The Rising: A Look Back

This past week my girlfriend and I found ourselves up in the later hours of a day gone by in a small hotel room in a city where last call had been rung. Flipping channels on the room’s TV we came across a rerun on MSNBC called 9/11: As It Happened.

For the next hour or so we watched a re-airing of the Today Show from that Tuesday morning. It was morbidly fascinating. I had a book resting on my stomach which had an ending in it that I couldn’t begin to guess at and the joy of Beatles remasters which could have been flowing into my head but instead I was glued to the wall mounted TV watching and waiting for an ending that I knew, dreaded and never wanted to see again. And hoping like an idiot that what I remembered wasn’t about to be replayed.

I started thinking about that time eight years ago. Not so much about just the terrorism and confusion but the surrounding media events. Like Letterman coming back. Like that first SNL. The Telethon where Neil Young played Imagine and Springsteen played My City of Ruins. And U2. Wasn’t U2 everywhere back then? Isn’t U2 everywhere right now?

This week I saw a list of the best fiction inspired by 9/11 on The Daily Beast. Unlike that format, music didn’t really have that many albums inspired by 9/11 (or at least not too many memorable ones) besides the necessary over the top country ones.

Take this with a grain of salt. Less than a year after 9/11 when the wounds were still fresh and didn’t seem like they would ever heal Bruce Springsteen announced he was recording a new album with the E Street Band inspired by September the 11th. This would be The Rising and the first Bruce/E Street album to come out after I reached puberty. Needless to say I was excited and even made uncouth and regretful statements like “if this is what it takes to get a new E Street band album…”

The album came out on July 30, 2002. For some reason I waited until 8 PM or so to get a copy. I was living in Saratoga that summer and honestly, though I’m ashamed to admit it, I think the fact that it was release day slipped by. This was a rare oversight on my part. Just take a look at my Mastercard bill going back a decade for confirmation. I jumped in the car and hopped over to Borders, bought a copy and headed back to the house and began listening and seven years later I still haven’t put that one down.

I was stunned. The Rising was great. It was long but great. Back in 2002 every song seemed to incorporate the events of 9/11. Waiting On A Sunny Day and the album’s opener, Lonesome Day with its joyous refrain of “It’s alright…” repeated thrice, reminded us that things would be getting better. But we were brought back to reality by Into the Fire with its opening lines that the “sky was falling and streaked with blood.” and songs like Counting on a Miracle, Worlds Apart, Your Missing, and Empty Sky set the scene.

The album continuously shifted from this sadness that contained a slight glimmer of hope we could grab hold of to the optimism and infective and uncontrollable delight that Springsteen has been creating for decades. I remember my mom that summer listening to Your Missing and breaking down in the back yard but I can also recall a drive into Albany with a friend doing nothing but singing at the top of our lungs to the album’s rockers.

The Rising had many purposes and it served them all. It was made to help us and its writer heal and to give us something to listen to when we began to ease back into normalcy and enjoy life again. It was the soundtrack to a movie that contained all the emotions in the spectrum bursting to be let out so they could compete with one another. But The Rising also had another purpose separate from all of the above. To just be a great album on its own. No 9/11 strings attached.

What amazes me is that The Rising was billed as the 9/11 album and yet years later it doesn’t have to be, it can be listened to as a topical piece of music or like any other album in the canon. There are no overt references to 9/11, no buzz words, no political statements. Until I played it this week in the context of thinking of 9/11 I realized I had forgotten all about its original history somewhere over the years.

If you played it for someone unfamiliar with its release, they may be clueless to its inspiration but perhaps if they listened hard enough they’d be able to guess that its music was being driven by events unfamiliar to rock music because maybe with every listen our recent history is always there somewhere and it what’s make the party in Mary’s Place all the more bittersweet or the anthemic “Come On, Rise Up!” refrain of My City of Ruins so inspiring.

Or maybe its themes are universal, stretching beyond a specific day or place and we all at sometime or another just need to clear the furniture to the walls and dance or build something back up after its been wrecked and rise again.

(I didn’t want to detract from the above post, but the reason I included the video from Bruce’s performance of My City of Ruins from the Tribute to Heroes telethon was that Bruce was one of the only artists or the only artist to play an unreleased song not already known to the public and to point out that Bruce had written the song prior to 9/11, in regards to his NJ)

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