I've got a piece on Slate today arguing that the element that makes Springsteen on Broadway—which I saw on February 28, the night after I saw Hello, Dolly!—worth the difficulty and expense of getting tickets is quiet. You can read that here, and it is my fond hope that you shall.
And in the spirit of Bruce Springsteen having written more worthy songs for Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River and Born in the U.S.A. than he could possibly use at the time, but contrary to the spirit of him waiting 15-30 years before releasing all those unused songs, which I as a diehard am legally required to claim were better than the ones he put on the albums which by the way is true in many cases... here's a deleted scene from that piece, wherein I expand upon my 20-show record as a Bruce Springsteen fan:
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Last Thursday, I attended the seventh of U2's eight concerts at Madison Square Garden, which concluded their U.S. tour. It was my 18th U2 concert since 1997. Here are my notes, assembled in chronological order, which is the most boring possible method of review writing. Let's go!
1. Bono took the stage by himself, at the opposite end of the arena from the band. Most of the folks surrounding the B-stage on the floor where we were (though it’s called the E-stage now, being that this is the annoying capitalized iNNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE Tour) were staring at one of house-right floor entrances to the arena, smart phones at the ready, from the moment Patti Smith’s “People Have the Power” started playing on the P.A. I don’t like that he enters on his own. It contradicts the “just the four of us” narrative that they’ve always fostered, and it’s worth fostering. What other band has stayed intact with its original lineup for just a year or two shy of four decades?
2. My fellow superfans were really nice. We were in the G.A. line ahead of a guy named Bob Springsteen, of the Arkansas Springsteens — he showed me his I.D., unbidden. He was at the show with a pal on this evening but returning with his wife and young daughters, he said, the following night. So Bob Springsteen was in the house the night Bruce Springsteen joined U2 on stage. (I was not.) I’d been reading rumors of a Bruuuuuce appearance on fan sites for a week, and I figured, accurately, that if he showed up he would join in on “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” which he played with U2 after inducting them into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 10 years ago. (He was returning the favor. Bono gave Bruce’s induction speech in 1998.) He also played it with U2 at the 25th anniversary concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2009. So a not-especially-surprising surprise.
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It’s a death trap! It’s a suicide rap! And so on.
My love of Bruce Springsteen is not exactly news. It may no longer even qualify as infotainment. He played the single best concert I’ve ever seen anyone play, out of hundreds of bands and artists. (This
is merely a partial list.) There is nothing remotely controversial
about the assertion he is the greatest live performer in the history of
rock and roll.
I wrote all of this down three years ago, after I
saw him play his penultimate show of 2009, in Baltimore’s appealingly
small and out-of-date sports area, the end of a busy two-year tour
wherein he also made one of his worst albums. Basking in the glow of
that remarkable show in the days afterward, I knew if I were never to
see Springsteen and the E Street band play again, I’d be fine with that.
I had a Born in the U.S.A. on cassette when I was a little kid, but it wasn’t until college that I became a hardcore Springsteen fan. His Live 1975-85 album (three discs, because I got it in the CD era) and his solo acoustic, recorded-in-his-bedroom Nebraska
album were the documents most directly responsible for my conversion.
At the time I was discovering this music, Springsteen hadn’t toured with
the E Street Band in seven years. Another four would pass before they'd
announced they were reuniting.
Those reunion shows in 1999 and
2000 were remarkable. I saw five concerts on that tour. They were
different from the shows Bruce and the band had played in the 70s and
80s, the ones I had heard only on cherished (and in the pre-broadband
era, expensive) bootlegs. There was no intermission. Bruce’s
meandering, easily parodied, improvised on-stage stories were gone,
replaced by a gospel preacher schtick. The shows tended to be about
two-and-a-half hours long — a generous amount of stage time from anyone
but Springsteen, who had regularly broken the three-hour mark all
through his twenties and thirties.
His twenties and his thirties.
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