remnants: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Convention Hall, Asbury Park, NJ, 24 March 2009

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Hi friends, I've been on a deadline from hell and I don't know what words are any more? I tried to find something I'd written about Willie Mays from my old baseball blogging days but came up empty (you want to read my friend Jay Jaffe on that anyway), so instead, here's a review of a Springsteen rehearsal show from 2009. No photos of the show because I don't think I even owned an iPhone yet.

[Header photo is from 2011, after seeing Gaslight Anthem at Convention Hall. Bruce showed up there too! lol]

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
Convention Hall, Asbury Park, NJ
24 March 2009

Rehearsal Show #2

We’re at an odd juncture in E Street history. Bruce decided that 2009 was the year he was going to finally get the world to see that he has the best band on the planet. That he was going to try to bring back everyone who jammed the stadiums for BITUSA, and corral a new audience to boot. You and I have previously discussed this. I understand why he is doing this, and I am fine with it. (Not that it matters if I’m not, but I get it. I honestly do.) He wants everyone to come out and see his band play. This is not about money, if it was about money there would be sponsors and VIP packages and a gazillion other things that are uglier than anything he has ever done.

So you have this whole group of people who marched out after the Super Bowl and bought tickets to the shows and sent the record to #1 on the Billboard charts, and then, on the other hand, you have the rest of us. The people that were there before BITUSA, and the people that never left. We have been there in good times and in bad. The problem is that a man cannot serve two masters, and that is what tonight’s set performed at “Beautiful Convention Hall in the fabulous resort city of Asbury Park, New Jersey” was trying to do.

I love the rehearsal shows, because they are rehearsals. Some are more polished, some are leaning towards a train wreck. It’s the only place you’d have ever seen Clarence Clemons onstage playing bagpipes (Rising – no I did not get to see that). So I accept the worn sports and rough edges and in fact welcome them. But the early reports of closed rehearsals that I skimmed did not seem promising, and apparently last night, the set was all over the place. Tonight, he was trying to put a theme together, string the songs into an arc, the pacing was okay, but the choices were not good and many of the performances were far below the usual E Street standards, even for a rehearsal.

The set started well, and when it went into the middle combination of “Working On A Dream” into – “Seeds” (don’t worry, more on that), into “Johnny 99” into “Ghost of Tom Joad” – hey, I recognize that. It makes sense. I want to know where the HELL “Seeds” has been for the past FOUR tours, where its absence was obvious and glaring. It’s fine now, but it would have been far more pertinent then.