Notes on opening night of Bruce Springsteen’s MAGIC TOUR with the E Street Band Hartford Civic Center, Connecticut October 2, 2007
(Listen today, Thursday 10/4, for the WBUR story, podcast archived this afternoon.)
LEAD: Bruce Springsteen, a spry 58 years young, proved once again that rock’n’roll is not just for kids Tuesday night in launching his latest world tour at the Hartford Civic Center. His new album is called MAGIC, and there was plenty of that as a crowd of 10,000 roared BROOOOCE and sang along with every song, including some released just a few hours earlier.
For his first tour with the E Street Band since 2003’s The Rising, Springsteen led his longtime crew of nine backup musicians through a set that mixed topical commentary with his older hits (“Promised Land” and “Born to Run”) for a set that argued for his catalog’s continuing relevance in the digital downloading era.
KEY THEMES:
Rock’n’roll is not just for and about teenagers anymore… Springsteen digs into his older material as though there’s still a lot left to discover there, and he makes youghtful rebellion like “Badlands” and “She’s the One” mean completely different things when sung by a greying married father of three…
Springsteen’s bond with his audience is matched only by his bond with his muse: he keeps working on his songwriting so his material is both relevant and sturdier than his earlier, more earnest pieces. A lot of the songs on this new album are rousingly melancholic, he described this era as an “Orwellian moment” in political history, and yet he still turns in a show that is achingly jubiliant. “Last to Die” is built around John Kerry’s famous anti-war congressional sound-bite that got inverted by the Swift Boat ads. Another song from MAGIC, “Long Walk Home,” talks about the flag down at the courthouse that declares “some things are set in stone…” and yet the song is clearly about disillusionment with America’s neo-imperialist adventures… how does Springsteen pull off such bitterness without turning sour? By skirting sentimentality, nostalgia and cant, and grinning down self-seriousness at every turn.
Among the varied ways rock stars have answered the challenge of getting older with the style without turning into self-parodies, Springsteen’s is among the more persuasive. He’s still got the most energy in the room, pushes his hard rock songs without thinning them out, and has a hard time leaving the stage — he pushes on, encore after encore, after everybody else is drenched with excitement. Compared to the Rolling Stones (in denial about aging) or Dylan (mordantly embracing death), Springsteen comes across as perfectly comfortable approaching his seventh decade of life and rocking just as hard as you please. He’s not embarrassed in the slightest by some of his goofier lyrics and dresses up familiar songs in new arrangements to startling effect…
It’s not a comeback because he’s always been so productive, but this tour presents Springsteen at his finest, with musicians who inhabit the songs with ambition and intimacy, and a legacy that keeps on rewarding repeated listenings.
Ho-hum, another knockout grand-slam expectation-bursting night from Bruce Springsteen….
COMPLETE SET LIST: Radio Nowhere/The Ties That Bind/Lonesome Day/Gypsy Biker/Magic/Reason to Believe/Night/She’s the One/Livin’ in the Future/The Promised Land/Town Called Heartbreak/Darkness on the Edge of Town/Darlington County/Devil’s Arcade/The Rising/Last to Die/Long Walk Home/Badlands
Encores: Girls in Their Summer Clothes/Thundercrack/Born to Run/Waitin’ on a Sunny Day/American Land (via Backstreets)
rock culture approximately
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When I was 14, Bruce Springsteen was the man I wanted to marry, the closest I’d come to witnessing lightening in a small house: Lizner Auditorium, Constitution Hall. My best friends and I stood for every one of his shows and left charged and inspired for another year between concerts. Nixon was denying Watergate and we were all convinced Rome was falling any day. Fast forward thirty years and those days look almost bright in retrospect, compared to the blockades on Pennsylvania Avenue and the Emperor fiddling away our legacy. Springsteen, like Bonnie Raitt, has taken the high road all along and done his job as an inspired artist and ambassador for the human condition. He’s Rock’s Walter Cronkite. I’m so grateful for him.
We here in Kansas City just got a new NHL hockey team, the Kansas City Garth Brooks. No disrespect to the new team, but we need the team called the Bruce Springsttens and we can remap the area downtown so they can play their “sport” on E-Street.”
It’s amusing to see Springsteen being hailed as an exemplar of sixty-ish grown-up rock, when artistically he’d gained a mature, middle-aged perspective by his early thirties. I read his first six albums, ending with “The River” and “Nebraska,” as an extended diary of “Growin’ Up,” with youthful illusions left far behind by the time he crawls gratefully into bed in “Wreck on the Highway” at the end of “The River,” then paints a scary, flat and barren world in “Nebraska” that’s no day on or under the boardwalk. I pretty much gave up on Bruce with “Lucky Town” and whatever that companion album was called, followed by that other terribly unmusical journalism-by-other-means album he did in the 90s. But maybe I’ll check out the new one for nostalgia’s sake. Live, he was an inspiration, and it’s good to hear that his commitment and exuberance haven’t waned.