FOXBOROUGH — For the eight days leading up to the first of his two shows there, it was reasonable to wonder whether Bruce Springsteen would make it to Gillette Stadium this week. On Aug. 16, the Boss’s management announced that his two scheduled concerts in Philadelphia had been postponed because he had “taken ill.” That mysterious locution and the lack of additional details raised the possibility that something more than the sniffles might be ailing the Boss. But not to worry; whatever had sidelined Springsteen in Philly didn’t stop him from taking the stage on time (well, on rock time; he started 20 minutes late) Thursday night in Foxborough.
He appeared, in his contemporary uniform of dark jeans and black pearl-snap short-sleeve shirt, to be none the worse for wear. Quite the contrary; Springsteen’s performance on this night, as on all nights these days, leads quite naturally to astonishment at the capacity of a man who is 73 years old to play — hard, and nonstop — for the almost three hours he logged on Thursday, and to do it again and again.
The only thing that might have reminded a listener of where Springsteen is at in life was a certain raggedness in his singing voice — or perhaps that was the lingering effect of last week’s bout of whatever it was. But then, who goes to a Bruce Springsteen show for displays of technical vocal proficiency from the Boss?
That aside, Springsteen was indomitable from start (a blistering run-through of “No Surrender”) to finish (when he stood alone, with his guitar, to sing a gorgeous “I’ll See You in My Dreams”). Along with the ferocious assistance of his E Street Band, he sang and played his songs — 26 of them — as if it was the first time he’d gotten to do it, and as if he’d never get the chance to do it again. Almost every song launched without a break from the one that preceded it, and prior to the encore, he didn’t even bother to leave the stage. He spent almost as much time out on the catwalk that thrust into the audience, or alongside the barrier that separated the front line of the pit from the stage, as he did on the stage itself, exhorting the crowd to rise up, urging them to sing, singing with them, playing with them, being with them.
None of this was especially out of the ordinary for a Springsteen show, and the setlist itself was, by and large, meat-and-potatoes Bruce, dominated, naturally enough, by songs that made him his bones — ”Prove It All Night” and “The Promised Land,” “Backstreets” and “Badlands” — drawn especially from “Born to Run,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” and “Born in the U.S.A.,” which together accounted for 12 of the 26 songs he performed.
But there were also glances back to the time before those songs about young working men, their concerns and their desperation, became his modus operandi. “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out,” the alliterative recounting of the E Street Band’s formation, became a memorial to band members who have passed on via shots of Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici flashing on the stage screens during the song. So, too, there were four songs from “Letter to You,” his most recent record with the E Street Band, with the soaring “Ghosts” and “Last Man Standing” both looking back to and reflecting on his beginnings in his first group almost 60 years ago.
The inevitable creep of time, then, and what it brings with it, did make an appearance. But for the three hours that Springsteen was on stage with pedal to the metal, giving everything he had, it seemed like he could go on forever.
Stuart Munro can be reached at sj.munro@verizon.net
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND THE E STREET BAND
At Gillette Stadium, Thursday (repeats Saturday)