Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band - USA & Europe 2023 tour

Crystal Talifiero and Zach Alford were the only two that really impressed me. TBH, I kinda wished Alford had replaced Max.

 

Man, Zach Alford was the guy that killed the other band for me. I'm not a drummer, but it certainly seemed like he couldn't keep a consistent tempo.

 

Indeed. I could be wrong but I seem to remember Alford taking the lion’s share of the grief from Springsteen fans at the time and I have no idea why. I thought he was the best of the new band members and really gave some drive and punch to the older songs. Fontayne is the one I didn’t have a lot of use for.

 

Wow, you really have to be careful on this website. The reasons I was disappointed with the 92 show at the LA Sports Arena were (i) he replaced the E Street Band and (ii) Human Touch/Lucky Town were the weakest albums of his career UP TO THAT POINT. Obviously no one thinks they are worse than High Hopes. But sorry for not making that clearer.

 

He wrote it for Kathleen Brennan, who would become his wife. She had been born in small-town Illinois but grew up in New Jersey.

 

It depends on what period yous aw them : 1994 and 2001 were weird tours (1994 was in the mad drug / turmoil era, and 2001 was them touring both their weakest album and dropping almost all the singles from their setlist)

 

I think SF alienated people because he seemed like such an obnoxious personality.

But he had/had talent. Sting hired SF in 2005, so he must've seen something there as well.

And SF was just as obnoxious in 2005 as in 1992!

Though Sting puts on such a somnambulant show that SF was a positive - he added energy.

Bruce didn't need that energy so SF just came across as annoying.

 

I am a drummer. I don’t know if tempo was a problem, but what I do know is he had zero dynamics. Played everything at 10 just whacking away like a jackhammer. No subtlety at all.

 

It was divisive at the time. I was in the camp that felt (and still feel) that the E Street Band is essential to Springsteen. It was like Mick replacing Keith, Charlie, Bill and Ronnie. It just didn’t work for me.

 

The two shows with Jay in 2009 was the weakest I've seen with the band. Still pretty good though.
Globen 2007 was another that could've been better.

 

I never said the show was "automatically inferior" because "it didn't vary." There is so much more to a Springsteen show than set list and structure. It looked to me and others like he was mailing it in. If you "found it a very moving experience" so be it. I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise. Interesting you say that you "found it a very moving experience" but yet "never watched or listened to it since. Once was enough."

In my opinion the apex of the solo performances since the first ones in the 70s, the Christic shows, revealed authentic artistic expression, with tension in the room so fierce that you could split it with a knife, from an artist if not at the top, pretty close, of his craft and so willing to try new songs and reveal deeply personal things in public for the first time, like going to therapy, and the "first *hit." Context means a lot. In 1990 he was a brand new father, had recently fired the band, and was in uncharted territory. That context created a perfect storm for artistic expression and created an unforgettable experience.

I didn't experience anything like that on Broadway. Springsteen was now a gazillionaire and instead of publically supporting human rights organizations like Amnesty and the Christic Institute, he was supporting millionaire politicians like John Kerry and Barak Obama, and palling around with the rich and famous. Springsteen could have made a choice to at least try to replicate the success of those Christic shows on Broadway. He made a choice not to and instead, he scripted a performance from his biography, which he admitted he treated like a "job," his words. Not surprisingly, it looked like he mailed it in. This was a far cry from the Springsteen who used to celebrate never having worked a day job and "playing" music.

 

Maybe he got burned by the (rumoured) failed Porcaro negotiations and just couldn't be bothered anymore.

 

Boy, I enjoyed the Jay shows I saw, mainly because he brought such a jolt of energy to the band!

 

With all due respect, I strongly disagree. I saw several shows of that tour , including one of the few US show that Jay drummed the entire time, and I loved it. I wouldn't have minded Jay taking his dad's seat permanent. He really brought a youthful energy to group.

 

The 92/93 band just sounds thin and weak. Maybe that's on Bruce, I don't know. They just don't have any power. Plus, there was a lot of weird dancing and fake laughing and it all sounded forced. And very little of the new material didn't completely suck. The songs just sucked.

 

The '92 tour was my first time attending a Bruce Springsteen concert and, even though I had to acknowledge to myself that I was catching a legendary act past his prime, I thoroughly enjoyed (and still have fond memories of) the '92 concerts I attended.

That said, in retrospect, it does seem to be a missed opportunity. Bruce had the clout at that point in his career to recruit not only the very best rock performers on the planet, but the kinds of musicians that could bring something new to the table and push the concerts on that tour to new heights. Instead, he opted for a solid, perfectly competent, but ultimately unremarkable group of players...none of whom could be considered among the top of their respective peers. Finances may have been a consideration, but I can't help but wonder if it was a matter of ego. Perhaps Bruce just couldn't handle being upstaged. Maybe I'm being needlessly cynical.

On the upside, he later seemed to have course-corrected with the Seeger Sessions Band, as those musicians (while not household names individually) indeed brought something refreshingly new and original to Springsteen's concert repertoire. Sadly, that 2006 tour is the only Springsteen tour I've missed in the past 30 years and that's only because they opted to skip Atlanta for the first time in Springsteen's touring history (going back to before the Born to Run tour). The rumored second US leg never came to fruition.

 

Forgetting to bring your saxophone on stage for Born To Run was neither solid nor competent.

(And she was the best one!)

 

Christic was 2 nights not 200 or whatever it was. You can't do that over and over again. I only saw it once because it was perfect as it was. I didn't need to hear those stories again in an inferior format that didnt compare to being in a 900 seat theatre when I didn't have a clue going in what was going to happen

 

But the assumption was at the time that Bruce wanted to move FORWARD not in a backwards folkie direction.
That he was into Sting etc, moving in that direction. You can hear subtle hints in Human Touch LP. But ultimately I think he realized he didn't have the chops to go avant garde, didn't pay as well.

He also wanted to check his commitment to E Street,

 

But Springsteen could base an entire 50+ year-performance career, including Christic, up to Broadway, playing live shows not based on a script from his biography, but somehow he could no longer "do that over and over again" once he got to Broadway. Got it.

So because you have "a clue . . . what was going to happen" and listening to the recorded shows "didnt compare" to being there live, does that mean you don't buy any archive shows that you've been to? Or does this standard just apply to the recording of your "very moving [Broadway] experience?"

 

I saw several shows with The Other Band at The Meadowlands, and they were enjoyable, but what I never could understand was Bruce jettisoning the E Street Band only to hire players to do a very similar show to what he would do with The E Street Band.
I remember Keith Richards ragging on Mick when Mick did a very Stones-like album. He said something to the effect that he could understand Mick doing a solo album of “ Irish folk music”, but why do the sane thing?
(Keith did do something different as a solo artist.)
Well it would have made some sense if Bruce went out with a stripped down band or if he did a solo tour or hard rock or something, but he did the same thing as he always did.
I never got that.
Sometimes I think that with The Other Band he was sending a warning shot over the bow , telling the E Streeters, “ Look I can get anybody to do what you guys do.”

 

The Broadway shows are an extension of the autobiography. I enjoyed it on Netflix but the singing is strained.

 

But they couldn’t. Bruce Springsteen would not have been able to continue at the level of success he has as live act with the other band.

 

I agree. That’s why he eventually brought them all back.

 

Apples and oranges