I walked into the Asbury Park Convention Center with a troubled mind. Not even the weather was right - early December and still 60 degrees out on the boardwalk. The drafty old building, the shape and size of a large high school gym, fit my mood. Left and right of the broad stage were bright green Christmas trees; on the stage a band, lounging in the midst of a sound check. To the microphone stepped Nils Lofgren with an acoustic guitar. I stopped to listen.
"Oh say can you see by the dawn's early light," he sang in his beautiful, eternally youthful voice, awash with a kind of emotion that honored even my ambiguous relationship to patriotism. I was flabbergasted. "The Star Spangled Banner" is a tough piece of music and before then, I'd heard three good versions of it by Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye and Whitney Houston. This was going to be the fourth.
I waited for Nils to launch into a cathartic Hendrix-derived guitar solo. But he didn't even trick up the rhythm. He stayed with the song and wound up with a passionate but dreamy classic. The idiots who later chanted "USA! USA!" over the final notes will never know what they missed.
For me, it was healing, as healing as later that night when Nils and Bruce Springsteen combined on a new arrangement of "If I Should Fall Behind," which took that song's also unwieldy lyrics and gave them a groove that even the doo-wop versions by Dion and the E Street Band don't have.
So, on a night when I heard a live version of my favorite Springsteen song, "Incident on 57th Street," for the first time in 20 years, Nils Lofgren did even more to restore my weary soul.
I shouldn't have been surprised, because he has always been the most sweet-tempered of rock'n'rollers. The fiercest song he ever sang, "Keith Don't Go," was a plea for Keith Richards to choose survival over overdose.
That is the Nils Lofgren I have known all the way back to his first band, Grin. It is the Nils who made the new album, "Break Away Angel" (Vision Music, www.nilslofgren.com). Without any of his usual slash'n'burn stylistics, Lofgren reveals himself as a beautiful soft-rock singer, capable of pulling off the Everlys' "All I Have to Do Is Dream." He's written songs as gorgeous and painful as "Open Road," "I Found You" and "Heaven's Answer to Blue," yet he's still enough his old self for "Love a Child," not so much a song or even a prayer as a gentle command.
If this makes him sound too much of a wimp to have dared challenge Hendrix, get a copy of his _other_ new album, "Tuff Stuff! - the Best of the All-Madden Jam Band," featuring Nils Lofgren (you can order it from the same place). Unbeknownst to me, Lofgren has for years been supplying instrumental background music for John Madden's loopy All-Madden NFL team TV bits. Nils has always been an instrumental virtuoso - he's the only rock guitarist I know who wears fingerpicks. Tuff Stuff rocks like an update on the old instrumental combos of Duane Eddy, with late night saxophone, occasional accordion and pedal steel, and ferocious drumming. It combines grace, power, intelligence, violent energy and unified teamwork in a way that does suggest NFL ball.
You need that upbeat spirit, too, especially when you're at your most downhearted. Not that I expected to get another ample dose of it from Springsteen singing "You Sexy Thing." But that's a tale for another day.
(c) Copyright 2000 Dave Marsh
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