Red Bank,
that's the site of the old Carlton Theater,
now the Count Basie...
where back in the '70s, I'd play with the early E Street Band.
I used to walk these streets on Saturdays in the '60s
when they were filled with teenagers.
And my first band, The Castiles, and I would spend the mornings in Freehold
getting our hair just right.
How we used to dream of playing in front of screaming crowds.
Since I was 16,
playing live has been a deep and lasting part of who I am
and how I justify my existence here on Earth.
A lot of it comes together when I count off the band.
Recently, when the world shut down,
no live music, no audiences.
So I made a promise to myself, to my fans, and to the band
that if we got through this,
I'd throw the biggest party I could.
Let's go!
This would be our first tour in six years.
Now that's a lot longer break than I planned.
So we got together on a quiet, cold January morning in Red Bank
to begin our rehearsals.
There are two things I try to accomplish in rehearsal.
One, you've got to shake the cobwebs off the band,
off of all those years of inactivity.
And two, you've got to find your set list.
Now that set list is going to communicate the story
you are trying to tell your audience this time around.
And the 25 songs I chose to focus on
would complete the narrative for what I wanted to say,
and it would let the audience know who I am
at this point in my work life.
Notes?
Notes, notes.
Getting ready to write it down.
No Surrender.
Ghosts.
Letter To You.
Promised Land.
Last Man Standing.
Backstreets.
She's The One.
Badlands.
Glory Days.
Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.
I'll See You In My Dreams.
And that's the end of that set.
This is 28 songs and I think on the last tour...
That's easily three.
Last tour, what... I think that's about how many we did.
- That's three hours. - Yeah.
After six years, I thought it might, uh, scale it back a little bit.
Well done, man!
- We can't do that! - Yeah, amen to that.
Can't disappoint the fans, goddammit!
When we rehearsed in Red Bank at this small Black Box theater,
of course, it was wonderful on a reunion basis.
We hadn't been in the same room, all of us,
since the recording of Letter to You.
I think everybody's mindset was,
you know, we're gonna go on tour.
But what was then four years since the last tour
wound up being six years.
I hadn't seen everybody together for a very long time.
And I'm always taken back by the deep,
profound sense of camaraderie that you feel
when you see everybody all together.
You know, it's 50 years
that this group has been together.
And, of course, we're all in that zone.
We don't know how long things can go on and what can happen to anybody.
We're lucky that we have the core band.
The only thing we have to fear
is destroying the legacy we've made so far.
Uh, so, Doug, you get those chords?
E minor.
A little bit concerned when we started rehearsals.
Um, you know, it was all a little bit casual, you know?
The initial rehearsals is just the core band
getting our sea legs with the songs.
So you got, like, 40-somethin' songs.
Three new albums we've never played live.
Max is saying that we changed the arrangement for the live?
- Yes. - Oh.
Yeah, the chart is wrong.
- The chart is wrong. - No wonder I don't know it!
Six years, seven years is a really long time
to not really play together.
It became fairly apparent
that we were playing everything extremely slow.
We played She's The One so slow, it was a ballad.
People would expect musicians in their 70s
to play that loping thing, which would be unfortunate.
Tempos were so damn slow,
I couldn't play the damn song.
I can't play... I can't play that fast.
I can't pay... play that slow.
You know, I, I only play it one way and it's...
That's all I can do.
He had articulated to me in a phone call earlier,
he wanted this show to be a real rock show.
And we had the responsibility to those audience members
who hadn't seen Bruce and the E Street Band in 1976.
You've gotta transmit that excitement.
We had to recall some of that manic,
out-of-control-way we played, 50 years ago.
Really get back to where we were.
We only rehearsed, I think, six days.
We have new horn players, we have new singers,
and it's a big band and a lot of moving parts
and I am completely anal
and I care about every note that everyone does, you know?
That's just my thing.
Yeah, good. Yeah, I know.
Remember in E Street Shuffle, we did a thing where
Max and, uh, it used to be Everett, of course
- did the back and forth... - Oh yeah, on E Street Shuffle.
- ...so we wanna do that tomorrow. - Trading eights.
- Yeah, trading the eights. - I told Anthony...
