Showtime! Concert #12-Asbury Park Beach, New Jersey Part 1
Sunday, September 15, 2024 Entry #107
An Asbury Park news website set the scene for the highly (to put it mildly) anticipated appearance of Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band at the Sea.Hear.Now Festival on his old stomping grounds:
“Springsteen and various members of the E Street Band have played in Asbury Park hundreds of times over the decades, but full band performances have been rare in recent years. The last time Springsteen and the E Street Band played together in the city was on December 7, 2010, at the Carousel House on the south end of the boardwalk. That show was the last time Clarence Clemons played with the band before his untimely death.”
So now here is Springsteen in 2024, following his band (the core members of which he met right in this town over 50 years ago) onto the festival stage simply beaming. “GREETINGS, ASBURY PARK!” he bellowed, referencing the title of his debut album that put this town on the cultural map. Naming Asbury Park on his very first record was a very strong statement of “this is where I am from!” Springsteen always gives enthusiastic shout-outs to every single city on his touring itinerates, but I am pretty sure there was an extra-special quality in his voice on this one.
I was overwhelmed. Often, the reality of events that we anticipate the most pales when they actually happen. Not this time for me. The significance, power, beauty, and energy of this particular concert were off the charts from the start. My feet were in the sand, to my left the setting sun was casting a glow on the iconic boardwalk, and to my right the almost full moon was rising over the ocean. In the center of it all, and I was really close to the stage, was Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. I took a quick 360 degree video while the opening song “Lonesome Day” was booming just so I would later have some kind of documented proof that what I was witnessing indeed happened (while acknowledging that the exact emotions I was feeling were impossible to record).
After the opener, Springsteen said:
“I wrote this a long time ago about 500 yards north of here. We haven’t played it in a long fucking time. We got a lot of stuff we haven’t played in a long fucking time for you tonight. Let’s see how we do.”
It was “buckle up” time! Springsteen proceeded to play three songs in a row from the aforedescribed album called Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ (he ended up playing a total of six songs from that album, far more than usual now that we so far removed from the year of its release). Two of those three were tour premiers. First up was “Blinded by the Light.” In Springsteen’s memoir, he talks about sitting on this very stretch of beach with his rhyming dictionary and his guitar, writing this very wordy and infectious song. As you can tell from my recording, I was still in a state of awe, swinging my phone excitedly from the performance, to the full moon, to the boardwalk, and back to Bruce and the band.
Next up in the trio of early songs was “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street,” about a trip Springsteen took as a young man from the Jersey Shore to New York City. Then, the utterly recognizable opening piano notes of “Growin’ Up” sent me into the stratosphere. I adore that song with its authentic defiant and rebellious heart. As you will hear, Springsteen launched into one of his “There I was” spoken word stories in the middle of “Growin’ Up”, which was one of his signature moves in his first years of touring. The tale he told on this night was about right now! I clipped this video for Entry #104 because in it, Springsteen mentions Kingsley Street, the title of that post. Here is the full account:
Springsteen is expressing amazement at the 35,000 people he is seeing stretched out on the beach in front of him and placing it all in the larger context of the decline and revitalization of Asbury Park. He will have more to say about this later in the evening.
I need to mention Springsteen leading us in howling at the beautiful moon over the beach. “I feel the moon shinin,” he said, “I need an Asbury Park howl!” I don’t have video, but we complied, of course. Springsteen never ceases to amaze me with his fascinations that so often perfectly match mine. I am also drawn to the spiritual and aesthetic appeal of full moons, which also mark the middle of the Hebrew month on the Jewish lunar calendar. I couldn’t help but marvel that I saw Springsteen outside under a full moon at the very beginning of the summer in Barcelona, and now I was again under the bright orb’s spell. this time watching Bruce out on the Jersey Shore a few days before summer’s end.
The seventh song of the night was a shocker. “Thundercrack” is a Springsteen outtake from the early 70’s, only released much later on the excellent rarities album Tracks. If nothing else, it is a great beach party tune, so its inclusion on the setlist was very appropriate. It is also a “Holy Grail” selection for many Springsteen devotees, and I had certainly never heard it performed before. Again, Springsteen lets us know that he also wrote this song just up the beach. “I wrote this song when I was 20 at the surfboard factory in Wanamassa,” said The Boss.
After “E Street Shuffle,” another location-specific number, came the song we were all expecting and waiting for. “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy).” This song pulls a neat trick-it describes an emerging disillusionment with the boardwalk scene while simultaneously romanticizing it. With Springsteen’s artful descriptions, you can totally see the characters, feel the ambiance, and breathe in the drama at play outside by the ocean, and inside the seedy bars, arcades and tourist traps. Springsteen paints a picture of a kingdom ruled by the young, everybody desperately trying to squeeze in each late-night summer hour amidst the “pier lights and carnival life.” When Springsteen sang the line about Madam Marie’s, he chuckled and pointed up to where her fortune-telling shack still stands (I watched with glee as Madam Marie’s granddaughters hawked the psychic arts to the throngs after the concert) As Springsteen tour guide extraordinaire Stan Goldstein (see Entries #61-67 on my experiencing his mastery) later posted, “Couldn’t be a more perfect song for a beautiful evening in Asbury Park.” Here’s two snippets I recorded:
Springsteen dedicated “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” to longtime E Street organist Danny Federici, who originated the accentuated accordion parts of the song, and who sadly passed away from cancer in 2008 (piano player Roy Bittan plays the evocative instrument now during the infrequent-almost exclusively in New Jersey-times Springsteen performs the song). Federici, who had taken leave from the band during the tour supporting the album Magic that was happening the year he died, came back to the stage for one last performance in Indianapolis. That night, as Springsteen recalled, his friend and bandmate had a special request:
“He wanted to strap on the accordion and revisit the boardwalk of our youth during the summer nights when we’d walk along the boards with all the time in the world.”
To be continued: