obviously a rather talented story teller. In any case there are a couple of aspects that spring Spirit into the usual suspects particularly, as was the case here, in a setting that allows him to crowd surf back to the stage while Jake wails away on sax. Jake wasn’t actually doing the wailing this time, having returned to the States following a family bereavement, but Ed Manion worked the same territory just as well.
Kinda corny once you’ve seen it a couple of times, but it still gets you in. Regular rituals and all that.
And when we’re talking regular rituals, with Born in the USA and Born to Run getting go to whoa run throughs in Melbourne, you’d probably figure Darkness on the Edge of Town for the same treatment here. I hadn’t really been overwhelmed by the decision to run through BitUSA, though I was probably one of a very small minority in that regard. BTR is slightly different because there are tracks there that don’t quite qualify as the usual setlist suspects (Night, Meeting Across the River) and it does have the title track, She’s the One and Jungleland.
But if I’d had to pick an album to get the treatment I would definitely have gone for Darkness. Like a shot. For one reason. Candy’s Room. But we’ll get to that, won’t we?
For all the glorification of America and things American, there’s a grimness lurking under the veneer, and we’ve got some of the same here, which makes the bookends of Badlands and Darkness as appropriate in this time and place as they were when they were written in the mid-seventies.
So we start with an incendiary Badlands, always a concert favourite, run the angst quotient up to the max with an angry Bruce guitar solo for Adam Raised a Cain and drop things back a tad as pianist Roy Bittan shines on Something in the Night.
And then there’s Candy's Room, a perfect statement of obsessive lust. Every time I hear that rattling rustle on the cymbals …
But it’s the sequencing and the light and shade that makes Darkness such a great album. After that howl of lust things drop back to everyday life and quiet despair for Racing in the Street and the reading here was magnificent, the instrumental ending stately and immaculately paced.