Magic Tour (Bruce Springsteen) - The Show

The Show

When the tour opened at the Hartford Civic Center, several things were immediately apparent. The show was clearly shorter than in years past, beginning at around 8:30 and ending at around 10:45. However more songs were played than could be extrapolated from this time, given past practice, due to the omission of elongated numbers with stage hijinks, and in particular no long monologues or band intros. As guitarist Nils Lofgren said of the tour's start, "Bruce tired to do an experiment with condensing everything, covering all the emotional territory he needed to."

Soozie Tyrell, while now clearly not an official member of the E Street Band by analysis of publicity material, tour T-shirts and the like, was nonetheless a full member on-stage, appearing on every song with some combination of violin, acoustic guitar, and backing vocals. On the front line of the stage, age was taking its toll: on one side Clarence Clemons was once again sitting in a chair when not playing his saxophone or percussion parts and needing a steadying hand for getting on and off stage, while Danny Federici was also looking a little frail. On the other side, not only was Springsteen's teleprompter (a fixture since the early 1990s) still in view, but sidekick Steven Van Zandt had his own (for lyrics) as did wife and band member Patti Scialfa (for guitar chords). In the latter respect, however, the show featured a breakthrough: the first Scialfa song played in its entirety, the mid-set "A Town Called Heartbreak", which would continue to be played intermittently on the first leg of the tour. Drummer Max Weinberg also had a small teleprompter within his drum kit, showing lyrics, unusual in that Weinberg does not sing onstage.

The set list heavily leaned on Magic material, as might be expected, with The Rising initially also well represented. The 1970s were also featured, with a number of songs off Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town. Thematically, the show was organized in recent Springsteen fashion, with certain fixed sequences that appeared every night, interspersed with "wild card" sequences in which a variety of recent or old songs might appear. Shows usually began with a calliope playing "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" as the band took the stage, followed by several calls out from the darkness by Springsteen — "Is there anybody alive out there!?" Then, as might be expected, Magic's first single "Radio Nowhere" and its expression of social longing began the concert. This was followed by some older number such as "The Ties That Bind" or "No Surrender" that supplied that social connection, and then by The Rising's "Lonesome Day" to balance the equation. The next part of the show brought out ''Magic'''s political undercurrents, first with a spoken introduction to "Magic" that made clear that song's understated lyric: "This is about living in times when the truth gets twisted into lies and lies get twisted into truth. So, it's not about magic. It's about tricks." Thus set up to follow was just that, a trick: yet another at-first-puzzling rendition of the always challenging "Reason to Believe". The Nebraska closer was transformed from a low-key acoustic number to a heavy-hitting, harmonica-driven, boogie-woogie blues rock version, with Springsteen pumping up the audience with phantom overhand throwing motions ... all for a song that represented, despite frequent misinterpretations, a void empty of hope; only a return of the Devils & Dust Tour's ultra-distorting "bullet mic" at the end served to reveal a bit of the deceit. An explicit public service announcement rap during "Livin' in the Future" listed Springsteen's complaints about developments in American during the George W. Bush administration, including extraordinary rendition, illegal wiretapping, voter suppression, no habeas corpus, New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and the continuing Iraq War. "The Promised Land" followed by wild card slots would then alleviate the mood.

Another fixed, socio-political sequence occurred at the end of the main set, "Devil's Arcade" into "The Rising" into "Last to Die" into "Long Walk Home" into "Badlands"; in an interview, Springsteen said of the transition out of "The Rising" and into "Last to Die", signalling the course of American society from the September 11 attacks to the Iraq War, "The whole night is going to turn on that segue. That's what we're up there for right now, that thirty seconds." Encores started with the relaxed lament of the new "Girls in Their Summer Clothes". This was followed by pot luck back catalog choices, often involving one of his long epics, the inevitable "Born to Run", a celebratory "Dancing in the Dark", and as the show finalé, "American Land". This, the only holdover from the Sessions Band Tour, featured Clemons on pennywhistle, both Federici and Bittan on accordion and joining Tyrell and the others on the front stage line, in an up-tempo jig that sought to convey the whole tale of immigration to the United States. As such it careened wildly in purpose between a rousing closer and a message summation; these dual roles were found in the start with Springsteen's exclamation over drums, “It’s your country, don’t let anyone take it from you!” and was emphasized as the tour went on, when the large video screens above the stage began scrolling the lyrics as the song played, and then illustrated Springsteen's quick-paced band intro spiel with 1960s Batman-styled cartoon bursts: E! Street! Band!

The European second leg featured very enthusiastic crowds and shows lengthening towards two and a half hours, but also largely static set lists, possibly due to stand-in organist Charlie Giordano needing time to learn the Springsteen oeuvre. By the North American third leg, set lists were slightly loosened, with "Night" or other choices often preceding "Radio Nowhere" as the show opener. Oddball selections showed up more as wild cards or audibles, sometimes prompted by audience signs held up in the pit below the stage. The signs practice became more frequent starting in March, and eventually built up into a tradition that would carry over to the band's next tour. Clemons' chair was now comically upgraded to a gilded throne, with a tambourine placed next to it so he could play along on songs where he was catching a breather. His role overall was not diminished, however, as "Jungleland" and his longest and most famous saxophone solo began appearing more often in the encores. "Long Walk Home" gained more emphasis, with Nils Lofgren and especially Steve Van Zandt adding their own vocal parts during the coda.

