"a fighting prayer for our country" - Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Toronto, November 6, 2024
Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't.
I wrote about this show for Variety, so you can read that over there. Consider this a companion piece for subscribers, both paid and free.
Not a subscriber? You can easily rectify that.
I had made the decision to go to this show once Springsteen made his endorsement of Kamala Harris in early October. I’d been eying the shows in Toronto, wanting to see one more before the end of the year, but I decided that for historical and personal reasons, I wanted to see the show on November 6. It was either going to be the world’s biggest party or a wake, but I felt like, as someone whose job is paying close attention to this man’s body of work, I needed to be there either way. At no point during this calculation did I consider I'd be waking up at 5:45am and trying to figure out how I was going to avoid crying the entire day.
I arrived in Toronto around 1:30pm and it was a beautiful day. I rolled my suitcase out of the train station to my hotel, down the street from Scotiabank Arena. I didn’t feel excited. I just felt heavy. I’m in a foreign country and I have the day off and I’m going to see Bruce Springsteen, my dude, and I am emotionally at flatline. And I still had to figure out how I was going to write something for publication once the show was over.
A couple of things contributed to me being able to get into a decent headspace before the show started. I had just barely gotten to my excellent seat in section 116A, just over Roy Bittan’s right shoulder, when I got a text on What’s App from a Spanish friend. I assumed she was either checking on me or telling me she’d be in Detroit soon with the band she works with. I was not expecting her to tell me that she and her husband were in Toronto and at the show, and because this was Canada and not anywhere in the US we criss-crossed sections so we could say hi and exchange hugs and talk for 15 minutes without some security guard insisting we go back to our seats. I cannot tell you how much this did my heart good.
The second was that I somehow ended up sitting in a section of great people. When you buy a single seat these days, you can no longer just pick up a random seat at the end of the row. You’re usually in the middle of a row that has an uneven number of seats, which as a woman usually has me sandwiched between groups of men. What I knew I absolutely could not fucking handle tonight was the inevitable “oh are you writing down the setlist for setlist fm” or some kind of inquisition designed to affirm that the men are the superior fans. But the men to my right had never seen Bruce before and explained they rarely went to arena shows. The men to my left had driven in from… Detroit!
That’s when someone in the vicinity noticed the graphic on the video screen above us (which at that level is mostly obscured; we can see the stage!) noting “ESTIMATED START TIME: 8:40PM.” People around me hadn’t all seen Road Diary yet but most of them had watched or heard Howard Stern and so most of them knew about Patti Scialfa’s illness and so the first thought of folks was concern for her health. (This might be something the org should take into account in future - just tell people that the band is fine and it’s a purely operational delay.) In any event, I was amazed by how the audience accepted the delay in good spirits. People went to get merch. People went to get drinks. People stood in the concourse with their friends and chatted. I figured out how to buy a bottle of water and be able to keep the cap.
Caryn Rose
I also helped my new Detroit pals figure out where in the set they could make their escape and miss the least. They’d explained that they only decided to come to the show two weeks ago but couldn’t stay overnight because one of them had to be back in time to take grandchildren to daycare in the morning, and this was predicated on the show ending around 10:30pm. My response was to pull up Brucebase and show them the most recent setlists. (They ended up heading out during “Born To Run.”) I was not going to judge a guy who told me about sleeping out in the snow to see the opening show of the River tour at Crisler Arena in Ann Arbor, most famous for being the show at which Bruce forgot the words of “Born to Run” because it had been so long since he’d sung them last.
Lights out was 8:51pm. When I saw the flashlights behind the stage I muttered something under my breath about how this had better be the quickest stage entrance in the history of E Street, and to their credit, no one was fucking around. Bruce apologized for the delay, and then said the magic words: “This is a fighting prayer for my country.”
