Review | Bruce Springsteen talks to his ghosts

For the first time in 16 years, Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band took to a Montreal stage on Thursday, in front of 21,650 of their disciples. A historic Halloween evening during which ghosts were chased away, but others were called to participate in the party.

Always count on Bruce Springsteen to mark a special occasion with a finely chosen song. But what was the Boss going to pull out of his bag of surprises to celebrate Halloween? It was a little after 7:30 p.m. when, preceded by a duly frightening organ, the E Street Band attempted what no one would have predicted: an amused version, as deliberate as it is approximate, of Ghostbusters by Ray Parker Jr.

This is, according to our research, the first time that the theme song from the 1984 film of the same name appeared on the program of a show by the man who, in 1984, was busy releasing an album entitled Born in the USA.

The entire Bell Center was full Thursday evening. The entire Bell Center as in: every seat, even in the back sections, melts. Every seat…even behind the stage! Which means that 21,650 people came to receive communion, as many disciples who were undoubtedly aware that Bruce must be picked up in Montreal when he passes. His last visit was on March 2, 2008 and the American president was then named George W. Bush.

Le E Street Big Band

Started in February 2023, the current tour of the boss of bosses initially responded to a selection of songs varying very little, if at all, from evening to evening, a decision from which he has increasingly allowed himself to deviate during recent dates.

But on Thursday evening, Mr. New Jersey will have essentially reconnected with the skeleton of this show as initially conceived (plus a few gifts that fans will remember for a long time, like Racing in the Street). The songs played in position numbers 4 and 5 sum up the message well: No Surrenderhis youthful promise to never give up, and Ghostsin which he addresses all the ghosts of his missing friends, whom he will find on the other side.

Although still smiling, Springsteen seemed to really need – vocally at least – his expanded E Street Band during Ghosts. Made up of 17 musicians, including four backing singers and five brass players, this majestically powerful group has more in common with a big band than a rock band. Bruce could also count on the wonderfully nasal voice of his own Keith Richards, Steve Van Zandt, who was dressed as a pirate, not because it was Halloween, but because he never goes on stage otherwise dressed.

It wasn’t until the eighth song, Hungry Hearthis first real career hit, that Bruce seems to have shaken off his rust and that the Bell Center seems to have remembered that such a rare visit had to be honored.

Two solid versions of slightly more unusual songs would follow, first Atlantic City, Then Youngstownwhich the author of these lines has long dreamed of hearing in concert. The dream finally materialized on Thursday and the magician Nils Lofgren snatched his prodigious solo from the Milky Way (and his guitar). It’s a lot for those kinds of moments that there’s nothing in life like going to see concerts.

The only political parenthesis of the evening would precede Long Walk Homea prayer for his country to find its way back to health. “We are going through an incredibly critical moment for us in the United States and for our democracy,” Barack Obama’s friend soberly declared, before performing this piece published at the time of his last visit to the city, while the war was raging. in Iraq.

The eternity of friendship

Springsteen has always been transparent about the immense debt of his work to black music, but rarely in his career has he better invited, with the help of his backing vocalists, what is spiritual in his music, in the noblest sense of the term. Nightshift is, evening after evening during this tour, a luminous platform offered to the E Street Choir, including Ada Dyer and Curtis King. And Thursday was no exception. The more introspective, more serious portion of the evening had begun.

In 1975, Bruce Springsteen promised a friend that despite their conflicting loyalties, they would remain “forever friends”, in one of his greatest songs, Backstreets. He was in his mid-twenties and probably knew little about what it really means to lose someone close to you.

In 2024, Bruce Springsteen places this same song just after Last Man Standingdedicated to the late George Theiss, who until 2018 was the only other survivor of the Castiles, his first group. “As we age, mourning becomes a facet of life,” he explains in a moving monologue.

It is therefore the guitar stretched towards the sky, where his comrade is now, that Bruce Springsteen begins Backstreetsa song almost 50 years old, in which he manages to make say things that it did not initially contain.

It is very likely that at the Bell Centre, friends who were too male to say “I love you” finally dared to take the plunge. Thursday evening, manly hugs were distributed with as much generosity in the CH home as candy in the streets of the rest of the city.

This eight-minute version of Backstreets will remain the definitive version of this ode to the eternity of friendship, which the rocker interrupts with another short monologue during which he explains that the most important thing he keeps from George is not his box of 45 rpm records, but all the memories that his memory contains. Then Bruce points to his heart and everyone cries.

There is always a question of transcendence in the work of Bruce Springsteen. Transcend one’s original environment, transcend the bugs inherited from one’s parents, transcend the idea one had of oneself. But the transcendence discussed in his current tour, thanks to the story he weaves through his careful choice of repertoire, is also that of the dialogue that music allows us to establish with our dead, with those who are no longer there.

And music soaked in memories, he had plenty for us in the final stretch: Born to Run, Rosalita, Dancing in the Dark, even Twist and Shout, with all the arena lights on, because on the other side of grief is always life again.

This is why with Springsteen, it is sometimes a little possible to believe in eternity. That of the past, the present and the future, all contained in the same refrain. And eternity, Thursday night, no one wanted it to end.