Human touch

The rebirth of Bruce and the E Street Band

by Jon Garelick

I'd love to see a demographic readout on the crowd at the FleetCenter in Boston for the Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band show last Saturday night (the last of his five sold-out concerts are this Thursday and Friday, August 26 and 27). My personal unscientific approximation: 50 percent over the age of 40, 75 percent over 30. That's not where rock is supposed to be, but the boomers who Springsteen swept up in his path from 1975 to 1985 (plus a few million stragglers) are with him, it's clear, to the end. The center holds.

Can a major artist be a superstar and irrelevant at the same time? Bruce may no longer be "rock and roll future," but he's not past, either. It helped, maybe a little bit, that he's touring for the first time in more than 10 years with his old E Street Band -- by most guesses, the last round-up for the Asbury Park gang. The legendary three- and four-hour marathons of the past might be over, but no one's complaining about the "modest" two-and-a-half-hour shows he's been delivering on the current tour (Saturday night's extravaganza began at 8:13 and ended at 11). Springsteen is cited for his "intensity" as a performer, but his appeal goes beyond that. His songwriting mixes complex personal narrative, epic arrangements, and rock-and-roll salvation anthems, and then he ups it a notch in concert by making a direct, personal connection with his audience.

I didn't feel that connection on the '92 Human Touch/Lucky Town tour stop at the Worcester Centrum. That was Springsteen's "comeback" with a new road band. But at the solo acoustic Tom Joad tour at the Orpheum in '95 (and PPAC in '96) it was all there again -- Springsteen's witty, spontaneous, passionate-yet-self-deprecating raps between numbers cemented the show and brought it to another level of expression. It's what I remember, too, from seeing him at Charlie's in Harvard Square about 150 years ago (okay, 1974).

When Springsteen opens up to arena-scale, the E Street Band help him make that connection. Time and again, he took to the mike at the FleetCenter with a different member of his septet, sometimes a few in turn during a single song. On the encore of the ballad "If I Should Fall Behind" the effect was especially touching, Springsteen's yowl giving way to the smoother impersonation of him by Steve Van Zandt, a churchified Clarence Clemons, a honey-glazed C&W vibrato by Patti Scialfa, and Nils Lofgren's almost Aaron Neville-like tenor.

Of course, none of this would matter without the Reverend Bruce leading his congregation in a hellacious revival meeting of what he likes to call "the Ministry of Rock and Roll." He'd fall to his knees, rise again, wave his right hand to Heaven, point to his congregation, leap to the top of Roy Bittan's white grand piano, shout out for the spiritually and materially undernourished, and cry in thanks for God's grace as an arm-waving crowd, houselights up, rode with him down "Thunder Road," singing along all the way.

Truth be told -- as one who doesn't know by heart the words to every song and therefore couldn't make them out in the crappy FleetCenter acoustics -- I didn't feel the old connection until the encore, when Bruce revealed another new tune, an acoustic number dedicated to his old New Jersey home town, "Freehold." He introduced it with one of his funny little raps, asked for quiet and added, "because it's a masterpiece," then laughed. The song was funny, bitter, elegiac, and dry-eyed, juxtaposing autobiographical fact with social observation, offering the memory of an innocent sexual experience and then catching your laugh with the throwaway "If you were different, black, or brown/It was a pretty redneck town." It was the Boss at his rambling, compassionate best.