We had a bigger band, some of the people I didn't know.
Hold right there.
- We're varying the last lick. - Yeah.
Let's go on. Uh, Max, do the... tail end there?
One, two, three.
First rehearsal, I was nervous, you're excited.
There's a whirlwind of emotions.
I made it a point to go over and introduce myself.
Anthony are a fantastically talented percussionist.
It was the first time he's played with us.
We started talking about musicians that we know,
and we spoke for about 30, 40 minutes.
That was all before we played a note.
So by the time we started playing, it felt very natural.
So I said to Anthony...
...well, one thing you'll never hear anyone say to Bruce,
"Gee, that's not the way we rehearsed it."
It doesn't matter.
It's what's happening now that matters.
This takes experience.
We heard about this guy Bruce,
and we went down to see who this guy was.
I had to be with Bruce.
Before I met Bruce,
I was very successful in the club circuit.
I realized that you had to,
one, start doing original material
and two, had to have a strong leader.
Bruce came along, you know, he didn't like me at first
and that was okay, I stayed busy.
Eventually, he came around and said, "Okay, I need you."
We finally started playing.
And it's been since January of '71.
Long, long time.
I grew up in a Baptist church.
My mom and my dad were very, very religious people,
and they were really stunned with my decision
to give up my job as a counselor in a reform school
to go to follow this man, and play rock and roll.
When Max and I joined, the band came together
in a very different way.
Prior to us, it was more eclectic, I think.
Very jazz orientated with Dave Sancious and Vini Lopez.
Blues, R&B, rock hard, pop, that was our wheelhouse.
I'd only been in the band about two weeks
and Bruce said, "Bring it down."
I-I just got quieter.
And he took me aside later and was like,
"When I say 'bring it down, ' hit that snare drum,
just bop as hard as you can."
He was teaching me his brand of the stuff
that he absorbed from seeing Sam & Dave and James Brown.
I'd been looking for a situation like that.
I was so disgusted personally with what,
you know, rock had become in the early '70s.
Where's all that great show business stuff?
So Bruce brought that back.
Which is why he had me join the band.
He wanted to put the guitar down and front the band.
Which was a huge step.
I can't even begin to explain how big a step that is
for a guy I grew up with
that was the most introverted guy you'd ever met in your life.
For him to go from that to, like, the world's greatest entertainer...
This is not by accident.
Bruce loves to be surrounded by a family of musicians
and other talents who he can depend on.
And occasionally, we have to make a substitution,
a tragic pair of deaths.
Well, the loss of Danny and Clarence
were terrible blows to the band.
First off, they were both relatively young and playing great
and, well, they both died of natural causes.
Danny contracted melanoma,
and Clarence had a stroke.
But for any band that had been together
with the exact same lineup for 40 years,
there's no getting over that shock or replacing that history.
Now, Clarence and I were very, very close for 40 years.
We were different parts of the same spiritual body.
And the loss of that relationship is simply forever irreplaceable.
Now we've been blessed with Charlie Giordano on organ,
who channels Danny's style and mixes it with his own
and, of course, Jake Clemons, who took the toughest position
to replace in rock and roll,
and miraculously makes it his
while showing respect and love for his uncle,
both in his playing and the great presence
of his spirit on stage.
You never get over the guys you played with for that long.
They're always an integral part of your life
for the rest of your life.
God bless 'em.
Let's try the beginning of Dancing in the Dark. Next one.
These people have such a, such a strong identity
with the saxophone.
Which the presence of horns changes.
You know, you now become a rock and soul band, you know,
rather than just a rock band with a saxophone.
The rehearsals in Red Bank were a refresher course, if you will,
between myself and Curt Ramm,
do most of the arranging for the horn section
and try to prepare ourselves as much as possible
for whatever might come up.
Nobody really sat me down and said, "This is what's gonna happen."
They just put music in front of me.
They had thousands of pages of music for the horn section.
Books this thick.
You know, we might have arrangements,
we might have things worked out,
and he could change something at the drop of a hat.
Bruce, he likes the band to just be a little off balance.
It's part of the finding how we're gonna play these songs now.
It's-it's really a process of alchemy.
It's often times not adding more things,
it's distilling out the things that don't need to be there.
