Sometimes I think a ticket to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band is wasted on senior citizens like me. If I had my way the audience at 21st century Springsteen shows would be restricted to people under the age of forty. Most of the rest of us have seen him quite enough times and only complain about how much more expensive it is to get the best view these days; and why didn’t he play The River?
It’s the younger people who really ought to see him. They will certainly never have seen anybody like him before. If this is to be the last time, they can be assured that they will never see the like again. What makes him special? He’s not the greatest singer. He’s not the greatest songwriter. He’s not the greatest guitarist. None of that matters one bit, not when set against the thing he is the very best at doing, the thing which 99% of his peers don’t even realise is a thing.
That something is this. Bruce Springsteen is the greatest storyteller in the history of popular music.
That doesn’t mean he’s the folksy type who sits on a stool and reels off shaggy dog stories between numbers. The story his shows embody is bigger than that and it’s communicated on big stages, through big gestures. In that story he is the star actor, director, producer, writer, juvenile lead, veteran character actor, comic turn, critic and source material. That story tells of how rock and roll came along to transform a nine-stone weakling from Asbury Park, New Jersey; a nerd whose passage through high school was so anonymous as to be barely noticed by most of his fellow pupils, and made him the most envied and admired American of his generation. Now he has come among you to raise you, too, above your troubles through the redemptive power of music.
Bruce Springsteen has been telling this story in instalments since 1974. That’s the year he decided that henceforth he would be billed as Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. This, if you think about it, is quite a ballsy move to make when neither you nor your band are known by anyone but a few locals. Ever since that time his songs have been, in a sense, about Bruce Springsteen, his band and – as we say all too often these days – their journey. The songs that still resonate today, in front of crowds who weren’t born back then, are all about him, and them, and all the years at their back: Tenth Avenue Freeze Out and Glory Days,
When he first started calling himself the Boss, it was a joke based on his preferred token when playing Monopoly. Beneath the joke, he was at the same time deadly serious. People joining the band expecting the usual benign chaos were brought up short by the fact that this kid who had never topped a bill acted as though he was James Brown. He wasn’t trying to be loved. In his autobiography he proudly recounts the story of how he dressed down young saxophonist Jake Clemons, who sought to step into the capacious shoes of his late uncle Clarence, when he turned up unprepared for an audition.
Bruce Springsteen is fiercely old school, with a work ethic that is almost 19th century. This is difficult to explain. The man who is regarded as the blue collar laureate has never had a proper job. The man who wrote all those songs about driving didn’t get a licence until his late twenties. For years he had a romantic life that was widely regarded as a disaster area. But that just left him more energy to develop the act that he’s been doing ever since.
And of course it is no less an act than Beyonce’s. Whereas she celebrates the fabulous, he has come to celebrate the ordinary, which is surprising since his life hasn’t been ordinary for many years. He goes on holiday on David Geffen’s yacht with the Obamas and Mr and Mrs Hanks. You know, just folks.
To call him rock’s greatest showman, which he is, would run the risk of suggesting he goes in for empty trickery, which he doesn’t. Nobody commands the stage to greater purpose than Bruce Springsteen. Nobody can hold an audience like he does. Nobody can take them up and bring them down the way he can. That’s because he has studied everyone from televangelists to hip hop stars and learned something from every single last one. He’s a student of the business of show. He takes advantage of the fact that his age placed him at the intersection of Elvis Presley, soul music, the Beatles, Bob Dylan and punk to get as near as anybody nowadays could possibly get to embodying the whole story of rock and roll.
Nobody else seems to share his priestly devotion to the nobility of his craft. Nobody I’ve ever met is more devoted to giving a young fan exactly the same charge he got when seeing the Rolling Stones as a teenager. He likes to say, you have a responsibility to be living in the moment when eight o’clock comes around. Think about that.
I saw him first at Madison Square Garden in 1980, back in the vanished world a few days before John Lennon was shot. He was 31 at the time and I would guess there was no one in the Garden that night who was more than forty. It won’t be like that in Hyde Park.
I’ve seen him many times with a roof over his head, which is still the proper way to see rock and roll. That was back in the days when he was such a minority taste that he was never called upon to play outdoors. He made that leap in Europe in 1985 and at first he didn’t like it but eventually he mastered the art of making the crowd feel involved. The records he has put out since those times have come and gone but very few of them have supplanted Born To Run, Thunder Road or Born in the USA. In truth people can live without new material from people like him. It’s the old time religion they go for.
And because it’s Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, the older ones make a particular point of being in place at the beginning of the show in order not to miss that precious first glimpse of him and the band coming on to the stage. Here they are, these old friends who first came together when they were all in their 20s and Nixon was the President. Here they are 50 years later, not merely still doing what they’re doing, but doing it in front of large crowds and also looking as though there is nothing in the world they would rather do. That, when you think about it, is what the kids would call emosh.
