The Big Man blows

New Jersey has long been the butt of jokes -- the Polack of states, a place where all the bridge-and-tunnel cretins have Manhattan daydreams and bad '70s 'dos. Then along came a man they call The Boss and his colorful band of associates to make the Garden State cool. Yep, it's all about The Sopranos these days, as the hit HBO show has accomplished the impossible: replacing the Godfather films and Goodfellas as the finest depiction of mob life. Those classic, brilliant movies are a one-night stand with a supermodel; renting them is like masturbating to the memory. But The Sopranos is like a long-term relationship in which you take the bad with the good, because you're committed to see how it all turns out. Personalities are given the time to evolve and become more complex. Meadow's gotten chunky, Christopher has grown weak, and the shades of Tony's anger, Pussy's betrayal, and Carmela's emptiness are gently drawn out week after week.

The Sopranos is fascinating to watch, even if there are cringe-inducing scenes every week, like the time Tony tried to give Meadow her friend's car he received to pay off a gambling debt. Or when Anthony Jr. started quoting Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche while pondering the meaning of life -- a moment far more hysterical than anything found in Analyze This. But when you become a fan of The Sopranos, you buy into the entire premise and learn to accept the bad clams along with the good.

Same thing goes with that other Boss from Jersey, Bruce Springsteen. There exist more similarities between Tony S. and Bruce S. than the fact that both are from Jersey, are married to blonde Italian wives, and have to perform next to the air-sucking mobster/rocker caricatures created by Steve Van Zandt. (To further draw out the Soprano/E Street connection, Clarence Clemons is "Big Pussy.") Like the TV show, when Springsteen is on, he's untouchable. But he's not immune from boneheaded ideas.

With the possible exception of Bob Dylan, there has never been a better songwriter during the rock era than Springsteen. "Highway Patrolman," off 1982's Nebraska, is such an incredible storytelling achievement that Sean Penn made an entire movie (The Crossing Guard) based on the song and still couldn't reveal more about the characters than a single line from the song's chorus, "Takin' turns dancing with Maria, as the band played 'The Johnstown Flood.'" Springsteen did the same thing with "Galveston Bay" on his 1995 Ghost of Tom Joad album, creating a more dramatic account of the fight between Vietnamese immigrants and war vets over control of the shrimping business than Louis Malle's 1985 film Alamo Bay ever did. When Springsteen is good, man, there's no one better.

He's also capable of pure drivel, as evidenced by "Crush On You," "Adam Raised a Cane" and every song on Born in the USA (save for "I'm Going Down"). And just what was the idea behind 1992's Human Touch? That soulless piece of crap was so dreadful, the criticism spilled over to Lucky Town, a great album (released at the same time) that was universally panned -- guilt by association. As for his '98 bomb, the four-disc official bootleg Tracks, it accomplished only one thing: charging people $50 to see why the songs hadn't been released in the first place.

When you become a fan of Bruce Springsteen -- and that means anyone who stuck with him either before or after 1984's Born in the USA -- you accept the whole package. When a lover is good in bed, you'll put up with more bullshit. But as a hardcore fan, I'm not buying into the big Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band tour that will revive its weary bones Monday at Reunion Arena. I've got tickets, but I don't even want to go, because the E Street Band's dead to me. They have been, with a few exceptions, since "Jungleland."

When I look back at Springsteen's entire body of work, I see that the best cuts are generally the ones that feature fewer E Streeters, or none at all. Is there any doubt that the solo acoustic Nebraska is Bruce's finest album? Meanwhile, Born to Run and The River -- the records that prominently feature Clemons, drummer Max Weinberg, keyboardists Roy Bittan and Danny Federici, bassist Garry Tallent, and the schemata-wearing vampire Van Zandt -- are the ones I rarely play. When the whole band is blaring away, they sound like they're in a battle of the bands with Southside Johnny. Weinberg, who found his true calling as Conan O'Brien's Doc Severinsen, has no swing in his beat; meanwhile, every Clemons sax break sounds the same.

Springsteen and his editor-manager John Landau could sense this band in the rut was detracting from the songwriting, so the sidemen's roles were minimized on Born In the USA and phased out on 1987's Tunnel of Love. Good riddance to a band that was really doing interesting things on 1973's The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, but had turned into a crowd-pleasing parody by the time of their 1988 swan-song tour. A perfect concert would be two hours of Springsteen backed by a small combo, then the E Street Band coming out to do "Rosalita" and the Mitch Ryder medley as an encore.