It's not like a horn choir revue.
It seems like we're the rock band, we are at the core,
and they're adding beautiful touches throughout.
Same with the singing.
Out in the Street, you guys go over Out in the Street?
- Yep. We've been out there. - That's good news.
The E Street Band is very structured,
but inside that structure, you have to be really flexible
because he's gonna throw things at you.
Their approach is not quite the same.
Bruce takes the original, and they just start moving it around.
He's the kind of artist that doesn't set perimeters.
You don't know exactly what's coming.
You just go along with what might be in his mind,
and I guess it all gets felt out.
Alright, here we go!
It felt like I was just stepping onto this train that,
that I say that has no brakes.
'Cause it, once it gets going out the station,
it's just like we're nonstop.
A one, two, three, four.
Each tour rehearsal starts out in a small theater.
We settle on the songs, we practice 'em,
we get the band in the groove,
but then we move to a local arena
to address the staging and the pace of the performance,
what will the rhythm of the show be?
The big room also lets you know
that this will all very soon be real.
Now we get to Trenton, it's more about,
okay, when this tune happens, the horns are gonna go
to that spot of the stage.
It's how we're moving through the space of the stage by step.
After that last breakdown...
...singers gonna come up front.
Kind of a run-through
just so that the first time we all play together
in an arena, it's not in front of those people.
The energy really shifts
because now you have to be on point.
That's the time when you go, "Okay,
I better get my act together."
Rehearsals, frankly, were a little on the short side.
Two hours and so forth.
"And I realized," Eh... he's,
he's actually not that into rehearsing," you know?
We can do that again.
Alright, I'm gonna go home, Jon.
You're going? That's all you're gonna do? Um...
There's no sense tiring everybody out. We got it.
Now, the band needed rehearsal,
so Stevie really started to take an active hand
and the band started doing something they...
I don't know that they've ever done,
which is rehearse without Bruce.
In the '70s, Bruce, the band, and myself were obsessive.
Soundcheck is when you're just checking the PA system,
maybe you're using a half an hour to rehearse, no big deal.
He would have the band play continuously
as if it was a loop.
And he and the late Bruce Jackson, they'd walk every row.
Totally obsessive and you know,
I, I understand that, uh, you know, he cares, and that's good,
but...
playing for four hours, the same eight bars,
it's insane.
Now, today he tells the band to keep playing
the way they did in the old days
and he goes out to the soundboard
and he listens for all of two and a half minutes.
And he said to everybody, "That's fantastic.
Don't change a thing."
Bruce has tremendous confidence.
He knows that these guys, they care.
Stop, stop. No, no, no. Right there...
I'm like, man, what I don't want to happen
is the critics or the audience to look at us and say,
"Well, yeah, it's, it's nice, you know,
but these old men are just going through the motions."
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's the riff, right?
After seven years away, you know, who knows what they're gonna get, right?
Right there, right there, right there, right there, uh.
But I wanted to come out and blow their fucking minds.
"I said to him," Listen, man, le-let me, let me go in
and just, you know, tighten up some things."
So he's like, "Okay, yeah,
I'll make you officially the, the music director."
You know, which is, you know, nice, you know.
Whatever, you know,
40 years late, but fine.
I think Bruce said to me,
"Well, we don't want to get too good.
It'll work its way it's way out."
We could rehearse tomorrow.
We don't have to. I don't think so.
He knows exactly what he needs to do
and the time in which he had to do it
before we opened in Tampa.
Because there's a certain percentage
that we're gonna fuck up on anyway.
So...
That's what the people are paying for.
That's what they're paying for.
They wanna see it live!
That means a few mistakes.
Later on, I realized what was happening.
He got what he needed to out of rehearsals,
the structure of the set, warming up his voice
getting it into shape.
And as to pulling the arrangements together,
"I think he's" Well, I got the greatest band in the world,
they'll figure it out."
It was a little dreamlike.
You know, is-is this really happening?
And I looked around, and it was.
This was something that we've all been praying for,
for it to happen.
What you've been hoping for and wishing for
is being manifested before your eyes.
You walk out.
It's quite a beautiful thing
to see these faces with so much joyful expectation.
