What is it about Bruce and North Carolina?
I’m not a local, and I have no vested interest in promoting the state. The sum total of my time in North Carolina is the time I’ve spent seeing Bruce’s concerts there or driving through it. Yet I can’t deny how fantastic his shows are there. As long as Bruce keeps touring, I’ll be at those NC shows.
I don’t know of any reason why Bruce would be so popular, his audiences so enthusiastic, and his performance so inspired as they are.
Think I’m exaggerating? Then ask yourself: If I gave you, say, 100 chances to guess what catalog song Bruce would open his show with in Charlotte, where would “Iceman” fall on that list?
I’m guessing somewhere around the 300 mark. And yet that’s exactly what happened. I’m sure that casual fans were scratching their heads at the moody, atmospheric opener with the borrowed “Badlands” lyric in the opening verse (this was only the second time Bruce had ever performed the song), but the hardcore fans all got the message Bruce was sending: Anything goes tonight.
And anything did.
After “Iceman,” Bruce segued into “High Hopes” and then the U.S. premiere of “Just Like Fire Would.”
After a rocking “Cadillac Ranch,” it was sign request time, and it stayed sign request time for about half the show: from a sign double-shot of “Louie Louie” and “Mustang Sally…”
…to a pair of more pedestrian requests (“No Surrender” and “Out in the Street“) to a wild double-shot of “From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)” and “Brown-Eyed Girl…”
…and then to “Racing in the Street,” that made a full seven out of nine consecutive songs drawn from request signs. Even the songs that weren’t requests were audibled–meaning that Bruce essentially made the majority of the show up as he went along.
More sign requests followed: “My Love Will Not Let You Down,” a rare encore-opening “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” and Bruce audibled “Light of Day” as the main set closer.
After “Darkness” kicked of the encores, the show took a (momentarily, at least) more serious turn with “The Wall,” (watch the wonderful pro-shot video below), followed by a perfect pairing with “Born in the U.S.A.”
Bruce sent us home with “Dream Baby Dream” (the seventh cover of the evening), and I was stunned by what I’d just witnessed. Rivaled only by the second 2012 Fenway show, this was easily the most spontaneous, unpredictable, and joyous show I’d seen. When you see multiple shows on a tour, you get a sense of the structure of it; there are familiar tentpoles that tell you where you are in the show, and spaces where you expect the wild cards. Everything was thrown out the window at this show–I distinctly remember feeling delightfully unanchored and out of time, with no idea of what was going to happen next. (The one surprise absence: “American Beauty,” which I would have bet on heavily since it was released earlier that day.)
As the High Hopes tour continued its victory lap, the setlists would delve ever deeper into Bruce’s catalog, but nothing would equal the magic of this show.
Easily one of my top shows.
