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#bruce springsteen on broadway
immethi · 5 months
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Bruce Springsteen on his on-stage outfit. From Springsteen on Broadway, intro to My Father's House
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backroadboy · 3 months
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My Father’s House (Springsteen on Broadway), Bruce Springsteen
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ghostsmp3 · 6 months
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I lived on Randolph Street, with my sister, Virginia, she was a year younger than me, my parents Adele and Douglas, my grandparents Fred and Alice, and my trusty dog Saddle. We lived spitting distance from the Catholic Church, the priest's rectory, the nun's convent, the St Rose of Lima Grammar School, all of it, just a football's toss away, across the field of wild grass. I literally grew up surrounded by God. Surrounded by God... and my relatives. 'Cause we had cousins and aunts and uncles and grandmas and grandpas and great grandmas and great grandpas, all of us were jammed into five little houses on two adjoining streets. And when the church bells rang, the whole clan would hustle up the street to stand witness to every wedding and every funeral that arrived like a state occasion in our little neighborhood.
- Bruce Springsteen, Springsteen on Broadway at Walter Kerr Theatre, New York City, 2018.
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snortleme · 2 months
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Bruce Springsteen - The Wish, Springsteen on Broadway.
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wearebipolargods · 2 years
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I know it's been mentioned in another post with a massive amount of notes but it's always so beautiful hearing just how much Bruce Springsteen and Clarence Clemons really loved eachother. Some see it as a very deep platonic love or a very deep romantic love but it can't be denied how much they loved eachother, and how open two men can be about their feelings for eachother.
I'm listening to the Springsteen on Broadway live album and the story Bruce tells about Clarence during Tenth Avenue Freeze Out breaks my heart every single time. He talks about him with such reverence as if he was an ethereal being walking amongst lesser mortals. He ends the speech with:
"He was elemental in my life. And losing him was like losing the rain".
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aprocessblog · 11 months
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My Father’s House - Springsteen on Broadway intro
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westernstarofthenorth · 2 months
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Bruce Springsteen - The Wish - in memory of his recently deceased mother...
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Aaaww 🥺🥺💔❤- he NEEDS to play this on the tour this year. Bet he does, and with pictures of Adele on the big screens too. Must be 100% sure ! (This is from his Broadway-show in 2018)
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nadja-antipaxos · 3 months
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Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa backstage for Springsteen on Broadway.
Photo by Danny Clinch
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pieheda · 4 months
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So, I realized only after watching the Todd In The Shadows video AND the hbomberguy video that I, too, have caught James Somerton just making shit up.
I’m not going to cite actual video titles because he changes them all the time anyway so why bother, but he has one that’s about Angels in America and Rent. This is my jam, I’m a theater gay, so I watched them - and immediately felt like the main thesis would fail an English 101 class. The thesis was “people have the misperception that Rent was made before Angels in America, and why is that?” which is not a thing that people believe, actually. At least, not people who know how google works and can just look up release dates. I found myself thinking that maybe he and some friends were surprised at this, and he decided it was a widely held misperception. But I kept watching the video, and when talking about how popular Rent was when it premiered on Broadway, he said that it was taboo to even mention AIDS at the time.
That is completely untrue. I was an adult in 1996 when Rent was released on Broadway, and AIDS was no longer a taboo subject in the US. There is plenty of data out there to support this, but I think it’s particularly compelling that in 1993, the movie Philadelphia, about a man suing his employers for firing him upon learning that he has HIV, was an enormous box office hit. It won Tom Hanks and Bruce Springsteen both Oscars, for Best Actor and Best Original Song. The Oscars aren’t very daring, perhaps you’ve heard. They aren’t big on giving out awards for things that everyone is terrified to talk about.
In another video that is cited by Todd in the Shadows, I realized that I had ALSO caught James making shit up in that one. When I watched the video for Red, White, and Royal Blue, James said that all these straight women wanted gay romance without sex and I laughed and said “they most definitely do not want that”, because I’m a fan girl and I’ve seen AO3. No research needed to debunk that, most if not all women who knowingly consume gay romance absolutely want there to be some fucking. The only person who would complain about that would be some exceptionally clueless homophobe who accidentally stumbled into this movie.