When we stepped up on that stage in Tampa,
you start to witness how intense, how very personal this show is
for the audience, for us.
You know, these are, these are lasting memories.
The man who was coming up the stairs in Tampa,
he knows exactly who he is.
He knows exactly what he's done.
And he is the maestro.
Come on, Steve.
From the first second, this tour exploded.
All night long!
The audience response was as good or better
as we've ever had.
I couldn't believe the intensity level.
Twin Cities!
Milwaukee!
Boston!
I look in the audience, I see, I see these people are just
so grateful for having this music again.
Looking out in the audience is special.
I catch somebody's eye, and I catch a tear.
I call it a very spiritual show.
This is the church.
The faces in the audience, the entire breadth of people out there.
It's really kind of lifting it into a different realm.
Come on, Steve!
Something changes in a song
when you play it in front of a live audience.
You can't understand your song's possibilities
or the stakes that it can play for
until you count it off in front of your audience.
Now of course, our songs from Letter to You,
they were untested.
I know one thing, they were essential
to the story I wanted to tell this time around.
He came in with this unbelievable song list,
which I don't think we changed it from the first moment it came in.
What did we just do? Surrender.
- Ghost. - Right.
Prove it. The Letter.
He just had it exactly right right from the very beginning.
- Alright. - Let's start with that.
Pick two songs.
It started to emerge that this is all sort of connected.
It's not just 20 or 30 songs thrown together,
it's a building thing.
And it's just gotten more defined, more refined,
more direct.
And I think mention has been made of his experience on Broadway.
Come down and copy the set list right here.
Where you play essentially the same thing every night.
I think that informed what he wanted to do this time.
These songs are interlocked by a certain defiance
and a certain urgency.
There are four songs from the Letter to You album
that provide a certain continuity.
And those songs have occupied the same space in the set list at every show.
They all are connected to feeling the pressure of time
and approaching death.
The subtext is about living your life right now.
Yeah!
Now listen.
Come on!
See, that was quite good.
It's the mighty E Street Band, baby.
What's the surprise?
The start of every show we wait for him backstage.
We get called out of our rooms,
and, uh, we walk onto the backstage area
out of sight from the audience.
He comes in, we all grab hands.
It's not a prayer per se,
it's whatever comes off the top of his head.
Sometimes he'll have a joke,
sometimes it'll be a little solemn,
but for that moment, we're bonding.
One time he said, "This is the place I warmed up
"for the band Chicago and got booed off the stage.
"It will not happen tonight.
Somebody say amen."
Amen.
Woo!
Oh, he was in, like, local bands in Asbury Park
playing clubs playing Top 40.
I saw him play at a place called the Upstage Club.
It was a coffee house that was open till four o'clock in the morning.
And we... this is a place that we'd go to, to like, really get our rocks off.
Touring in the early days, it was not touring,
it was gigging.
We're going out to Westchester, Pennsylvania today
to open for Cheech & Chong.
After 30 minutes, some guy
stole my leather jacket from the dressing room.
It was dangerous not to take your wallet on stage
because if you went back to the "dressing room,"
your wallet wouldn't be there.
We did whatever we could do,
random gigs, clubs, wherever we could set up shop.
We played so many "shot and a beer" bars.
We played a show at a club inside the Bayway Refinery
where the flames come out.
We played a free gig at Damrosch Park,
and there might have been 10 people there.
We were new and the promoters just come out,
and they, they wanna push you around and then, "Yeah, yeah..."
You're on the stage for 45 minutes, they're pulling the plug.
Pull the plug? No, you're not gonna do that.
I think we were delirious for those early tours.
The rides were many, many hours.
We'd pull into a college and go do four-hour show
and then another nine-hour drive.
You realize that you've spent most of your adult life
with these characters.
There's no question how meaningful it is to all of us.
It's a real big core of familiarity and family.
For me, being like the, the new guy in the band at 39 years,
getting together to create great music,
it's one of the rare joys.
At this particular moment in time in our lives,
to be doing this, it's quite a blessing.
I've been performing with this band for 40 years.
With those first performances, it felt so good to be back on stage.
Touring has become a challenge for me.
