So this was the one: the first show where I thought at the end of it, “I need to see just one more…”
Until this point, I’d only ever seen Bruce when he came through my town. The thought of travelling to see a show had never even occurred to me. But I’d been living in the Pacific Northwest for seven years by this time, and the shows just weren’t the same out here.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the shows–just that there was something missing in the energy of the crowd. Seattle and Portland shows just always seemed a bit… tame. To be honest, I can’t say that I noticed it outright at the time, but it was always in the back of my mind. And then two things happened at this show that made me realize what I was missing.
The first was the trip down to the concert. I had to put in a full day at work, and I knew that traffic from Seattle to Tacoma was going to be awful–even on a good day, it was going to take at least an hour, and this was not going to be a good day. So when I heard that our local radio station (the late, great KMTT-FM) was running a Boss bus from Tower Records in Seattle down to the Tacoma Dome, my wife and I jumped at the opportunity to save ourselves the hassle of driving, parking, and navigating the post-show snarl.
What I didn’t realize that the bus would be chock full of east coast ex-pats, and the ride down was filled with story-swapping of epic shows past while Bruce’s music blasted from every speaker. It was a far worse commute than normal–we made it there very close to showtime–but I loved every moment of it. It reminded me of the sense of community that was generally missing at these west coast shows.
The second thing that jolted me: the massive mob of people standing in front of the stage. What madness was this? How in the world did people manage to get that close to the stage? I’d never heard of the pit system–it didn’t exist on earlier tours–and as I watched the pit crew sing, dance, and rejoice through the show, and when I listened to my co-workers regale us with their story of how they waited all day in the hot sun (the hottest day of the year), and how incredibly worth it the experience ended up being, I knew I had to experience that for myself. It would take me the better part of a year to do so, but I would be there front and center when the tour came back around to Vancouver eight months later.
The show itself was predictable through almost the entire main set. I’d recently discovered the Stone Pony London message board, and I hadn’t been able to resist peeking at the setlists. I knew going in that there was likely to be little to no variation from the previous shows. This was early in the tour, and the setlists started out rigidly the first week and had only just started to introduce one or two new songs per show. In Las Vegas, Bruce broke out “Viva Las Vegas” in the encore, but that was venue-specific enough to be an exception rather than a new rule.
The show just before us, however, was in Portland, and they got “Atlantic City” early in the set, and “Backstreets” toward the end. Not exactly rarities, but surprises nonetheless. So I had at least a little hope that we’d get something new, but truthfully I didn’t really care that much–I’d fallen in love with The Rising and would have been happy just to hear all the new material. The classics were just gravy.
It’s a good thing I felt that way, because sure enough, the setlist had reverted to the original one used for most of the still-young tour… all the way up until the very end of the main set.
Just after “Countin’ on a Miracle” and just before the set-closing “Into the Fire,” Bruce called an audible, and I sat forward in my seat to see what surprise we were about to get. I was actually just a little bit disappointed that we were getting anything different here, because this was the slot where Bruce had been playing “American Skin (41 Shots)” and of all the non-Rising songs on the setlist, this was the one I was looking forward to the most. I later learned that Bruce wasn’t going to play it anyway–he’d written in “My Hometown” in that slot, but he axed it for…. “Thunder Road.”
Now, I will never be disappointed to hear “Thunder Road,” but I was a bit perplexed: Bruce had been playing it every night of the tour, but in the encores. So if he moved it into the main set, that must mean he was making room for something… big.
Sure enough: at the beginning of the encores, Bruce walked up to the mic and announced, “I’d like to debut… my greatest hit!”
And then he launched into the very first performance of the modern-day arrangement of, well, his greatest hit: “Dancing in the Dark,” absent for almost a decade except for a few acoustic or countrified arrangements. This version was vital, ferocious, alive— and we all knew instantly that this wasn’t going to be a one-off. But little did we know that it would remain a staple for virtually every E Street Band show ever since.
This new arrangement of “Dancing in the Dark” killed, and Bruce sensed it. Looking very self-satisfied, he called another audible, replacing the setlisted “Glory Days” with the tour premiere of “Ramrod.” Bruce was loose, happy, and mugging for the crowd, breaking out his best “Robot” dance moves.
Bruce returned to the setlist for the remainder of the encores, and that was just fine by us. That double-shot of “Dancing” and “Ramrod” was a promise of looser shows to come and a signal that even though the new albums was a largely somber affair, Bruce’s shows would inevitably return to spontaneous celebrations of community.
So I needed to do just one more…
