August 27, 2024
Okay, gang, first a bit of personal as well as musical history, just about as condensed as I can make it...
It was late summer in 1984 when I experienced my first concerts by Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band. I was seventeen years old and still living in Southwest Philadelphia, the working-class neighborhood where I grew up, so it's not surprising that those early concert experiences also occurred within Philadelphia's city limits. In September of that year, Springsteen and the E Streeters held court at Philly's old Spectrum arena for a six-show stand, and I got to see two of those shows (both the opening night and the closing one, if I recall correctly.) Although my serious Springsteen fandom began in the early eighties, it wasn't until more than eight months into '84 that I first got to experience a live concert in person, just as Springsteen's national and international popularity had begun to explode exponentially with that year's release of the Born in the U.S.A. album, along with the string of hit-singles, music-videos, and the 1984-85 tour that followed it.
Those September '84 Philly shows also were the final Springsteen concerts performed before President Ronald Reagan, then running for re-election, would attempt just a few days later to capitalize on Springsteen's popularity by name-checking him in a New Jersey campaign-stop speech. Shortly thereafter Reagan's '84 Democratic Party opponent, Walter Mondale, made the false claim that he had received Springsteen's endorsement, but was quickly forced to retract that statement, since in actuality Springsteen never endorsed either Presidential candidate that year. Reagan's and Mondale's moves inspired Springsteen to begin making a variety of his own countermoves and responses as the Born in the U.S.A. tour and juggernaut continued. One of Bruce's most notable actions, however, occurred very quickly and had a long-lasting effect. In just under a month after that '84 Philly run at the Spectrum had ended, Springsteen had begun spotlighting at each show a local organization focused on hunger, poverty, and/or other important economic or social concerns. For a few minutes during each concert, he'd take a moment while introducing one of his songs and talk to his audience a bit about how the organization's goals and activities connected with the ideals expressed in his music, and he'd encourage his audience to support the organization with a donation and/or other forms of support. It became an essential element of his live shows, something that has occurred virtually each and every night on every tour since then, and continues to do so.
Flash forward now, four decades later. It's late summer in 2024, and once again - as I've done previously in the late summers of 2012 and 2016 - I am standing inside Philadelphia's Citizens Bank Park, the home of the Phillies, the City of Brotherly Love's baseball team (Go, Phils!,) watching Springsteen and the latest version of his "heart-stoppin', pants-droppin', earth-shockin', hard-rockin', booty-shakin', earthquakin', love-makin', Viagra-takin', history-makin'...legendary E Street Band!" once more hold court over the course of two evenings, just last Wednesday and Friday.
The two venues where I saw my earliest Springsteen concerts back in 1984-85, the Spectrum arena and Veterans Stadium, have long since fallen to the wrecking ball. Two more big changes, of course, forty years down the road...Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici are no longer onstage. The great Charlie Giordano took on the simultaneously enviable and unenviable job of replacing Danny on keyboards and accordion back in 2008, shortly after Danny's passing. For the first tour to follow Clarence's death in 2011, just as when Stevie Van Zandt left the band in the early eighties for about sixteen years, it took more than one person to fill the void that was left behind. (In Stevie's case, it took Nils Lofgren on guitar and Patti Scialfa on vocals. In the Big Man's case, however, it appropriately took an entire horn section!)
And having passed just recently, music-journalist/writer/editor/publisher Charley Cross is now also gone, as is his Backstreets magazine and website for Springsteen fans, to which I first subscribed back in the early eighties and later became a contributing writer for almost two decades. (For all intents and purposes, Backstreets already had ceased all of its major operations, more than a year ago, which is the main reason I started this website last year.) Shortly before this pair of Philly shows, while performing at the tour's previous stop in Pittsburgh, Springsteen delivered a sweet, beautiful little onstage tribute to both Charley and Backstreets. (Incidentally I felt Bruce's tribute to be especially significant, generous, and graceful on his part, given Charley's and Backstreets' very public disagreements with Bruce over his current concert-ticketing policies.)
