Review: Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band at Allphones Arena, Sydney (19 February 2014)

This one felt like it was going to be a cursed gig. We barely managed to survive all sorts of craziness on Wednesday afternoon. It was one of those situation where it seemed that anything that could go wrong did go wrong!

Sydney received it’s first big dump of rain in a few weeks, coming down heavily enough to cause flash flooding in some places, which wreaked havoc on the roads. If that wasn’t enough, a train hit a person near Croydon, right at the busiest time of the peak, on the busiest rail line in the city. Then, to make matters even worse, there was a signal failure on the Olympic Park Sprint line, which halted the only train service out to Allphones Arena for long enough that fans got nervous enough about missing the opening of the set that they braved the pouring rain and walked.

Getting into Allphones Arena and taking our seats was a major relief. True to tour form, though the ticket said 7.30pm, Springsteen and the E Street Band were nowhere to be seen, and there were hundreds of people still filing into the cavernous building. Surely, someone would have told the Boss and let him know that people were going to be coming in later than usual. Even as the first song fired up, there were fans still struggling down from the station, their commute completely collapsing under the weight of the Sydney Trains issues around Croydon.

When the Boss did come on, he immediately fired up the E Street Band – sounding as powerful as ever under the closed roof – for an off-the-hook cover of ‘Friday On My Mind’, a classic Australian song. Everyone was on their feet immediately, because everyone knows the chorus to that one, right? There were times during that first song where it seemed Springsteen waited for us to carry him along. Sure, why not? He couldn’t have chosen a more popular song with which to start the set.

I was at the show with two people who’d never seen Springsteen before, and only had a limited knowledge of his music – think ‘Dancing in the Dark’, ‘Born to Run’ and ‘Born in the USA’ – and watching them as the set rolled through a great ‘Out in the Street’, a hilarious anecdote about the toilet in his hotel room that led into an epic ‘Something in the Night’, and the powerful one-two punch of ‘High Hopes’ and ‘Just Like Fire Would’ was incredible. 

The way their eyes lit up, the way they cheered and screamed through Tom Morello’s solos, when Bruce went crowd surfing, when he skolled someone’s beer…I knew there were two more converts in the house. It says something about a performer that people who don’t know most of the songs being played expertly before them can still be so impressed that, after three hours, they both told me that it was the best concert they’d ever seen. 

For my part, I didn’t think it was quite as good as the full “Born in the USA” album show on Saturday night in Melbourne, but hearing the epic “Darkness on the Edge of Town” from start to finish was great. It’s a real album of hope out of the grimness of the American heartland, fired up by ‘Badlands’ carried along by ‘Racing in the Street’ and anchored by the title track that had sounded so good with Eddie Vedder on Saturday night in Melbourne.

Sadly, there was a missing member of the E Street Band tonight. I noticed it immediately, and soon Bruce confirmed that Jake Clemons had flown home to America because his father had passed away on Monday. Stepping into a very difficult breach was Eddie ‘Kingfish’ Manion, who did a solid job on all of Jake’s solos, and was given an encouraging and appreciative round of applause each time. I don’t envy that guy his job, but he did it well.

It was great to hear ‘Land of Hope and Dreams’ at the end of the main set. It’s a completely different sort of song to the one it followed: the Morello/Springsteen epic ‘Ghost of Tom Joad’, being almost gospel in it’s makeup. Springsteen really gives it his all, and there’s barely a break – the lights are down for only a few seconds – before the four guitarists stand together centre stage.

You hear the opening riff, and suddenly it becomes something that you know well. At first, I thought I might’ve been hearing things, but no, it is the INXS classic “Don’t Change”, and although it isn’t quite like watching the late, great Michael Hutchence up there, Springsteen knocks it out of the park, again benefiting from an enthusiastic 18,000-strong choir. As far as Australian covers on this tour go, I think Sydney got the best of the bunch. I wonder if the Boss caught any of the INXS miniseries?

After ‘Born to Run’, ‘Dancing in the Dark’, ‘Tenth Avenue Freeze Out’ and ‘Shout’, Springsteen watched the E Street Band leave the stage before coming back with an acoustic guitar. He plucked a sign from the crowd: it was someone’s twenty-third birthday, and that lucky person was going to get their wish tonight. The Boss sung ‘Surprise, Surprise’, then made thousands of other people happy by way of a brilliantly mournful ‘Dream Baby Dream’ complete with a wailing organ track. Three hours, just like that. Disappeared in an instant. These gigs always go by so quickly. Too quickly!

