Glory Days (and nights) with Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band (Melbourne 2014)

If there is a performing artist (and band) currently playing concerts anywhere in the world that are longer, more emotional and epic, longer and spanning more different genres and decades than those delivered  by Bruce Springsteen & his mighty E Street Band, then I'd like to know whom. Putting forward the evidence of Saturday and Sunday nights at AAMI Park in Melbourne, I'd bet that there isn't.

Springsteen's 2014 return is a welcome one, after a run of record-breaking shows on the 2013 Wrecking Ball Tour, which garnered rave reviews from even the crusiest and crabbiest of reviewers, delivering concerts of nearly three hours in length, zipping back to his earliest work and ensuring that a lot of more recent material was given a work-out, too. I saw The Boss twice last year, and I honestly didn't think that - given his age, the distance between New Jersey and Australia, and the fact that it had been ten long years since he'd last been seen on these shores - that we'd ever see arguably the greatest frontman of all time and his super band on stage on Australian soil again.

Fast forward eleven months, and they're back, the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, hard-rocking, Viagra-taking, history-making, legendary E Street Band and their superstar leader who is still going strong thirty-odd years after his first big record, Born to Run in 1975. The voice is still there, the band, despite having lost a couple of members along the way, is red-hot, and there's a rock and roll lesson to be learned by other performers each night Springsteen and his band take the stage.

Saturday and Sunday nights' shows at AAMI Park in Melbourne might prove to be the very best of the tour. Not just because of the cameos and unique set lists - more on them later - but because the E Street Band, seventeen members strong, has the power to create a wall of sound like I've never heard from any other band. Steve Van Zandt is back after television commitments kept him away from Australia a year ago, and his replacement last year, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello is back, too. Watching Morello’s unique and spellbinding style was one of the highlights of last year, along with his searing duet with Springsteen on ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’.

The members of the mammoth E Street Band are on top of their game at the moment! Springsteen, Nils Lofgren, Morello and Van Zandt are a guitar foursome (sometimes a group of five when Soozie Tyrell is playing her acoustic guitar) you simply have to see to believe. The recent addition of a horn section, anchored by Jake Clemons, nephew of the late Clarence ‘Big Man’ Clemons, adds punch depth to every song, as do three backing singers, a percussionist, the piano of Professor Roy Bittan, the organ of Charles Giordano and the anchors, the rhythm section: Garry Tallent on bass and Mighty Max Weinberg on thumping away on the drums. 

The E Streeters are a supremely-talented group of musicians who can play any given song at any given time, even the most obscure sign requests out there, like ‘Factory’ and ‘Jole Blon’, which were plucked out of the pit and given the big band treatment on Saturday night. Even Springsteen was impressed by the obscurity of the requests, and told us so.

Saturday night...where to begin? How about at the beginning, a steamy summer night in the rock capital of Australia. It seemed like we were in for something special…and we were. 32,000 fans cheered as one when The Boss took the stage and announced that he had a special guest coming on to kick-start proceedings. That guest? None other than Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder, who joined Springsteen on a cover of AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell’ and then ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’. Hell of a way to start. Sunday's show started pretty well, too, with a heavy version of 'Born in the USA' to set the crowd alight.

What will make these Melbourne shows forever unique - and me forever glad that I was able to be at both - was what happened mid-set. Apparently on a whim on both nights,Springsteen announced that he and the band would play a full album start to finish. He's done it a few times at European and United States shows, but never before in Australia, so there was a little Springsteen history on top of a sizable double-dose of Springsteen magic.

Saturday night, it was Born in the USA with it's hidden gems like 'I'm on Fire', 'Working on the Highway' and my favourite, 'No Surrender.' and Sunday was Born to Run, with 'Thunder Road', 'She's the One' and 'Night', amongst others. So, I'm a happy man, having heard my two favourites 'No Surrender' and 'Jungeland' live, along with so many other songs that enter my Top 10 list. I can pretty much die happy.

On both nights, Morello got his time to shine on ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’, mesmerising everyone with his guitar solo, extracting sounds from his axe more akin to what a DJ produces from a turntable.  He deservedly got a giant cheer during band introductions each night, and if we're lucky enough to see Springsteen in Australia again, I don't quite know how the Boss is going to be able to leave Morello at home. He's become a big part of the band now.

The talented singer Cindy Mizelle had her moment on ‘Shackled and Drawn’ on Saturday night, and Nils Lofgren showed everyone that, even if he’s somewhat the forgotten guitarist on E Street, he can still crank out a blistering solo, doing so whilst somehow managing to be able to spin around and around in tight circles, dizzying stuff. It defied belief, like so much else over the last two nights.

Springsteen seemed possessed on Saturday night, even admitting that it seemed like he’d been inhabited by his thirty-year-old self, as the set roared through three hours towards a climactic end, a searing version of Rosalita’, a rockabilly classic ‘Seven Nights to Rock’ and a cover of the Johnny O’Keefe hit ‘Shout’ before the E Street Band left the stage, so that Bruce could don the acoustic guitar and a mouthorgan for the classic ‘Thunder Road’. 

On Sunday night, he was in more of a conversational mood than I've ever seen him before. He's a guy who prefers to not even break between most songs, instead transitioning from one to the other, and now he's sitting down on the edge of the stage talking about his childhood before singing 'Growin' Up'? It was pretty special. As were his words about Nelson Mandela, South Africa and Pete Seeger before 'We Are Alive' on Sunday night.

Then there's the closers, 'Born to Run', 'Dancing in the Dark' and 'Tenth Avenue Freeze Out' and what more can one say than to label them as intensely epic. There we were, with thirty thousand of our closest friends, all together because of a love of the musical legend on the stage in front of us, belting out the words like we were at a pub somewhere. The opening bars of 'Dancing' and 'Born to Run' evoke a sort of euphoria that I've never felt at a non-Springsteen concert. Everyone dancing and singing and clearly having the time of their lives...no wonder they call him The Boss.

It’s hard to properly put into words what sort of a performance this way. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, it did, and Springsteen has raised the bar pretty high ahead of a midweek show in Sydney, and two more in the Hunter Valley next weekend. I don't know how he's going to top his Melbourne run at these upcoming NSW shows, but I'm looking forward to being there to find out!