Charley's passing, and Bruce's public response to it just days before he began his two-night Philly stand, probably drove all of this home in my head even further, but in case it isn't obvious already, I witnessed last week's two Philadelphia shows while very, very aware of my own personally significant anniversary of first seeing Bruce Springsteen in concert, just across the street from where I first caught one of his performances back in '84 in a building that no longer exists, and everything else that also has changed over the four decades since then. In addition to all of those changes already referenced above, there are, of course, the myriad of other kinds of personal changes that anyone is bound to experience if you've been fortunate enough to reach your late fifties as I have. Lots of folks in and out of my life over the past forty years, for sure, due to births, deaths, disputes, and various other forms of departure, as well as of arrival. I also began and ended a lengthy career with Philly's public schools, and am now enjoying semi-retirement, still living in the Philly area where I was born and raised - though now in a nearby suburb - with the woman I've loved for more than three decades.
Of course, Bruce Springsteen himself certainly has been through more than a few changes, as well. Among the most notable, he eventually married that redheaded backup singer who helped to replace Stevie Van Zandt, they're now grandparents, and in the years since all of that '84 Reagan/Mondale ridiculousness, Springsteen has become much more active in electoral politics than he ever was back then, openly endorsing and supporting a string of Democratic Presidential candidates beginning in 2004, and even recording a podcast and co-writing a book with the only winner he's backed to date: former U.S. President Barack Obama.
But despite all of those various changes involving the folks onstage and those of us in their audience like myself, some very important through lines still exist. First and foremost, a Bruce Springsteen concert in Philadelphia remains something very special indeed, as it feels like it's always been. Philly is one of his oldest and strongest fanbases; every single one of his Philadelphia concerts that I've attended (and I've managed to catch at least one Philly show on every one of his tours since '84, with the exception of that '88 "Tunnel of Love Express" tour that scheduled only two nights at the 18K-or-so-capacity Spectrum, making it one super-tough ticket to score) has been filled to the rafters with rabid fans. And Springsteen remains the masterful songwriter and live performer that he became after starting out as a scraggly, struggling working-class kid leading his New Jersey-based band in the 1970s, always finding a way somehow to connect with all of us in the crowd, and... this is the important part... directly in that space, directly in that moment... so very much live and in person.
Last week in Philly definitely was no exception. "I expect nothing less," said Springsteen onstage, with a grin and a chuckle, on Night One. So once more he went about doing what he does so well every time he performs with the E Street Band in Philadelphia: constructing one awesome setlist and performing it with all of the heart, soul, intensity, and skill they can muster. The state-of-the-art video projection and vastly improved sound - especially compared to what was possible back in '84 - help him immensely in connecting to all sections of larger arenas and outdoor venues like ballparks, but we're still experiencing very much the same basic thing that Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band have been offering onstage here for more than fifty years, since the days when they were playing tiny Philly-area clubs like the legendary Main Point: a nightly attempt - and one that virtually always succeeds far, far more than it fails - to deliver the best, deepest, funniest, most inspiring, powerful, and ultimately life-affirming mix of rock, folk, funk, soul, stage-schtick and artful drama that anyone possibly could - with every single note played and sung live, and very much in the moment, no matter how much rehearsal may or may not have preceded it.
Night One opened up with a blistering version of one of the two Springsteen songs that actually name-check the City of Brotherly Love in their lyrics: "Atlantic City." Two weeks earlier, Springsteen also had performed "Atlantic City" in Philly, duetting with Zac Brown as a special guest at one of Brown's two Philadelphia concerts. That countryfied version with Brown was great, but of course it rocked nowhere near as hard as what Bruce and the E Streeters laid down as Night One's Song One. Bruce and the band played it like they were out to draw blood from the get-go, and the intensity of their performances never let up moving forward.
