Were we ever that young? Bruce knows where he’s going and so does everybody else but he teases us along with an extended segue which has all of us just dying to sing at the top of our lungs. “Incident” is a beauty with the entire audience singing along “meet me tomorrow night at lover’s lane”. It is all leading to “Incident On 57th Street” and “Rosalita”. The album is 47 minutes long, the live performance around 77 minutes but most of the extension was on a dynamic “Kitty’s Back”with band member taking solos, the horn section powerful, and Roy Bittan almost entirely rhythmic piano, but best of all was Bruce center stage, bending notes like he was taking lessons from Jeff beck at the Hall of Fame. You haven’t sung along to “Everybody form a line” till you’ve sung along to it with 20,000 other people, you haven’t dance till you’ve danced with a very pretty, very drunk girl to Springsteen’s “E Street Shuffle”. To hear these two parts merge was one of the great moments in my concert going experience. At the start of the concert Springsteen noted that the The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle tanked and also that half of the songs were observances about his native New Jersey and the other half fantasies about New York. tonight, I don’t care, even the much hated “Wrecking Ball” is OK with me.įorty five minutes into the set Springsteen plays “The E Street Shuffle”. He can write em in his sleep but he hasn’t written a killer lick in way too long. Listening to “Born To Run” it underpins the song all the way through. When Springsteen writes a good song, decades of the stuff, he rights it because he nails the lick first and leaves the lick to do the work for him and as often as not he lets the keybs not the guitar repeat it. In a three hour set Springsteen played a handful of songs I actively dislike: “Working On A Dream”, “Waitin’ On A Sunny Day”, “The Rising” and “Wrecking Ball” and all of them were okay tonight. I think he left it off The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle for two reasons: the album was already too long and the sexual innuendo was a bit strong for the time, tonight it leads the way. The band is already warmed up, great swathes of the audience know it (I had it on Bruce’s “bootleg series” Tracks album from 1998) and the rest don’t care. This is one of several songs I’ve never heard live before and it is better than most bands second encore. The first song is “Thundercrack” an outtake from The Wild, The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle (he’ll play the album in order a little later). There was no waiting for Springsteen and the E Street Band to setttle into the three hour plus set. Why? Who knows what alchemy occurs with Springsteen? Who knows what makes the best rock performer ever dump the two lousy albums he has been forced to perform for years (he plays exactly one song between the two of them) dumps the “Is there anybody alive out there?” schtick and triumphantly performs a concert for the ages. Yes, it was THAT sort of a night the sort when the main person in your life, the person who has been with you for decades and played next to you at every show, finds it neccessary to mention just how good you were, just how well you’d captured the moment. But even so, if it is half as good, I’ll see it twice with pleasure, and if it isn’t and they reschedule, I’ll sell my Sunday ticket, Without further ado, one of the best shows I’ve ever seen… IL)ĭuring the encore last night, the bit where they all link hands at the edge of the stage, Bruce Springsteen’s wife, Patti Scialfa, whisper to her husband “That was a good concert”. (When people ask me why, with the Sunday’s The River gig only postponed more than probably, would I pay some larcenous ticketbroker an arm and a leg for a crap seat , I point them directly to this November 2009 performance of The Wild, The Innocent, And The E Street Shuffle.Yes, The River is no E Street Shuffle.
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