No Surrender: Springsteen and the E Street Band Perform The River

Thank god Bruce Springsteen is still alive, still touring, and still as passionate about his craft as he was forty years ago. It is inevitable that many veteran performers settle into nostalgia acts. Their audiences shrink. Those who remain become insistent, often irritatingly so, that their favorite artists show up, play the hits, and leave without a lot of fuss. Musicians who wish to keep the gigs coming in are generally left with no choice but to oblige them.

Bruce Springsteen, and by extension, the E Street Band, are something of an anomaly in that regard. Since reuniting the E Street Band in the late 90s, Springsteen has put out some of the best albums of his career. A number of tracks from these albums, particularly The Rising, have gone on to become staples of his live shows, which continue to draw sizable, reasonably varied (if only in terms of age) crowds. Springsteen has achieved an icon status that is truly rare in the music world. His fan base certainly wants to hear the classics from such albums as Darkness on the Edge of Town, Born to Run, or The River. At the same time, they are also more than willing to listen to anything else Springsteen may want to bring to the show.

Taking a look at his set lists from recent tours, Springsteen continues to pack his performances with extraordinarily broad, fantastic collections of music. The classics, the new songs, the rarities, and the (sometimes very odd) covers are all given equal attention at a Bruce Springsteen concert. For anywhere from 2 ½ to 3 or 4 hours, the man continues to play with the urgency and enthusiasm of someone thirty, forty years younger. It is well worth the cost of admission.

To put it another way, it’s not surprising that Springsteen can still fill Madison Square Garden on his own.

He did just that for his current River 2016 Tour, which will take himself and the current E Street incarnation (which largely consists of people who have been there from the beginning) across a number of U.S. dates. The tour is an interesting one, in the sense that Springsteen and the gang are not promoting a new album. If anything, they are promoting the absolutely devastating seven-disc commemorative boxset for the essential 1980 double album The River. They’re promoting it in true Springsteen fashion, in that they have decided that every date on the current tour will feature a performance of the 20-track album in its entirety. They’re promising that, along with whatever else Springsteen feels like playing. If you know his approach to live performances, then you know that list alone is a sizable one. Either way, we’re looking at a tour that can’t possibly hope to be less than three hours per show. For a young act, that’s a hell of a thing to maintain for an entire tour. For a group of men and women who largely consist of sixty-year-olds, it sounds like suicide.

But this is nothing new for Springsteen, or for the rest of the E Street Band. Again, it comes down to passion and energy. Springsteen seems to have those things in ample amounts. Judging from the tone of their recent River 2016 Tour show at Chicago’s United Center, everyone appears to be having a really good time. These songs have not grown old and tiresome for Springsteen or the rest of the band. They certainly haven’t fallen out of favor with the fans. The recent January 19th 2016 show opened by going straight into The River, which is widely regarded as one of the best double albums of all time. As seems to be the case for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, the group combined a casual, laidback performance with a hyperactive attention to quality and energy. The end result added a comma to the story of the group, because that story is clearly still ready to reveal a whole lot more.

As the band moved through River tracks such as “Drive All Night”, “Hungry Heart”, and “Stolen Car”, no one appeared to be going through the motions. On the audio of the show, available through the band’s website, Springsteen and Steven Van Zandt can be heard joyously laughing and playing their way through some of the album’s lighter tracks. If you compare the energy of these shows to the original River-era performances of 1980, it’s hard to tell the difference between the two. In playing these songs with the same vibrancy and sincerity that compelled their creation in the first place, Springsteen and the rest of the band proves that The River is so much more than a classic rock great. Its songs, stories, and characters are as important to music and storytelling now, as they were nearly forty years ago.

Occasionally, Springsteen discusses specific tracks in greater depth. For the most part, he is content to let the material speak for itself. It speaks timeless volumes.

“We got a few more,” Springsteen chuckles, when the band has finished playing The River from top to bottom. Indeed. For an additional 70 or so minutes, the group plays a random assortment of material. Most notable is the inclusion of a cover of The Eagles’ “Take it Easy”, which keeps in line with the tributes Springsteen has already included on the tour. That includes David Bowie’s “Rebel, Rebel” (which is worth a listen). However you feel about The Eagles, or about the recent passing of Glenn Frey, it’s hard to deny the fact that The Eagles’ early work is not without some merit. It’s just that the band would eventually drift towards a conservative, stale fanbase, with a disinterest towards anything that didn’t involve getting as much money from that fanbase as humanly possible.

The trajectory of The Eagles, when compared to that of Springsteen and the E Street Band, is interesting. One group became an unhappy reminder of what happens to bands that clearly stop caring. The other continues to find a surprising amount of relevancy and even reverence from a crowd that skews older and white, but still reaches out to people of all ages and backgrounds. An elaborate comparison between these acts is not necessary here. Springsteen’s cover is a good one. It’s just compelling to take a long view of the bands that manage to survive the decades. For most bands, survival is not a happy state of existence.

During the Chicago show, Springsteen screws up the Born in the U.S.A. classic “No Surrender.” He laughs. Everyone does. He tries again. Screws up again. Finally, on the third try, the song kicks off. It’s a wonderful, straightforward piece on youth, keeping the fight alive. As the band plays additional tracks like “Cover Me” (which sounds about as ferocious and heavy as it did on the Born in the U.S.A. Tour from over thirty years ago), “Shout”, “Human Touch”, “Thunder Road”, and “The Rising”, the energy doesn’t drop for even a second. On its own terms, that energy is a little inspiring. If only because it proves that if you’re lucky, you can still love what you do, several decades on down the line.

Combine that energy with the phenomenal powers that the band still possesses on every possible front. What you’re left with is one of the best live music experiences you could ever hope to have. The River 2016 obviously leans on the classics. At the same time, everything feels like it is being conceived and recorded in real-time. Expect this momentum to maintain itself through this entire tour.