From there Night One featured much of the core material on which Springsteen has relied for his current setlists, but of course with some pleasing curveballs for a summer ballpark show in Philly, beginning with the great Born in the U.S.A. raveup "Working on the Highway," brought in to pinch-hit at the last minute for the setlisted "Letter to You" (which meant that the title track of Bruce's latest album with the E Street Band didn't get played at all in either of his Philly shows,) and marking the first time that "Working..." has been played in a U.S. show this year. The guaranteed sing-along crowd-pleaser "Hungry Heart," the first-ever Springsteen-recorded top-ten single, also was a smart non-setlisted addition.
The one-two punch of "Youngstown" followed by "Long Walk Home," a sequence that got added to the set only about a month ago while the band was still touring Europe, has given the current tour - on a regular nightly basis - the most explicit political component it's had since it began. The looming 2024 U.S. Presidential election was most likely on Springsteen's mind as he added these two songs in sequence to his set last month. Coincidentally, the day after this new sequence debuted in Helsinki on July 12, the Pennsylvania campaign-rally assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump occurred, killing a rally attendee, critically injuring two other attendees, and minorly injuring Trump himself. Since that time, Bruce has consistently introduced "Long Walk Home" at each show as "a prayer for my country," just as he did on both nights in Philadelphia last week. It's a moving, powerful, and inspiring moment added to a show that's already packed with them.
Another "Philly Special" highlight of Night One was the tour debut of "Streets of Philadelphia," the other Springsteen song that name-checked the City of Brotherly Love. He wrote and recorded "Streets..." over thirty years ago for the late, great Jonathan Demme's excellent and groundbreaking anti-homophobia/anti-AIDS-ignorance-and-disinformation film Philadelphia, marking the last time to date that Bruce has scored a top-ten hit single. Among his most moving, powerful, and accessible songs, it still holds up extremely well, and it fits perfectly in a show so focused on loss and grieving.
"Streets..." was followed immediately by another of Springsteen's greatest ballads: "Racing in the Street." (The setlist had "Racing..." scheduled to be played before "Streets...," but apparently it was decided at the last minute to reverse that sequence.) It's always something special to hear this hauntingly beautiful, sad, and healing song from the masterpiece that is Darkness on the Edge of Town. And of course the live piano-led outro is one of "Professor" Roy Bittan's greatest moments to shine, every time it's played to heartbreaking perfection, without fail.
The current show's consistent loss-and-grief-themed setpiece of the solo-acoustic-with-accompanying-trumpet "Last Man Standing," followed immediately by a full-band "Backstreets," remains one of the best things that Bruce Springsteen ever has pulled off in concert. It's also one of the most scripted things he's ever done, but that doesn't diminish any of its power at all, any more than all of those heavily scripted moments in Springsteen on Broadway felt any less moving or powerful when you viewed or heard them repeatedly. In fact, this sequence of the show almost always - if not actually always - manages to temporarily and amazingly bring a Springsteen on Broadway feel to an E Street Band concert taking place in a giant arena, stadium or ballpark. It remains an incredible thing to witness, and one unique example of why Bruce Springsteen stands among the greatest live performers to ever stand on a stage. As Dan DeLuca noted in his Philadelphia Inquirer review of Night One, "You could have heard a pin drop. It was an astonishingly intimate performance in a vast public space, of a song casual fans aren’t even familiar with — a testament to the bond of mutual respect Springsteen has forged over many decades."
The story that Bruce consistently tells before "Last Man Standing," centered around the passing of his old friend and early bandmate George Theiss, was enhanced on Night One with some extra Philly-flavored details about how much Philadelphia-based television Springsteen got to watch - especially the music-based TV shows like American Bandstand and Summertime on the Pier! - while growing up in Central New Jersey. He also noted that George Theiss' widow, Diana "Dee" Theiss, was in the audience. (Springsteen later dedicated the consistent show-closer - his solo-acoustic version of "I'll See You In My Dreams" - to Dee Theiss, as well as to the memory of his nephew Michael Shave, who died last year. Speaking about The River's title track in a 2023 interview conducted shortly after Shave's death, Springsteen noted, "You can't get any more personal than the very title of that record. That was my sister, my brother-in-law. The baby that I wrote about in that song just passed away last week. So that song is at the center of a lot of my work.")