In 2018, while Bruce and I were doing a play on Broadway,
I was diagnosed with early-stage multiple myeloma.
And this affects my immune system.
So, I just have to be careful what I choose to do
and where I choose to go.
Every once in a while, I come to a show or two,
and I can sing a few songs on stage
and that's been a treat.
That's the new normal for me right now.
And I'm okay with that.
Fire is always fun to sing.
It's very personal in a way.
You can see a side of our relationship that you usually don't get to see.
Being back on stage with Bruce is a blast.
Now I remember those summer nights
down by the Jersey shore.
As the band played, with you in my arms,
we'd move across that floor.
Oh, but then, darling, you went away.
Well, all I've got to say is,
tonight, I don't care if you lied.
Let's dance!
Every night of this tour gives the band
a chance to celebrate.
Tell him this is his last chance
to get his daughter in a fine romance.
The record company, Rosie,
gave me a big, big, big, big, big, big, big advance.
US Tour, there were 31 arena shows.
They were wild. Those shows were incredible.
Come on!
He's having an experience every night.
He is living it.
I would catch Bruce in the gym the morning after our show day.
And I was like, "Okay, this is pretty impressive."
You know, this guy gives out three hours of concert,
next morning he's in the gym.
And I walk in and he goes, "Well, that's-that's how I like to see my guys,
in the gym ready to go."
And then he'll look at me and go,
"You haven't seen anything yet. Wait till we get to Barcelona."
I was like, "Okay."
Said that the first time.
And then he repeated that for a month.
Every time he'd see me, "Barcelona, Anthony."
In Barcelona, Catalans take their music very seriously.
We've had an audience here that's nonstop.
Very loving, warm, exciting,
everything you could ask for in a crowd.
It's been that way for a long time
and it still is.
It's a very warm audience.
It is an audience that accepts you on your terms.
I had never seen an audience like that ever.
There's more singing along,
the chants and those things.
Every single soul is engaged, alive from front to back.
Europeans, they let out their emotions
and their, their excitement out on their sleeves
and-and they let you know instantly.
Right now on this tour,
Bruce is the biggest he's ever been in Europe.
It's a second home for us.
It's magic.
We have been waiting for this with anticipation for...
It's been seven years
since you saw a real E Street, uh, concert in Europe.
Bruce's fan community, I think, is one of the strongest in the world.
There's this sense of unity that unites us all.
His community is like, I think it's on another level.
Some of my best friends, I've met in the pit
at a Springsteen concert.
This year in Barcelona,
to see the band again, all the friends, the crowd,
and we are singing along.
I know people all over Germany, from Switzerland,
from Austria, from Sweden, from England,
it's a big community.
When we're together, we're the best of friends,
we connect, we know each other, we connect with each other.
It's like we have been friends for a lifetime.
We have met for many tours.
We have grown older together
and we've all connected because of Bruce.
We're talking about friendship, we're talking about love.
For three hours, all dancing, not thinking about anything.
We try to, to live the moment.
I just want it to last forever.
There's part of the show when he says, "Do you wanna go home?"
Everybody, "No!"
Hey, Steve.
Yeah, baby?
I think it's time to go home now.
Are you saying... What?
I said, I think it's time to go home.
The first time I saw Bruce at a club until today,
there are certain fundamentals of the show that have never changed.
And one of them is no matter how serious some of the songs are
and how serious the tone of the show is...
Do you wanna go home?
...he always finds a space for humor.
It's always there.
That's part of his vision of what he's doing.
Max don't wanna fuckin' go home.
...if Max Weinberg don't go home,
- nobody goes fuckin' home. - Nobody wants to go home.
One, two, three!
I can't even wrap my head around how are they able to move
all this huge amount of gear that we have
from point A to point B.
I always laugh because, you know, if you look backstage there's,
you know, there's these road cases full of 40 guitars.
Every show we did in the early days, one guitar.
When you see all these guitars,
it's a lot of work maintaining them.
But at the same time, it's a blessing that we have 'em.
I don't have the time to, "Oh, hold on a second, Bruce,
I'll be right with you."
If he turns around and gives me that look,
I have gig-mares about it, truthfully,
to tell you the truth, man.
In the early days when we traveled,
I think we started in a Club Wagon.
