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November 27, 2024
"For what are we
without hope in our hearts...?"
Bruce Springsteen, Across The Border
Back in February 2023, when I bought tickets for Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band’s November 2023 Vancouver, B.C. concert, I anticipated a lighthearted road trip from my home in the Western United States across the Canadian border, reminiscent of the Bruce-chasing sojourns of my youth. COVID-19 was over (sort of,) the Boss and the band were back... What could possibly go wrong?
Fast-forward to November 2024. What was supposed to have been the first show of the 2023 Canadian tour had been postponed by a year due to Springsteen’s recovery from peptic ulcer disease, and was now the final show of the 2024 tour. I remember looking at the rescheduled date when it came out last year and realizing that the show would be right after the 2024 U.S. Presidential election. Like the meme of the oblivious cartoon dog in the burning house, I quickly replaced that troubling thought with the mantra, “Everything will be fine, just fine!”
I have walked into Springsteen shows before carrying all kinds of personal worries, ailments, and grief, knowing that for a couple of hours at least, Bruce would be my faith healer. But I never expected to walk into a Springsteen show nearly paralyzed with existential terror for the future of my country. My heavy heart was lifted somewhat by being among ecstatic, vocal, well-lubricated Canadians in an old hockey barn not much different from the Boston Garden, where I saw my first Bruce arena show in 1978. (Venerable Rogers Arena also had clearer, warmer acoustics than the two new monuments to billionaires where I saw my previous shows on this tour.) The Bruce fans of Western Canada have had to wait longer than anyone else to see this show, and so it’s fitting that in Vancouver, Springsteen saved the best for last.
As is customary for a tour-ender, Bruce and the band emptied the tank. At three hours and twenty minutes, Vancouver was the longest show of the Canadian leg and one of the longest - if not the longest - of the entire tour. (It's neck-and-neck with Night One in Inglewood, CA last April.) The mood onstage and in the audience was loose and festive; the entire pit surprised Springsteen by donning Santa hats at the first sound of the jingle-bells opening to “Santa Claus is Comin' to Town,” prompting him to say with laughter, “I’m impressed!”
Dressed as he was so often on the tour in a white button-down shirt, dark tie, and charcoal suit-vest (maybe a nod to his uniform in his teenaged band The Castiles,) Springsteen was as playful as I’ve ever seen him. (“The things these folks are saying, I can’t repeat them!” he exclaimed about a group of four very excited women during the opener “Spirit in the Night.”) And he was more spontaneous and chatty than he was earlier in the tour. “This is one of my favorite songs; I hope you like it, too,” he unexpectedly shared before “Racing in the Street.” Um, no worries on that, Bruce.
There were jaw-dropping surprises on the Vancouver setlist. A joyously ragged “Ramrod” made its 2024 tour debut, with Stevie Van Zandt fumbling the words as Bruce, across the mic from him, cracked, “Sing it, Stevie, sing it!” “Human Touch” and “Brilliant Disguise” were also ’24 tour debuts, Soozie Tyrell handling harmonies in the absence of Patti Scialfa. And on “I’m on Fire,” not played since Philly in August, Springsteen smoldered and hit those high notes on the fadeout like it was 1984.
It wasn’t a surprise when Mark Pender’s trumpet signaled the opening of “Meeting Across the River;" Springsteen added the song to the set recently for the Asbury Park and Toronto shows. But it still gave me chills to hear it live after I-don’t-know-how-many-years, knowing that “Jungleland” was soon to follow. And, oh, what a performance of “Jungleland.” The slightly slowed tempo and Springsteen’s age-deepened vocals gave the Born to Run technicolor epic an elegiac feel, becoming more of a bittersweet memory of wild youth than an anthem of it. Jake Clemons, playing his uncle Clarence’s sax, beautifully rendered the song’s cathartic solo, as Springsteen listened with eyes closed and a smile on his face. Jake looked up to the heavens when it was over, emotionally overcome, and Bruce walked over to him for a long embrace.
A word of appreciation for the E Street Band... During their performances in 2023 and 2024, despite a long, unforeseen interruption, the core band plus four horn players, four singers, and an added percussionist have jelled into more than simply a well-oiled machine. This is a band so in tune with one another that they’ve almost become a single-celled organism. The long, wafting outro to “Racing in the Street” is the best example of the E Street Band’s remarkable cohesiveness: organ, bass, guitar, violin and drums ebbing and flowing underneath Roy Bittan’s delicate, then muscular, piano riff. That outro is pure poetry, but there is one smaller moment that I’ve also grown to love over the course of this tour, and that also illustrates the band’s precision. Listen to the way Bruce and the core band, plus the horns and percussionist Anthony Almonte, gradually slow down the groove of “Bobby Jean” (played in Vancouver and many other shows) at the song’s end. It's like they’re expertly landing a jumbo jet.