Once again, the Boss raised the bar. One more show to go, Saturday night in the Hunter Valley and I have a feeling he’ll raise it once more there, too.

Review: Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band at Hope Estate Winery (22 February 2014)

One last chance for me to witness the tour de force that is Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, and it came in the middle of the Hunter Valley, at Hope Estate Winery, which has seemingly become the go-to performance venue for big-name acts over the years. When I got up there, I could see why. It’s a beautiful spot, with a nice sloping lawn and room for many thousands, and on a pretty warm and clear summer night, there was a clear sense of anticipation.

Something exciting was going to happen. And so it did, as soon as the E Street Band appeared. We know them all like friends now, and we wave to them when they take the stage: Max, Nils, Soozie, Garry, the Professor, Jake, Tommy and Stevie, who is without doubt a fan favourite, and a welcome addition after being MIA filming his TV show Lillehammer during the 2013 Wrecking Ball Tour.

Then came the star of the show, Bruce, who looked pretty relaxed for a Saturday night, and apparently ready to rumble, opting to take the stage without the usual waistcoat and tie. Instead, it’s a rock ‘n’ roll black t-shirt, guitar in hand, and doubtless impressed by the incredible surrounding of Hope Estate – I certainly was – and the sea of nearly eighteen thousand people (which honestly looked and sounded like a lot more than that) waiting for his arrival, and now cheering it.

Three shows in, I’d heard just about everything I wanted, with the twin notable exceptions of ‘Pay Me My Money Down’ and ‘American Land’, and Saturday night’s set list proved to be something of a greatest hits affair. At least, my interpretation of what a Springsteen greatest hits might be – wildly different, I’m sure, to the guy next to me at the gig. It was great to hear ‘Murder Incorporated’ and ‘The River’, two awesome songs that I’d never heard live before. ‘Shacked and Drawn’ is always great, but perhaps my favourite part of the main set was the double-shot from the Born in the USA album, ‘Working on the Highway’ and ‘Darlington County’.

That’s not to say that I didn’t yell out enthusiastically throughout ‘No Surrender’, which is probably my favourite Springsteen song (or at least equal with ‘Jungleland’ and the song that is apparently The Boss’s homage to Steve Van Zandt, ‘Bobby Jean’, both of which appeared early, as did a searing version of ‘Badlands’. It’s my favourite song from the Darkness on the Edge of Town album and a great live track.

For a while there, it was like a week ago in Melbourne, when Born in the USA was played in full. Perhaps a chance at the rarely-seen title track? I wasn’t going to bet against it, but the anti-American anthem didn’t get a run. That’s okay with me; as popular as th song is, there’s much better stuff in Springsteen’s catalogue. And I was still holding out for ‘American Land’ or ‘Pay Me My Money Down’.

Whilst Springsteen didn’t get around the crowd as much as he did at Allphones Arena on Wednesday night, he proved to still be a man of the people, visiting the crowd a few times throughout the nearly-three hour set. He borrowed someone’s cowboy hat – and dubbed it his “Magic Hat” – during ‘Working on the Highway’/’Darlington County’ – and uncorked one of the many hundreds of bottles of Hope Estate wine mid-song, and proceeded to give those in the vicinity an alcoholic bath they won’t soon forget. 

I won’t soon forget watching Bruce stick his face right in the camera, nor his hilarious anecdote about his elderly mother, her iPhone and the FaceTime conversations that they have every morning. For a guy who was pretty talkative, at least by his own standards, in the two previous shows, he barely said a word Saturday night until the encore. On this night, it was all about the music.

As the show crept towards it’s end, with the twin anthems ‘Born to Run’ and ‘Dancing in the Dark’ before ‘Tenth Avenue Freeze Out’, a raucous ‘Shout’ and the full E Street Band treatment of one of my favourites, ‘Thunder Road’, I felt myself getting sad. Four shows (including two absolute belters in Melbourne) had gone by so quickly, though there are plenty of things I’m never going to forget from what was easily the best week of concerts in my life.

When you think about how old the Boss is – sixty-fucking-five, as he told us in Sydney on Wednesday night – there’s a good chance that we won’t see the E Street Band and it’s legendary front man on Australian shores again. If that’s the case, at least he went out with a giant BANG!

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!