Bruce Springsteen’s Tour de Force

LONDON—I have seen rock ‘n’ roll’s past, and its name is still Bruce Springsteen. I have seen Springsteen half a dozen times over five decades, indoors and outdoors, with and without the E Street Band, from the rafters and from the side of the stage. His albums have bored me for decades. I cannot stand his fake-Okie folk singer routine, with its mock-rambling raconteuring. My toes curl at his podcasting with Barack Obama. But his show at London’s Wembley Stadium on July 25 was the best Springsteen concert I have ever seen. He has made the most of future past.

I went with low expectations and high ideals. I bought the tickets because I want to give my children an idea of what rock music had once been, and what it still was when I was their age. I have invested thousands of dollars in our homeschool of rock. This bank-breaking curriculum has lately included hail-and-farewell family excursions to see Elton John, Van Morrison, and Paul McCartney. I expected an extended evening of musical Bidenism. Instead, we got rock ‘n’ roll’s RFK Jr.: cultish, throaty, cross-generational, defying time and reality.

Springsteen is 74 years old. For years, he struggled with feelings of fakeness and inauthenticity. Now, he seems less like himself than ever, yet clearly happier than ever in his own skin, uncannily taut as it is. In 1985, he sang of wanting to change "my clothes, my hair, my teeth." He has done all three. Age has not withered him. It has given him a set of pearly gnashers, tightened his once-lined cheeks, restored his quiff to its cockerel splendor, and given him a ripped, slim-gym bod he never had before. We are told this is the result of eating one meal a day. It must be testosterone on toast.

Springsteen no longer dresses like a mechanic auditioning for the Village People, either. He wears a tie and waistcoat, like an undertaker in a Western, only with Doc Marten’s, which are easy on the bunions if you’re doing a three-hour show. This live marathon recapitulates the arc of his career, which itself recapitulates the story of rock. A brief hour of gripping, energetic rock ‘n’ roll leads to a sagging musical midlife of aimless, folk-infused tedium—and then the long goodbye, a final hour of singalong ecstasy, with 80,000 people howling along to songs that are 40 or 50 years old.

For decades, Springsteen’s shows were deformed by a kind of musical elephantiasis. The E Street Band were always ornate, but they were punchy; see the online footage of them at a theater in Passaic, N.J., in 1978. Their delivery inflated along with the scale of their concerts, first in arenas in 1980, then in stadiums after 1984. This came in part from Springsteen’s laudable attempt to reach the back of the arena, and then the back of the stadium. But it was also technical.

When you play loudly on a theater stage, you can pretty much hear the other musicians without needing monitor speakers. The rhythm section can literally play together, organically. But on bigger stages, you need monitors. The sound undergoes an infinitesimal delay as it travels to the monitors, and another, longer delay as it travels to the PA system. The musical term for an infinitesimal delay is "syncopation," but this is merely a drag on the feel. It’s why the impact of a collective performance becomes diffused on big stages. The musicians struggle to play to each other or play together. You’re playing along to the speakers in the floor or, more recently, the mini-monitor in your ear, on your own.

In a stadium, most of us can’t see the performers’ faces. The solution, screens at the side of the stage, only works in small arenas. Light travels faster than sound. If you’re sitting on the halfway-line of a stadium, the pictures reach you faster than the music. This is disorientating and alienating, a constant reminder that other, wealthier people are sitting or standing further forward and enjoying synchronized sound and vision. The performer’s best recourse is to decouple sound and images, for instance by projecting video onto the screen as Paul McCartney does, or to equalize the distance between the cheap seats and the stage by getting everyone to dance. One way to do that, Springsteen knew from his bar-band days, is to play long jams and never stop. Hence the delirious circuits of the "Detroit Medley" and the 20-minute versions of "Rosalita" and "Ramrod."

The other way is to keep the songs short, fast, and loud, deliver them in the wave-your-hands stadium style, drop the endless jams, and also drop two other aspects that only work in small theaters: tedious solo acoustic sequences and ruminatory monologues in the key of Martin Scorsese. This is what Springsteen is now doing, and it works. I don’t much care for his three openers ("Lonesome Day," "Seeds," "My Love Will Not Let You Down"), but their effect was like an elephant stampede with a five-piece horn section and a quartet of backing singers. The whole stadium was on its feet. Old dance numbers such as "Spirit in the Night" and "The E Street Shuffle" have a spring in their heels again. Rockers such as "Promised Land" and "No Surrender" have regained their muscle.

To keep up, Springsteen has sped up, modifying his vocal delivery and guitar playing. For years, he struggled to belt out a younger man’s words in their original phrasing, long notes and high notes and all. That meant playing the songs at a slower and slower pace. The band sounded as cumbrous as a dying dinosaur and Springsteen’s protestations of youthful ardor like its death agony. Now, the harder-faster approach allows Springsteen to hit most of the notes, but in a shorter span of time and with much shorter phrasing. Instead of flailing at his guitar, he strums actual rhythm patterns across the beat. The old dog has finally learned some old tricks.

