remnants: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Glendale, AZ, 12-6-12

In honor of the start of the 2024 tour, which began in Phoenix, AZ, rerunning this short piece I wrote for my old blog, a companion to the report I filed for brucespringsteen.net.

I thought the show was going to open with one of those numbers where Bruce walks onstage solo with an acoustic guitar, and was later perplexed when only Max, Roy and Bruce walked onstage – only to be followed a few moments later by the rest of the band. The perplexity did not end when the band kicked into a mostly-acoustic version of “Surprise, Surprise,” for reasons that still escape me: did they drive through Surprise, Arizona? Did someone meet up with Bruce at the hotel and make a request? Was this Stevie’s fault? It wasn’t exactly how I thought Bruce would kick off what I hoped would be a barn-burner of a last US show of the Wrecking Ball tour.

He then made up for it with the next sprint, and it was a high-energy one: “No Surrender,” “I’m A Rocker,” “Hungry Heart,” complete with crowd surf. I have never been dead center before for a crowd surf since the very first time Bruce went into the crowd, and didn’t realize that the rush of people who are propelling him from the back platform basically run into the people already there, creating a sardine-can effect. It was all good fun as Bruce passed over my head, and although there were many, many tall people keeping him high up in the air, I was able to genuinely help propel him forward. I love the trust and the fun and the unpredictability of it but sometimes I wish for just a little less spectacle.

We had barely caught our breath before he stepped to the front in the silver spotlight for what would be a short, sharp, 78-ish “Prove It,” not quite full fledged and searing enough for me to bestow it with the full description, but close enough. “Trapped” had one of the loudest crowds I have been in for some time. “Lost In The Flood” was wonderful as always, even as a woman behind me complained that he “always” did it because she’d heard it three times already. I myself happen have an above-average LITF attendance at something like 16 performances, but you would never hear me complain about its presence in a show. The solos in this one are always interesting, never the same; these days he is playing with a drive and a muscle and a loud yet contained roar. At the end, the very end, he extended his left hand out sideways to direct the band, just a sliver of light in the darkness, as they brought the song to a close. Please, let me see that 16 more times.

In “My City of Ruins,” Bruce noted his history with Phoenix, how he used to come here when a tour ended and “get a room at the Holiday Inn by the airport... this is when Phoenix was a town — nothing but a big town!” Of course this is the place where he used to sell tickets even when he didn’t sell tickets in many other places, where he played his first arena, where the “Rosalita” video was filmed. (We drove over to the old Veterans Memorial Coliseum earlier in the day so I could take a photograph; that video on television was a huge, huge thing to me, as I’m sure it was to many of you.) I also noted the upturn of optimism in the telling of the Asbury Park story: “We’ll be back, so come visit!”