A Last-Chance Power Drive
They tear straight into it, “Born to Run,” coming out of a cover of INXS’ “Don’t Change” in front of an Australian audience that was not just delighted to hear a local band recognized, but amazed at how well the cover came off.
Max is throwing in an extra back beat, or at least it sounds like he is, and maybe that’s what throws the enterprise off. After a first run-through of the riff, the second one collapses, and Springsteen starts it over.
Max is unrelenting; he seizes this song, a goddamned relic so old that the radio format you would most likely hear it on has gone extinct — he takes this song and he rips it open and he finds the heart still throbbing inside.
As always, the band tightens around him, coalescing into a sound that is today but 1975 at the same time, and 1978 at the Agora or the Roxy or Winterland, and 1984 in Paris, and 2008 in St. Louis, Missouri. It has circled the globe several times over, this song, and keen-eared devotees of Brucelegs may argue it’s atrophied over the years. It’s hard to play the same song every other night and still find what’s waiting inside of it. Age and the other challenges in an average Springsteen show must get in the way; they’re learning new material daily while Springsteen continues to dig up chestnuts from his catalog to startle his fans.
These are professional musicians at the peak of their powers with decades of experience, so it always sounds good, and the crowd is always into it, because it’s fresh to them. But to say the band always sounds like it relishes playing “Born to Run”? I don’t know if I agree with your police work there.
On this night in Sydney, they relish it. It’s faster than usual, but not “the fastest we’ve ever played that motherfucker,” as Bruce comments. It’s faster than they’ve played it since the late seventies, when it was still new and revealing itself every night. It fit in those shows because Springsteen was still singing songs of desperate escape and romance, even as the dark themes in his music were beginning to emerge and at times dominate. Whether the singer wanted to escape out of hope or fear, it fit.
Where do they fit now, these old songs? There’s some nostalgia, naturally, for performers and audience. There’s theater in the way Bruce inhabits the characters in the lyrics and dramatizes their struggles. But does a forty-year-old song MEAN anything rubbing up against songs written two years ago? Where does “Born to Run” fit? Can the show, the band, the singer find space for it?
They found it in Sydney. They found it in a performance that barely holds together, that sounds unhinged. It’s like they’re back forty years ago and feeling like every show they played together could be the end of the world. It’s like that moment around the Born to Run album when Bruce put all his chips on a single bet and made a record that would help shape the next forty years of music. It means something. It’s full. It’s alive again.
