“It’s defining shape”: Bruce Springsteen on the show that made the E Street Band legendary
For any musician who has been playing for a while, every show counts. Even though it would be easy for most legacy artists to phone it in and make the kind of show that everyone expects out of them, there’s a beauty in trying to one-up every performance you play, almost like trying to give the audience a kick in the ass with every single chord that rings out from the stage. Although Bruce Springsteen usually needed a little more help to bring his rock and roll to life, he knew there were moments when life felt different when he left the stage.
Beyond being one of the most engaging live performers, though, Springsteen knows how to make every single person in the venue feel like they’re there for a damn good reason. The entire appeal of ‘The Boss’ is standing for everything right with rock and roll, and even when he found himself playing the Super Bowl half time show, there’s a certain power that he wields the minute that he talks about “[putting] those chicken finger down” that no man has ever been able to do since.
That’s because Springsteen knows that what he does is about more than simply playing tunes live. A lot of his music is about immersing himself in his different stories, and while there might not be that much flesh and blood behind Wendy from ‘Born to Run’ or Mary from ‘Thunder Road’, they feel like people that we’ve known our whole lives when the band kicks in and Clarence Clemons’s saxophone starts.
Despite standing for everything American rock and roll was about, it was strange to wonder how that would go over across the sea. The British invasion had already done wonders when Springsteen was a kid learning Rolling Stones licks, but considering what Bob Dylan had done for the written word, ‘The Boss’ brought life to his words the minute that he played the Hammersmith Odeon in 1975.
For Springsteen, it was simply another show, but he quickly realised that the temperature had changed before he even started. That London audience had been waiting for what he had to offer, and while there were a few questions surrounding how new songs like ‘Born to Run’ were going to go over live, ‘The Boss’ knew that the band had reached its final form once they hit the stage.
“It’s interesting how really good the band was — it’s a relatively new band you’re seeing, really. So the band was new, and it had just morphed into what would be its defining shape.”
Bruce Springsteen
According to him, those few minutes playing ‘Born to Run’ during that show was when the band truly solidified, saying, “I remember that was hard to play because it was a studio production and I never felt like we had a strong enough version of it for it to be a closer for the first year or two. It’s interesting how really good the band was — it’s a relatively new band you’re seeing, really. So the band was new, and it had just morphed into what would be its defining shape. It was fun seeing that when it was just poppin’ out of the box. We were just very good. ”
Although the signature introductions weren’t solidified in the same way they are today, the main thing they accomplished was getting comfortable with each other. Springsteen was already a musical wizard in many respects, but having that many people behind him gave him the freedom to play anything that he wanted and leave all of his internal feelings out there onstage for the world to see.
But none of that was by design. Springsteen was more than happy to be playing to whomever even if he had an acoustic guitar in his hands, but whereas the audience got one of the greatest shows they ever played, the frontman got a lesson in the kind of band that he was working with. They had all been musicians on the Jersey club scene before, but now they were practically superhuman.
