The funeral perfume given off by his latest album with new songs, ‘Letter to you’ (2020), was just a reminder of the transience of our existence, and that for Bruce Springsteen it can only amount to a corrected and increased pact with life. The Boss will return to Barcelona this month having left a trail of fiery, committed and highly rigorous executive nights on his tour of the United States, like the one this Saturday in a historic square such as New York’s Madison Square Garden.
Six years of hibernation from his deal with the E Street Band preceded him, so that this Bruce is already a man in his seventies who seems to have refreshed the motives that one day pushed him to write songs and sing them in public. There were flashes of youthful edge in his heartfelt vocals and stinging guitar solos, transitioning from gravity to showman gag, from the lament for lost friends to the debauchery of the final stretch: Bruce, opening his shirt, bare-chested as in ‘No nukes’, attacking ‘Tenth avenue freeze out’ without forgetting the ‘Big Man’ Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici.
The last survivor
Springsteen’s concerts have sometimes drifted (especially in Europe) towards the ‘greatest hits’ without major alibis, but this ‘2023 Tour’ surprises for now with a Script of certain stability in which a background message is guessed. We’ll see if it holds when it crosses the Atlantic. In the Madison were 27 songs, close to three hours, including four from ‘Letter to you’ that anchored the session in the dialogue with an unsympathetic subject such as our life expectancy. There was ‘Last man standing’, where he told how the death of an old colleague, George Theiss, made him realize that he was the only survivor of his early band The Castiles.
It was as if the great themes of ‘Springsteenian’ literature had taken on a more transcendent and credible form, if possible, since that start at full sail with ‘No surrender’. The old ideals of youth, commitment and hope (‘Prove it all night’, ‘The promised land’), the feminine mystery (‘Candy’s room’) and an unhurried wander through the corners of old New Jersey, with a pair of pearls from 50 years ago, ‘Kitty’s back’ and ‘The E Street shuffle’, sublimated by brass and chorus girls, with their swing and jazz-soul vibe. More delights revisited: a furious ‘Trapped’, the ‘cover’ of Jimmy Cliff, the assault on ‘Johnny 99’ overlooking New Orleans.
burning streets
By following an almost fixed script night after night, the ‘E streeters’ were seen taking pains with each song, pampering details and inflections. Roy Bittan’s refined perennial foundation on piano, Nils Lofgren’s solos (‘Because the night’), Jake Clemons’ calligraphic barrage entrances and his ‘Jungleland’ ride (tour debut), with an audience that he knew even the critical final verse of the song, pointing to those “burning streets in a deadly waltz”, with the Boss’s face lit up in red. An overwhelming Max Weinberg, Little Steven’s acid collegiism and those metals that added nuances, a bit sacrilegious, to ‘Thunder road’ and ‘Born to run’. 17-piece band, without Patti Scialfa, has been down for a few nights.
Aunque al final cayeron ‘Glory days’ y ‘Dancing in the dark’, the repertoire looked to the 70s more than any other decade (14 songs). Without leaving out ‘Rosalita’, the funniest, with the venue’s lights on and a fat party atmosphere. And picking up the thread in the farewell with ‘I’ll see you in my dreams’, a ballad from ‘Letter to you’ in which a welcoming horizon can be glimpsed behind the last resting place.
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Springsteen has been in the news lately for shady issues, the controversy derived from the price of tickets, particularly the ‘dynamic’ plot and the resale one (in New York they reached $11,000 these days), but tonight all that was far, far away. It is presumable that it will be like that at the start of the European tour, on April 28 and 30 at the Estadi Olímpic.