Night Two opened with a sequence of five - count 'em, five... in a row - songs not played on Night One: "Seeds," "Prove It All Night," "My Love Will Not Let You Down," "Two Hearts," and "Darkness on the Edge of Town." What a stellar way to open, with a super-high-energy delivery of some of his all-time-best intense rockers (even if there was a bit of rare - and hilarious - minor flubbing on "Two Hearts.") The guitar work in this sequence, provided by that amazing (and often underrated) trio of onstage guitar-wizards - Bruce, "Reverend" Nils Lofgren, and relatively recently designated Musical Director Stevie Van Zandt - was simply off the charts, and they continued - both individually and collectively - to impress throughout the evening. "Fun Fact" about "Seeds," by the way... I'm 99.99% sure that it's now one of only three officially released Springsteen-penned songs - "Light of Day" and "Red-Headed Woman" being the other two - that he has yet to release in studio-recorded form.
"Hungry Heart" was the first Night One song to get played again on Night Two, though this time around it actually appeared on the written setlist, as well. What followed it, however, was not on the setlist, nor had it been played at a U.S. show in almost a decade. "Waitin' On A Sunny Day," complete with the schtick of letting some little kids in the audience sing part of it, apparently was a last-minute call-up to replace the setlisted "Darlington County." I'm sure there remains a group of fans who are less than thrilled whenever this song and its accompanying schtick reappears, but it is a sweet little number, fitting in well with the important aspect of Springsteen's show that emphasizes the more positive, upbeat, and hopeful aspects of life, and there actually still are many other fans who enjoy not just the song, but also the bit where those cute little darlin's try their best to sing along. So lighten up, folks, to each..., live and let live, etc. and just enjoy (or possibly just "endure," depending on your perspective) the relatively brief, pleasant interlude for what it is.
The show then quickly returned to much darker and more adult concerns as both Nebraska's "Reason To Believe" and "Atlantic City" were setlisted and played back-to-back instead of Night One's "Youngstown," to pave the way for this night's performance of "Long Walk Home." The "Electric Nebraska" versions of these two early-eighties songs worked just as well in that tension-before-the-release-of-some-sorely-needed-hope slot preceding the 2024 tour version of "Long Walk Home," as the late-nineties song "Youngstown" had been doing consistently ever since "Long Walk Home" made its tour debut in Europe last month.
Two other setlisted items for Philly 2024 Night Two that got nixed at the last minute were another performance of "Streets of Philadelphia" and a performance of "The River." But I'd much rather focus on all that we got on Night Two, rather than what we didn't get: to wit, the return of "The E Street Shuffle," but this time with a spoken intro that hearkened back to those legendary Main Point shows, followed by a non-setlisted "Growin' Up" complete with an actual old-school story inserted into the performance, totally 1970s-retro-style! (It was a cleverly humorous little tale, too, fusing Bruce's battles with peptic ulcer disease last year to that classic W.C. Fields line about our fair city.) It also was cool to hear "I'm On Fire" performed in Philly for the first time in almost a decade, especially since the song hasn't been played here very much since those Born in the U.S.A. Tour shows way back in '84-'85. The crowd really got into it, too.
Each night's performance of "The Rising" sounded especially good to me, as well. I don't know how new or old the use of this effect is, and perhaps it was just more noticeable given the especially good, consistent sound quality over both Philly nights, but using an immediate-digital-repeat effect for just certain phrases that Bruce sang, such as "in front of me," "this darkness," "sixty pound stone," etc. added immense power to what already is one of his strongest vocals.
