Summer’s still here, and the time was finally right for Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band to play Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia.
“It took us a while,” Springsteen said at the close of last week’s 3 hour-plus, 30-song joyful, goofy and deeply serious marathon that was the first of two dates rescheduled from last August. “But we made it.”
Springsteen said these words as he stood alone in center field on a blessedly beautiful evening with the giant Phillies sign illuminated on the scoreboard over his right shoulder.
Without the 17 other musicians and singers who make up the expanded E Street Band — not counting his wife Patti Scialfa, who took the night off — Springsteen brought the characteristically cathartic Springsteenian evening to a quiet close with “I’ll See You in My Dreams.”
That song about a spirit that lingers on in those you loved and who loved you back — and a road that’s long, until it isn’t — was one of only three from Springsteen’s most recent album of original material, 2020’s Letter To You.
Those songs provided the evening’s thematic through line; a sense that time is ticking, that the day must be seized, and that, for now anyway, absolutely nothing can stop the E Street Band.
That was evident from the get go when Springsteen came on stage at 7:34 p.m. while the sky was still blue, and immediately acknowledged the band’s enduring relationship with Philadelphia.
Max Weinberg’s drums boomed, and Springsteen opened with the full band and “Atlantic City” from 1982’s Nebraska. “Well, they blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night, and they blew up his house, too,” he sang, standing less than two miles away from where that explosion took place at the Porter Street home of gangster Phil Testa in 1981.
That was the first of several nods to Springsteen’s 215 stronghold. He sang two songs — “Spirit in the Night” and “The E Street Shuffle” — dated to his early 1973 days when he was making his bones at local venues like the Main Point in Bryn Mawr, plus a moody “Streets of Philadelphia,” from Jonathan Demme’s 1993 AIDS drama Philadelphia.
He also explained, in a spoken interlude that preceded Letter To You’s “Last Man Standing,” that one of the best things about growing up in Freehold, N.J., was its location between Philly and New York. “That meant you could tune in to UHF television stations from both cities,” he said. He shouted out the Steel Pier in Atlantic City and American Bandstand, before concluding: “Philly is a heavy music town.”
That TV detail resonated with an audience that was mostly old enough to remember well a world without cable television. That said, plenty of old heads in the packed stadium brought along children and grandchildren, and Boss fans in their 20s and 30s were present, keen to check out the legendary Springsteen live experience.
They got a taste of magic with “Last Man Standing,” inspired by George Theiss, the leader of Springsteen’s mid-60s teenage band the Castiles, who died in 2018.
The intro started out with crowd pleasing kidding around. He promised: “We ain’t quittin’! What the f— for?” But then Springsteen, 74, got existential, telling the audience of sitting by Theiss’ death bed, soon to be the last surviving Castile.
“Now as you get older,” he explained like a wise uncle, “Death brings a certain clarity. It’s lasting gift to us as an expanded vision, a clearer vision of what living itself can mean. And the grief that we feel when our loved ones leave us is just the price that we pay for having loved well.”
Then, alone on acoustic guitar, he dedicated the song to Theiss’ wife, Diana, who was at the show. “Rock of ages lift me somehow, somewhere high and hard and loud, somewhere deep into the heart of the crowd,” he sang, seeking transcendence through communion with his people.
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.
And what made the show so rewarding — and so much fun — is the ways in which the definitive carpe diem concepts that preoccupy Springsteen were brought to vivid life on stage.
The joyrides, the quest for escape and adventure were there, in the house-lights up encore of 1975’s “Born To Run.” But then as now, it was a accompanied by an urgent demand to find out before it got too late: “I want to know if love is wild, I want to know if love is real.”
From that same year, written while Springsteen was in his mid-20s, he sang “Thunder Road,” where Mary’s swaying dress got him “thinking that maybe we ain’t that young anymore.” From a decade later, he sang “Dancing in the Dark” — part of a 40 minute encore — that masks a core of dissatisfaction. “You sit around getting older,” and think you might want to “change my clothes, my hair, my face.”
And even “Nightshift,” a cover of the Commodores hit from the 2022 soul album Only the Strong Survive is about death, a tribute to the late great Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson.
It’s sadly become a mid-set bathroom break song, but Springsteen also uses it to showcase the prodigious vocal talents of singers Curtis King, Ada Dyer, Lisa Lowell, and Michelle Moore.
A personal favorite on this theme is “Wrecking Ball” — not the Miley Cyrus song, though I like that too. It’s a novelty in disguise, sung from the perspective of a to-be-demolished football stadium.
Springsteen and longtime consigliere Steve Van Zandt and singer-percussionist Anthony Almonte chuckled when Philly fans booed mentions of the Meadowland and the New York Giants, but the freewheeling carnival-like, five-man horn section fired song found its way to a sobering gist, as Springsteen songs are wont to do.
It’s really a hit-me-with-your-best-shot song about resilience, about girding yourself against the trouble that time will bring, and refusing to be beaten down. “Hard times come and hard times go,” Springsteen sang, in his button up vest and tie, sleeves rolled up for an honest night’s work. “Just to come again.”
They sure do. A marathon Springsteen show takes that into account, and is both an escape from and a confrontation with that reality. A late-in-the-set series of songs hit on that theme, coming on like a freight train, including “Backstreets,” “Because The Night,” “She’s The One,” and “The Rising,” peaking with “Badlands” and its famously pithy pronouncement: “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”
Some highlights: “A Long Walk Home,” which Springsteen last performed in Philadelphia at Independence Hall the night before the 2016 election, and which he called “a prayer for my country.” Charlie Giordano’s accordion and Nils Lofgren’s white-hot guitar playing on the blast furnace “Youngstown.”
Roy Bittan’s graceful extended piano coda on “Racing In the Street.” And in the encores, Springsteen and Van Zandt’s delightful goofing around and mugging for the camera on “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight),” “Twist & Shout,” and Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” was one of many standouts.
There is so much carping about Springsteen on social media and elsewhere. Some of it is deserved, about how he mishandled the brouhaha about dynamic pricing that resulted in some tickets to his 2023 American tour being priced outrageously high. And some of it is just silly, with trolls contemptuously dismissing him as a left-wing “commie” or capitalist “billionaire.”
Sorry Springsteen deniers, but you’re the ones missing out. I’ve seen scores of shows — I lost count long ago — and this one was unquestionably top tier. The whole over the top, intensely human production is that much more poignant because time is a thief and it can’t go on forever, a reality underscored by the fact that these shows had to be put off for a year due to illness.
The glory days are still here.
