The Boss is the Bo$$

My problem with Bruce & E Street Band is their sound is just so big and blasting.  It is hard to hear any separate instruments.  Just bombastic.  I can name countless large bands where you can pick out each instrument and follow it over the course of a song.  Not so with Bruce & band.

But, I will say, he is one hell of a performer.  3+ hours of Rock n Roll.  Quite enjoyable.  Only went to one show during the River Tour, but what a show.  By the third song he was being body passed in the audience.  One Hell of A Performer.

With all that, a few of his early things are great.  The Thunder Road with just harmonica & piano from Max's Kansas CIty (I think) is a great Americana song.  I can't deny that.  

@pgaulke60  - Try this one...

He is a very talented artist who both writes and performs his own music.  What do YOU do?

He is clearly not Pavarotti, but is not supposed to be.  It is Rock 'n' Roll, in the tradition of Chuck and Jerry and Roy and Elvis and so forth.

AND, he recorded STAND ON IT, which is one heck of a rock tune!

Cheers, and good for him.  (My daughter went to college with his son, who dropped out to become a firefighter, FYI.)

@pgaulke60 Yeah, it took me a while to get used to Springsteen's all-loud-all-the-time approach, too. Then I succumbed to it.

pgaulke60

Bruce and the band has sound that is "big and blasting" in studio albums. Other than his first 3, none of which were well recorded-- but not annoying, Darkness (excellent sound), Tunnel of Love, Human Touch, Lucky Town (all ok) and Western Stars (very good)--most of his albums, especially those over the last 25 years (WS excluded) are the worst sounding records in my collection.

His sound quality has historically been amazingly bad and has bothered me for so long that-- other than the above albums, I can almost never follow any instrument. The drums sound like paper, his voice takes up much of the space and everything else is just a compressed massive mess behind him. Nevertheless, I tolerate the sound because I am a fan.

I was test listening to a Techdas Premium 3 with SAT arm with VTL Siegfried 2 monos and Wilson Chronosonic XVS at my dealer a few weeks ago. I took about a dozen records from audiophile to middling sound quality and was amazed at how all of them sounded better than I had ever heard them. Then I put on the Springsteen Magic album to test a really bad sounding album. It was so sludgy, harsh, compressed and screechy that the salesman and I could not live through an entire minute. It was, in a word, horrific. The salesman who is a fan of classical music and had never heard the album before could not believe that such a record could be released or listened to at length.

Of course Bruce was, and to some degree remains, a dynamic and charismatic live performer. I’ve always felt that his performances were so much better than his albums in part because of his charismatic energy and physically engrossing presentation and in part because we get to hear how the songs should actually sound without the studio screwing them up.

By the way, check out the No Nukes concert BD (I was lucky enough to be at both shows). The sound on that is pretty good as the Record Plant remote truck was used with a number of great engineers inside.

As for the sale of his music catalogue, I don't know how he beat out Dylan but kudos to him.