Speaking of strong vocals, Springsteen's singing over these two nights sounded consistently strong and impressive to these ears, especially given that there was only one day off scheduled between the two shows. I'm glad, however, that overall the "new normal" for Bruce is now generally at least two days off between each of his concerts, with few if any exceptions. There is absolutely no shame in such an energetic, healthy performer in his mid-seventies just getting some extra rest in between performances, especially if the end result is consistently stronger singing.
This current touring version of the expanded E Street Band (a concept first explored on the 2012-2013 Wrecking Ball Tour) deserves special recognition, too. With the additional horn players, percussionist, and vocalists, the song arrangements have become so much more interesting and powerful, which is quite a feat to pull off when you're dealing with the already high-quality E Street Band arrangements. For example, when Jake Clemons hits that triumphant sax solo at the end of "Thunder Road," playing it through the very same instrument that his late, great Uncle Clarence used to play onstage, and then it's followed by an entire horn section echoing those notes with him, that is quite an additional lump-in-the-throat moment to supplement what already is such an emotional musical climax.
Kudos to Jake, too, for carefully developing - over the past decade or so since his uncle's passing - an onstage persona that is clearly distinct from the role that Clarence "Big Man" Clemons played onstage, while simultaneously honoring and extending the spirit, purpose, and complexity behind what Scooter and the Big Man got up to together, both musically and theatrically.
It also has been equally interesting and moving to watch Stevie Van Zandt take on more of the "longtime friend" part of what was Clarence's onstage role with Bruce. a part that Jake can't possibly take on as a much younger man. My presumption, admittedly as just another audience member witnessing it all unfold, is that even now all of this remains very sensitive ground for everybody involved, and that they continue to work very consciously and diligently to recognize and continue in the best possible ways the important legacy of such a significant fallen comrade. The best part, of course, is getting to see them succeed so consistently in doing so, at least in my view.
Some other "only-in-Philly" Night Two moments that I'll continue to treasure... my finding out (or possibly having forgotten and being reminded) that the great Curtis King, Jr. is a fellow Philadelphia native, and hearing Stevie repeatedly reply "Yo!" to Bruce every time Bruce attempted to consult with Stevie (and us) about just how tired and ready to go home we all were during "Twist and Shout." (Yeah, I know Stevie probably says "Yo!" onstage elsewhere, too, but it has an especially pleasing local ring 'round these parts.) Oh, and also yet another brief spotlight/microphone moment for "The Philly Elvis," Bruce expressing onstage just how much he really could go for a cheesesteak once the idea came up, and hilariously doubling down even harder on the "And we ain't going to quit" part only recently added to his "Last Man Standing" intro: "We ain't doin' no farewell tour bullshit. Jesus Christ! No farewell tour for the E Street Band! Hell, no! Farewell to what?! Thousands of people screamin' your name?! Yeah, I wanna quit that!" Then at the very end of the evening, perhaps best of all, "Thank you, Philly! Thanks for two great nights! The E Street Band loves you! We'll be seein' ya!"
Forty years later, I find myself still enjoying immensely this part of the ride, still intrigued, inspired, and excited by the prospect of whatever and whenever Bruce Springsteen might record or perform next, with or perhaps even without his great E Street Band again at some point. He's apparently now grown richer than he was even at the height of his popularity, but his best art - whether on record or onstage - always has found a way to remember and reconnect with what his life and his loved ones' lives were like before all of that fame and fortune, and/or a way to connect with the experiences of people whose lives always have at least seemed to be very different from his anyway.
And as long as nights like the two that I experienced last week remain possible, I'll continue looking forward to it all. So keep bringin' it all home, Bruce. I intend to still be there with everything that I've got, ready to experience and re-experience this music's power as an audience member, and to continue covering and analyzing it with some of my other fellow travelers via this website. Play ball!
All Citizens Bank Park photos by Jo Arlow and Mark Krajnak, as credited individually.
All photos are used with permission from the photographers.