The day Bruce Springsteen accidentally sabotaged his own show
Any artist is going to want to give their audience a good time whenever they hit that stage. After all, it’s any musician’s job to make the crowd feel larger than life, and while Bruce Springsteen knew the kind of work he was up against, he knew there were bound to be moments where he coughed it up now and again.
But is anyone going to a Bruce Springsteen show looking for the E Street Band to be absolutely note-perfect every single time? Sure, they managed to write some songs and play them great live, but it’s almost secondary to some of the greatest audience interaction that anyone has ever done. Whenever ‘The Boss’ takes the mic, it’s like going to rock and roll church, and even in the stage banter sections, he always remembers the importance of being up on that stage playing his music.
And that mentality of creating a rapport with the crowd extended well beyond those stadium shows. As far back as his early days playing in New Jersey, Springsteen would manage to get a crowd of people riled up with an acoustic guitar that wasn’t even plugged in half the time, all while the rest of the band stormed over every single person in whatever venue they happened to be playing in.
It wasn’t important to have every note heard, but when Springsteen first got the chance to tour, he didn’t consider the number of times he would have to change guitars halfway through a set. For anyone starting out in the field, it’s important to work with what you’ve got most of the time, but when Springsteen came up for air after going through the most rigorous sets anyone has ever experienced, he would often find that his guitar would completely crap out on him halfway through the show.
When talking about his stage mishaps, Springsteen had said that his guitar wouldn’t work because of how much moisture was accumulating over the course of a set, saying, “You have one guitar, not ten guitars. So when I got that first one, I would get onstage and sweat so much, the sweat would go inside the guitar and short out the electronics, and suddenly it would sound awful. So we had to go inside and line the entire guitar with rubber. I keep it at home now.”
And given how long Springsteen plays throughout his shows, it’s not like that sweat is an exaggeration or anything. This is a band that’s no stranger to playing shows that run for three hours or more, and while it can be fun for every single person performing, what ‘The Boss’ goes through is probably the equivalent of running a marathon twice whenever he launches into any of his songs.
Things may have become a little more low-key as time went on, but Springsteen has also been able to keep that fire in his later years. Even if his Super Bowl Halftime Show was a distant memory at this point, he approached that football field the same way he would have if he were a 20-year-old, and while certain things might not be as nimble as they were back in the day, there’s no one listening to a song like ‘Land of Hope and Dreams’ live and not feeling a rush of adrenaline whenever he sings it.
Because Springsteen knows that for as much as he might sweat and inadvertently sabotage his own show, he knows that it wasn’t anything he did that made the songs iconic. It was about the people relating to every word he sang, and whenever he takes the stage now, every member of the audience is able to see a little bit of themselves in between the massive saxophone breaks and the guitar solos.