Both of those things, when I saw them, made me shake my head and say “that’s just not true.” I even commented on the Rent video.
What I did not do is think hard about what exactly is going on here. My opinion of Somerton went down with each of those discoveries, but it wasn’t very high to begin with; I never have liked his presentation style, because of how often he talks down to the people he’s discussing or to his audience. But frankly, there’s a lot of content out there that plays free and loose with the facts or starts with a bad premise (“people have this misperception” with no evidence of that isn’t far off from “Marvel fans on twitter hate this movie!” followed by only 5 tweets cited in the article). I just accept that people lie on the internet, I didn’t expect better. I didn’t stop to consider that gays really should do better, particularly we should not lie to one another about gay culture and history, and ESPECIALLY not when claiming to be doing what we do for the purpose of uplifting gays. I didn’t google to see if there were other issues with him, because if I had I would have learned about him getting into it with Jessie Gender and wouldn’t have given him a view ever again.
We’ve reached such a garbage state that I overlooked that. Seeing everything he’s done all lined up in these two videos had a real impact on me. Todd is absolutely right that it’s abominable to add to all the misinformation in the world, and hbomberguy is right that it’s particularly egregious for James to rob from gay writers who don’t have the funds and attention that James does. But it’s especially bad to just make shit up about gay history and the current state of gay acceptance, particularly when James constantly had the perspective that it’s always bad and gay men always have it the worst. Most likely the “everyone hates gays like me especially” was a calculated choice to create an attitude of persecution within his fandom so that they would accuse anyone calling him out of homophobia. But misinformation about acceptance is ALSO harmful to our community. It’s harmful to go around believing that people are out to get you when they aren’t. The cost of damaged mental health is ALSO important.
And he coldly exploited that because there’s a stupid fucking app that is tailor made for grifters to make cash hand over fist by confirming their audience’s worst fears and creating new anxieties in them. It’s absolutely ghoulish.
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deeptothebone · 8 months
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on fathers
Aftersun (2022) / cardigan by Taylor Swift / My Father’s House by Bruce Springsteen (Springsteen on Broadway) / Interstellar (2014)
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zeroaddzero · 7 months
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it's friday evening so time for some horny- i mean scientific research
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72942 · 12 days
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dress rehearsal rag - leonard cohen // smallville 3.09 // dinner at eight - rufus wainwright // smallville 3.21 // my father's house (springsteen on broadway) - bruce springsteen // smallville 3.19 // adam raised a cain - bruce springsteen // smallville 3.19 // franz kafka's letter to his father // smallville 3.18
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backroadboy · 6 days
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the father-sized ache
[aristotle and dante discover the secrets of the universe, benjamin alire sáenz || shadow, supernatural || we are all welcome here, elizabeth berg|| all hell breaks loose, supernatural || my father’s house (springsteen on broadway), bruce springsteen || driver's seat, madds buckley]
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ghostsmp3 · 2 years
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god have mercy on the man who doubts what he's sure of
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"My Father's House" (Springsteen on Broadway Version) by Bruce Springsteen / "Father’s Uterus, or The Map" by Hiromi Ito, tr. Jeffrey Angles / Taika Waititi interviewed for the New York Times, 2022
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slavghoul · 2 years
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A really nice article from this month's Classic Rock (6/2022) focusing on the atmosphere of Ghost shows and what Tobias is like on stage versus in private.
THE GREAT PRETENDER
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The choral wells of Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere Mei, Deus drift through the audience at Manchester Arena. It’s Saturday night, the mood is high and a cathedral is being built on stage. Behind the curtain, eye catch glimpses of the sort of theatre normally associated with the Iron Maidens, Rammsteins and Alice Coopers of this world. Giant steps. High walls and arches. Ornate stained glass window backdrops. More dry ice than Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights video, dotted with a scattering of men in hard hats. Stonehenge this is not.
