“You’ve just seen the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, hard-rocking, booty-shaking, love-making, earth-quaking, Viagra-taking, death-defying, legendary E Street Band!” yelled Bruce Springsteen in a Pentecostal frenzy, three hours into the first of two last chance power drives through this year’s British Summer Time Hyde Park festival.
If Springsteen ever had the number on which to phone in a performance, it clearly became sweat-soaked and unreadable decades ago. At 73 he’s now putting rockers a third of his age to shame, hitting the stage with a No Surrender that sounded like a statement of intent and blazing through enough chrome-wheeled glory rock to give organisers itchy plug fingers. Again. At his last Hyde Park gig in 2012 the sound was cut when his duet with Paul McCartney ran over curfew, as Bruce reminded his fortune teller of a guitar foil “Little” Steven Van Zandt as Glory Days reached its umpteenth euphoric peak. “F*** ‘em,” Van Zandt sagely advised, and kept right on rocking.
Springsteen had, after all, a whole rock’n’roll lifetime to cover. Once the poster boy of small-town rebellion, he has built a rich canon that virtually represents the great American novel in song form over 50 years. All aspects of the noble blue-collar life were here: the hungry teenage runaways (Born to Run), the machine shop dreamers (The Promised Land), the struggling family men (The River), the disillusioned Vietnam vets (Born in the USA), the barstool nostalgists (Glory Days) and the old-age romantics full of fear and doubt (Letter to You).
A country ballad section culminated in a forlorn Last Man Standing, written – Springsteen explained, holding back tears – following the death of George Theiss, who had been the only other surviving member of his first teenage band The Castiles. “At 15, it’s all hellos, and a lot later on there a lot more hard goodbyes,” he said, pressing home the song’s message, “how important it is to seize the day.”
He certainly seized this one. Though he’s more going-for-it-grandpa than hi-octane James Dean these days, there was still an unquenchable power and charm to Springsteen’s presence, whether belting out Badlands or Thunder Road, venturing out to the crowd barriers to fist-bump toddlers or waggling his backside at the onstage cameras.
And with Jake Clemons proudly filling his legendary uncle Clarence’s formidable boots on saxophone, the E Street Band remained a powerhouse, attacking a punchy Because the Night, the heavy-duty honky-tonk of Darlington County and party rocker Mary’s Place like heartland rock’s most elite battalion.
He kept plenty in the tank for a momentous final stretch involving a celebratory Dancing in the Dark, a Born to Run that still roared along like a precision-tooled hog and Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out transformed into a visual tribute to fallen E Street Band members Clarence Clemons and organist Danny Federici.
The tour’s solo acoustic closer I’ll See You in My Dreams speaks of a road “seeming without end”. Here’s hoping.
