"A Springsteen show is like Paris," The Spin emailed someone in the hours before Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band took the stage at Bridgestone Arena Thursday night. "See it and die satisfied." A whiff of mortality colors a Springsteen show today the way clouds of green smoke once affected his Municipal Auditorium shows back in the ’70s. The music still sounds terrific, the band still fires on all cylinders like the great sky-pawing beast of a machine it is, but your mood is definitely altered a little. But in a good way, The Spin would argue, still high from a three-hour-plus set made all the more moving by the band's invocation not just of shared history, but of a common fate.
Even without the late Big Man and Danny Federici — who loom in the show not so much as absences but phantom presences, licks or flourishes you sometimes hear even though they're not there — the E Street Band lineup was unusual, missing key players and making unusual substitutions. The band, that fascinating organism of equal parts sports team, long-running family drama and traveling tent revival, bears additions that represent every stage of Springsteen's career, like rings in a tree trunk: guitarist Nils Lofgren from the Born in the USA switchover, violin player and vocalist Soozie Tyrell from the Lucky Town wilderness years, the Dixieland horn section from the Seeger Sessions project. The latest is former Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello — probably not the first name you'd pencil in for the redoubtable Little Steven Van Zandt while he's off shooting Lillyhammer.
It works, though, for the same reason the shows themselves are such a jubilant spectacle: They contain multitudes, and within their sprawl there's room for all. Forsaking what the Cream's resident Bruceologist Adam Gold termed the "region-specific cover" openers of recent dates — Brisbane, no joke, got a killer "Stayin' Alive" — Springsteen, yeoman percussionist Ernest Bradley and the E Streeters set the show's tone with the urgent, defiant optimism of the cover that gives the new High Hopes album its title. Yet the response it got from the (gratifyingly) full house doubled in volume once "Professor" Roy Bittan sounded the familiar piano chords of "Badlands." The sound of 15,000 people singing those fist-pumping "whoa-oh-oh-ohs" in unison was the first in a night full of heart-swelling communal moments.
Not that the intense sense of community, and the demands that go with it, can't be something of a mixed blessing. Like Bob Dylan, Springsteen has spent the past four decades as the object of daunting adoration and expectations, two pressures that can be paralyzing for an artist with any ambition. Dylan's late-career response has been to some degree sabotage: He sings generation-defining songs like a cagey, addled wizard finding scraps of half-remembered spells in the sleeves of his robe, testing if they still have any power.
Well, Springsteen knows his spells by heart, and he knows they work: the obligatory may-I-have-this-dance routine in "Dancing in the Dark," the obligatory audience-sung verse to "Hungry Heart" — hell, the obligatory "Hungry Heart." If anything, they work too well — that's a lot of obligation. During the lengthiest working-the-room moments there were times Springsteen appeared reduced to a prop in an endless procession of audience selfies. At times, the stiff-legged, geezerly trudge he affected early on — as in an epic "Spirit in the Night," where he played his age for laughs by slumping mid-song (and mid-arena) into a conveniently materialized director's chair — didn't seem entirely an affect.
What kept the show from lapsing into a shtick marathon was Springsteen's unmatched ability to create a sense of intimacy and one-on-one engagement in the vastness of an enormodome. (Case in point: the "Dancing in the Dark" routine, which became sweetly amusing once the chosen dancer stopped the show to negotiate getting her mom onstage instead. The punchline was even funnier: Each demanded her own selfie.) No other artist — with the possible exception of Bono — has so boldly explored the arena-rock grand gesture as an artistic form in itself, down to the thrill of those bellowed "HAH-WAHN! TWO! THREE!" count-offs. Springsteen did this most affectingly on The Rising album, using the stadium-pitched incantation as a rhetorical device to raise vanished loved ones, lost rescuers and the hopes of a stricken city.
He turned to that device repeatedly Thursday night, invoking the anthemic exhortations of "Land of Hope and Dreams," "Waiting for a Sunny Day" and The Rising's goosebumps-raising title track to get audiences of young and old shouting as one. The cumulative emotional effect was like the gradual swell and crash of a wave. There was little obligatory about the set, which was filled with curveballs and unexpected selections. With the arena floor divided into two general-admission sections by a mid-arena runway, Springsteen used an unexpected stage dive to gather fan-made request posters to his chest as the crowd passed him along over its head. From those, he selected — and nailed — a cover he said the band had performed only once before, Elvis' "Burning Love."
