Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band perform their second of two concerts at the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto on Nov. 6. Springsteen performs at the RDS Arena in Dublin, Ireland in 2023.Rob DeMartin/Supplied
On the first Sunday of November, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band were obligated by statute or at least societal convention to turn back the hands of time. To wind things back to the 1970s, well, that was Springsteen’s call.
After opening Sunday’s concert at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena to the bopping Bo Diddley beat of She’s the One from 1975, Springsteen and his 17-piece rock-and-soul battleship stepped into Prove It All Night, a pledge from 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town. High energy, big sound, hot damn – arena music as if broadcast from a record company billboard on Sunset Boulevard.
All that was missing was Springsteen’s old T-shirt, leather jacket and hungry eyes. (He wore black jeans, white shirt, black vest and a burgundy tie, with black wrappings on his right hand and left wrist for support.)
He invited his wing-man rhythm guitarist Steven Van Zandt over to his microphone. Van Zandt wore more scarves than you’d find at a Stevie Nicks Everything Must Go Sale. “Yeah,” he yelled into the mic. “Yeah,” his boss did the same in response. They traded yeahs a few more times before Springsteen squeezed a number of screaming notes out of his butterscotch blond Telecaster. (Leo Fender’s electric guitar ideas still hold up.) Lead guitarist Nils Lofgren did most of the heavy lifting after that.
Springsteen and E Street play the same venue again on Wednesday. Rest days are built into the itinerary – the current run of Canadian dates was postponed a year ago because of the man’s health issues. For Springsteen, at 75, proving it all night is still on the table. Proving it every night is not.
The concert ran 28 songs and nearly three hours long. The current tour began on Feb. 1, 2023, in Tampa. Because of illnesses in the band and Springsteen’s own peptic ulcer, two dozen dates from last year were rescheduled for this year. This year, four more concerts were postponed because of issues related to Springsteen’s voice.
His singing in Toronto? Scratchy as a cat in a burlap sack but strong enough to bark the rhyme of “death trap” with “suicide rap,” and “you can’t start a fire” with “this gun’s for hire.”
During the eight-song encore set, between the horn-happy, soul-rocked Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out and a cover of the warhorse Twist and Shout, Springsteen said, seemingly to himself, “It’s too late to stop now.” Those words are the title of a 1972 book written by former Rolling Stone writer and long-time Springsteen producer-manager Jon Landau, who nicked the phrase from Van Morrison’s Into the Mystic.
Morrison wanted to rock our gypsy souls, “just like way back in the days of old.” Springsteen’s goals were the same.
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He also wanted to pay tribute to the late sax player Clarence Clemons and the late organist Danny Federici, long-time E Streeters. Their photos were shown on the four giant screens hovering over the stage and arena floor. (Clemons’s nephew, Jake Clemons, is the band’s current reed man.) The song Ghosts and the night-closing solo-acoustic send-off I’ll See You in My Dreams addressed camaraderie and mortality.
Both those songs come from the 2020 album Letter to You, as does Last Man Standing, which Springsteen strummed in a muted spotlight. It refers to George Theiss, his bandmate in the first real band he was a part of – the Castiles, in the late 1960s. Of that group, Springsteen is the last man still alive.
“As we get old, death is a part of life,” he told the sold-out audience. “Grief is just the price we pay for having loved well.”
People die and band mates die. Dreams, too – American ones.
“We’ve got a big day coming on Tuesday – pray for us,” said Springsteen, a public supporter of Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris. He introduced Long Walk Home as a “small prayer for my country.” It is a lament for the way things were.
Born in the U.S.A. was not performed, but Badlands, the lead track off Darkness on the Edge of Town, was. “Lights out tonight,” Springsteen sang, “trouble in the heartland.” He did not mention Donald Trump but did sing “Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king; And a king ain’t satisfied, till he rules everything.”
He performed Born to Run after Jungleland and before Bobby Jean. The song was released in 1975, a year after rock critic Landau proclaimed Springsteen the “rock and roll future” in a piece for the Boston alternative weekly The Real Paper, titled “Growing Young with Rock and Roll.”
Now rock ‘n’ roll is growing old. Are kids today tramps like us? Do they still wrap their legs around velvet rims and strap their hands across engines? Do they even have a chance to “break this trap” any more?
Please don’t tell me Springsteen’s best mythologizing was for nothing.
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena, Nov. 6; Ottawa’s Canadian Tire Centre, Nov. 9; Winnipeg’s Canada Life Centre, Nov. 13; Calgary’s Scotiabank Saddledome, Nov. 16; Edmonton’s Rogers Place, Nov. 19; Vancouver’s Rogers Arena, Nov. 22.