I can’t remember the last time we did a concert review on Mildly Pleased. However, I wrote a bunch of words about seeing Bruce Springsteen at Citizen’s Bank Park in Philadelphia on August 21, in the midst of Criterion Month. Since I felt like publishing them somewhere, here are those words…
Bruce Springsteen is an artist that I’ve loved since probably my sophomore year of high school. A few years prior, I first became aware of him watching early ’00s VH1 specials that chronicled his Born In The U.S.A. era and how it at that time tapped into a certain type of ‘80s nostalgia. What these first impressions of Bruce didn’t convey was the amount of artistry, passion, and fervor for rock and roll mythology that were inherent in his records that came before Born In The U.S.A.
But then I remember listening to every track on Born To Run for the first time in sequential order on Limewire, because despite my boomer-leaning musical tastes at the time, I was still at heart a millennial. Born To Run is one of those few albums that aims to sound like a masterpiece and against all odds, succeeds. It started me on my Bruce fandom journey that led me to Darkness On The Edge of Town, The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, Nebraska, and on and on. In fact, as has been chronicled on this blog, I’ve listened to every single Bruce Springsteen album, which is not a habit I have for most artists who keep recording into middle age.
Luckily, I became a Bruce fan during a pretty good era to be a Bruce fan. He had reunited with the E Street band around the turn of the 21st century and they would fairly frequently reunite for tours and albums throughout the ensuing couple of decades. The Bruce album that came out in the midst of my becoming a fan was 2007’s Magic, which I would still say is probably the best of his 21st century albums, though maybe not by that large of a margin. Bruce and the E Street band managed to be pretty omnipresent during this era despite being a 30-year-old rock outfit, making appearances at the Super Bowl and on TV and being weirdly tied to the hope and dreams of the Obama presidency.
Yet, for as much as I loved Bruce, I never saw him live. One of the reasons had to do with geography. He didn’t make stops in Seattle during a lot of these ‘00s and ’10 tours as far as I remember, which makes sense considering he’s always been a very East Coast artist. Though his 2016 The River tour did make a Seattle tour stop, I made the unfortunate mistake of sleeping in the morning those tickets went on sale. So when I awoke in a hurry, I saw that only super expensive seats were available, and my meager mid-20s funds just couldn’t justify paying for higher-end Bruce tickets. So despite the fact that Bruce’s live shows have loomed large in his legend, perhaps just as much as his records, for a long time I had never seen one of my favorite artists live even though he still toured with some frequency.
This was all seemingly going to change when on my 34th birthday, my now fiancée Nina graciously bought me Bruce Springsteen tickets. This was particularly kind since I was once again going through a period of not having a ton of money, which is why I hadn’t even considered buying tickets for this particular tour. Which would have been a goddamn shame, since at this point, it’s hard to know how many more of these big tours Bruce and the band will do, since most of the members of the E Street Band are now in their 70s.
But it was finally going to happen! After waiting years to see what all the hubbub was about in regard to Bruce’s live shows, I’d finally get to see the man, the myth, the etc. in person with the mighty E Street band.
And then a few days before the show was supposed to happen, it was canceled due to an illness that Bruce had. It was a reminder that despite Bruce seeming like one of the more eternally youthful rock stars of his generation, he is still human. This is something we’ve been reminded of consistently the past few years — that these rock stars we’ve built up as gods are in fact mortals that will eventually die. I even entertained the fact that maybe this illness could be an indicator of some more serious health problem for Bruce. He is an old dude after all.
So the shows in Philadelphia were rescheduled for the next summer, postponed from July of 2023 to August of 2024. During that period, I kind of forgot about the show and didn’t do much to prepare for it, since a lot of my enthusiasm had been sapped by the one-year wait for it. Still, I was more than willing to wait because 1) what else was I gonna do? and 2) I’d already been waiting my whole life for this concert, why not wait a little longer?
So the date snuck up on me. I didn’t really go out of my way to get into a Bruce phase, though I did listen to his discography on shuffle a bit while doing chores in the days leading up to the concert. But I already knew the Bruce catalogue about as well as I could. There’s not too much for me to discover when returning to his music, since it’s always been pretty at the forefront of my life.