The curtain drops. The opening guitar glitter of Kaisarion bursts into our faces. Punters wearing nuns’ habits, crucifixes and corpse paint gaze up like children in a sweet shop, while Nameless Ghouls in gas masks are illuminated by cracking pyrotechnics. As riffs and drum thunder roll out like groovy cavalry, marrying heavy mystique with Def Leppard-sized hooks, it’s easy to see why Metallica and Dave Grohl are fans. The most rapturous applause, though, is reserved for their mercurial leader. An impishly charismatic figure, masked by black-and- white face paint. Hair slicked back with grey. Microphone in hand. Part Victorian military dandy, part Joel Grey’s MC from Cabaret in tight black skinny jeans and black leather gloves, Papa Emeritus IV strides, skips and gesticulates with the precision and campery of a seasoned Broadway star. And although there are thousands watching, those painted eyes of his have an oddly penetrative, Mona Lisa-esque effect. All-seeing. It’s as if he’s looking at you. Welcome to the Ghost show.
A few hours earlier we’re in a Grade Il-listed hotel on Manchester's Oxford Road, lifting an armchair with a short, polite Swedish guy in a band T-shirt. Silver chains clink at his wrists. A skull ring hulks round one finger. His generously spiked hair is jet-black, contrasting with almost bloodless skin. He could have wandered in from one of the rock pubs across the road.
"Master,” Tobias Forge says with a smile, pulling back his jacket, when asked about the T-shirt. “They’re an American eighties death metal band. They’re not very good, but they're cool!”
It’s surreal to think that this is the man who will slink across the stage as Papa Emeritus IV tonight (the latest incarnation of Forge’s fictitious, ecclesiastical one-man dynasty). The 41-year-old conductor at the heart of the 700 cues, 45 or so crew members and four tour buses that make up the Ghost experience; a production that, in some ways, feels more akin to the Cirque Du Soleil than to a rock show. It’s a globetrotting colossus, following its doomy, cultish origins in Linkoping, Sweden in 2006.
“Some people prefer ad-hoc rock bands like Pearl Jam or Springsteen, who come up on stage in whatever they wore on the street and just start playing,” he says, quickly adding: "which I love; I love Pearl Jam, I love Bruce Springsteen. But that’s not what we do. We don’t improvise that much. A lot of the show is free-form, which makes it edgy, but there’s still a script.”
Having released a gloriously grandiose new album, Impera, Ghost returned to the live circuit this year as co-headliners with Volbeat in the USA, causing some political “head-butting” when Ghost went on second every night. As Forge implies, they are not so much ‘hard to follow'-’ as logistically impossible. Now; at the start of this European tour, they’re very much on top - with Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats and Twin Temple in support slots.
“Co-billing for us is not necessarily a great thing,” Forge reasons, carefully. “What we’re doing is not compatible with many other bands. Not necessarily the sound; I don’t see a problem for a fan to absorb both. But if it’s going to be a forty-five-minute changeover, is that great for the crowd that paid for these tickets? I can order ten courses I really like, but I can only eat one. I’m not sure it’s doing the desired trick.”
There’s a cool flash of fanaticism about Forge, just detectable behind his approachable demeanour. He looks you straight in the eye. He pauses to consider his answers. During our conversation he’ll compare putting on a show to a football season, making a film, running a restaurant and going to war. All are analogies he’s used before, and all support the sense of auteurship that ripples through the Ghost world (as well as echoing Forge’s own fondness for sports, Stanley Kubrick and good food).
But there are other sides to him. The geeky classic-rock lover, who watches live Queen and Iron Maiden clips to get pumped before shows. The guy who on tour goes out to football and hockey games. The arty urbanite with friends in music, film and amusement parks back home in Stockholm. The happily married father of teenage twins, who binge-watched The Sopranos, Game Of Thrones and Stranger Things with his family over lockdown. The reluctant frontman who, if he had his way, would be Ghost’s guitarist.
