Bruce and the ESB in Hartford, 8/19/09: By far the best of the four shows I’ve attended on this play-for-the-sake-of-playing victory lap of a tour, and as much fun as any full-band show from the last three. Some of this had to do with the “seats” - we were stationed in the GA pit, about 30 feet back slightly left of center stage - but mostly it was due to the fact that the band seems to be enjoying itself again.
Especially at the end of the Magic tour, the shows I caught had a punch-the-clock feel to them; Little Steven and Clarence, in particular, couldn’t have been less engaged if they were waiting on line to purchase orange juice. By tour’s end, Bruce had abandoned the Big Idea that fueled the extremely underrated Magic record - basically, that things might look shiny on the surface, but dig deeper and you’ll find rot - and started playing half-assed versions of catalog nuggets requested by fans. This was fine from a check-songs-off-the-bucket-list perspective, but lousy from a creative one. Bruce has always done pretty okay without our help, y’know?
By comparison, last night the streamlined band (Patti seems to have been relegated to pack-up-the-kids-for-college duty) just played the living hell out of the evening’s 28 songs. They jammed, gyrated, giggled. They took the if-we’re-having-fun-you-sure-as-heck-will-too approach, and the show was far more involving for it. Not every night of live music demands a refined statement of thematic purpose, I suppose.
The good: I’m vehemently anti-shed unless crapball ’80s bands are involved, but the Comcast Theater was a perfect fit on a balmy summer night. Totally dug the outdoor promenade to the extent that I didn’t mind paying $9 for a Budweiser, plus it earned massive bonus points for the sloping-upward floor, which was wonderfully midget- (and thus Larry-) friendly… Nothing against Li’l Jay Weinberg, but the band purrs like a jet engine with Mighty Max behind the kit. The mauling he visited upon his kit during My Love Will Not Let You Down should be illegal… Nils Lofgren absolutely killed - in the awesome comic-slays-the-crowd sense of the word, not in the bad death-by-solo one - everything he touched. You get the impression that he could wring some beautiful, random sound out of a stick and three rubber bands… Several great returns to the set list, notably Something in the Night (both dark and uplifting at the same time), Be True (one of his few unequivocal early love songs, sounding as pure as it did during the Tunnel Of Love tour), Sherry Darling (loved the triple-barreled-accordion arrangement) and I’m On Fire (performing it on a rickety chair on the lip of the stage served to heighten the desperation-cum-creepiness of the lyrics)… Got a big laugh from the story that preceded Be True, in which Bruce acknowledged that leaving it off The River in favor of Crush On You was not among his sounder artistic judgments… Quite a lively and involved crowd for an old-white-people market like Hartford, with about 12 gals ending up on stage without being mauled by security during the Courteney Cox segment of Dancing In The Dark… The word I keep using in these dopey recaps to describe Bruce himself is “marvel,” and that holds triple for last night’s performance. Holy lord: a legit three hours of stage-stompin’ athleticism from a 60-year-old on a night so warm that members of the audience had to be carted out. He didn’t take a break at any point or, like, receive fluids intravenously. I have no idea how much longer he can keep up the pace - but then, I was saying the same thing at the end of the 1999-2000 Reunion tour.
The bad: Courtesy of the 98-degree temperatures in the Pit, I broke my own U.S. record for sweating at a Springsteen concert - quite the achievement, given that I attended the mid-summer 2002 Today show taping in a non-air-conditioned Convention Hall. At the end of the night, I was as moist and fragrant as a homeless mutt… While American Skin (41 Shots) was cool to hear after it’d been put on the shelf for a few years, it killed the crowd dead. Bruce didn’t help matters by extending its “you can get killed just by living in your…” coda by three minutes… Insert requisite “Sunny Day and Promised Land need a break” blurb here… Apparently he audibled Out In The Street for the setlisted Loose Ends. Ouch, babe… Clarence muffed the Sherry Darling solo and came up short of breath on about 10 others. On the other hand, he appeared about 30 pounds thinner since his last east-coast sighting. Gastric-bypass surgery, maybe? Anything that keeps him upright is a good thing… Did Bruce accidentally flip the Mountain Of Love verses? No matter. I’m in splitting-hairs territory now, so that’s probably a sign to wrap this puppy up.
