A week after closing down rehearsals at Fort Monmouth, Springsteen and the band start rehearsing at the Sun National Bank Center, the home of the Trenton Titans, a minor-league hockey team. The theatre at Fort Monmouth was secluded and cheap, but not nearly large enough for the crew to set up the full travelling stage, with all the proper lights, risers, ramps, and sound system.Inside the arena, Springsteen is walking around the empty seats, a microphone in his hand, giving stage directions. “We can’t see the singers from this angle,” he says. “One step to the right, Cindy!” The crew moves the riser. Cindy Mizelle, the most soulful voice in the new, seventeen-piece version of the E Street Band, takes one step to the right.
Springsteen lopes to another corner, and, as he sets his gaze on the horn section, a thought occurs to him. “Do we have some chairs for those guys when they aren’t playing?” he says. His voice ricochets around the empty seats. Chairs appear.
The band gets in position and starts to rip through the basic set list in preparation for the Apollo show. Lofgren plays the slippery opening riff of “We Take Care of Our Own”—a recession anthem in the key of G—and the band is off. Springsteen rehearses deliberately, working out all the spontaneous-seeming moves and postures: the solemn lowered head and raised fist, the hoisted talismanic Fender, the between-songs patter, the look of exultation in a single spotlight that he will enact in front of an audience. (“It’s theatre, you know,” he tells me later. “I’m a theatrical performer. I’m whispering in your ear, and you’re dreaming my dreams, and then I’m getting a feeling for yours. I’ve been doing that for forty years.”) Springsteen has to do so much—lead the band, pace the show, sing, play guitar, command the audience, project to every corner of the hall, including the seats behind the stage—that to wing it completely is asking for disaster.
In the midst of the fifth song in the set, he introduces the band. As they run through a vamp of “People Get Ready,” the old Curtis Mayfield tune, Springsteen grabs a mike and strolls across the stage. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” he says to the empty arena. “I’m so glad to be here in your beautiful city tonight. The E Street Band has come back to bring the power, hour after hour, to put a whup-ass session on the recession. We got some old friends, and we got some new friends, and we’ve got a story to tell you . . .”
The tune, thick with horns and vocal harmonies, elides into “My City of Ruins,” one of the elegiac, gospel-tinged songs on the 9/11 album, “The Rising.” The voices sing “Rise up! Rise up!” and there comes a string of horn solos: trombone, trumpet, sax. Then back to the voices. Springsteen quickly introduces the E Street horns and the singing collective. Then he says, “Roll call!” And, with the music rising bit by churchly bit, he introduces the core of the band: “Professor Roy Bittan is in the house. . . . Charlie Giordano is in the house. . . .”
When he finishes the roll call, there is a long ellipsis. The band keeps vamping.
“Are we missing anybody?”
Two spotlights are now trained on the organ, where Federici once sat, and at the mike where Clemons once stood.
“Are we missing anybody?”
Then again: “Are we missing anybody? . . . That’s right. That’s right. We’re missing some. But the only thing I can guarantee tonight is that if you’re here and we’re here, then they’re here!” He repeats this over and over, the volume of the piano and the bass rising, the drums hastening, the voices rising, until finally the song overwhelms him, and, if Springsteen has calculated correctly, there will not be an unmoved soul in the house.
For the next hour and a half, the band plays through a set that alternates tales of economic pain with party-time escape. While the band plays the jolly opening riff of “Waiting on a Sunny Day,” Springsteen practices striding around the stage, beckoning the imaginary hordes everywhere in the arena to sing along. There is a swagger in his stride. He is the rare man of sixty-two who is not shy about showing his ass—an ass finely sausaged into a pair of alarmingly tight black jeans—to twenty thousand paying customers. “Go, Jakie!” he cries, and brings Jake Clemons downstage to solo. He practically has to kick him into the spotlight.
A bunch of songs later, after a run-through of the set-ending “Thunder Road,” Springsteen hops off the stage, drapes a towel around his neck, and sits down in the folding chair next to me.
― Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, 26 February 2014 16:59 (ten years ago) link