In the Heart of the Crowd: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, KC and Tulsa

It’s been a tough six months or so for many Bruce Springsteen fans. First came the Ticketmaster dynamic pricing debacle that no one ever adequately addressed (and left empty seats to be filled with last-minute cut-rate ticket sales in Tulsa). Then Sirius Radio’s Live from E Street Nation talk show went on hiatus. Just at the beginning of the tour, Springsteen’s 43-year-old fanzine, Backstreets, closed shop. For me certainly, a weight hung over the show.

To Springsteen’s credit, he focused on what he did best and achieved far more than I could have imagined. For that reason, I feel it's important to mention the context, just as its important to let the review stand separate, the show celebrated on its own merits. DA

KC, Photo by Sarah Kathryn Funck

 “The first thing to remember about Bruce Springsteen is that he’s a musician.” –Dave Marsh, Monmouth University talk, 2005

 Though I thought his music perfectly fit the oil roads, sections, smelter skyline, and main drag of my hometown, I’ve never lived in Springsteen country. Aside from that handful of hits in the middle eighties, his 50-year career did not have eastern Kansas and Oklahoma as a base. A 16-year gap between Kansas City stops (1984 to 2000), two Oklahoma concerts in the 70s and only two more four decades later about sum up the relationship.

 So, I was lucky to get to see two nights of this tour with loved ones and family—first in my present home of Kansas City, second in the city next to where I grew up, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Though I’ve been going to these shows for 42 years now, I have never seen two so early in a tour (stops 8 & 9), and I’ve never had a close second show experience quite match the first.

 What wound up happening was much more powerful than I could have expected. And that’s ironic because most of what made it so moving was the company I kept, my family in KC and a longtime road buddy meeting family with me in Tulsa. But I think the surprise (and it probably shouldn’t have been one) was how much that companionship fit the show’s purpose and meaning.

The Castiles, Springsteen front left, George Theiss top center

 

Before “Last Man Standing,” the one moment in the show the normally talkative Springsteen chose to stop and tell a story, he recalled his 2018 death bed visit to the leader and only other surviving member of his first band, George Theiss. He used that memory to underscore the carpe diem of the “Prove It All Nights,” “Because the Nights,” and “Badlands,” all those songs at the core of what Pete Townshend once called the “triumph” in Springsteen’s tales of desperation and long chances.

 “Last Man” itself makes the concert’s central confession and pledge. He called on a “flock of angels” to “lift him somehow.” And where else would he seek deliverance? “Somewhere deep into the heart of the crowd.”

So far, this new show stays focused on that ephemeral crowd, the souls gathered in the room, in many ways repeatedly reinforced by the emphasis on the band. His use of the Miami Horns may show it best. From a “Kitty’s Back” built for improvisation to a rousing “Johnny 99” that even formed a bit of a second line this Fat Tuesday, Springsteen repeatedly threw the focus to Ed Manion on baritone sax (and a good deal of tenor in Kansas City when Jake Clemons was out with COVID), Ozzie Melendez on trombone, Curt Ramm and Barry Danielian on trumpet.

 But everyone had their moments—Soozie Tyrell laid into fiddle, particularly thrilling on that “99” and “Darlington County” in Tulsa. The Disciple of Soul’s percussionist Anthony Almonte played supple and quick to push for mightier and mightier responses from Max Weinberg. Singers Curtis King, Michelle Moore, Ada Dyer, and Lisa Lowell filled out the sound with shining punches of soul fire. The core of the old band (and both Steve Van Zandt and Nils Lofgren in particular up front) vamping, clowning, cavorting, and taking memorable turns in the spotlight.

 In that bridge before the final refrain of “Backstreets,” where Springsteen has often lingered to sketch stories, this time he touched his broken heart and said, “I’m gonna carry it right here,” repeating “right here,” and tapping his breast softly until that final piece of the pledge, “until the end.”

 Aside from the lack of talk—one song after another, relentlessly plunging ahead—the show was also noteworthy for another absence—its lack of songs focused on anything overtly political. The politics are always there of course, in the hearts of the kids of “No Surrender,” in the belief in “The Promised Land,” in the “more than all this” of “Johnny 99.” The most all-encompassing political commentary might just have been that moment in “Wrecking Ball,” when he repeats “hard times come, and hard times go” over and over again before calling on that crane to tear it all down.

 This moment, tellingly, was followed by “The Rising.”

Before he used to sing “Straight Time” on The Ghost of Tom Joad tour, Bruce would ponder what we do when all the tricks that got us where we are, when all the tools that used to work, don’t seem to work anymore; in fact they seem to make things worse. With this new tour, Bruce Springsteen has obviously laid some tools aside, but he’s stuck close to the ones which keep the crowd feeling “high and hard and loud,” strong, not so much spectators as participants. 

When Springsteen closed both shows, he sang of feeling “split at the seams.” In 2023, for reasons ranging from COVID to opioids to state-sanctioned murder and the threat of World War III, every person in that room knew that feeling. As the man sings in the song, we need each other by our sides, and for these three (and six) hours and some days after, I certainly felt less alone.

Thanks to Ben Bielski, Cody Alan McCormick, Farrell Hoy Jenab, Josh McGraw, and Sarah Kathryn Funck!

KC, photo by Sarah Kathryn Funck