Concert review: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band

Max Weinberg. All you need.

So I saw Bruce Springsteen live over a month ago and I immediately wrote a review of it. Because I'm a lazy bastard, I'm only posting it here now. I wrote the article in The Observer office though, meaning that I don't have the original, unedited article on hand, and copy had to cut a bit of it due to length issues. So, this is the version that ran, verbatim, in the paper, not the UNCUT, UNCENSORED version that I would normally post here (really I think there was an extra sentence about how great Clarence Clemons is that got cut and that's probably it). Long live Broos. Etc.

Bruce Springsteen may have turned 60 years old less than two months ago, but as soon as he and his "mighty" E-Street Band launched into a performance of the entire Born to Run album last Tuesday night at the Quicken Loans Arena, the reckless, romantic, eighteen-year-old spirit that drove the seminal record into the hearts of millions took hold and did not let up. This was a spirit that spread quickly through the sold out crowd and ultimately showed proof of Springsteen's relentless showmanship and passion.

As the crowd still kept piling in at the concert's proposed starting time of 7:30 p.m., tensions began to mount while an increasing number of people restlessly awaited the band's performance. One particularly cruel move had the arena shut its lights off, only to light up again. Nearly 45 minutes after the band was slated to perform, though, Springsteen and the E Street Band finally took the stage.The ensuing performance was well worth the wait.

Springsteen surprisingly enough started the show not with a bang, but with the mere strumming of his guitar, slowly but surely building up speed and energy on his new track, "Wrecking Ball," about the demolition of Giants Stadium earlier this year. Opening a show with a brand-new, non-album track was a welcome, yet odd decision on his part, but following it up with classics "Prove It All Night" and "Hungry Heart" was an even better decision. Springsteen crowd surfed back to the stage during the latter song and never sang a word of the chorus, letting the audience take over.

From there, he moved on to his new staple, "Working on a Dream," a song whose homecoming to Cleveland was truly significant, as just over a year ago, Springsteen premiered the song during his performance at the Cleveland campaign rally for then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.

In the first break since starting the show, Springsteen had a brief talk with his thousands-strong audience, mentioning how in recent shows, he had performed entire albums from front to back. Cleveland lucked out with a full performance of what many argue is Springsteen's high-water mark, 1975's Born to Run. The album, which features such epochal tracks as "Thunder Road," "Jungleland" and the wall-of-sound-affected title track, translated almost perfectly live. For an album performed by most of the same people who initially recorded it over thirty years ago, its songs still managed to retain the same vitality they possessed when Born to Run first hit shelves.

The rest of the concert continued along as a revue through Springsteen's extensive catalog and displayed the man's versatility, able to crunch out gospel covers with the same energy that he put into his ballads. There were also plenty of moments where the show transitioned from being a mere concert into a full-blown spectacle. During one song, he collected a considerable amount of posters made by adoring fans, and displaying certain song-specific ones as he played the respective songs throughout the night. Toward the end of "Waitin' on a Sunny Day," he pulled three young girls out of the front row to make their arena show debut and lead the crowd in two choruses.

Springsteen's enormous persona filled up the arena as much as the band's sound did. He played the roles of bandleader, preacher, Good Samaritan, and marriage counselor through the course of the three-hour long performance. The latter occupation was exemplified during a heart-wrenching performance of "Back in Your Arms," which featured him dropping to his knees and urging his crowd to "fight and beg" for whatever romance in their lives they had let go.

There were a few minor missteps throughout the night, the greatest of which was the crew's decision to turn the house lights on for several entire numbers, an effect that killed some of the mood in several key songs. Additionally, Springsteen's choice to nearly conclude the show with covers and folk songs, while serving well to showcase different facets of his music, could have been bettered with perhaps something from Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. Thankfully, he had the good sense to end the show with a blistering performance of "Rosalita," a perfect concert-closer.

Few artists have managed to maintain vitality over the great length of time that Bruce Springsteen has. Early on in the show, he demanded that his audience "build a house out of Cleveland spirit" and it's likely that house still stands on the court in the Q.

