8 -- Bruce Springsteen – Sunday, November 18, 2007 – Verizon Center – Washington, DC

A Prediction
 
I will never see a better show as long I live. I would love to be wrong, I would hope that some other performance can conjure up as much heart and soul as this one, but I’m not holding my breath. Nothing will compare to the first time seeing Bruce.

 













Almost Never Happened

I had prepared for weeks for the show. I called Ticketmaster the morning tickets were made available, stalked Ticketmaster.com that afternoon, Metro’d to the Verizon Center box office a few days later…and came up empty. With those tactics, I could have had ten tickets for any other artist, but the problem is, everyone uses those tactics with Springsteen. In desperation, I searched Stub Hub, Tickets Now, and Craigslist, but the cheapest tickets there started at $600!


My savior, I thought, was my cousin Kevin. He was a lifelong Springsteen fanatic, so I thought he’d know if there was any way to get anything. He surprised me when he casually insisted, “Yeah, no problem.” He guaranteed something would turn up by the day of the show. I called back a few weeks before, then a few days before, and finally the day before, and the response was always the same: “Yeah, no problem.”

Yet there I was, the day of the show, without a ticket. Kevin’s final response, an hour before the show, as I Metro’d in, was that there would still be tickets available at the door. This infuriated me because there clearly wouldn’t be. There had been none available for months; tickets were not just going to appear at the door.
Out of options, in defeat, before I took the train home, I walked up to the box office, and asked the woman, “Are there any tickets left behind the stage? Or in one of the nosebleed sections?”

 










“No” was the expected reply. I started to walk away and the woman said, “Wait. There are none available there, but there still may be tickets.” Rejuvenated, I insisted, “Anywhere. Wow, that’d be awesome.”

I didn’t know the half of it.

I paid for the ticket, went through security, and found my seat. I was FOUR ROWS FROM THE STAGE. I had come to the arena at 7:58 the day of the concert and secured a face-value seat four rows from the stage! 

 











Just the Beginning
 
Over the next 3.5 hours, for the first time in more than 3.5 years, I went to church. To a non concertgoer, this may sound hyperbolic, but it really did feel spiritual. There was the charismatic preacher, reverent congregation, and religious imagery, but beyond that, there was this aura of…communion – of purpose.

The E Street Band had united every demographic in the arena: middle-aged white men, middle-aged black women, male Asian college students, female Indian teens, etc. These groups were united not by some catchy chorus or some radio hook; they were united by genuinely meaningful songs that captured what it’s like to grow up in America. Virtually everyone could relate to the suffocation of a small town and the bloodshed of 9/11. Virtually no one could present it as well: i.e. as a death trap that “rips the bone off your back,” as a life-giving/life-taking substance that “mix[es] with mine.”


Badlands : Bruce Springsteen from Olas Oasch on Vimeo.
 

[Here's a link to "JUNGLELAND" -- to me, his Everest: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bw572hRD1diCaVNaRVowNENKZEk/view?usp=sharing]

In the end, great as the E Street Band was, the concert came down to Bruce. 57 on the day of the concert, he invested more blood, tears, and sweat into each song than any performer half his age. Each line was inflected with care. His rising growl during “Badlands” was remarkable. Each verse, as his anger built, it got throatier. You could hear his determination; he needed to rise above. Conversely, during “Empty Sky,” all aggression was gone. He seemed to quietly consider every syllable of every line. I tried to explain to the kids that his voice reflected the way citizens uneasily considered the skyline right after 9/11, but they didn’t fully understand. They were too young; they didn’t remember.

Overall, the best use of his voice, and the last thing I remembered as I left the arena that night, was “Mary’s Place.” In lesser hands, the squeal of delight he let out at the end of the song could have been over the top. He built to it gradually, though, so it was believable. He started off hushed, a mere “black hole on the horizon,” but little by little, he grew. By the time he got to the squeal, you had to buy it. As had been the case innumerable times during the course of the night, he fully earned the “shout from the crowd.”

 

Grade: A+