gasworks

lapocho:jukeboxgraduate:

“Backstreets,” Live in St. Louis, 6/8/05.

You think you know this song, you’ve heard it dozens of not times if not more - and you think you know what solo piano “Backstreets” will be like, and I will tell you that you do not. Because this absolutely, completely blew my fucking mind when I heard it, and I went through the exact same thought process. The modalities, the tone, the pacing - I worried that needing to concentrate on the piano would impair the emotion and delivery, but in some ways it’s even more powerful because there’s more chance for him to pause and breathe into things.

At the end, it sounds like the audience is applauding so loudly that the house is in danger of falling down.

When I arrived in Milwaukee the next morning - don’t ask, it made sense at the time - I don’t know how we heard there had been solo piano “Backstreets” in St. Louis, but we knew, and there was this sense of OMGHOWDIDIMISSTHAT which hadn’t been around in while. At the time, I attributed it to Bruce’s habit of letting the building in which he was playing rise to the occasion sufficiently; the Fox Theater in STL is one of those grande dames of the golden age, magnificently restored, and I like to believe that everyone plays better in places like that.

But SOLO PIANO BACKSTREETS?

This was the stretch of D&D where he started dusting off the songbook and where every single show had one or two tour premieres. And as much as I struggled with the D&D tour at times, it did give him a canvas on which he could remix and rebuild things like “Reason To Believe” or “Johnny 99” and where he could sit at a piano and give us “Real World” or drag out “Sad Eyes” or “Valentine’s Day”. For me it’s less about the baseball card collecting aspect of it (e.g., you want to see X song so you can say that you’ve seen it) than the fact that I think that going through the archive can only be better for all of us.

I always find it interesting to track Bruce’s solo piano performances, and how he’s grown in confidence and skill even over the past 10 years. (It is kind of intimidating to sit behind the piano for anything when you’ve got *Roy Bittan* in your band.)

oh my god…

My jaw dropped straight to the ground.