You couldn't lay down to sleep. You had to, you know, sleep like this.
By the time I joined, things were a little better.
Not much.
I think by then, we graduated to the bus.
You know, we customized it ourselves with army cots.
It had to be chained to the wall.
And every time the bus went around a corner,
the bunk beds would...
Would kinda lean over.
Shortly thereafter, we went to a motor home,
and actually it was the GMC Motorhome,
which was at the time very modern.
Well, it was a huge step up.
Here, you could turn the tables down into little bunks.
There was a fold-down, like on a submarine,
Bruce had that.
There was a sofa,
you took the cushions off, and Clarence could fit on that.
There was a, a table that recessed into the floor,
and Garry and Roy slept on that.
Except it really wasn't wide enough for two people.
So Garry and I would sleep foot to head
and we put a little mattress over it.
And in the back was another table that we could lay out,
and Danny and I slept in it.
Driving six, seven hours, you could sleep.
One of my fondest memories is we woke up
to the smell of Clarence cooking breakfast.
He made pancakes, bacon, eggs.
Anything you want, like a short-order cook,
like the father.
And it was really, it was really fantastic.
Give us a limerick, a limerick, Clarence.
Now, as I was saying...
It was a very bonding experience.
And that bond, thousands of shows later,
that's what gets played out on stage.
If you get swept up in the spirit, you'll be able to figure out a way in.
I grew up seeing my uncle there.
It gave him so much happiness,
which is why I've always been really particular
about playing his horn, playing his mouthpiece.
Like, I need... I need to keep as much of him
with me as possible.
Those solos, those sax solos,
Badlands, Jungleland, Prove It All Night
that puts Clarence right back there.
It's almost like this transference.
Bruce loves stability
and so when he finds the person that's a match
for what he needs,
he tends to keep that person.
Having this musical and communal experience,
I never took it for granted.
I'm very grateful to be part of the band
and all the fabulously talented people that are up on that stage.
I listen to what everyone is doing
and just try to add my little spice to it.
Not too much but just part of the whole.
Clarence and Danny have not been forgotten.
Nightshift.
People hear that song in the show in a lot of ways
and the way I hear it is...
he's talking about our guys.
Nightshift early on, I mean, I was curious to see
how the crowd was gonna be receptive to it.
The fact that the singers come forward and they take the spotlight.
We were in sound check.
He said, "Ada, you know, I think I want you
to do a little something here."
He didn't specify as to exactly what that something was gonna be.
And I knew that if it was too much, he would say,
"Uh, pull it back a little bit."
But he said, "No, no, no, I want more."
"There you go, this is a seed.
Now let's see what it grows into."
He just said, "We're going down front",
we're gonna do this together."
And I'm sort of kind of watching him.
A lot of it was me just observing him.
One night, we stepping down as I usually do,
and Bruce kind of let the song go a little longer
and sit a minute.
It's almost like on pause, let people feel that moment.
I mean, we're talking about those who have passed.
And then he sang a higher note.
I sang a note over him.
I remember him saying...
- I can try. - "Try, I can try."
I took that as, "Let me just do something that might be a little different."
He seemed to react to it. He responded to it when I went higher.
And then it went on from there.
It just started developing.
Nightshift, that's become a showstopper.
Come on!
Curtis King!
Miss Ada Dyer, Michelle Moore,
and Lisa Lowell.
The E Street Choir.
A little Mary's Place, just to remind us.
The greatest musical influences of my youth
are all my soul music mentors.
They've guided me on stage and shaped our show
for many years.
Sam & Dave, James Brown, Jackie Wilson.
Come on!
They still inspire me as a band leader to this day.
Is there anybody alive out there?
We're trying to translate in our musical language
what he's doing moment to moment.
Even if he just twitches his butt,
you kind of know where he is going with that.
Sort of visual cues on stage,
certain tells that Bruce might have physically
that indicate he's about to do something.
He might not know what that is, but he's about to do something.
He cues with his shoulders a lot.
He'll cue with his hand.
There are cues with the guitar.
You just have to watch him.
He knows what to give us in order to make all these things happen.
Come on!
Hit it, Max.
Shh!
