September 16, 2024
"Wow! I feel fuckin' old tonight, in a good way. I never thought I'd live to see this sight, nowhere in my lifetime. The band... We were here on that little street corner [pointing towards The Stone Pony] when nobody was here, and I didn't know when I'd see folks in this good town again. So I just want to take a moment and thank all of the people that have invested themselves in Asbury Park and brought the city back to life. On the East Side, on the West Side... I want to thank the LGBTQ+ community for all they've given to Asbury Park in the last twenty... twenty-five years. Danny Clinch, I want to thank you for this wonderful event. And most of all, I want to thank all of you for being here tonight and for supporting Asbury Park for all this time."
-Bruce Springsteen, onstage with the E Street Band on the beach of Asbury Park, NJ, during their September 15, 2024 Sea.Hear.Now Festival performance
As you probably know already, it was a very special weekend in the Garden State indeed, more specifically in "Little Eden." It featured a Saturday-night return to those legendary surprise drop-in visits at Jersey Shore bars/nightclubs, followed on Sunday afternoon by Festival sit-ins with Trey Anastasio and The Gaslight Anthem, all preceding the big event, of course: Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, live on the Asbury Park, NJ beach/boardwalk, delivering a special, fully-customized, one-off, early-Jersey-Shore-days-focused setlist for one of the biggest beach-parties in the storied town's history.
Appropriately, we're gonna let our Jersey-based pals Chris Jordan of The Asbury Park Press and Jay Lustig of NJArts.net supply all of the details, by linking here to their comprehensive coverage:
Click here to read "Bruce Springsteen and E Street play magical three-hour show at Sea Hear Now: Review" by Chris Jordan of The Asbury Park Press.
And finally, also very well worth reading is John T. Ward's timely and lesser-known history of the Off Broad Street Coffeehouse in nearby Red Bank, NJ, one of Springsteen's earliest musical homes on the Jersey Shore. Click here to read "Growin' Up With Springsteen, Off Broad: The untold story of a Red Bank coffeehouse that helped shape Bruce Springsteen, and other teens, in 1968" by John T. Ward, editor/publisher of redbankgreen.com.
-special thanks to Lisa Iannucci
-thumbnail-photo for this report by Caroline Madden; used with permission