by Peter Cooperon
The Nashville Tennessean
http://www.tennessean.com
November 19, 2009
Bruce Springsteen has still got it, and it seems to mean more now than ever.The guy is 60 now, and he doesn’t have to work for the applause anymore. Nostalgia is the cheapest pathway to emotion, and Springsteen’s songs are interwoven into the fabric of so many American lives that he could do a by-the-numbers, greatest hits set each night and thousands would cheer.
At the Sommet Center on Wednesday, Springsteen and his E Street Band instead delivered a sweaty three-hour workout that featured 13 different songs than they offered at last year's Nashville show, and seven different songs than they’d played four nights ago in Milwaukee.
Of the songs on this year’s 18-song Greatest Hits album, Springsteen’s Sommet night did not feature “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “The River,” “Born in the U.S.A.,” “I’m On Fire,” “Glory Days,” “Fire” and three others. On an evening in which he and the band performed breakthrough album Born To Run in order and in its entirety, Springsteen still managed to balance the smiling shock of recognition with spontaneity and invention.
That doesn’t mean Springsteen was going for esoterica. It meant he and the E Streeters sought, and achieved, presence and emotion. Oh, and volume as well.
“So you’re scared, and you’re thinking that maybe we ain’t that young anymore,” Springsteen sang in “Thunder Road.” He’s not young anymore at all, and “Thunder Road” turned 25 years old nine years ago, and yet he and the band delivered the song with all of the throb and romance and desperation present in its long-ago recording.
The evening began with some of Springsteen’s darker, more difficult material: “Wrecking Ball,” “Seeds,” “Trapped” and “Something in the Night” demanded attention that would be rewarded with a sing-along of “Hungry Heart,” a song that offered saxophone man Clarence Clemons his first of many spotlight solos of the show. Last year, Clemons spent much of the concert sitting down. He’s apparently recovering nicely from hip and knee replacement surgery, as he stood for the entire three-hour concert on Wednesday.
Born To Run included more Clemons solos, most memorably on the the title track and on the epic “Jungleland.” For the Born To Run material, the band stuck fairly close to the original plot, though never to the point of rote replication.
After Born To Run, Springsteen began taking “requests” in the form of posters from fans that had song titles printed on them (the posters, not the fans). “Waiting on a Sunny Day,” “Santa Claus is Coming To Town,” “Two Hearts” and “Darlington County” were requested, and then Springsteen began crafting the show’s end without help from posters or shouted requests, save for a casual pass at the requested Johnny Cash hit “Ring of Fire.”
Late-show highlights included a slinky “Darlington County” that nodded to the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” and an impassioned “Badlands” that found bass man Garry W. Tallent’s fingers racing while he stood stock-still and rock-solid enough to appear as if no combination of strong winds and linebackers could derail him from his rock ’n’ roll purpose.
The show closed in encore, with “Dancing in the Dark,” “Rosalita” and a thrilling take on Jackie Wilson’s "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher."
There has always been a Peter Pan-esque, “Do you believe?” question involved in a Springsteen show. Wednesday’s show was a call to believe that, in this shuffling, iPod age, it’s relevant to deliver an album’s songs in original order. And it was a rollicking insistence that music is not a soundtrack or a backdrop, that music is in fact the heartbeat of the whole deal.
“Wendy, let me in, I want to be your friend/ I want to guard your dreams and visions,” Springsteen sang then and sings now, in the most Peter Pan line of them all. Dreams and visions aren’t often well-guarded, but they can be illuminated. Sixty years into this world, Bruce Springsteen refuses to turn off the light.
Setlist:Wrecking Ball
Seeds
Trapped
Something in the Night
Hungry Heart
Working on a Dream
Thunder Road
Tenth Avenue Freeze-out (with Curt Ramm)
Night
Backstreets
Born to Run
She's the One
Meeting Across the River (with Curt Ramm)
Jungleland
Waitin' on a Sunny Day
Santa Claus is Comin' to Town
Two Hearts
Darlington County
You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)
Lonesome Day
The Rising
Badlands
* * *
Ring of Fire
No Surrender
Bobby Jean
American Land (with Curt Ramm)
Dancing in the Dark
Rosalita (with Curt Ramm)
Higher and Higher (with Curt Ramm)
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