“But that’s like complaining about not being the general because you got to be the king instead. I would have felt more fluid being the guitar player, but the difference would have been that, mask or no mask, my on-stage persona would have been closer to my real one - my actual one, my private one - than it is nowadays.”
Over at the arena, the gap between those personas increases. As Impera's lead single Call Me Little Sunshine starts up, Papa returns in glittering cardinal's robes. He looks like a Christmas tree. Freddie Mercury via the Vatican. Liberace for the holy orders.
Back home, conversely, Forge marvels at the chops of friends like Fredrik Akesson, Opeth’s lead guitarist who played on Impera, embellishing the whole record with splashes of virtuosic, 80s-rocking flair.
“I mourn the fact I get to play the guitar so little over the course of my life, because I love playing,” Forge says, twisting his skull ring, “and I think I am a better musician than I am a singer. I just happen to be a good singer in Ghost.”
A self-described jack of all trades, the place you're most likely to find Forge, on tour, is behind a drum kit. Backstage he pounds through Top 40 hits as part of a mobile workout regimen. Foreigner’s Urgent, Carry On Wayward Son by Kansas, Lenny Kravitz’s Are You Gonna Go My Way? and The Guess Who’s American Woman are all on his go-to list.
In the past he relished the travel aspect of band life, ducking out to explore new sites and record shops. So much so that it began to tire him out, pre-show. Now, he mostly sticks to a strict routine of workouts and walking with audiobooks - most recently Jan Guillou’s Carl Hamilton series, Sweden’s politically astute answer to James Bond.
“Ten books, eighteen hours,” he says. “That’s good for ten thousand steps, and you can do calls when you’re walking.”
On stage the seven Nameless Ghouls are in similar ship shape, darting from the menace of From The Pinnacle To The Pit to a galloping Spillways - complete with guitar duels, knowing glances and gestures. Even without facial expressions their performances feel characterful, not to mention being shit-hot on a technical level. It says a lot about them, as people, that they’re happy to be in this group anonymously.  
For almost a decade Forge was similarly hidden. He spoke to journalists from behind curtains or masks. Officially he only revealed his identity in 2017, following a lawsuit from ex-bandmates. These days, living in a celebrity-heavy pocket of Stockholm (the Skarsgard acting dynasty are among his neighbours) he’s relatively undisturbed, except for any passing rock fans who recognize him from video interviews on YouTube, and a few Google images. How does that level of visibility sit with him? Does he enjoy doing interviews, for instance, while unmasked?
“I guess from a therapeutic point of view, speaking so much about yourself, your background and your motivation of why you’re doing this, it does have a cathartic function. But I definitely reach a point each day where I don’t want to talk any more. As much as people think that as an artist you like to revel in yourself...” he catches himself. “Look, I’m an exhibitionist, of course, but I definitely get to a point where I get really bummed talking about myself after a while.”
Perhaps this explains the desire to inhabit other personas, and makes sense of his latent acting ambitions.
“Yes,” he says with a laugh when asked if there are specific characters he’d love to play, “but I can’t say because it's part of how I view myself, and that might not rhyme with the rest. As an actor you are working with your physical attributes as your currency, so I know being five foot nine, white, with a certain body shape, I couldn’t do everything on the menu.”
In the Ghost universe, Forge bypasses such restrictions, starring in it and directing the various other parts. Mid-set at Manchester Arena, the audience’s mouths stretch into grins as Papa Nihil - an ancient ‘mentor’ cardinal in aviators - is wheeled out in an open coffin. This was not expected. Supposedly they killed him off in Mexico just before the first lockdown, but here he is, ‘reanimated’ by stage hands to deliver Miasma's saxophone solo. It’s all very Alice Cooper, with a dash of Benny Hill.
“I like to compare it to running a restaurant, because people...” Forge searches for the words. “You grew tired of your quiche or whatever a long time ago, even if it’s your grandma’s recipe, but people expect it to taste the same every night because they don’t come in and eat it every day. They expect the quiche to taste the way it did, because they brought two friends with them.”
