Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band put a big, loud River inside Sprint because they are semi-divine

I dreamed of Bruce Springsteen before the concert. I dreamed of Bruce Springsteen after the concert. And I dreamed of Bruce Springsteen during the concert.

After is pretty clear in my head right now — my groggy, ringing head — because I just woke up. Shot up, really, with the unwanted adrenaline defibrillation of deadline writing. But you guys aren’t really waiting for this or any other review, are you? You already know what I’m going to tell you because all of you were there. All of you were at the Sprint Center, a bulging, dad- and favorite-uncle-heavy cross-section of the metro in polite, awkwardly dancing communion. Anyway, the dream, the latest one, probably the last for a while: After the show, deep in the night, Springsteen and I walked to the house in my neighborhood whose owner has spray-painted “VOTE TRUMP” on the driveway, and together we painted over that message and stole the three handmade signs on that lawn, and the whole time he sang the part of “Badlands” about poor men wanting to be rich and rich men wanting to be king. (He had, in real life, played the fuck out of “Badlands” to kick off the second set Thursday night.)

Defiling some Trump collateral is one of the few ways that Springsteen could have made me happier than I felt after last night’s E Street Band show. Though, as the Boss will tell you, there’s a price for happiness, and dreams tend not to come true. This being the tour that reprises The River.

It’s a long album, and its whipsaw, unseatbelted ride takes you by as many graveyards as it does roadhouses, and I suspect I’m not the only one who rarely plays all four sides all the way through. So my dream before this show (other than the recurring nightmare that I’ll be down front and he’ll put the microphone in my face and I won’t know the line when it’s my turn to sing) was that semi-visceral contact with “Crush on You” and “I’m a Rocker” and a couple of others that have always sounded sort of same-y to me would at last trigger my affection.

And here I sit, typing along while the studio “Crush on You” vibrates the room on repeat.

Or vibrates my ears, which are recovering very slowly from Sprint’s usual acoustic punishment, the price I paid. It’s not that the sound there can’t be detailed — it was last night, the ride cymbal clear, the piano majestic — but that the space itself pins those details into just about any artist’s mix with a force equal to that of the guitars and the drums and the voices. The result is a single matrix of mostly midlevel sonic information that fatigues your brain long before your shuffling feet and legs wear down. One dream I had during the show was that the roof would disappear. Besides the Rolling Stones, it’s only Springsteen who makes sense — who, arguably, is best — in a stadium. God and Elvis can see him better in the open air, and the signal is clearer coming his way, too, from them and from Hank and Buddy and from others departed.

Anyway, yes, River mission accomplished, despite some overselling of the album’s solemn passages (Roy Bittan’s “Point Blank” preamble was uncharacteristically gaudy, and Max Weinberg’s mallets-on-cymbals answer to it further purpled the moment; it’s not supposed to be “Funeral for a Friend”) and the underselling of the title song (whose clipped coda was a re-interpretative misstep, minimalism that was just less-is-less).

(See our slideshow here.) 

Springsteen has in recent years done the full-album thing a fair amount, concentrating on the pre-1980 stuff (and not doing whole tours around one record). The River is the densest object in his discography, though, and the regimentation its 20-song sequence clearly demands — the chilling 2016 model of “Stolen Car” seemed to make even Bruce want to sit for a minute and collect himself last night — has yielded an unusually rigid set list. After The River (and its overture, in the form of every night’s concert opener, the River outtake “Meet Me in the City”), every audience is delivered 12 to 14 additional songs, most of which are the same from night to night. There are a couple of openings in that second set for deep cuts and, having kept an eye on what other cities have gotten, I dreamed during last night’s show that I’d hear “Brilliant Disguise” or “Tougher Than the Rest” for the first time. Instead: an urgent “No Surrender” and a killer “She’s the One.” Which is more than fair. And “Because the Night” is no tour rarity, but Thursday’s was revelatory, both joyous and vengeful. Thanks, Nils Lofgren.

Surprise isn’t the point this time around, though. The River is the point. Specifically, last year’s repackaging of The River.

Unlike many in his FM peer group, Springsteen hasn’t wrung his catalog through a plurality of reissues, tacking on or withholding bonus tracks on a whim and letting the label pimp a re-re-re-re-remastering. Until late 2014, most of his 1973-84 albums — the core of his legacy — hadn’t gone under the digital knife since their initial arrival on CD. Those albums needed a good hosing-down, and that set did the job. On the other hand, there have now been a couple of big-ass sets to enlarge key records with clean and sanctioned versions of material that had circulated for decades — a great idea, until you get a bill for not only the best of that material but also for DVDs you’re unlikely to watch often enough to justify the price. The River is one of those albums (Darkness on the Edge of Town the other so far), and its Ties That Bind expansion, which arrived last December … well, it’s $100 and it comes with a coffee-table book. 

Putting fancy rock-and-roll books on display for company can’t be what the man means when he introduces The River each night on this tour by talking about the album’s grown-up concerns. And hearing the thing come to life proves, as though proof were needed, that Springsteen’s art still transcends his commodity. Except that some proof is needed, now that ticket prices and service charges and Blu-rays and all the other marks of ongoing commercial viability mean that even the most basic fandom of an A-list artist has some financial barriers to entry. And so Springsteen plays three and a half hours, at seeming full tilt for all of it (there was no encore ritual last night, just the house lights coming up for “Born to Run,” after the Boss had wrung a wet sponge over his sweaty body, and staying up until it was time for everyone to file out), and makes physical contact with scores of people on the floor.

All of which to say that I dreamed of not thinking about the money, and I didn’t think about the money, and I’m not thinking about it now, either. 

A couple of days ago, I e-mailed a friend that I’ve seen Springsteen deliver a sublime show and I’ve seen him ably convey the artifice of sublimity, and that I was dreaming that Thursday would be in the former category. But that Lofgren solo — like Bruce’s own playing, like Little Steven Van Zandt’s 12-string and his vocal harmonies, like drummer Weinberg’s impossible constancy — just can’t be labeled one or the other. This is why we argue about Springsteen’s populism and its worth — because that popularity is owed to the workingman rhetoric of songs now delivered by a man whose hard work has fetched fortune upon fortune, and because that popularity is also merit-based, driven by decades of E Street Band precision that has never felt clinical or posed. Can you love out of habit and still be shown something new? And do you believe that the thousands of people sharing the experience with you feel what you’re feeling, feel that newness, feel renewed themselves?

It sounds like cheese, it sounds like corn, it sounds like cheesy corn, but I say yes. You do, too, right?

Setlist:
Meet Me in the City
The Ties That Bind
Sherry Darling
Jackson Cage
Two Hearts
Independence Day
Hungry Heart
Out in the Street
Crush on You
You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)
I Wanna Marry You
The River
Point Blank
Cadillac Ranch
I’m a Rocker
Fade Away
Stolen Car
Ramrod
The Price You Pay
Drive All Night
Wreck on the Highway
Badlands
No Surrender
Candy’s Room
Because the Night
She’s the One
Backstreets
Thunder Road
Born to Run
Dancing in the Dark
Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)
Tenth Avenue Freeze-out
Shout
Bobby Jean