The new songs from Wrecking Ball worked well in concert. He was able to open with two of those songs without anyone wondering where “Badlands” was (it came third). “Jack of All Trades”, which I assumed would be a pee break for people who don’t like the slow, quieter songs, was quite powerful, and, in our section at least, grabbed the audience. “We Are Alive” seemed oddly placed near the end of the main set, as it, too, is not exactly a rousing, audience participation tune, but it was fine and, ultimately, exactly where it belonged.
We got plenty of intriguing selections in the set list, many of them audibles: “Thundercrack” (which won the crowd over), “Johnny 99” (excellent reworking), “My Love Will Not Let You Down”, “American Skin (41 Shots)” (timely), and “Rosalita”.
Much is made of how a 62-year-old man could have such an inexhaustible supply of energy, but I think the physical stuff is window-dressing. It’s fun, no question (best was probably when he body surfed his way from the back of the pit to the stage). But I imagine there are plenty of 62-year-olds out there with energy to spare.
The thing I find most impressive is that Bruce still commits emotionally to his work. He has sung many of these songs a thousand times, and you have to believe at some point, he tires of them. But he rarely gives that impression. When a song gets old, he retires it for awhile. He sang “Rosalita” at the first ten Bruce shows I attended, and only four times in the next 32 years.
It helps that he has a good new album with songs that fit the show, which hasn’t really been true since The Rising a decade ago. So he does seven songs from the new album, an new-to-him oldies medley that is a big hit, and then has a huge back catalog to choose from … a catalog, I’d add, that itself includes plenty of relative rarities.
This time around, he must also deal with the loss of two band members who have been with him since the early 70s. He didn’t take the most obvious route of simply replacing them. Well, Danny Federici has been effectively replaced by Charlie Giordano, but Clarence? It’s taken a five-piece horn section to fill his spot, musically speaking. That one of the horn players is Clarence’s nephew, Jake (who takes several of his uncle’s solos), makes a family tie to the past that is touching and important, and Jake can play, so the transition (again, musically) is much smoother than you might think.
But Bruce has clearly taken this unfortunate opportunity to rethink his concert sound. Some of the changes have been there for awhile, most notably Soozie’s violin. He’s used a horn section at times in the past, but they feel more integrated into the sound this time around (I suspect Steve Van Zandt has a lot to do with that). Where in the recent past, his newly-added backup singers seemed superfluous, now they add a lot to the songs.
And while Bruce no longer has Clarence to play with on stage, he seemed last night to have replaced that hole with … the audience. Again, this is something he’s always done, but I think he was using the audience as a sidekick in ways that were new.
A lot of the emotional power of the concert came from the absence of the Big Man. The first tears flowed in the third song, when Jake Clemons played his uncle’s “Badlands” solo. “My City of Ruins”, which I think is the best and most lasting song from The Rising, included Clarence and Danny in the roll call of band members. And the video tribute to Clemons during “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” was perfect and wrenching.
But then there were my own “special to me” moments. Yesterday I listed my three favorite Bruce songs, and he played them all. Two of them were surprises: “Backstreets” and “Rosalita”. While it’s hard to do anything bad with these songs, he has played them enough times that there is always the possibility he’ll walk through them more out of duty than love. Last night, there was a lot of love. “Backstreets” was at its most emotional and evocative, and “Rosie” was as goofy as it was in the olden days. About the only thing that could have topped them is if he’d done “Back in Your Arms”.
Plus, no matter what “Born to Run” means as an anthem for all Bruce fans, it is also “our song”, the one I always associate with my wife. When he plays it, we reflect on the past 37 years of Bruce concerts, and it never fails to break me up when he says, “Someday, girl, I don’t know when, we’re gonna get to that place where we really wanna go, and we’ll walk in the sun.”
Finally, it is not easy for me to believe that the new is as good as the old, especially when it comes to rock and roll. By that, I don’t mean that new music sucks, not at all … I had a great time at the Wild Flag concert last week, to point to one example. I mean that when it comes to long-lasting artists, I don’t always recognize when they reach a new peak late in their careers. In Bruce’s case, I think that a list of his best albums would lack anything from the last 25 years. And, also in Bruce’s case, his well-earned reputation as the great live act of rock and roll, with so many classic shows in the past, combined with his age, means that I find it highly unlikely that he’ll reach the heights of 1978. 2009 was evidence of all this, a fine show that I was glad to see, but nowhere near the best.
But in 2008, I saw a couple of his shows that were mindbogglingly great. And last night was right up there with those shows.
So when I talk about the best of the 34 Bruce shows I’ve seen, there’ll be the three from 1978, and there’ll be that endless, monumental show on the Tunnel of Love tour, and there’ll be the first batch of Reunion shows in 1999. And there will be 2008, and, perhaps even more so, 2012. Imagine how miraculous it is that someone who has put on some of the most famous and acclaimed rock and roll shows of all time, can still approach that same level while in his 60s.
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