The greatest skill Bruce has
is demanding the attention of an audience...
Shh.
...and being able to direct it however way he'd like.
Hit it, Max.
Shh.
He has an amazing amount of control,
and he can quiet that crowd to where you can hear a pin drop.
Shh.
He directed me to stop playing completely, just the piano.
Just Roy.
Shh.
- And then he said, "Nobody." - Nobody.
And he wanted silence.
Love you, Bruce!
This is the genius of Bruce.
Nobody.
The complete silence on stage...
Woo!
...tends to make people very nervous.
I mean, you never see anybody do this on stage.
It takes a lot of thought and detailing to make it all look tight
and to be spontaneous at the same time.
In the early '60s, me, Bruce, and Garry
had gone to see Sam & Dave.
Seeing an R&B, you know, a soul music show up close,
you know, it was like in, in a little club,
uh, i-in those days was just an incredible impression on you.
He has a way of being able to pull those nuggets
from these different genres of music that seem unrelated.
But then he's able to kind of weave them into the mix
in a way that it's very relatable.
And tapping into all these various streams of American music.
You got a little gospel in there,
you got a little rock and roll, a little jazz.
We're improvising, like we made a conscious effort.
We could have worked out our little eight bars,
and we play the same eight bars every night
and it's gonna be perfect.
But that's not what Bruce wants.
Bruce wants, like, say what you're feeling at that moment.
Kitty's Back is a very different song,
and it's very loose...
let everybody have their moment and do what they want.
He goes, "You know, guys, I want something
"after you guys finish your solo in the horn section,
I want you guys to come up with some kind of a horn soul lead."
Which means you're playing the same thing together.
It's almost like a small group at a jazz nightclub vibe.
It's an exciting thing
because you don't know what's gonna happen.
I am a big fan of having a very random set list,
and I know most of the other guys would not agree with me.
On other tours, we would always get a set list
maybe 30 minutes before we would go on stage.
Well, the last tour, he was a lot more spontaneous.
It was a lot of going out in the audience and picking up signs.
Hey, can we stump the band?
If you knew it, you knew it
and if you didn't, you just had to catch on.
Hit it, boys. Come on, Charlie Giordano!
The audience had these signs.
Always exciting and nerve-wracking.
Bruce would go out and find some of the most obscure songs
and song titles.
That was kind of the theme, "Stump the E Street Band."
Alright, Professor...
Craning my neck to try to see what was on the sign,
you know, and oh, my God.
We haven't played that in 10 years.
I don't think I've ever played that.
Is there a chart somewhere on that?
Quick, quick.
And he'd often times come back to the stage with a dozen of 'em stacked up,
and he'd be flinging through 'em on stage and find the one he wanted.
Give it to the organ man.
We were doing 15 different songs a night.
Nobody knows what the hell's happening.
Turn 'em up! Turn 'em up!
There's an energy to that.
Three, four!
But you can't really get deep, deep, deep in any one song
because you were just never playing it that often.
That's one of the things I like about this tour is
you can hear your band mates evolving.
It's not a jam session, it's not a "Stump the Band,"
it's an experience, it's a show.
Bruce has put this set list together meticulously.
Start listening a little closer.
There's different emotions being brought out of each song every time you hear it.
My first concert, I was 19.
I skipped school the next day too.
Since then, I've seen him in Spain, in Germany,
in the UK, in Italy.
Now I'm 37, and I grew up with Bruce.
My first Springsteen show was here in Oslo in 1993.
Oh, it was so magic.
You just get happy.
So happy.
My dad is a massive Springsteen fan.
He's been listening to him all his life.
It's always really special to go to concerts with him,
having, like, that history.
He's the reason that I love Springsteen now.
When I first got into his music,
I could connect to these scenes that he described
and to these feelings that he described,
to me after all these years,
it still means a lot to me and that I still enjoy so much.
I always get emotional when I,
when I go to Bruce Springsteen concerts.
You know, it's just like he takes his soul,
and he puts it into music.
So I think that everyone can relate to it.
We don't expect the man to tour forever.
We hope he does, we hope he tours for as long as he can.
But we're appreciating these moments.
We want to soak up every last moment of this, just in case.