Better (and more surprising still) was a cover of "Satisfaction" with a pre-teen girl selected from the crowd as his duet partner. (Throughout both numbers, E Street bassist and part-time Nashvillian Garry Tallent must've thought he was back in the Long Players.) A two-song nod to Nebraska climaxed with a blazing "Johnny 99" as the horn section led by star-in-the-making Jake Clemons teetered on the stage's lip, gunning the song's motor with a swaggering "Night Train" riff. By this point, it was clear the 64-year-old frontman was pacing himself like a canny athlete; to drive the point home, he later slithered down the mic stand in a frankly erotic backbend, parallel to the floor on the toe tips of his boots as the crowd uttered a gasp that can only be described as orgasmic. The Spin's companion looked on ruefully and said, "I couldn't do that when I was 20."
Many of the night's most chill-inducing moments came from less familiar, more socially conscious material: the Amadou Diallo protest anthem "41 Shots (American Skin)," the solemn Vietnam Memorial ballad "The Wall," which Springsteen introduced with a eulogy for fallen Jersey friends that hushed the crowd to a pinprick drop. "The Ghost of Tom Joad" is a song that has stubbornly failed to ignite for The Spin, either by Springsteen or by Morello solo. We're not sure we could have taken Morello's jaw-clenched earnestness and rock-face guitar acrobatics on his own — in his nightwatchman's garb, he sometimes resembled a progressive action figure The Nation might give away with subscriptions. But the energy and camaraderie he inspired from Springsteen, standing shoulder to shoulder with cocked arm pumping like a piston, electrified them both; it made the song a live showstopper.
Even the hits offered some surprises. Gold had seen Springsteen 22 times without ever hearing "Born in the USA" live; the 23rd proved to be the charm (thanks for reading, Boss!), with Mighty Max Weinberg rising to the occasion with a 50-cal barrage of a drum solo. By the time the band polished off the climactic trifecta of "Born to Run," "Dancing in the Dark" and "Tenth Avenue Freeze-out" — a song that has morphed over the years from origin story to eulogy to "look how far we've come" — the sea of extended hands and straining fingers across the arena looked like a wheat field in a windstorm.
The fact that Springsteen is still capable of surprise after all these years, while delivering elements fans have come to rely upon the way Western lovers await shootouts at high noon, speaks to his mastery of the concert as an art form. Watching him pause interminably as disembodied hands rub his head, or acknowledge yet another kid seeking his attention in the audience, would be hard to take if affection didn't overcome resignation. In a sense, he's the Bill Clinton of rock stars — without you, he's nothing. And yet he's attentive enough to seize moments of spontaneity fronting a band the size of an FBI task force. There's something thrilling about a guy barking "E flat!" at roughly a dozen people and expecting order to result, like hearing a man at the helm of a locomotive holler, "Turn left!" As for the selection itself, who ever thought anybody could again make "Shout" something more than a frathouse reunion-band cliche?
Time throws you off a rooftop the day you're born, and the fall you have to the pavement is called a life. The Springsteens of the world are there to remind us the object is to never stop kicking and punching and straining for the sky, all the way to the inevitable finish. You can complain Bruce Springsteen mugs too much, indulges too many little kids and weepy middle-aged moms, does too many of the same things again and again. You know who else you can make that complaint about? The people who inspire the most love from you — the people who have demonstrated their resilience, and their willingness to be there for you even when it's not convenient, and who have lifted their chin to face the hard times we know will eventually have to come.
The Spin was thus happy not to be the only person who got choked up when a little-girl guest singer handed the featured attraction's tambourine back to him, to his clear surprise, only to have him offer it to her to keep. And we were happy not to be the only person brushing away tears at the night's overwhelming benediction, an acoustic "Thunder Road" full of ache, shared experience and tenderness. But that wasn't surprising. Nobody ever left a Springsteen show feeling alone.
Setlist:
1. High Hopes
2. Badlands
3. No Surrender
4. Death to My Hometown
5. Hungry Heart
6. Spirit in the Night
7. Burning Love (Sign request)
8. (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction (Sign request)
9. Atlantic City
10. Johnny 99
11. American Skin (41 Shots)
12. The Promised Land
13. Because the Night
14. I'm on Fire
15. Downbound Train
16. Shackled and Drawn
17. Waitin' on a Sunny Day
18. The Ghost of Tom Joad
19. The Rising
20. Land of Hope and Dreams
Encore:
21. The Wall
22. Point Blank
23. Born in the U.S.A.
24. Born to Run
25. Dancing in the Dark
26. Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
27. Shout
Encore 2:
28. Thunder Road (solo acoustic)