All of those setlist changes, plus “Santa,” meant that some staples of this long period of touring were dropped in Vancouver. Gone were “Prove It All Night,” “No Surrender,” “Rosalita,” and “Land of Hope and Dreams.” And the closing-night spiritedness meant that Springsteen’s carefully constructed story arc got somewhat diluted. I was lucky to have seen the show once early in 2023, once in early 2024, and now at the end of the year, witnessing the 2023-2024 show's evolution. The February 2023 show I saw in Seattle relied heavily on Letter To You songs; I don’t regret getting to hear one of the few performances of “Burnin’ Train,” an underappreciated track that smoked in concert. Bruce was noticeably in Springsteen on Broadway mode for this show, intent on presenting his life-summing yet universal story of friendship, love, aging, loss, and transcendent hope, from the scene-setting “I’m ready to grow young again” of the fixed opener “No Surrender” to the scripted gut punch of the “Last Man Standing”/”Backstreets” middle monologues to the “death is not the end” of the closer “I’ll See You in My Dreams.”
What we didn’t know at the time was that Springsteen was somehow performing through the pain of his ulcer. When the postponed shows resumed, I caught Night One of San Francisco in March 2024. Bruce looked more relaxed and was singing with more power and consistency. Not to disparage the static setlist of the earlier shows - static Bruce and E Street is better than none at all – but he was now loosening the reins a bit. Springsteen had started opening the show with a different song each night. (For "my" San Francisco show, it was a mind-blowing, out-of-left-field “Something in The Night.”) Strangely, the loosening of the setlist at the front end made the story arc even more powerful, because it no longer dominated to the point where it made the show more Broadway than E Street.
Which brings us to the final 2024 show... The larger themes were still there in Vancouver. Mortality, the sacredness of memory, and the necessity of leaving nothing unsaid were all explicit in the show, because they were explicit in the four songs from Letter To You and the continued purposeful sequencing of one of them, “Last Man Standing," with "Backstreets.” But those themes also were palpable in Jake Clemons holding his sax aloft after “Thunder Road,” and in the “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” montage of Clarence and Danny Federici, absent yet present. In Vancouver, for the first time, Bruce made the absence of Patti Scialfa a part of the show, however subtly. Scialfa revealed in Thom Zimny’s recent Road Diary film that she has been living since 2018 with a blood cancer, which causes fatigue and a compromised immune system. The inclusion of two Springsteen-Scialfa duet songs in the setlist ("Human Touch" and “Brilliant Disguise") seemed like Springsteen’s poignant way of acknowledging her as an E Street Band member, and keeping her close, during this last show of the year.
As the 2024 tour entered late summer and early fall, and the U.S. Presidential election loomed, Bruce added “Long Walk Home” to the core setlist. Recorded for the George W. Bush-era album Magic, “Long Walk Home” is one of Springsteen’s greatest political – no, patriotic – songs. Written about the lies told by a presidential administration and the erosion of civil rights and liberties in the rush to vengeance in post-9/11 America, “Long Walk Home” is a searing snapshot of a country slowly turning into something unrecognizable from the one we pledged allegiance to in grade school. Not many of us could imagine at the time where this was leading, but Springsteen did.
On “Long Walk Home,” the narrator wanders through his old hometown, a metaphor for a United States falling into dystopian social and economic division and Constitutional chaos, and instead of seeing familiar places and faces, he sees only shuttered storefronts and “rank strangers.” The money verse, the one that has gained power in the years since the election of 2016, is this: “Your flag flyin’ over the courthouse/ Means certain things are set in stone/ Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t.” In Vancouver, as he has in every performance of the song this tour, Springsteen angrily, defiantly spat out those words. And as usual, he prefaced the song with, “This is a prayer for my country.” The E Street Choir’s buoyant work on the song, repeating the “It’s gonna be a long walk home” chorus a capella toward the end, is indeed prayer-like: Please let us get home again to those truths we hold self-evident.
In Vancouver, Springsteen set up “Long Walk Home” with “Atlantic City,” a song about survival when morals are a luxury – “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact/ Maybe everything that dies someday comes back” – followed by “Youngstown,” in which a laid-off steel worker confronts the mill owner with the brutal line, “Once I made you rich enough/ Rich enough to forget my name.” This three-song set told a story of shattered ideals, a widened gulf between haves and have-nots, crumbling illusions of the American Dream and American exceptionalism. That story meshed perfectly into Springsteen’s overarching theme of time’s changes and mortality, enlarging his vision to include the post-election reality in which Americans now find ourselves. “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” famously reads The Washington Post’s masthead, and that newspaper proved it in the week before the presidential election by pulling an editorial board endorsement (of Kamala Harris) on the orders of the paper’s owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos. Well, everything dies, baby. That’s a fact.
Around the same time he began adding "Long Walk Home" to his setlists, Springsteen also made a small change to his “Backstreets” monologue, which stayed in for the Vancouver show. Where he talks about the physical objects left behind by his departed friend, and how he will keep all the truly important things “right here,” patting his chest over his heart, instead of singing “till the end” he sings “till it ends.” Perhaps the word “it” is meant to be open-ended. “It” means whatever you read into it. So here goes... If we can carry departed loved ones in our heart, keep their spirits alive within us, doesn’t it follow that we can keep the spirit of a country alive inside us, too? Can’t we hold these vulnerable founding ideals of freedom and equality in our hearts, keep faith in a land of hope and dreams that “wraps its arms around you” where “nobody crowds you and nobody goes it alone?" Does everything that dies someday come back?
These were the questions I pondered on the long drive home to the U.S.A.
For more from Joyce Millman, please visit joycemillman.wordpress.com
You also can connect with Joyce on Bluesky @joycemillman.bsky.social