Bruce Springsteen is one of the few American rockers keeping alive the theatrical traditions of James Brown, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Screaming Jay Hawkins. Nothing I’m saying here is particularly new, I was just compelled to say it after watching the video below, which reminded me of Springsteen’s value to rock music and our culture and why he’s perhaps the last of the old skool rockers we’ll ever see.

In the video, Springsteen brings back memories of James Brown’s appearance on The T.A.M.I. Show when he performed a scorching and history-making version of “Please, Please, Please” - the one in which he dramatically falls to the stage, is covered with a cape by members of The Famous Flames and is escorted offstage, only to defiantly rush back to the mic to resume the song. This is repeated several times before he finishes the tune in a heap of sweat-soaked sharkskin while an audience of screaming teenyboppers goes apeshit. Yes, it’s shtick, but it’s shtick of a very sublime sort. It’s the ritual that brings the spirit to the church of rock ‘n’ roll.

During his show in Sunderland , England last month, Springsteen pulls off his own James Brown moment (at twice the age that Brown was in 1964). The new “hardest working man in show business” brings some of the same wild energy that caused the little girls at the T.A.M.I. Show to wet their pants when a Black man from South Carolina fell to his knees and screamed “pleeeeeese…”

It was good for our mothers.
It was good for our mothers.
It was good for our mothers.
And it’s good enough for me.

The scenario:

Springsteen is down for the count. Little Steven attempts to revive him in a baptismal of healing water while the congregation, clapping and chanting at a fever pitch, breathe new life into The Boss (the preacher man). Raised from the dead, Springsteen, like Lazarus, struggles to his feet and tries to get a handle on the situation. He implores the crowd to give him some more energy and they ramp it up, singing the chorus of “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out.” As the fans reach a collective epiphany, Springsteen bolts toward a piano and jumps up on it. Renewed and sustained by the incantations of the audience he leaps back onto the stage floor, grabs the mic and arches backwards until his entire body is only inches above the ground, held aloft only by the very tips of his boots. Moments later he’s slapping flesh with the roaring congregation as he and the flock navigate the farther reaches of rock ‘n’ bliss. Young, old, the infirm and the lost, have found a glimmer of hope and beauty in a world where madness rules and cities melt like pillars of salt in the winds of Gommorah.

It will take us all to heaven.
It will take us all to heaven.
It will take us all to heaven.
And it’s good enough for me.”

Springsteen’s unabashed love of rock ‘n’ roll makes him not only a protean performer, able to create convincingly in multiple genres, but also a fan of epic proportions. In concert, he mashes up the history of rock ‘n’ roll, not only musically, but in moves and attitude that pay tribute to both the ritualistic and carnivalesque aspects of a music that is well over a half century old. He’s tapping into a tradition where performers, from Cab Calloway to Wayne Cochran and Iggy Pop, put their bodies into the beat and become moving hieroglyphs signifying something so deep that we ultimately have no name for it. We can only act it out, like Jesus walking on water or James Brown walking on air. And while Bruce, The Boss, is the center of the spotlight, there is something self-deprecating about the man. As serious as his lyrics and concerns can be, there is a rock ‘n’ roll clown in Springsteen that is willing to be a fool for his art, a jokester and an anarchist. The Boss has come to play. And we, the audience, come not just for the show, we come for the catharsis. That is the power and glory of rock ‘n’ roll.

Makes me love everybody.
Makes me love everybody.
Makes me love everybody.
And it’s good enough for me.”

Springsteen may not have James Brown’s moves (the only person who did is dead), but he’s got the spirit down right. It may be old time religion, but it’s sure as shit good enough for the millions of people that pack The E Street Band’s travelling tent show night after night in what seems with every passing year more like a spiritual mission than a rock ‘n’ roll tour. Of course, with Springsteen there’s little difference.
 

 
James Brown on the T.A.M.I. Show after the jump and Springsteen at the Isle Of Wight 2012…