It's the Story of his Life (Option 1)
He comes onstage – on-time – and gets straight to it. At first you're just surprised to see him. Not that you didn't know he was coming - this show's been in the diary for a long time and with ticket prices being what they are, it's not exactly the kind of show you wander into without more than a little planing and preparation. But, yeah, surprising all the same. Because he's standing in front of you. He's not a pixelated image on a screen in the distance or, if you're lucky and are prepared to put in the effort, a figure in the nearer distance witnessed while standing in the pit of a massive stadium. He's RIGHT THERE in front of you. Greyer and a little rounder in the shoulders (like I can talk) than the last time you saw him but still in great shape. Shorn of his E Street cohorts, there's nothing for him to do but get on with it. Which he does, not by singing but by speaking. He starts by reciting the intro to his 2015 autobiography 'Born to Run' explaining that, just like the town he came from, he's something of a fraud himself, performing a magic trick to huge numbers of people across the globe on a regular basis since the mid 70s. This evening, we're told, we'll learn how he does it. And we're off.
I'm not sure that he ever really achieves that, or that it matters, but over the next 2 and a quarter hours, Bruce Springsteen does something that he's never done in the 50 or so years he's been appearing on stage - he talks more than he sings. He's also doing something he hasn't done for a long, long time - performing in front of less than a thousand people a night. By the end of June, he'll have played to less people during the entire 9 month 'Springsteen on Broadway' run than he'd manage in 3 nights of a typical European stadium show. It's still kinda unclear why he's doing it - the workload, while not exactly back-breaking, is unlike anything he's ever known. In one of the evening's many laugh out loud moments, Springsteen points out that he's never held an honest job, completed a 9 to 5 shift or worked 5 days a week until now. "I don't like it", he adds as an aside to a crowd that doesn't need much convincing that he's probably not joking. Whatever his motives, this is where he's spending most of his time from last October to this coming June (edit: he's since extended the run to December 2018), performing the same setlist (give or take a night or two over Christmas when the absence of his wife Patti Scialfa, who joins him every night for two songs, forced a couple of changes) with pretty much the same stories night after night. If he was bored by January 25th, he didn't show it.
The 15 song setlist is drawn from Springsteen's records from 1972 to 2007 and manages, give or take, to be a neat encapsulation of all the work he's produced throughout his entire recording career. Of those 15 songs, the first 10 help to contextualise the stories Springsteen tells about his life from his childhood in Freehold, New Jersey up to the late 1980s and his relationship with Patti Scialfa. Three of the remaining five songs are less about Springsteen's own life and look more to the world around him. Long Walk Home, Land of Hope and Dreams and The Rising are all about the America that Springsteen has lived in for the last 15 years while the remaining two Dancing in the Dark and Born to Run act, as de facto encores - performed outside of Springsteen's personal chronology but used instead as a sort of rallying call for living well in times of turmoil. The fact that they're his best known songs and performed at the end of the night is, I'm sure, just a coincidence.
Still, where the songs are typically the main draw at a Springsteen show, here it's the stories that resonate. Throughout the 1970s, Springsteen earned a reputation as a live performer not just on the strength of the songs and the onstage antics but also the yarns he told mid-concert. At some point in the 80s, the stories became less personal and more comedic, before disappearing altogether in the early 1990s, never really to return. Those stories from the 70s were about a lot of the same things he talked about on Broadway: parents, escape, frustration with one's lot in the world, However, the perspective has now changed (as you'd hope it would) taking on a more forgiving and understanding tone. Instead of making his father the bad guy in the story as he often did back then, now he looks at him with understanding and sympathy. Similarly. his fury at the small town mentality that put a lot of fire in his belly back then has again been replaces with a reconciliation with and understanding of the role that our early homes play in our entire lives. No matter how far much you try to escape. In another funny moment, he observes that 'Mr Born to Run, Mr Thunder Road, Mr Go, Go, Go, Go now lives 10 minutes from his hometown.
So much talking. He speaks before, during and after every song (apart from two that run into each other). He tells stories about childhood, about his first cross-country tips wen he was 19, about his parents, his sister, his struggle to be discovered, his friends that died in Vietnam, his band (and how nice to see all of the E Streeters called out by name), the death of Clarence Clemons, his relationships, his favourite tree (there's a lot about the tree) and what he's been trying to do onstage for all those years. Politics too, but less than you might expect. It was spellbinding stuff. A lot of laughter, a good few tears too. Also a couple of lyric changes in My Hometown (slightly different to the recorded version) and The Wish (reverted to the recorded version, having changed a significant lyric in the song's rare live appearances over the years) which were probably unnoticed by most people but must be of some significance to Bruce.
The sound, if you're asking, was immaculate. He often spoke off-microphone as he walked form centre stage to the piano. Occasionally, he threw out lines as tossed-off interjections (he probably does it every night) almost as if speaking to just one or two people at the front. And the lighting was extraordinary. I might be making this up, so bear with me, but it did seem that the lighting in the earlier parts of the show made Bruce look like the young man he was describing. Obviously it's the same 68 year old man but his hair looked darker, his face less lined. By the time we reached the end, his grey hair seemed more obvious, the lines in his face more visible. Maybe that's my imagination. It's a magic trick after all - perhaps I just allowed myself to see the younger Bruce. Maybe I just felt younger myself watching those early songs.
If you've been following Springsteen for as long as I have, it was hard not to be incredibly touched by the experience. I was 15 when I first saw him live in 1988. I was 45 when i saw him in January. I've said elsewhere that, although I don't listen to his records very much anymore, his live shows have been nourishing me for years. To sit and hear him describe what he's been trying to do for us – and for himself – for all these years, was a moment I hope I'll never forget. It was something like this:
I wanted to rock your very soul and then have you pass it on, to be sung and altered by you, your folks, your children, your blood, that it might strengthen and help make sense of your story, your life, the way that you have helped me make sense of my life. And I hope that I have done that and I hope that I've been a good travelling companion for you.
Some people are seeing this as Bruce's goodbye. I'm not so sure. But wherever he goes next, I'll be there.
I should probably add that I met Springsteen before the show. That was a whole other thing, a 4 hour wait outside the theatre door with a bunch of oddballs (who I ignored, save asking them for advice about where to stand) and a Scottish chap called Andy who stood beside me for the entire time and became my best friend in the world for one afternoon in NYC. The details aren't worth retelling (you had to be there, man!) but eventually he arrived, got out of the car and signed a few things for those outside - including my copy of 'The Promise' and Andy's hardback copy of 'Born to Run'. We mentioned we'd come from Dublin and Scotland and he told us we were incredible (yeah, amazing anecdote, I know). Then we shook hands (warm hands, we observed, particularly after standing in the January cold for an afternoon) and he told us to get inside. He forgot about us approximately 1 second later. It'll probably take us a little longer.
Oh, hi John, what are you doing in New York?