Setlist:

Wrecking Ball

Prove it All Night

Hungry Heart

Working on a Dream

Thunder Road

Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out

Night

Backstreets

Born to Run

She's the One

Meeting Across the River

Jungleland

Waiting on a Sunny Day

Raise Your Hand

Red Headed Woman

Pink Cadillac

Back in Your Arms

Radio Nowhere

Lonesome Day

The Rising

Badlands

No Surrender

Bobby Jean

American Land

Dancing in the Dark

Can't Help Falling in Love

Higher and Higher

Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)

Here are a few videos I found on youtube from the evening...

Full performance of "Jungleland." Clarence's sax solo was one of the most transcendent concert-going experiences of my life:

Full performance of "Thunder Road." Video is shaky but audio is good:

Bruce doing his thing in the middle of "Hungry Heart." Whadda guy:

Ultra-belated mini-reviews!

In a sad attempt to defibrillate this nearly dead blog, I will post a couple Observer articles I've had sitting on the back-burner for a little while now. The first of these is a little set of mini-reviews I wrote a few months just for the hell of it. Look out, peoples! I get scathing and negative for once! Whoahhhhhh. And on top of that, the very day this article hit the racks, Pitchfork gave Girls' Album a 9.1 comparable to my 4 and a half stars. Not that anyone really gives a shit, but maybe I can be a tastemaker too! Look out, Chicago and/or Williamsburg!

Be glad they didn't use anything from the "Lust for Life" video...

Girls – Album

Any hype-driven band is subsequently met with its fair share of skeptics, and more often than not, the skeptics win and the hype flutters from group to group. Every now and then, a young band manages to live past the hype, and judging from the strengths of this debut, the androgynously named Girls (a band consisting of two guys who start the album by singing, “I wish I had a boyfriend”) should be sticking around for a while.

The album is easily one of the best works of modern indie pop released this year, and its range of emotion and relentless attention to pop hooks should endear it to an audience far beyond the hipster set. Songs like “Morning Light” and “Big Bad Mean Motherfucker” are up-tempo bursts of fuzzy rock while “Laura” and “Darling” admirably channel sunshiny, infectious ‘60s pop. The album’s centerpiece, however, the lofty “Hellhole Ratrace,” is an affecting torch song for the wistful pop geek inside all (or at least most) of us.

I have nothing to say about this album cover.

Times New Viking – Born Again Revisited

For what it’s worth, the current resurgence of scuzzy, no-budget garage rock has become a reputable force in the current independent rock scene, and Columbus trio Times New Viking have been one of this aesthetic’s most visible bands. Regrettably, the band hardly moves beyond this aesthetic, producing a sound that amounts to little more than all-style, no-substance, and Born Again Revisited barely follows through on the band’s promise of 25% higher fidelity than their first Matador release, Rip It Off.

Even so, there are glimpses of true songwriting talent hidden underneath the feedback, and tracks like the relatively understated “Those Days” and the powerful rushes of “No Time, No Hope” and “Hustler, Psycho, Son” justify much of the hype that persistently surrounds the band. It’s a shame then that the rest of the album uses an avoidable lo-fi sound to bury these song snippets and prevent whatever hooks (which may or may not actually exist) from flourishing. That may be part of the point, but even the experimental, filler tracks on Guided By Voices’ best albums were catchy.

Tetris!

Lou Barlow – Goodnight Unknown

Lou Barlow is one of the most unquestionably prolific songwriters in independent music history, having released massive albums of material under several different monikers. Apart from his contributions to the Dinosaur Jr. reunion, he’s been working steadily under his own name, casting off much of the rough, lo-fi sounds that he helped revolutionize and showing proof of graceful aging.

It is impressive that after so much material, Barlow is still able to craft unique melodies, and strong tracks like opener “Sharing,” “Don’t Apologize” and “One Machine, One Long Flight” bolster a collection of fine tunes. Perhaps even more notable is the manner in which Barlow, one-third of one of the loudest bands in alternative music history and one of the men most responsible for the noisy lo-fi movement, is able to pen songs like the Elliott Smith-esque “Thinking…” and love song “The One I Call” and still come out sounding more earnest than most balladeers.

Okay, that's all for now. Hopefully soon I'll post another old article and then put together a final list of the top albums and songs of the year! Hopefully...