Picture: Euan Cherry/Getty Images
Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band
Murrayfield Stadium, Edinburgh
May 30, 2023
A MINUTE OR SO SHY OF 10PM, THE MEMBERS OF THE E STREET BAND WAVE FAREWELL AND MAKE TO LEAVE. Standing between them and a well-earned post-show refreshment is Bruce Springsteen, who insists on dispensing handshakes, smiles and hugs to each. But instead of following his team down the off-ramp, the skipper turns back towards the 52,000 crowd. Almost exactly three hours since he walked onto the stage, Springsteen isn’t ready to leave yet. “Thanks Edinburgh,” he smiles. “We won’t leave it so long to come back next time.”
You’d hope he means it – because Bruce Springsteen and his band last played in Scotland’s capital 42 years ago. In another 42, he’ll be 115. Even his prodigious reserves of energy and stamina might struggle with a granite-tough full-force stadium rock revue at that age. So this hint at a next time feels significant – dare one say, hopeful.
Springsteen’s recent records have been informed by mortal thoughts, and each tour since the 2008 and 2011 deaths of E Street Band comrades Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons haunted by loss. Earlier at Murrayfield, after an eye-popping E Street revamp of Nebraska’s Johnny 99 from death row blues to uptown honk, the E Street ensemble vacated the stage for a solo Springsteen rendering of Last Man Standing, the keynote song on 2020’s Letter To You, a tribute to the teenage Springsteen’s first band The Castiles, all of whom bar Bruce have passed away. Now, at the evening’s end, he again straps on his battered acoustic guitar and plays out with I’ll See You In My Dreams, an elegy to friends lost along the way, with music the cipher for those left behind to make sense of the emptiness. “The road is long,” he sings, “and seeming without end.”
If the set's underlying theme is sombre, its momentum is perpetually ascendant...
If the set’s underlying theme is sombre, its momentum is perpetually ascendant. An opening segment heavy on hard blast anthems – No Surrender, Prove It All Night, The Promised Land, Darkness On The Edge Of Town, core texts from Springsteen’s baked asphalt interior – permits barely a pause for applause, and certainly no time for chitter-chatter. Ghosts invokes the spirit of the fallen to give the survivors strength to power home its jack-hammering gospel (“By the end of the set we leave no one alive”). There’s respite during Out In The Street when Springsteen and Jake Clemons work the front rows much like The Boss and Big Uncle Clarence once did.
Then, a centrifugal pivot into the band’s genesis loosens everyone up: the jazzy passages of Kitty’s Back and The E Street Shuffle cede the focus to the supplementary horn, percussion and vocal sections, while a cover of The Commodores’ Nightshift sees Bruce entreating the soul gods to transport his physical self through the set’s second half. Via Because The Night’s heady mass singalong, we’re ushered into the upper echelons of Jersey Shore-lore, an apparently limitless succession of melody, memory and Steve Van Zandt guitar changes that starts with Backstreets and ends on Thunder Road.
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No time for the artifice of an encore, no exodus and return – just a brief group bow, then back to work with Born In The USA and a final stretch that wrings the emotions, impels the limbs and lungs to places many of us had forgotten, and remembers to serve that crucial side of E Street cheese, as Springsteen and Van Zandt do their Statler & Waldorf routine. “The only conclusion Steve? No one wants to go home!”
But go we all must, sooner or later. Like a de-scripted Springsteen On Broadway, the 2023 Springsteen & E Street tour is a show that tells a story, one whose ending is clear. Frank Sinatra liked to leave his audiences with a benediction: “May you live to be a hundred and the last voice you hear be mine.” Springsteen’s version – “I’ll see you in my dreams” – feels a little more plausible, and definitely less sinister.
Prior to that lone performance of Last Man Standing, he’d given his one monologue, noting: “At 15, it’s all tomorrows. At 73, it’s a lot of goodbyes… seize every day.” This isn’t religion, it’s only rock’n’roll. And the last man standing could well be its last word.
Setlist:
No Surrender/Ghosts/Prove It All Night/Death To My Hometown/Letter To You/The Promised Land/Out In The Streets/Candy’s Room/Darkness On The Edge Of Town/Kitty’s Back/Nightshift/Mary’s Place/The E Street Shuffle/Johnny 99/Last Man Standing/Backstreets/Because The Night/She’s The One/Wrecking Ball/The Rising/Badlands/Thunder Road/Born In The USA/Born To Run/Bobby Jean/Glory Days/Dancing In The Dark/10th Avenue Freeze-Out/I’ll See You In My Dreams