POP MUSIC REVIEW : A Storyteller Returns : Springsteen Defines Musical Focus With Images of Steinbeck in Solo Concert Tour

Bruce Springsteen’s performance on Sunday at the Wiltern Theatre had more of the feel of a one-man play than a concert, all the way down to the sign in the lobby warning that late seating would be at the discretion of the management.

Fair enough.

The evening--the formal start of Springsteen’s first solo tour--was high-stakes drama, both in the context of the singer-songwriter’s long career and in the purposefulness of the musical focus.

At a time when his relevance in the rock climate of the ‘90s has been widely questioned, Springsteen delivered nearly two hours of music that was uncompromisingly bleak and frequently brilliant.

“A lot of the songs were written with a lot of silence and they need silence to work,” Springsteen told the audience after the opening number. “So if you like singing and clapping along, please don’t.”

On a lighter note, he added, “I know this is L.A., so I hope I don’t have to come out there and confiscate any cellular phones.”

It was about the only time the audience--which included such celebrity guests as Tom Hanks, Dustin Hoffman, Jim Carrey and Jackson Browne--got a chance to laugh.

There’s a lot of looking back these days in pop, as evidenced by the stampede to record stores for what amounts to table scraps from the ‘60s Beatles feast.

But Springsteen’s new “The Ghost of Tom Joad” album reflects the determination of a veteran artist to move forward, and Sunday’s show, which featured 11 of the album’s 12 songs, continued in that spirit.

Much of the power of Springsteen’s live shows over the years has been in their marathon nature--three or more hours of glorious music and motion with the E Street Band that served up virtually every emotion that has been important in rock. There were moments of celebration and comfort, commentary and rebellion.

On Sunday, however, there was little comfort and no celebration. He even wiped away the glamorous rock-star image of the ‘70s and ‘80s by combing his hair back to spotlight, rather than hide, his receding hairline.

Without a band by his side, Springsteen continues to sing about dreams, but there’s a profound difference.

Where he once urged his young fans to follow their sometimes elusive dreams, he now asks an audience of all ages to reflect on the shattered dreams of those caught on the wrong side of the line in a land where the term “two Americas” underscores the harsh socioeconomic realities.

Accompanied by his own acoustic guitar and harmonica, Springsteen opened with the album’s title song, an update of the underclass oppression outlined in John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel “The Grapes of Wrath” and in John Ford’s classic film version. Those works apparently had such an impact on the young Springsteen that he described the details of a scene from the film to introduce a song on Sunday.

The title song defined the evening’s theme with the clarity and character of a playwright’s opening scene:

Hot soup on a campfire under the bridge.

Shelter line stretchin’ ‘round the corner

Welcome to the new world order.

The concert’s most moving segment came when he brought together four of the album’s songs--including the poignant “Sinaloa Cowboys” and the wistful “Across the Border”--that speak about the struggle of Mexican immigrants in California.

He sang these and other old and new tunes in a voice so gruff and pointed that it stripped the songs of any trace of comforting melody, in much the way that conditions have stripped the songs’ characters of their hope.

While the “Tom Joad” material worked well, Springsteen’s choice of supplemental songs needs some fine-tuning. He could sharpen the set’s focus by replacing such selections as “Spare Parts” and “If I Should Fall Behind” with more songs from “Nebraska,” the 1982 album that is his closest in spirit to “Tom Joad.”

He should also reconsider using “Darkness on the Edge of Town” in the center of the set, where its anthem-like quality interrupted the flow of the evening by spotlighting, however inadvertently, Springsteen’s old glory days rather than the topic at hand. Predictably, the number drew the evening’s strongest cheers.

In contrast, a reworked “Born in the U.S.A.” fit superbly. The 1984 song was meant as a hard look at the American fiber, but the recorded version’s bright, sing-along chorus led many to see it as a patriotic toast. On Sunday, Springsteen downplayed that chorus and made the song a harrowing reminder of the Vietnam experience. It was the moment in which the artistic hearts of the old and the new Springsteens connected most vividly, and showed how well that heart continues to beat.