A FAN’S NOTES

Sparks Fly on E Street

Edmonton! You’ve just seen the earth-shakin’ soul-quakin’ educatin’ motorvatin’ legendary E Street Band!

The fans in our sold-out downtown hockey arena could not dispute that natural fact. While not quite all night, living proof stretched beyond three hours. Ann and I were primed; soul engines tending to baby boomer bladder management. A Bruce Springsteen concert is like “Suspicious Minds”, you can’t walk out.

E Street in Canada is like a confused comet, it comes around irregularly, infrequently. A newsworthy event. I’ve been lucky enough to see Springsteen in person at least once in every city I’ve lived in, a decade or more filling the spaces between encores. And every single time without fail, well, I’ve never seen anything like it since the time before.

Should you attempt to construct a bar graph of Springsteen’s songwriting through fifty years, you’ll find the promises in his romantic escapist sagas tightening into darker concise stories of resignation and despair; his thesaurus lost, red-shifted. There’s the guitar too, that one, the blonde Fender Esquire, the one with the finish worn off, the one he taught to talk. He’s pretty good at ripping off a solo, shredding. And Springsteen can sing, wrap his tongue around a hundred syllables at a thousand miles an hour while staying on key or howl like something out there in the night. He’s no Roy Hobbs with any of these burnished gifts, not the best there ever was. But combine them in concert and you get a real life giant like Willie Mays, arguably the most complete baseballer ever. Springsteen understands the stage is no place to loiter, look sullen and brood. It’s an entertainment platform. It’s the only entertainment platform.

And you’ve got to bring it night after night, after night, after night, after night!

The core of the E Street Band (do I even have to type their names?) is the Platonic ideal of a bar band: they can play anything. The expanded version (I counted around twenty people – my arithmetic has never been exact) is a steroidal soul revue with every member playing their assigned part, working hard to create the illusion of off-the-cuff spontaneity. And there’s always room for that, space built in. The entire travelling circus is presided over by a gleeful ringmaster prone to fits of preaching and giggling; the winking barker aware we know it’s all performance (and what a performance). But we also know this slick tout will not fleece us: there really is a one-of-a-kind attraction inside the big top tent.

Tuesday’s show was late, a year late although it kicked off on time. Our heroes age and encounter health issues, just like us. Up until curtain I was fretting a doctor’s consultation later in the week, blood work and other interesting tests. I was scared he’d tell me I ain’t that young anymore (I was right). Those fears evaporated with “Spirit in the Night” and I settled in beside Ann for the next three hours. Don’t take us back, take us there. E Street is nothing like a walk through your old neighbourhood or down the street the first insanely major love of your life lived on. Tonight, there’s no time for nostalgia or regret because you are awake and alive right here, right now. Besides, the lockdown-stymied Letter to You is the best full band album since 2002’s The Rising. That record’s theme, the intimations of mortality in the title track, “Last Man Standing” and “I’ll See You in My Dreams” coloured the night. Even the lights-on rave “Glory Days” poignantly surprised because while the lyrics don’t change, your interpretation does. It’s okay to grieve, it’s okay to look back, just don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line.

Steve! I think these people are tired! I think they wanna go home! (Steve mugs, shakes his head, No!) Steve! I think, I think maybe we’ve got another song! Just, you know, maybe, one left!

I’ve heard that one before. I hope to hear it again soon.  

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is a little dusty, but up to date. New fiction coming in 2025 provided I stop fussing with the damn manuscript; it can be less imperfect.