Showtime! Concert #9-Los Angeles, CA
Thursday, April 4, 2024 Entry # 80
Here’s how we got here. Bruce Springsteen launched his current tour with the E Street Band in early 2023, his first since the end of the COVID lockdown. They played concerts in the United States and Europe for more than six months when Springsteen abruptly called for a pause, postponing multiple shows that were ahead on the tour’s itinerary. We came to learn that Springsteen had been diagnosed with peptic ulcer disease. Bruce reflected recently on the severity of this recent health scare:
“You sing with your diaphragm. My diaphragm was hurting so badly that when I went to make the effort to sing, it was killing me, so I literally couldn’t sing at all…And that lasted for two, three months…”
Fortunately, under medical care, Springsteen recuperated. He announced that the delayed concerts were back on, and that the shows in 2024, though they were rescheduled dates (such as these Los Angeles concerts I drove in for) from before, would be like “a whole new tour.”
As I have been writing about in these pages, I attended eight Bruce Springsteen concerts last year, and I saw nothing that would suggest to me that he was in pain, or even that he was close to losing his voice (The last time I saw him perform was less than a month before he made the announcement about the illness). I experienced the same joy, excitement, exhilaration and awe that I remembered from catching Bruce live in previous years, going all the way back to 1980.
However, taking absolutely nothing away from those magnificent 2023 concerts, I have to acknowledge that the show I saw in LA this night felt qualitatively different. Springsteen seemed looser, more spontaneous, and somehow even more filled with energy and life, his stock-in-trade (not to mention his new dapper look, tie and all).
For one, Springsteen totally shook up his setlist. Because I had reviewed the song choices from the five concerts in 2024 that proceeded this one, I knew that the song choices were becoming much more varied from night to night than the year before. The first song at the Forum sent a strong signal that the E Street Band’s vaunted eclecticism had returned. For example, at over 90% of 2023’s shows, Springsteen opened up with “No Surrender” (a terrific tone-setting song that I love, and I was glad he played it later on in the concert). Tonight though, Springsteen and the band came out swinging with a fresh and powerful version of John Lee Hooker’s classic “Boom Boom.” From there, Springsteen played a bunch of awesome songs that I did not hear on any of the numerous concerts I attended last year. One of those was “Bobby Jean,” a sentimental song about the emotional power of friendship. I didn’t realize it until I reviewed this video snippet, but you can see a pair of buddies a few rows up with their arms over one another during the song, swaying to the music and really feeling those lyrics. Of course, I was at this particular concert with a lifelong friend of my own, but I plan on writing about that particular angle in my next post.
Springsteen dug deep in his repertoire again when he included “Jole Blon,” a traditional Cajun song that he rarely performs. I was also quite pleased to hear the namesake of this blog, “Spirit In The Night,” for my first time on the 2023-2024 tour. “My City of Ruins” made an appearance, complete with Springsteen in his secular preacher mode, something I love about seeing Springsteen that was auspiciously missing last year. Here’s a piece of the song, I’ll get to the content of the “sermon” in a later post.
Another indication that Springsteen had loosened up is that he took a sign request for a song, a practice that had been a regular part of Springsteen’s bag of tricks for a number of his twenty-first century tours until he declined to do so last year. Then, Springsteen actually pulled a fan up from the pit to dance with him, a move he etched into the cultural memory in the 1984 “Dancing In The Dark” video with actress Courteney Cox. Again, this had been a very common occurrence until 2023.
This concert was also marked by Springsteen’s wife Patti Scialfa’s return to the stage. Scialfa has been part of the E Street Band for decades, dating from before she and Bruce were a romantic item. While Patti sang with the band for two of the first four concerts (all of which I attended on my initial Springsteen road trip) of the tour last year, for the most part after that she pretty much stayed off the road. At this show, Patti was not actually part of the band, instead she showed up for a two song cameo duet with her husband, in the same vein as her nightly appearances in Springsteen on Broadway. Scialfa and Springsteen were more flirty and sultry than I had ever seen them onstage. It was really sweet.
We also were treated to “Land of Hope and Dreams,” which always provides extra doses of inspiration, emotional resonance, idealism, and promise of redemption at a Springsteen concert.
After a fantastic concert, there is often the letdown that sets in when it’s all over. I have successfully put that feeling at bay a number of times on this tour by ‘simply’ attending multiple shows in a row. In all my many years of embracing live music, I had neve done anything like this, but oh my, what a great concept! I left the Kia Forum with the sweet awareness that I would be back there to see Springsteen in just a few nights.
Unfortunately, my friend Steve did not have the same luxury, as he needed to be out of town during concert number two. However, we still had a few days in California ahead of us to enjoy together and reflect on the powerhouse experience we had just shared. We reluctantly exited the arena where we had just connected and communed with Bruce, with one another, and with 17,000 like-minded and open-hearted new friends. We left, not as tired as the young Springsteen fan in his father’s arms in the photo, but pretty worn out-though it was Bruce Springsteen who did the heavy lifting in that wondrous marathon of a concert we were blessed to witness, not us!
Wiped out as we were, we still felt it though, the overwhelming desire to keep exclaiming into the night Bruce Springsteen’s cry of resistance, vibrancy and sheer humanity, “I’m alive!”
Day 4