It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.
I went to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band last night at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. It was the fifth full Bruce concert I’ve seen, from the first show at the Boston Garden in 1992 with his Human Touch/Lucky Town band until the most recent at Madison Square Garden in 2016 when he was playing The River double album in its entirety. I’ve also seen him do two guest appearances with U2 and a promo set at the Today show. As a sufficient Bruce fanatic to have done the two–part Political Beats show on Springsteen, I am not an impartial observer, but I confess that I still had some doubts: At 73, after a long layoff from the road due to the pandemic, in a tour already repeatedly interrupted by illnesses, would Bruce still have the old force and the old fire? Or would it be simply a pleasant trip down nostalgia lane, with subpar performances that needed to rely on the audience’s memories to connect with the magic of tours past?
Given the miles Springsteen has put on his voice over the years, it’s nearly miraculous that he can still sing at all. Some of his promotional appearances at least raised questions about whether he could still belt out the big rockers with the old volume and vigor. The hard part about rocking into your seventies and beyond is maintaining the vocal power and intensity to remain credible.
After a solid three-hour set, nobody in the house could have had any doubt that Bruce still has it — not just the ability to perform his old songs, but the energy to sustain a long show without flagging and the showmanship to hold a packed house in the palm of his hand. At 51, I was probably around the median age for the crowd, and keeping a crowd dominated by 40- 50- and 60-somethings on their feet and singing and clapping along for three hours on a Monday night is no mean feat even for the Boss. But the set list, which has been consistent on this tour except for one slot (in which he played “Land of Hope and Dreams”), was clearly designed not only to play to the strengths of the band’s septuagenarian core, but also to draw in the crowd and keep it there.
Other than slowed-down acoustic versions of two songs from 2020’s Letter to You and an up-tempo but light rendition of “Night Shift” from 2022’s Only the Strong Survive, Bruce seems to have gone through his potential playlist and ruthlessly culled out anything that couldn’t rock. There were no dirges, no elegies, no light pop romance, no middle-aged angst, no acoustic folk songs — all of which can be found in his catalogue. A jazzy, up-tempo version of “Johnny 99” was the only song from Nebraska, and there was nothing from Tunnel of Love, The Ghost of Tom Joad, Devils and Dust, The Seeger Sessions, Magic, Workin’ on a Dream, High Hopes, or Western Stars. Instead, backed by an increasingly enormous band with a full horn section, backup singers, and even a second drummer who traded solos with Max Weinberg on “E Street Shuffle,” Bruce coupled the familiar hits with long jams such as “Kitty’s Back” and “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City,” fist-pumping crowd pleasers such as “Out in the Street,” and big rockers such as “Because the Night.”
This was a tight show, like a baseball game with a pitch clock: it started only a few minutes after the scheduled 7:30 opening (Bruce never has an opening act), and there were strikingly few breaks between songs or interludes of Bruce talking (which meant no political monologues, and only a very quick plug for donating to local food banks). The setlist was also heavily tilted toward earlier material: Other than “Night Shift” and four songs from Letter to You, Bruce played only three songs from the entire period running from 1988 through 2019, those being “The Rising,” “Wrecking Ball,” and “Land of Hope and Dreams,” the first two of which hit a lot harder with a New York audience. I confess that I got very emotional during “The Rising,” which Bruce performed with the same intensity as if 9/11 happened yesterday.
For all of that, there was also a lot of thematic consistency in the set list. Gone was much of the old Springsteen focus on conflict with his father and musings about love and marriage. Mortality was the theme of Letter to You, as Bruce reflected on the death of George Theiss, the last of his original band from his mid-1960s teenage years. That was a theme last night of the blistering “Ghosts” and an acoustic version of “Last Man Standing,” which featured the one monologue on that death; it was also a theme of the show-closing solo acoustic version of “I’ll See You in My Dreams.” Many of the other songs in the set list explored some mix of death and the need to grasp life with furious conviction while it lasts, and “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” included the by-now familiar tribute to the departed Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici.
Much of the energy of the crowd and the band alike drew from the Covid-imposed touring hiatus and the knowledge that Bruce’s ability to sustain this level of live rock ‘n’ roll is finite. But as he hopped up and down late into the third hour of the show, it was clear that Bruce Springsteen and his fans still embrace the credo of “Badlands”: It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.