ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, January 13, 1996 TAG: 9601150010
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: B10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BRIAN McCOLLUM KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
Bruce Springsteen's new national tour is real simple: A spotlight, the man and his guitar.
Please check your ``Brooooce!'' at the door.
Springsteen's latest musical excursion represents everything the 46-year-old superstar wasn't about during his early 1980s heyday.
And not everyone's thrilled.
No pumping fists. No tank tops. No sweaty, three-hour stadium blowouts that are religious experiences for the audience and put the drained Springsteen onto a stretcher for a triumphant stage exit and return.
Today's Springsteen is more subtle than super, more sparse than spectacular. On this tour, his first big outing since 1992, he's playing the thoughtful troubadour, with a set drawn mostly from last fall's album, ``The Ghost of Tom Joad.''
The songs, which find Springsteen ruminating on the struggles of the modern working class, are a brutally dark, stripped-down bunch. Their delivery demands intimate venues - Springsteen has played theaters with as few as 2,200 seats - and audiences that behave themselves.
That means, for instance, that nobody can mistake ``Born in the USA'' for a hunky jingoistic anthem. Springsteen has transformed the misunderstood paean to Vietnam veterans into a slide-guitar dirge, barely mumbling the lyrics and often ditching the chorus entirely.
The audience - most of it, at least - seems to understand what's up.
``The themes Bruce wants to get across - including problems with immigration, problems between the haves and have-nots - come across on this tour very well,'' says Charles R. Cross, editor of Backstreets, a Springsteen fanzine based in Seattle. Cross caught two shows early in the tour.
``His argument would probably be that they just wouldn't come across with the band [accompanying him].''
Ahh, the E Street Band - a touchy subject with some fans, who still cringe about the day in November 1989 when Springsteen parted ways with his faithful backing players. After a year of enduring tantalizing rumors about an E Street tour - fueled by the group's appearances with Springsteen at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert and on new songs included on his ``Greatest Hits'' - those devotees took the Boss' solo tour like a slap in the face.
For them, it was just more of the Bruce they didn't like - the Bruce who abandoned his band and his New Jersey street ethics for Los Angeles mansions and tabloid-worthy marital escapades.
But Springsteen has done this back-to-basics stuff before, in smaller doses on past tours - his acoustic version of ``Born to Run'' is considered a live classic - and even on most of 1982's classic ``Nebraska.''
So certainly no one can accuse Springsteen of jumping on the lucrative ``unplugged'' bandwagon. If anything, the Boss is simply touching up an artistic image tainted by iffy works such as the poppy ``Tunnel of Love'' and ``Human Touch''/``Lucky Town.''
``It's really an attempt to put the focus on the music and the lyrics, not on the myth or man,'' Cross says. ``Some fans are going expecting the myth, and that's not what's on stage.''
LENGTH: Medium: 63 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Springsteen's new songs are brutally dark andby CNBstripped-down.