On my seventh birthday, my dad gave me Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band’s Live 1975-85: a three-cassette extravaganza, with a booklet of all the lyrics to the 40 songs. I was underwhelmed.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like the Boss; I did. Dad was responsible for my early music education, and my tastes at that age were far more diverse than those of most of my friends. Sunday night drives back home after a weekend with Dad had an accompanying soundtrack of Phil Collins, the Rolling Stones, Simon and Garfunkel, Eric Clapton, and the Moody Blues. I just wasn’t terribly excited about a present I couldn’t play with.
I was so nonplussed that I gave the tapes back to my father, and he agreed to get me something else. It wouldn’t take many years for me to regret that decision, as my appreciation for Springsteen grew. Now I have a family of my own, and one song from that album is regularly heard in our home. “This song was originally… written as an angry song,” Springsteen growls as he introduces his version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” to a crowd at New York’s Nassau Coliseum in 1980. “It was an answer to Irving Berlin who’d just wrote, ‘God Bless America’… It’s just about one of the most beautiful songs ever written.” And it is. And Springsteen’s slower, soulful version has a rawness to it not present in the original, with an impossible key change in the second chorus that somehow perfectly reflects the anger behind the work. I can’t replicate that, but it is one of a number of songs I sing to my children at bedtime. So when I saw that Springsteen was performing at London’s Wembley Stadium just days before my dad’s 70th birthday, I knew it was the obvious gift.
Springsteen strolled onto the stage with effortless swagger, dressed in trademark black jeans and a white shirt with a black waistcoat and burgundy tie, and a guitar strapped across his chest. For the first 45 minutes, he and the E Street Band rolled from one song to another, the only words spoken: “One, two, three, four.” When one young woman held up a sign saying, “My boyfriend will propose if he can have your harmonica,” the Boss smiled, and obliged. “The Boyfriend” dutifully fulfilled his side of the deal.
There were moments where the crowd seemed to be disciples of the Church of Springsteen. When he shouted, “Can you feel the spirit?”, the fingers at the ends of 180,000 raised hands wiggled in reply, in preparation for his popular song “Spirit in The Night”. As darkness began to fall, Springsteen launched into the beautiful, goosebump-inducing piano ballad “Racing in the Street”, before offering some moving thoughts on life, love and grief, recalling his boyhood band the Castiles (he is now the only surviving member, as he reflected on in his 2020 song “Last Man Standing”). “The presence of death brings a certain clarity,” Springsteen told the crowd. “And the grief that we have when our loved ones leave us is just the price we pay for having loved so well.” I held my dad’s hand, and we sat still for a moment.
There was a sudden change of gear as Springsteen and the band rattled through the rock ’n’ roll hits the crowd had come for: “Badlands”, “Thunder Road”, “Dancing in the Dark”, and an epic performance of “Born to Run” that we hoped would never end. As the crowd cheered his name, Springsteen leaned against the microphone stand, lapping up the adoration, and oozing cool. Few 74-year-old men can pull off such a tightly fitting pair of jeans.
As curfew approached, Springsteen turned to guitarist Steven Van Zandt: “Steve, you wanna go home, don’t you?” “Nope,” came the reply. “Do you wanna go home?” Springsteen asked us. “No!” we roared back. “Are you telling me you think you can outlast the E Street Band? We’ve been doing this for fifty f***ing years!”
Of course, the show had to end, and after 31 songs played over three hours and 11 minutes, it did. We had experienced, as Springsteen put it, the “heart-stopping, booty-shaking, love-making, Earth-quaking, Viagra-taking, history-making, legendary E Street Band.” Dad was smiling. So was I.
[See also: The Nabokovian genius of Taylor Swift]
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