Review: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Feb. 27, 2023, Climate Pledge Arena, Seattle

Two weeks shy of seven years. That’s how long it’s been since I last saw Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert. To say “a lot has happened” since then would be an understatement, so I won’t go there. But here we were on a wintry Monday night in Seattle, in a sold-out Climate Pledge Arena, me and 17,000-ish of my people, carrying all of our memories and expectations of Springsteen shows with us. It’s a lot of weight to place on an artist, our need to be taken back to the magic of the epic, blow-out shows we saw in our youth, whichever decade that happened to be. But at 73, Springsteen has figured out just how much weight he can carry.

The Seattle show, like the others in this 2023 tour, was basically a greatest hits concert, 27 songs, two hours and forty five minutes of a carefully assembled emotional arc encompassing all the things that Bruce fans need from an E Street Band show. The signatures were there (“Rosalita,” “Born to Run,” “Thunder Road”, “Glory Days”) and the anthems (“Land of Hope and Dreams,” “The Promised Land,” “The Rising”). Springsteen clowned as usual with guitarist/foil Steve Van Zandt, and posed with saxophonist Jake Clemons in stances evoking the dynamic of Springsteen’s relationship with Jake’s uncle, Clarence Clemons — except now Bruce is the wise old soul master and Jake is the adoring student. House-lights-up, dance party atmosphere down the homestretch? Check. A good representation of new-ish songs from Letter to You, the 2020 late-career masterpiece album that never got its own tour due to the pandemic? Yes, finally. There were a couple of tour premieres in “Land of Hope and Dreams” (which I expected) and “Trapped,” Springsteen’s Jimmy Cliff cover (first played and recorded on the Born in the U.S.A. tour) which I honestly did not expect, and which sounded flat-out majestic augmented by a four-piece horn section (plus Jake) and a choir of three backup singers.

What wasn’t there: no handmade-sign song requests from the audience, no fans invited up for “Dancing in the Dark,” no audibles called in a departure from the setlist, and thankfully, blessedly, no little kids brought up from the pit to sing “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day.” All of those things may come as the tour rolls on, but I gotta say, I didn’t miss any of them. (Well, maybe an audible would have been nice.) As a result, this show didn’t have the unpredictable, rambling quality of previous shows, but it was a keeper all the same. Lordy, did Springsteen and the E Street core and their added friends look and sound fired up! The 17-piece (give or take a revolving door of Covid absences) band is firing on all cylinders. The big band brought a jazzy elasticity to “Kitty’s Back” and “E Street Shuffle” (Max Weinberg has never looked so happy onstage as during his drum-off with percussionist Anthony Almonte on the latter song) and a joyous bluesy stomp to “Johnny 99,” with Springsteen and the five horn players parading New Orleans style across the lip of the stage. And most of all, this tour has a structure that helps to tell a story, the story that Springsteen has been telling since his first album. It’s all about growin’ up.

If you grow up enough, of course, you grow old. Spending a year doing Springsteen on Broadway, a summational, confessional solo show adapted from his autobiography Born to Run, seems to have helped Springsteen figure out how to give E Street Band fans what we need from him while carving out room to take what he needs from us. And I think what he needs from us is commiseration. Growing up (and old) can be terrifying and depressing. It brings loss, pain, ghosts, all of which are represented in the current show by the songs “Ghosts,” “Wrecking Ball,” “Last Man Standing” and “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” and by the videos of Clarence Clemons and original E Street Band organist Danny Federici that have floated above the audience during “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” in every show since their passings.

And there were ghosts among us in the audience, too, the friends and loved ones we’ve lost over the years and carry with us as we move through our lives. To grow old is to say goodbye over and over. Springsteen articulated this in his introduction to “Last Man Standing,” which he wrote after the 2018 passing of his friend George Theiss, with whom he formed his first teenage band, the Castiles, leaving Springsteen as the lone surviving member. Springsteen performed “Last Man Standing” solo on acoustic guitar, with a trumpeter taking up the repeated melody line at the end, its lonesome blare conjuring “Taps.” Then the band reassembled, seamlessly launching into “Backstreets,” and the inspired pairing of these two songs about friendship and loss broke the show open in a catharsis of grief.

Springsteen has never been afraid to display big, unabashed emotions in his performances. Those big emotions are part of what drew a lot of us to him in the first place. You go to a Springsteen show for the emotional liberation, whether happy or sad. You go to let yourself go, knowing that you’re among friends. And that communion and kinship is why you keep going to see him, come hell or high ticket prices. “Backstreets” endures as one of Springsteen’s most gigantically emotional songs, an operatic, melodramatic piano-driven ballad powered by its betrayed narrator’s howls of longing. One of two set pieces of the Born to Run album (the other is “Jungleland”), it’s a song steeped in the ache of youth, a time when the world revolves around you and every rejection is the end of the world. When Springsteen played it live during the 1970s, trying on his whippet-thin, smoldering Scorsese-misfit-hero stage persona, the song evolved into theater, psychodrama even; he used to insert a monologue into it, known on bootlegs as “Sad Eyes,” that could have served as his Actors Studio audition. In “Sad Eyes,” Springsteen’s character talk-sings directly to an old girlfriend, using strands of lyrics that would eventually be recorded as “Drive All Night” on The River. He starts out softly, cajoling and begging her to come back, slowly working himself up on some versions into a startling rejected lover’s rage, screaming “You lied!” over and over before breaking into the climax of “Backstreets.”

On “Backstreets” at the Seattle show Monday night, Springsteen resurrected the “Sad Eyes” interlude in form, but not content. Instead of an agitated plea to a former lover, he spoke with tenderness to a departed friend or loved one, paraphrasing lines from “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” another lovely song of mortality from Letter to You. He told the departed soul that he has their books and their records and their picture in a frame, but all the rest “I keep right here,” patting his heart and quietly repeating “right here.” And then “Backstreets” resumed and the lyrics about how the characters “swore we’d live forever” hit like a gut punch. In 1978, “Backstreets” was about melodrama and self-centeredness; in 2023, it’s about making peace with ourselves and our ghosts. That’s what it means to grow up.

I don’t want to give the impression with all this talk of death and grief that this E Street Band tour is a downer. Far from it. I think we all learned from the past few years how quickly life can turn upside down. I have never appreciated a Springsteen show more, and I think the Climate Pledge Arena audience, pumped, primed and losing its collective mind, would agree. So what if I’ve heard most of these songs a gazillion times live — shoot them directly into my veins, please. Joy is as big an emotion as despair. Or, as Springsteen tells us in “Badlands,” it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive. There’s a TikTok video going around of Springsteen touring Seattle’s Pike Place Market (home of the famed salmon-tossing fishmongers) during his free time in town. Clad in a sensible puffer jacket and a flat cap, Springsteen has a deer in the headlights look as he stands with arms outstretched waiting for the throw. But when he makes the catch and that salmon plops safely into his arms, he gives a yelp of utter delight. As an old lady myself, I can relate. Sometimes, you just need to take joy in the dumbest little things. You have to catch that fish when it comes at you.

©Joyce Millman, 2023