The shows Bruce Springsteen called “one of the greatest” to play
Bruce Springsteen has lived his life trying to make every stage feel like home.
The E Street Band were practically his musical brothers and sisters every single time the house lights went up during one of their shows, and even though some of them might not have been the best at what they did, they were the perfect people to be on that stage whenever ‘The Boss’ counted out one of their tunes. But Springsteen felt that the best way to relate to the audience was when all he needed to do was speak his mind.
To be fair, though, Springsteen has never been one to be short on words whenever he plays a show. He knew that the audience would be ready to hear his speeches about the stories behind every single one of his songs, and while it does verge close to Bono territory in terms of his political messages, the reason why it works for ‘The Boss’ is that you can feel the passion behind every word he says.
The messages behind his songs mean just as much to him as any of the lyrics that he wrote for the songs, and he wanted the chance to break down those walls even more. And sometimes he managed to do that even when he wasn’t intending to make music that anyone was supposed to hear, either.
Nebraska is still one of the best albums that he ever made, but the reason why it works is because it sounds so vulnerable to hear him singing those tunes. He documented a moment in time when he was going through one of the darkest passages of his career, and while he did make Born in the USA directly afterwards, there was a certain power that came with him having an acoustic guitar and his thoughts to work off of.
The Ghost of Tom Joad worked so well for that very reason, and the same could be said of the way that Devils and Dust panned out, but it never occurred to him to turn that into his second career. The E Street Band was where he lived for most of his life, and while he did have a wilderness period working with other people in the 1990s, Springsteen did get a sense of accomplishment when he turned these intimate moments into a Broadway show.
‘The Boss’ isn’t necessarily the first person anyone thinks of when looking at the greatest showstopping Broadway singers or anything, but when talking to Rick Rubin, he considered the show to be one of his finest works, saying, “About 90 minutes of the play I put together in about four hours. I played it to the president [Barack Obama], and at the end he said, ‘I know you did that just for us, but that should be a show.’ If it would be a show, I needed a small audience. It was the best experience of my life. One of the greatest.”
A lot of that involved Springsteen getting a few things off his chest about what was bothering him during his life, but it wasn’t like people were paying tickets to see a pity party or anything. Springsteen had plenty of stories to tell, and he was willing to do everything he could to make sure that everyone saw the vulnerable side of him that was underneath those layers of E Street sound.
It wasn’t easy for him to tackle those kinds of shows, but the more intimate the setting got, the more he began to realise the kind of audience that he was playing for. These were people genuinely interested in hearing about his journey from the streets of Jersey to one of the biggest artists in the world, and Springsteen was willing to put himself up on that stage if it meant being seen for who he was.
