It always happens. The individualized mass is an annoying cacophony of conversations, but when its presence is sensed, it becomes a single voice unified by emotion and converges into a single scream, unified and overwhelming, that bellows “Bruuuuuucccceeeee”. It happened again yesterday, in an Olympic Stadium with 58,000 people who witnessed the willful vigor of a person of almost 75 years who, just as Bill Withers stopped stuttering when singing, becomes invigorated every time he has a stadium before him. And it always happens the same, a ritual is repeated with slight tweaks, the audience, who knows they will have a good time, ends up having an even better time than expected and that small secular miracle occurs again. Each and every time. For years now. It doesn’t seem to have an end. The Virgin of Lourdes of the agnostics. She does not cause healings, she does not appear in a grotto and unlike the Virgin, she promises happiness now, on this earth, not in the afterlife.
In his first Barcelona concert of this extended tour that passed last year in the same place, Bruce Springsteen, the Boss, once again made a crowd happy. It seems like a miracle. And he is on track to achieve with his E Street Band the 18 apparitions in Barcelona that the shepherdess María Bernarda Sobirós contemplated in the Massabielle grotto. The only difference between that creature and the 58,000 last night is that one was stunned and the crowd screamed in pure astonishment. She did it with the initial Lonesome Dayimposing that sonorous happiness on the hubbub that was still erupting on stage with My Love Will Not Let You Down, Cover Me and Radio Nowhere, a novelty in a repertoire that included almost the same songs that were played in Madrid, although in a different order and suppressing the novelties of the third concert in the capital. That’s what it’s like to have a big but bare stage, lacking special effects and not having dancers: you just need to decide the changes and shout “one, two, three” like Springsteen does. The rest comes alone.
Until the eighth cut Darkness Of The Edge Of Town There was no quarter, not even for her voice, which in this composition wanted to sound full, as if to correct a hesitant beginning in which it did not reach the tone. But even in that, Springsteen is different: just as there are artists who, despite their age, fail trying to go up and up, expecting gratitude from the public just for the audacity of defying nature, Springsteen goes up as much as he can, so that he does not punish his voice and maintains a more than acceptable and continuous tone. Resources such as making the audience sing, such that at the beginning of Hungry Heart or later in The Riveror lower the tone to be able to arrive well, case among others of The Last Man Standingand always using choruses with a soulful soul are other resources of an old cat who knows how far he can go and knows that his business is not to sing like in talent contests on TV.
By the way, regarding Last Man Standing, a song to life about death, dedicated to George Theiss, a companion in his youth, both his speech and the lyrics of the song appeared on screens with subtitles in Catalan. Bruce used this language on several occasions, a deference already common to him. “A beautiful night” he came to say. From the thirteenth topic, My Hometownn, Bruce and his band, already splendid, with a Little Steven who is definitely more Lilyhammer’s character on stage than The Sopranosthey addressed the immovable part of their repertoire, that of the hits that offered the most plastic moments of dedication to the audience, waving their arms, flapping their hands as if thousands of butterflies were flying just above them, dancing, bouncing and, at the same time, apparently, moving Bruce himself, who added one more song to the repertoire, Rockin’ All Over The Worldby John Fogerty, before ending in an acoustic take with I’ll See You In My Dreams.
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He also jumped on the scene with Dancing In The Dark, cheerful and happy; She took off her vest and tie to stay in a white shirt in the soulera Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out. He walked before the audience, gave the microphone to a young girl who either didn’t know the chorus of Waiting On A Sunny Day, or having the Chief so close made her stay as stiff as Sobirós in Lourdes. In She’s The One He changed his harmonica for an envelope of ham, pata negra, it is to be expected, and in the first encore, Born In The USA, with the stadium lights on to increase the feeling of communion, brought out the best in his voice as he had done before in the heartfelt performance of Backstreets. And okay, there are no special effects, but the profiles that the cameras gave of her face in songs like The Rising, seemed to postulate him to be sculpted on Mount Rushmore. In short: “miraculously” business as usual.
It is true that he has not offered an estimable album for a long time, Born To Run was the most popular, that it does not maintain the continued validity of artists like John Cale or Brian Eno, that it lacks the scenic sophistication of David Byrne, that its distance from the reality it explains is oceanic and that its best years are not yet to come, but the concerts of Bruce Springsteen, a real man, who would have said Dinarama, continue to move because they maintain the vigor and emotional electricity that his artistic honesty demands and because he is the last great Mohican of a century that saw the birth of both rock and the vast majority of those who saw it at the Olympic almost like an apparition. In a way it is.
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