Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Cleveland, OH, 5 April 2023

New haircut, new oxblood red Doc Martens, and an ebullient IT’S GOOD TO BE BACK IN CLEVELAND greeting opened the show tonight at the INSERT CORPORATE NAME arena .1 The energy was sparkling. It wasn’t just that Bruce seemed to have more physical energy but that he was also more relaxed and focused and just felt more positive as compared to last week in Detroit. The setlist and the show still have issues but the performance was absolutely elevated tonight.

“Prove It All Night” was a moment close to magic. Cleveland loves themselves some Steve Van Zandt, this was like the Jukes’ second home back in the day. It felt like it was both happening right now and also conjuring every other version of “Prove It” that’s ever been played in Cleveland. It’s deja vu if you were there, but even if you weren’t, you probably tried to conjure it in your mind all those years you spent listening to bootlegs. I wrote “INCENDIARY” in all caps in my notebook after the “Prove It” solo and that is not a word I would have applied to anything I saw last week.

“Nightshift” was beautiful but ruined by the drunk people to my right. “Backstreets” once again brought the whole place to attention. It is such a difficult song to sing because you cannot phone it in. He has to draw from someplace truly deep within himself to render that song in this fashion night after night. I am used to a Bruce Springsteen concert where every song was delivered from this wellspring and maybe it is unrealistic of me to expect the same intensity from him at 73 that we got at 66 -- and he is still agile and spry and is still giving close to three hours every night. The interlude in “Backstreets,” where instead of an expression of longing or desire a la “Sad Eyes2” he tries to connect it with the story he has just told us before “Last Man Standing.” The speech before “Last Man Standing” is scripted and on the prompter. The recitation during “Backstreets,” how he keeps everything right here, as he taps his chest over his heart, is not. There’s a reason “Backstreets” is kind of quasi assuming the place “Jungleland” used to. [Side note: I am okay with that song taking a rest. It was in a reasonable place in the recent set at MSG but I don’t want it sullied with bad sequencing.]

I was behind the horns again, but lower down, so I could observe things like how the teleprompter displays SOLO in red when it is time for, well, you know, and also could spy the setlist being attended to (or something) by a crew member literally right below me. With a little camera zoom help from a friend I could see “Saint” was on the setlist, which made sense because it came out in Brooklyn. My response to that at the time was “we don’t need another epic in this set” but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t be happy to see it. It got audibled out and we got the completely unnecessary “Pay Me My Money Down” which I hate less than the equally absurd “Johnny 99” because the horn breakout is contextual and appropriate from a genre perspective, but not by a whole lot; when I saw the acoustic guitar come out I was sure we were gonna get “Darlington County” which I have a real soft spot for but it sometimes gets too hammy, and this tour has too many opportunities for ham as it is: the ‘more cowbell’ stupidity in “Johnny 99,” the Three Stooges shtick [which I know is not new but is tired] in “Rosie,” and what I consider the absolute disrespect of “10th Avenue Freeze-Out.”

I don’t like the exaggerated comedic gesture of Bruce ripping his shirt open. Like I know he has done dumb things like this before, with shaking his ass, or inviting fans to drum on his butt, and he’s doing it during a vamp that is if not borrowed from James Brown is definitely derivative of some rhythm and blues revue moment and those people were not fucking around onstage. He’s also doing it before the story about the band, and we’re still showing like five seconds of a video of Bruce and Clarence. If Bruce wants to keep that element of the set in place for the rest of his life, god bless him. It was such a heart-rending, communal moment on that 2012 tour and I was grateful for each and every time I got to be part of it. But this is not that. The center platform is there for literally only this moment3 and it’s now become a fucking circus, with everyone in the pit running back in a mad dash and suddenly there’s a dozen signs that aren’t requesting songs, but making demands (tonight he kept trying to keep singing “10th” while signing the cast of a kid with a broken arm, whose father had held up a SIGN MY SON’S CAST? sign all night). I surmise he is doing the platform because he can’t jump on the piano any more.  But all of this is killing one of the most important songs in the E Street Band’s repertoire. It used to be A MOMENT. The build of the intro to “10th Avenue Freeze-Out” is epic, it is one of my favorite Steve Van Zant guitar riffs, that moment when he comes in with that chicken scratch. And it must be hard to sing that song about your friend when your friend isn’t there onstage with you any more, and at least he isn’t trying to recreate that with Jake, which would be wrong and weird for everybody involved. Go out in the crowd with “Hungry Heart” or literally anything else. 

At least he did not spit water on anyone tonight. BRUCE! WHAT ARE YOU DOING