18 -- Bruce Springsteen – Sunday, July 27, 2008 – Giants Stadium – East Rutherford, NJ

I mentioned in the REM / Modest Mouse review how excited I was that I had scribbled a “liveblog” during the concert that I could simply transcribe here. Moments ago, I discovered that I also did a write up for this Bruce Springsteen show! Yay, laziness! Here is what I wrote the morning after the show:

The coolest thing about this concert was seeing it with old people. Ok, older people. I thought I’d feel resentful of my cousin Kevin and his friend Mike McDonald, who were able to see Springsteen in high school, in college, and thirty times in between. At the Meadowlands, though, it ended up being moving watching how much it still affected them. Mike kept shaking his head through the opening set, which included numerous old songs like “Spirit in the Night,” “No Surrender,” “Bobby Jean,” “Workin’ on the Highway,” and “Youngstown,” which Kevin said Springsteen hadn’t played in concert in 20 years! The high point of the first section was “Atlantic City,” a nostalgia song that moved Mike to tears.



The overall high point of the concert was “Jungleland” – as it had been at UVA. It was less a song than an experience – eight minutes of Bruce’s voice at its most subtle and soulful, eight minutes for you to close your eyes and get lost in a knife fight. The thing that made the song at UVA was the physical distance I was from the stage. Buried in the dark under an awning a football field away from the performer, I could still feel every note, pause, and piano chord. It worked more than the rest of the concert because I wasn’t being dragged down by the lifeless fogies around me – it was just me and the voice in the distance.

Because it was a giant outdoor stadium, “Jungleland” didn’t have quite that intimacy, but it had its own advantage: the fact that 45,000 people became dead silent during certain sections of the song. This time there was also the excitement of wondering whether he’d actually play the song (Kevin said he rarely does)...and leaping out of your seat when you realized he was.



Grade: A