Glory days
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band to hit TD Garden
Bruce Springsteen has outlived every member of his first band.
On the stage at Philly’s Wells Fargo Center on Thursday, Springsteen told the story of how his sister’s boyfriend, George Theiss, recruited the New Jersey legend to join the Castiles (named after a shampoo). It was 1965. Bruce was 15. Theiss knew the kid played a decent guitar — which Bruce had been at for only six months.
“It was like standing on the tracks with the white hot light of an oncoming train bearing down on you,” Springsteen said of Theiss’ death. “It brings a certain clarity of thought and purpose that you may not have previously paid attention to… It makes you realize how important living every moment of your life is. So be good to your loved ones, and be good to yourself and be good to this world we live in.”
After the origin story, Springsteen eased into a tender solo acoustic version of “Last Man Standing,” his tribute to the Castiles founders and their three years spent laying siege to school dances and Asbury Park beach bars.
Fingers crossed, Bruce and E Street Band make it to their Monday Boston show at the TD Garden. COVID has been working its way through the band and Springsteen scrapped the three shows before the Philly date — singer, guitarist and Springsteen’s wife Patti Scialfa was missing from the band on Thursday. At this point, at his age — the icon is 73-year-old — nothing is a given. This makes the E Streeters first tour in six years feel like a gift.
Boston fans can expect a set list full of songs born out of Springsteen’s getthem-dancing-and-keepthem-dancing Jersey shore days. That means a flood of high energy performances of stuff like “She’s the One” and “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” At Thursday’s show, “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” carried the epic tune’s joy from the early ’70s to today — Springsteen, Steven Van Zandt, Jake Clemons and plenty of 20-somethings in the crowd were positively gleeful during it.
Springsteen gets an enormous amount of mileage out of his rapturous, joyful nostalgia vibe. (And rock ‘n’ roll should be joyful, which Little Steven knows as he took the stage looking like a glorious Technicolor pirate — your move Keith Richards.) But much of Springsteen’s best stuff adds a wink or shade of irony to that pleasurable nostalgia. Thursday’s set included a lot that fit this bill such as “Glory Days” and “Backstreets.” And when coupled with songs that grapple with mortality, the set has a sort of narrative arc.
What starts in beach bars builds to the anthemic hits while stopping at real moments of loss and introspection like “Last Man Standing.” Bruce seems to know that even he can’t go on forever. Maybe this is why — after all the hits — he closed the night with another solo acoustic new song, “I’ll See You in My Dreams.” He left the crowd with the lyrics, “I’ll see you in my dreams/Yeah, up around the river bend/For death is not the end/And I’ll see you in my dreams.”