--- I was shocked that he started with the night with “Iceman,” a track I had never even heard of. Guts.
--- "High Hopes” had EDGE. It had trumpets, it had Tom Morello, it fit The Wire theme song, and it got Hark whooping without any prompting!
--- “Just Like Fire Would.” Awww, middle-school-trumpet flashback.
---- Awwwwww at “Cadillac Ranch” off The River. Everyone loved the Carolina shout out!! Eight band members swung on the bottom row.
--- “Louis Louay”: the fun continued.
--- Hadn't played “Mustang Sally” in “50 YEARS!" “What key is this in?” Lol at the falsetto and the climax. “Ride, Sally, ride.”
--- “Badlands”!!!! The lyrics!!
--- “No Surrender”!!! They randomly made it acoustic three minutes in -- made it that much better.
--- Can’t remember if I Hark or I said, “I don’t know when I’m going to be able to pee.” Great sign either way!
--- “Hungry Heart”!!!! A 64-year-old man just chugged a beer, dove into a crowd, grabbed song requests mid crowd-surf, and sang the entire song in tune. What was in that beer?
--- Love the shalalalas in “Brown Eyed Girl,” the brown-haired girl who waited “on a Sunny Day,” the cool down in “Racing in the Street,” and the fact that “Out in the Street” sounds like The Little Mermaid.
--- This lady attempts to chide me for diving to the bathroom during “Jack of All Trades”: “How could you leave during this?” My death stare makes her reconsider.
--- “Death to My Hometown” was good. “Wrecking Ball” put Miley to shame. (As if that’s difficult…)
--- At the Virginia Beach show a week earlier, I said the new “Tom Joad” was polarizing. This time it was uniformly AWESOME.
--- “The Rising”: woo. “Light of Day / Galveston Bay”: who knew?! The “800, 900 miles, na na na” section is so catchy!!
--- With that, it was time for the encore. It turned out to be the greatest encore I have witnessed by any band in 151 concerts. The fact that Hark Tagunicar was there for it and had taken part in an annotated 30-song countdown the ten days leading up to it made it that much more special. I was able to type out a brief reaction to the acoustic “Darkness,” the tender “Wall,” and my first-ever “Born in the USA.” After that, though, I could not type.
Hark, the couple from Williamsburg next to us, the rest of the arena, and I had to head into another dimension. The progression from “Born to Run” to “Dancing in the Dark” to “Tenth Ave Freeze Out” to “Shout” was mind blowing. Our seats were among the furthest ground level seats from the stage, so we could see 17,000 fans in front of us lift, leap, and whoop for four minutes straight. We would think it was over, and then there was another closer, and another, and another. When the last song finally came, it was not necessary. All hearts had been opened; everyone had fulfilled Bruce’s “Dream.”
Grade: A+
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