Everything is lighter, everything lands harder, everything fits again. The E Street Band always were a mighty machine, smoothly switching gears between the styles and the decades, but now the Boss has taken his foot off the brake. Stevie van Zandt starts "Reason To Believe" with Norman Greenbaum’s "Spirit in the Sky" riff from 1969, settles back into John Lee Hooker’s original "Boogie Chillun" feel from 1948, and then the band storm forward. The refrain to "Atlantic City" is the lick with which Clarence Clemons ended his solo on "Badlands," but "Atlantic City" plays it Celtic while "Badlands" plays it R&B. It’s unforced, because American music developed naturally, but they play it hard.

Now that Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson are gone, the E Street Band are the last of the giants. The only weak link is the tenor saxophonist, Jake Clemons, literally a "nepo baby" in the manner of the Renaissance papacy as he’s the nephew of the late Clarence. Young Clemons has none of Old Clemons’s charisma, and not much of his timing either. His playing and stage presence are flat-footed. When he mimics Clarence’s rooting and tooting note for note, it sounds joyless and tinny. When he attempts his own lines, they fall flat. I suppose this is the price of keeping the flame, or the myth, or whatever it is Springsteen believes is the metaphysical purpose of what he’s doing.

Springsteen’s mission was always to embody his art, or at least his craft—rock ’n’ roll never quite became an art, and Springsteen is nothing if not a craftsman. This commitment to the past is what excited Jon Landau when he saw Springsteen at the Harvard Square Theater in Cambridge, Mass., in 1974. "I have seen rock ’n’ roll’s future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen," Landau wrote. He became Springsteen’s manager shortly afterwards. Landau’s influence seems to have driven Springsteen’s futile but lucrative efforts to keep up with the present. Born in the USA is a monument to the 1980s radio sound. In the wilderness years that followed, Springsteen wandered alone, his only companions a drum machine, a synthesizer, and a personal chef. At least he has never committed the heresy of aiming for the future. He has kept the faith in the past, and keeps it in the past even now.

How late it is. As the audiences at the German concerts of Springsteen’s European tour no doubt discussed at the concessions stand, Springsteen has arrived at what Theodor Adorno, writing on Beethoven in 1937, called Spätsstil, "Late Style." This, like much else on the night, should be technically impossible. Rock cannot mature. It is forever young, so it can only get old. We saw this with Springsteen after Born in the USA. The extroversion of youth gave way to the reflective introversion that the German historian A.E. Brinkmann called Altersstil, "Old Style" and Springsteen fans recognize as the Tunnel of Love era. The ringing guitars fell silent. Synthesizer pads cushioned The Boss’s musical backside as he reclined on a palanquin of self-pity. It sounded sad, and it didn’t look good—as Adorno said, "ultimately the content of art always consists in mere appearance." Springsteen’s new hair and teeth are the visual counterpart to a more important alteration. By changing the aural appearance of his songs, he changes their content, because the content of rock is primarily emotional.

Fourteen songs pass before the E Street Band get a breather with a cover of The Commodores’ "Nightshift" and prove that, should Bruce lose it once more and sack the lot of them like he did in the late 1980s, they will never be short of a wedding gig. After that, the band cruise through "Racing in the Street," and leave the stage for "Last Man Standing," a ballad which elicits the evening’s sole monologue. In 1985, I saw Springsteen play "Racing in the Street" at the old Wembley Stadium from roughly the same spot as the one I sat in at the new Wembley Stadium this time. The bootleg from 1985 confirms that Roy Bittan was a more subtle pianist then, that everyone talked amongst themselves during Springsteen’s three-minute intro monologue, and that Springsteen’s voice was stronger then. The same goes for "Backstreets." Springsteen cannot hit the final howl, but the sound is better now, and—crucially—the performers handle the stadium better.

Late Style, should it exist at all, is a formal reckoning, a focusing of fading strength, a deepening of technical engrossment. As the latter is impossible in rock music, the marshaling of strength counts for more. The tour’s slogan is "Only the strong survive." Springsteen’s devastating final sequence shows how he gains from swapping the marathon slog for high-intensity interval workouts. One signature of Late Style, Adorno wrote, was the "unabashedly primitive accompaniment" to the first theme of Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 110. We heard it in a fast-and-furious "Because the Night," the thunderous trio of "She’s The One," "Wrecking Ball," and "The Rising," and then the one-two of "Badlands" and "Thunder Road." No one alive can deliver a sequence of classics like this with such intensity—including Bruce Springsteen as he now is, in his eighth decade.

"Touched by death, the hand of the master sets free the masses of material that he used to form," Adorno wrote. A quick breather on "Land of Hope and Dreams," then the combination punches ("Born to Run," "Bobby Jean," "Dancing in the Dark," "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out") and the knockout of "Twist and Shout" (in Bruce’s end is his beginning). I left before the reviving sponge of the solo acoustic "I’ll See You in My Dreams," because I’m out when Bruce straps on his harmonica neck-brace, but I hear it was moving if you like it mournful.

This must be what Adorno meant by the "explosive force of subjectivity in the late work." It breaks the formal bonds of the music and the memories of old recordings. It turns a stadium into a club. It makes the old sound and feel like the young. This late-life subjectivity erupts "in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art." Its immediacy is the greatest illusion of all. Springsteen still has the magician’s ability to manipulate our sense impressions, to convince us for a moment that what cannot be true is real. Yet his faith in the "willing suspension of disbelief" cannot last forever; the E Street Band are still largely the same players as they were in 1975. See him—and while you’re at it, hear them—while you still can.

The American leg of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band’s 2024 world tour starts in Pittsburgh on August 15.

Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

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