BORN TO RUN ON
Springsteen delivers epic shows of legendary length and crashes curfews, but nobody complains. After all, he is the Boss
The Boss pushing boundaries of how long is too long,
Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band logged what was, according to the global guardians of such lore, their longest recorded set ever at Helsinki’s Olympiastadion this past July 31: four hours and six minutes.
Fans of the Boss can’t necessarily bank on a similar marathon at the Rogers Centre this Friday night, but they can more or less bank on, well, a marathon.
Marathons are what Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band do for a living, after all. They’ve staked their reputations on delivering concerts that habitually extend well beyond the accepted, industry-standard of 90 minutes or two hours.
That kind of dogged commitment to giving the people what they want doesn’t come without a serious commitment to pseudo-athletic musicianship from everyone onstage.
Nor without a willingness to go the extra mile financially when concert-hall curfews — typically set at 11 p.m. in this town — are blown through and local venue and union fees start piling up to the tune of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. If a prudently early start time isn’t observed, that kind of exhaustive show can gnaw into the headliner’s nightly takeaway from the net profits in a fairly big way.
The 62-year-old Springsteen, who has been employing a 16-piece band in service of some of the longest shows of his career on the summer leg of his transatlantic Wrecking Ball tour, is obviously successful enough that he can afford to crash past the three-hour mark on a regular basis.
Indeed, he’d be offending his tremendously loyal fan base if he dared sell it short even just once.
Such a “display of energy and its depletion is part of what is expected of him,” a recent New Yorker profile noted, going on to quote Springsteen on concert length: “there is a commercial exchange, and that ticket is my handshake. That ticket is me promising you that it’s gonna be all the way every chance I get. That’s my contract. And ever since I was a young guy I took that seriously.”
“With the Boss, he’s maybe even painted himself into a bit of a corner,” ventures Toronto booking agent Jack Ross, who counts Bruce Cockburn, Sarah Harmer, Kathleen Edwards and Sam Roberts among his clients.
“He’d probably disappoint fans if he went out and did a long show by anybody else’s standards that was two or two-and-ahalf hours long.
“It has to be exhausting, although I do emphasize that for the artist, it is the very best time of their day . . . For a touring musician, life is sorta boring and there’s a lot of drudgery involved. The very best part of their day is the time when they’re onstage. That’s sort of their reward for driving around in a van and being away from home and having to talk about themselves all the time.”
There is, nevertheless, a fine line between delighting in the communal ecstasy of delivering a boffo performance for as long as you can and overstaying your welcome.
Audiences — probably Boss fans in particular — tend to have jobs to face the next day and kids to attend to. Is it really fair to make them stay for over three hours until “Born to Run,” which is typically deep in the encores?
Mind you, as most working musicians will tell you, there’s no hardand-fast rule for figuring out how long you should stay up there.
“I really don’t want to ever cross that line, and that’s definitely something we’ve thought about lots,” says Jimmy Shaw, guitarist for Toronto’s Metric. “I’m not a fan of the two-hour show, man. It’s too much f---in’ rock.
“But it’s kind of band dependent. When you’re getting in a car with a bunch of your college buddies in Connecticut and driving to, like, a jam-band show in Maine, you kinda want it to go for three-and-a-half hours because you drove a long way and you’re on some really good drugs and it’s really fun, y’know? But when you’re seeing the Strokes play, you kinda want it to be 51minutes because they’re cooler than you and you kinda want to leave with that impression that they’re off to somewhere way cooler than you could ever get into.”
“If you’re Bruce and you’ve got a huge body of work and your fans absolutely idolize you, you can do whatever the heck you want for those ticket prices.” MIKE LEVINE TRIUMPH
Shaw notes that Metric feels compelled to deliver a longer set now that it’s popular enough to charge $40 rather than $15 for a ticket to its shows, which is no doubt also a consideration for a lifetime champion of the working class such as Springsteen. Three-and-a-half hours of rock ‘n’ roll for your $130 ticket to the Rogers Centre is an inarguably good deal compared to 90 per cent of the tours that come to Toronto charging similar prices.
After 15 years or so of attending rock shows for a living, mind you, this writer tends to tune out after 45 minutes or an hour. Three hours is a tough slog — although I’ve swooned through a couple of Cure shows that went on for three hours and barely even noticed the time passing.
Obviously, how much music one can take in a sitting is dependent on the depth of one’s fanhood.
Still, there aren’t a lot of artists outside the Grateful Dead/Phish jam-band circuit — where 20-minute guitar solos, let alone four-hour shows, are the norm — who can get away with such excess.
“You have to have two things,” opines Steve Jordan, overseer of the Polaris Music Prize and an enormous Springsteen fan. “One is you have to have hits, and two is you have to have albums.
“If you are a pop-hit act, you can have 20 hits or more and that would probably be a pretty decent show. But I think what keeps people’s attention for that long is not just the excitement of Bruce playing ‘Glory Days,’ but also him going back to his first couple of records or even playing outtakes that didn’t make the records.
“Prince is the same way. You’re gonna hear ‘Purple Rain,’ but hopefully you’re also gonna hear ‘Erotic City’ or ‘DMSR’ or something from The Black Album. Those are the ones, I think, who get away with it, the ones who can go even deeper than an album legacy or a legacy of hits. And also, they have to be f---ing amazing live bands.”
The latter statement is also true: few bands possess the physical ability to put it out there for hours on end the way Springsteen and the E-Street Band do.
As Mike Levine, bassist for storied CanCon rockers Triumph — whose energetic sets historically topped out around 100 minutes — puts it: “We’d be dead. We couldn’t exist with sets that long.”
The key, says Levine, is not just performing within one’s limits, but knowing how much the audience can take as well.
“You pace a show, right?” he says. “If you looked at it like a graph, you’ve gotta come out big and keep going big, then you kinda settle the audience down . . . You get that graph moving higher towards the end of the show and then in the encore you take them higher and then, when they’re really, really high, that’s when you go: ‘See ya later. Bye. Thanks for coming.’ You want to leave them buzzing on their way out as opposed to saying: ‘Oh, God, I’m so exhausted.’
“Then again, if you’re Bruce and you’ve got a huge body of work and your fans absolutely idolize you, you can do whatever the heck you want for those ticket prices.”
The artist’s cut of the proceeds will suffer if the show goes long, but the cost varies — it can be as little as $500 for a solo act playing in a theatre, or tens of thousands in a stadium with a massive and complicated production. The crew working the performance get paid a premium, overtime rate for an extended show, and if the crew loading out your gear has to work past midnight, the artists get hit again.
But if your fans absolutely idolize you, it’s hard to give up the spotlight. PS I Love You frontman Paul Saulnier, for instance, figures no one wants more than 45 minutes of what he has to offer, but there have been occasions where he’s felt compelled to go long.
“Only a couple of times have we played over an hour and that’s just because we had a crowd that was just not getting enough,” he says. “That’s a crazy feeling. And I’ll bet that probably happens every night to Bruce Springsteen. If he just wants to give people what they want, I’m cool with that.”