So going into the concert, I wasn’t pumped per se, perhaps because there was a wariness over whether the performance would live up to the stories I’d heard over the years about how Bruce’s concerts where a spiritual experience, where every song was stretched to its showstopping limits. After the health scare involved with this concert, I was worried Bruce would show his age. Despite his unkillable energy, he has looked just a tiny bit more frail than he used to, so I was worried it would be a pale imitation of his past (ahem) glory days.
Though on the crisp summer night of the concert, once Bruce and the band came out promptly (without an opener), those fears quickly subsided. They opened (wisely) with a more rock-y version of “Atlantic City”, which of course opens up with the crowd-baiting line “Well they blew up the chicken man in Philly last night” and caters to all the South Jersey folks who made their way into Philly to Citizen’s Bank Park for the concert.
I’m not sure what type of crowd I should have been expecting for a Bruce Springsteen concert, but it seemed like a good group. It was a pretty broad spectrum of ages, though it leaned a little more boomer, as you might expect. But there were also plenty of people my age and younger, with a decidedly middle-class bent to it. The concert also came during a weirdly apt time to experience this type of communal experience, since this was the week of cautious joy brought on by the 2024 Democratic National Convention. Bruce has always felt somewhat connected to the politics of this country, perhaps because he often courts it, but also because he feels like the rare popular musician that authentically represents the working class. So even though he didn’t make a single political statement in between songs, it was once again a moment where Bruce’s music felt intertwined with the political moment, even if that was something I was completely making up in my head.
I’m not sure how much I want to go into the highlights of the set. Bruce of course played “Streets of Philadelphia”, since even though the set didn’t merely stick to the hits, he is a guy who knows how to give the people what they want. This Philly favorite is probably one of the more depressing songs in the Bruce catalogue, so it’s not like it brought down the house. However, there was something very satisfying about hearing its haunting refrain while being able to look out from the upper deck of Citizen’s Bank Park toward the Philly skyline off in the distance. There is a part of me that’s glad that I waited to see Bruce in Philly, since apart from maybe New York, it’s the place that feels closest to Bruce’s New Jersey home base that could hold a stadium’s worth of his fans. He even commented cheekily that the band had traveled a long way to see us — a whole 90-minute drive from Central Jersey.
One thing I appreciated about the concert as a whole was that even though I saw little sign of Bruce’s and the band’s age, it still didn’t shy away from the fact that these folks are getting older and that death is a little hard to ignore. This manifested itself in a few of the songs Bruce played from his latest album, Letter To You, where he acknowledged that some of the songs had been inspired by losing some of his friends in the past few years. Also, oddly enough, the songs that I vibed with most were off of 2012’s Wrecking Ball, which I’ve always liked but never loved. But a few of the songs from that album (particularly the title track) both have that E Street power to them, but also are clearly coming from someone who’s older and wiser and a little beleaguered by this world.
That said, the classic tracks were also thrilling. I sang along to “Badlands” and “Born To Run”, while “Rosalita” was the show-stopping staple that I’d always heard it was, which I’ve witnessed in various YouTube videos. There was just the right mix of 70s material and a few cuts from the more recent albums to feel like you were getting your money’s worth but also getting a truthful representation of where Bruce was at in his life when he walked onto the stage that night.
I knew that the show would be long, and while it didn’t quite reach one of his all-time marathon 4-hour shows, it was still somewhere between 3 and 3.5 hours. Did I care that it was long? Not really. In fact, I didn’t really want it to end, though for Nina’s sake I figured we should probably all go home at some point. But the show did really reach that communal level when by the end of it we were all singing along to a rendition of “Twist and Shout” that seemed performed for no other reason than for all these white people to have fun displaying their questionable dance moves to each other.
After this, the band walked off the stage and Bruce stood there alone with a guitar in the darkness and played “I’ll See You In My Dreams”, another one of the laments to a departed friend off his latest album. Again, it felt like an honest note to end the night on, not shying away from the fact that death is a reality and who knows how many more times we’ll get this many Philly Bruce fans in a stadium together. But at the same time, he left us going home happy and feeling like we’d had the time of our lives.