So what dish would Ghost be?
“Because of the mixed nature of the music that’s combined,” he muses, “I guess it’s a calzone, with sushi in it, with cream on top.”
As the hits keep on coming, they make good on that sushi-calzone-with-cream-on-top concept. The Ghouls storm into Kraken-sized riffer Cirice, and Papa Emeritus reappears in bat wings – because why not? There are smoke jets, more dry ice, new robes, a fancy hat that (at certain angles) looks a bit like antlers... And then come the flames. Big ones. Fucking loads of them, giving the pyromaniac crews behind Slipknot and Rammstein a run for their money, before leading into He Is - a satirical yet stirring singalong with ABBA in its veins, completed following the suicide of Forge’s friend Selim Lemouchi (of Dutch occult rockers The Devil’s Blood) in 2014. Four years previously, his music-loving older brother died suddenly, the same day the first Ghost songs were released. Death runs deep in this music - in the fortitude it’s taken Forge to run with it.
But they're not done yet.
The metallic crunch of Mummy Dust is swiftly offset by Papa donning a blue sparkly jacket. “Let me hear you say ‘oomph’!” he roars into the audience, followed by what might be “did you feel it in your pants?!” - but it’s hard to tell through the make-up and an accent that sounds increasingly Compare The Meerkat-esque.
Indeed, for all Papa’s suave qualities his stage banter comes with an enchantingly befuddled edge; somewhere between a swashbuckling lothario and a slightly mad pensioner, but less creepy than that sounds. Is this the same softly spoken Scandi guy who chatted earlier about doing his 10,000 steps and watching hockey games?
“We’ve had a good hang!” he declares, by way of a pre-encore ‘farewell’. “I hope you leave feeling... well hung?!”
From there it’s time for a dynamite brace of Enter Sandman (they provided a version for Metallica’s Blacklist guest covers album last year) and Dance Macabre - the least metal song ever recorded by a band with such a metal-friendly image as Ghost.
“Just one more?” Papa shouts to the whooping masses. “And then you go out into the Manchester night, and either you fuck someone, or you go fuck yourself! How about that?”
With that, the band nail an addictive Square Hammer, and the cheers shoot up by several decibels.
Back at the hotel, just before he disappears to gear up for the evening ahead, Tobias Forge considers how it feels when he steps on stage. Transformed. Ready.
“I would say phenomenal,” he replies. “It’s one of the few moments where I don’t think about much else. Most of the time I am thinking of something else. I’m worrying about all kinds of stuff at the same time. The best nights are when you flow through them, and the worst nights are when you think: ‘Oh shit, I forgot the last step, I need to go back,’ and you start thinking about it.”
If that happens tonight, they hide it well. Curtain calls arc taken to the pastoral strains of Emmylou Harris's Sorrow In The Wind, and as Papa and the Ghouls wave, blow kisses and throw plectrums into the adoring audience there’s something reassuringly innocent about it all.
When children learn the truth about Santa Claus, they often keep believing anyway because they want to. They play along with stockings by the chimney, or Dad/Uncle Pete/whoever in the red suit, because it’s more fun that way. The same thing happens with Ghost. Ultimately it’s make-believe. A mystery with a sparkling rock soundtrack.
 ‘Fun’ can feel like a dismissive term. But as we’ve been reminded tonight, there is power in fun. Power in big, rousing guitars. Power in brilliantly entertaining spectacles. Not least of all, in recent times, fun offers cathartic escape like little else. The means to smile instinctively. Restoration for anyone who’s ever felt crushed by life.
“I would put on Live After Death before going on stage because it takes me near to the dream, rather than thinking of the practical nature of today,” Forge reasons. “That’s what it’s all about. All we’re doing is dreaming.”
Fistfulls of 'Ghost dollars' are scattered by roadies as house lights go up, the smell of burning permeates the arena and, finally, we wake up.
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