Once the tour resumed following Federici's death, the existing structure began to break down. For the first seven shows, a video montage about Federici, set to past-tour-finale-song "Blood Brothers", was shown preceding the start. Many old songs were performed, both well known, such as "Growin' Up", and songs which had remained virtually unplayed for 20 years, such as "Wild Billy's Circus Story". Magic slots were reduced and its songs put on rotation; the middle of the set became extremely varied, with "Livin' in the Future" and "She's the One" the only constants. "The Promised Land", which had been a mid-set regular, was moved to various places in the set lists. Encore length varied, but again "Born to Run" and "American Land" remained the only constants. The band found that playing shows helped them to cope with the emotional effects of the loss of Federici.

On the European outdoor summer's leg, where unlike in the U.S. Springsteen was still a stadium-level attraction, the shows became increasingly longer, a pattern that had been taking hold throughout the tour. The Helsinki Olympic Stadium show in Finland ran past three hours, containing no less than 31 songs (in that metric, the longest show of Springsteen's since 1993 on the "Other Band" Tour and the longest of E-Street Band since 1988). As the tour left Helsinki, the group had played a total of 117 different songs over 87 shows, the list having been expanded in Europe with rarities like "I'm on Fire", "Held Up Without a Gun", "For You", "Drive All Night", "Rendezvous", "Summertime Blues", "Cover Me", and "None But the Brave". Front pit audience signs and Springsteen audibles from same were now a constant feature of every show; never having been done by the band before, the Springsteen official website said that "All of us have been enjoying the signs and banners with song requests," and requested that they be kept a reasonable size during the upcoming final American leg. In some cases, songs were audibled that the band had not rehearsed at all, and arrangements were made up on the spot. Clemons, Lofgren, and Weinberg all indicated they enjoyed the new unexpectedness of the shows. Magic selections, in contrast, were sometimes down to four from their original usual eight. E Streeter Nils Lofgren described the state of the show in an interview after the end of this European leg: "The band, musically, is in the best shape we've ever been, I think. The whole show has become one long improv/audible now; sometimes changes the first song on the way to the stage, and usually by the second song he's calling audibles, so the set list is useless. It's fun to be part of something ... where a band leader can do that much improv and get away with it and have a band that'll deliver and make it work. So, it's all really a pretty historic run, from my perspective."

The fifth and final U.S. leg began with three shows at home's Giants Stadium, seen at the time as possibly Springsteen's last there. The opening "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" had the upper deck literally shaking, while Lofgren's impromptu somersault during "Because the Night" astounded everyone, especially since Lofgren was headed to double hip replacement surgery after the tour. The practice of longer shows and of songs played for sign requests continued. The latter was now cued by an extended drumbeat for "Summertime Blues" or "Light of Day" while Springsteen collected and assessed the many signs. The fourth and fifth legs also featured a new "Build Me a House" stage rap from Springsteen, located in 15-minute renditions of "Mary's Place"; the rap would carry over onto the next tour, albeit in a different song. Springsteen obscurities continued to be played, although the stadium audiences would be inattentive for quiet, intense numbers such as "Drive All Night". In other cases, the band would hash out onstage the key to play "It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City" in. The biggest surprise was "Crush on You", which had not been performed since The River Tour in 1980; Springsteen explained why by saying, "We firmly believe this is the worst song we ever put on a record." Show lengths and energy were such that Lofgren sometimes wondered whether the audience was up to handling extra songs in the encores.

Beginning with the Gillette Stadium show, one-off renditions of old 1960s songs that Springsteen had heard growing up, and that he and the band had played decades before, began showing up in set lists, sometimes taking up to as many five slots in a show. Such numbers included "Pretty Flamingo", "Little Latin Lupe Lu", "You Can't Sit Down", "Double Shot (Of My Baby's Love)", "Gloria", "I Fought the Law", "Then She Kissed Me", "Mountain of Love", "It's All Over Now" (with Soozie Tyrell taking her first lead vocal with the E Street Band), and "Boys" (with Max Weinberg surprisingly doing the same). In the final stretch of shows, Springsteen expressed the freedom to take on anything and everything. The tour's final performance at Harleyfest featured Danny Federici's son Jason playing accordion on "Sandy", followed by venue-thematic selections such as "Wooly Bully", "Gypsy Biker", "Racing in the Street", and a tour finale of "Born to be Wild". By the conclusion, some 144 to 148 different songs had been played, depending upon how snippets were counted.

At the conclusion of the Harley show, Springsteen told the audience, "We just had the greatest tour of our lives." Springsteen would later say that the Magic Tour constituted "some of the most exciting shows we've ever done." And Springsteen echoed the sentiment he expressed before the tour's start, that it was not a swansong for the band, at the final show of it, saying "We'll be seein' ya ... we're only just getting started."