Just a little, where it says horn, it's just a little riff.
Let's try just Curt.
That's good. Alright.
So I'm gonna tell a little story.
And I'll go into the song.
From the beginning of the tour,
he has told the story of Last Man Standing
and why that phrase came to him.
And the story he tells is that he realized
when his friend George Theiss passed away,
that of all the members of his first rock band,
he was the last man standing.
I think he reads into that notion
an increased sense of mortality.
He's next.
That's kind of like you're standing on the tracks
with the white-hot light of an oncoming train
bearing down upon you.
It brings a certain clarity of thought,
you may not have previously experienced.
Because death's final and lasting gift to the living
is an expanded vision of life itself.
George passed away
shortly after I wrote this song.
It's just about the passions we follow as children,
not knowing where they're going to lead us
and how at 15 it's all tomorrows and hellos
and then later on there's a lot more yesterdays and goodbyes.
One of the most emotional parts of this show is the juxtaposition of.
Last Man Standing and Backstreets.
Last Man Standing talked about friendship and end of days.
Then he put it up against Backstreets,
a song from 50 years ago, about betrayal of some sort.
Backstreets reads a whole other way
in the shadow of Last Man Standing.
Bruce seems to be again talking about the mementos
of his lost friend.
In the breakdown where it's just Roy and Bruce...
...he's continuing the story
that he began in Last Man Standing
and brings the two together.
Now I got, I got that box of 45s that you left me...
and I got all your old books...
and I got the, the guitar that you used
to keep down at the end of your bed.
And I got that picture of the two of us
sitting on your porch on your wedding day...
and you were barely 19.
And everything else... everything else...
I'm gonna carry right here.
Until the end.
To go in the space of a half an hour
from the depths of Last Man Standing into some of his most well-known songs.
The fact that he can cover that range of territory
he always has.
Backstreet is the beginning of this ramp-up,
this insane roller coaster that is the rest of the show.
One, two, three!
We end with Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.
We line up and take a little bow with Bruce.
He gives everybody a, a thumbs up or,
you know, a pat on the back.
He just makes you feel like you're the greatest.
Then he goes on to finish the show by himself.
He comes back one last moment with the acoustic guitar.
It's of vital importance that he ties together
the underlying thoughts and feelings
that make this show different than any other show he's done.
The E Street Band loves you!
I stuck closely to our original set list
on this tour
because it told the story I wanted to communicate.
Life, death, and everything in between.
Playing music as you get older is an interesting
and tricky business.
Now I plan on continuing until the wheels come off
and for as long as the band will follow me.
There's one thing I know,
after 50 years on the road, it's too late to stop now.
Time moves quickly when you are on the road.
And I've always believed the audience
does not pay necessarily to hear their favorite song
or to see your aging face again.
But they pay for the intensity of your presence,
how alive you are on any given evening.
That's the beating heart of my job,
to be there and only there,
playing for all the stakes rock and roll has to offer
for you, in your town, on this night.
And in doing so, I want to leave you with life's possibilities,
with energy to take outside the concert gates,
to bring into your life with a smile on your face
and some feeling of love in your heart,
a quiet soul, and hopefully a lifted spirit.
It's my job.
I'm left with one thought, it's a quote from Jim Morrison,
"O great creator of being"
"grant us one more hour to perform our art..."
"And to perfect our lives."
Jersey in the house!
On the trombone,
Ozzie Melendez, Barry Danielian,
Curt Ramm, Eddie Manion.
Curtis King, Lisa Lowell,
Michelle Moore, Ada Dyer,
sister Soozie Tyrell, brother Charlie Giordano.
On the guitar, Nils Lofgren.
On the saxophone, Jake Clemons.
On the drums, the mighty, mighty Max Weinberg.
On percussion, Anthony Almonte.
On piano, Professor Roy Bittan.
Miss Patti Scialfa.
On base, Garry W. Tallent.
And last but not least,
on guitar,
Little...
Steven Van Zandt.
Bring it up, bring it up, bring it up.
Bring it up, bring it up, bring it up, bring it up.
One, two, three, go!
Whoo!
That's right.
Now this is the important part.
Beautiful, Ma. Beautiful.
Beautiful.