And so, after a frantic Saturday morning hunched over our computer my wife and I secured two tickets to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band at the Erwin center on April 5th[1]. He and his legendary band are currently touring behind his new album, Working on a Dream, and Austin made the cut. Bruce Springsteen is a long time favourite of ours; for me it’s all about Nebraska[2]; for Anita it’s all about Born in the USA[3] – her parents had it on vinyl when she was growing up. Either way, we both agree that Springsteen is a classic American legend – a walking piece of Americana and a celebrities’ celebrity.

Come the night and the Erwin Center is packed. And the first surprise(even though we knew it would be the case) is that the crowd is made up of all types of people; young college party kids in flag t-shirts, old biker guys, Indian dudes in bandannas, women old enough to be grandmothers with pleather handbags, middle-aged couples in dinner theater wear, families with children, rock critics with goatees, amphetamine-crazy Stevie Ray Vaughn lookalikes. And this, as with that other stalwart of Americana – Willy Nelson, is part of what makes a Springsteen concert great – it’s a true middle-American slice of the coast-to-coast contradictions of this great land. As an aside, Springsteen’s admiration for Pete Seeger is evident – he embraces the contradictions that makes this land his land and your land – the weirdness of conservatives rocking on down to a democratic Jersey boy’s gentle protests. And he doesn’t shy away from this contradiction; at one point doing an Obama-esque preaching stretch about hope overcoming fear as the crowd grew noticeably less enthusiastic the more liberal his preachings became. And he knows it, he knows that he’s challenging his audience with the dichotomy of their mistrust of the left and their love of his American spirit.

America in attendance

So, if there ever was one musician who could kick off our American years rights it’s Springsteen – the most American of all songwriters. And from the moment that he walks on stage it’s clear that he is one tough, good looking, friendly, powerful dude. He comes on looking sharp in black workday duds, sleeves rolled up as he readies to toil under the hot press of the machinery of his factory shift.

The Boss

And the show is all workman-like. For such a massive icon and star he seems the type of musician who works every night as if he’s trying to sell his first show in a bar room. Springsteen shouts and screams and runs and jumps around as if he’s doing everything he can just so they don’t take him off the stage before he’s done. He also did great, great versions of Seeds and Because the Night – two songs that I had forgotten that I loved so much.
Now, it’s true that, as other reviews have pointed out, some parts of the show are a little scratchy; some songs meander instead of punching, some solos are flabby around the middle and some song choices are placed out of sequence – breaking the momentum of the set. But I had a blast, and I do believe that Springsteen and his band did too.

Now, there are five things they don’t tell you about a Springsteen concert before you go; things that you have to learn for yourself.

5. Max Weinberg is a great drummer

Max Weinberg, if you didn’t know, plays two gigs. He’s the leader of Conan O’Brien’s house band – The Max Weinberg 7 – and also the drummer for the E Street band. The two are worlds apart. The MW7 are all cheezy zoot suits and fedora hats as they back up O’Brien’s cheez-clown act. Now, I do like Conan O’Brien and the MW7 are a good enough fit for his schtick – but backing up The Boss is an entirely different proposition. Weinberg’s face is all strained concentration and effort throughout. He works hard from start to end blasting the songs along down the track. His style isn’t nearly as elaborate as it is on C O’B's show – it’s straight-up-and-down tough and difficult to do. Very cool – serious.

4. Springsteen is a very effective soloist

Springsteen shares the stage with 10 other musicians including 4 other guitarists of which two others have solo parts; but Bruce had the sound I wanted most. His solos aren’t as elaborate as Nils Lofgren’s and certainly not as tentative as Steve Van Zandt’s – they’re tough, straight-up-and-down just like his drummer. Very cool – serious – hard working.

3. He pours water on his jeans and slides across the stage

This was cool. At one point in the build up to the closing of a song (something legendary from Badlands or such) he walks around to the side of the drum kit where his drinks are, douses his lower jeans legs in water, heads back out  to the front of the stage and takes a running (running!) leap and knee slide out to the left-most edge of the stage just as the band crash out the song – bam bam bam slide, tadaaa!!!! Bam! Not bad for a 60 year-old.

2. They bring up the house lights on crowd favourites

Twice during the show, on main-set closer Born to Run and the killer encore closer Glory Days they bring up all the house lights, all of them, for the duration of the song. They light that sucker up as if it were daylight with nowhere for any of the crowd to hide so that the only thing you can do is to jump around and clap and sing along. You may as well cheer and shout when they do that because we all looked fat and drunk and pasty in our T-shirts and shorts. Glory days indeed.

1. He does requests

He does requests. Who still does requests? Does Elton John do requests? Do U2 do requests? I don’t think so. Springsteen did four of them, from obscure love songs to, yup, Glory Days. What he does is to, at one stage in the show, collect all the posters with requests from the audience, assembling a pile of ten or more next to the drum kit. And then at different times during the set he goes and rummages through the pile, picking whatever strikes him as the song that’s needed at that time. And once he’s found one to his liking he takes it around to show all the band members and the cameras to make sure that everyone knows what’s coming before the band dive head-first into whatever The Boss did pick. The first song request (Sherry Darling) was written by some dude onto a gum wrapper and Springsteen clearly took pleasure in picking out the tiny piece of paper before holding it up for the audience to see.
Who wouldn’t love to have their request picked up and played by Bruce Springsteen?

Oh the humanity

And finally I guess that that really sums up what I liked so much about the show. It wasn’t the most perfect show that I’ve ever seen[4], nor the musically most intense[5] – but it was the most human. From the little girl lifted up on stage to sing the chorus of Waitin’ on a Sunny Day, to the sliding around to the requests to the house lights – it was all soaking in band’s sense of  the personal, the human. And humanity cannot be made, it has to be there from the start.

PS. videos shot on mobile phones at loud concerts are never any good – but here’s two anyway. The first is a clip from Waitin’ on a Sunny Day (with singing little girl) and the second is with the house lights up during Born to Run. YMMV – I’m really just putting them here for myself.