The one show that made Bruce Springsteen reform The E Street Band
It’s not a stretch to say that Bruce Springsteen would have been still playing club gigs were it not for The E Street Band.
Although ‘The Boss’ has made beautiful albums by himself and had a few times departing away from his friends, the rest of the group were as important to his music as Crazy Horse was to Neil Young or the Fabulous Flames were to James Brown. So when he decided to put them on the shelf for a while, all he needed was the right show to convince him to turn all the lights back on.
But it’s not like the band were completely on good terms all of the time. Anyone would have been run ragged if they had to go through all the blood, sweat and tears that it took to come up with the landmark album Born to Run, but there were already glimpses that Springsteen was going to work on his own as far back as Nebraska. It would have been easy to cut tunes like ‘Atlantic City’ with the rest of the band, but something about the emotional vulnerability of Springsteen in his room is what made everything sound so haunting.
So if he could make that all on his own, perhaps there was room for him as a solo star. He managed to have his own independent album on Tunnel of Love, but once he started working on his pure solo records, something always felt a bit off. Albums like Human Touch and Lucky Town weren’t objectively bad by any means, but there was definitely something missing when you didn’t hear Clarence Clemons on saxophone or Nils Lofgren or Stevie Van Zandt on guitar.
If that wasn’t enough of a reality check, the fact that Springsteen got inducted completely by himself in 1999 was absolute bullshit. The idea of the rest of the band having to wait decades before they got inducted was already a slap in the face to what they brought out of Springsteen’s material in the beginning. The band had been estranged for a while, but even by 1998, ‘The Boss’ knew that he needed to add a few more employees back onstage with him.
After seeing his heroes like Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell all singing together at a gig in San Jose, Springsteen realised that he had missed that sense of community onstage, saying, “The floor was a mass of smiles and swaying bodies. As I watched I thought, ‘I can do this. I can bring this, this happiness, these smiles.’ I went home and called the E Street Band.” And by the time the new millennium started, he really was going to need a band like that behind him.
A tragedy like 9/11 was always going to do a number on anyone living near New York City, but what Springsteen did had to have a band behind him. He wasn’t going to try and make tunes as a memorial, but even if a track like ‘My City of Ruins’ worked well with him and a guitar, hearing ‘The Rising’ wouldn’t have worked unless he had the rest of the band behind him singing along to every word.
Since then, it almost makes sense that most people in the E Street Band are as close as can be. Some of the old disagreements might flare up every now and again, but since Springsteen has built his family with Patti Scialfa, it’s safe to say that the rest of the band are as close to blood brothers as one could be.
There are countless instruments onstage whenever the band plays, but Springsteen was reminded that one night about the collective instrument they turn into whenever they play. It’s also a reminder of why Van Zandt’s words hit Springsteen so hard when inducting the group into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Springsteen’s name might live on for generations to come, but the actual legend comes from the E Street Band.
