Bruce Springsteen, E Street Band Live Up to Hype in Kansas City

by Julian Spivey

Everything you’ve ever heard about a Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band concert is 100 percent true. There is just nobody around that can match the intensity and hard-charging rock glory of The Boss, even acts half his age. The 63-year old rocker pours his heart and soul out for the crowd on every tour stop at an incredible three hours at a time.
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Springsteen is my all-time favorite musician and songwriter, hands down, so I knew I absolutely had to see him perform live at least once in my life (hopefully there will be others down the road). The performance by him and his stellar band (the best in the business) was well-worth the six and a half hour drive to Kansas City, where he performed Saturday night (Nov. 17) at the Sprint Center. Early on in the show Springsteen told the audience: “Kansas City, Mo. The Show Me State. Well, we’re gonna fuckin’ show you something tonight!” He certainly would be a man of his word.
From what I’d previously read, Springsteen’s concerts always seem to be a mixture of greatest hits and deep album tracks that he might only play one time per tour and Saturday night was no different. His current “Wrecking Ball” tour for his most recent album of the same name meant that he’d also play a handful of tracks from the album, which was no problem by me, as it’s utterly fantastic.

Springsteen kicked off the marathon night with a cover of the Lieber & Stoller standard “Kansas City”, made popular by Wilbert Harrison, saying that one has to play this song when in Kansas City. The performance might have come as a surprise to many in the audience, but I figured Springsteen would break this classic out all along.
Following “Kansas City” was a roaring version of “Prove It All Night” from Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town” album that featured a whirling and twirling guitar solo by the incredibly talented Nils Lofgren, who would prove to be an instrumental jack of all trades during the night later playing a banjo and a pedal steel.
The energy set right away by the E Street Band would never leave throughout the entire night as Boss and his band rocked through “Candy’s Room”, “She’s the One” and “Hungry Heart”, in which Bruce let the crowd sing the chorus as he ran through the audience in the floor seats before epically crowd surfing back to the stage at the song’s finish.

One of the highlights of the show followed when Springsteen and the band jumped into some of their newer stuff off of “Wrecking Ball” including the title track, “We Take Care of Our Own” and “Death to My Hometown”.

Things slowed down briefly with Springsteen launching into a lengthy monologue about the devastation three weeks before that Hurricane Sandy had done to his home state of New Jersey before a very emotional performance of “My City of Ruins”, in which he introduced the band to an applauding audience during a long mid-song instrumental.

After a performance of “E Street Shuffle” that had the entire audience shuffling in the aisles came the request portion of the show in which Springsteen always picks sign requests held high by audience members desperately wanting their favorite tune performed. One such request was thrown on stage written on a rather large blue bra that had Springsteen exclaiming “that’s a surefire way to get your song request played!”, the song was “Cover Me” and the group knocked it out of the park. Other requests granted were “Fire”, which was picked out by longtime E Street Band guitarist Little Steven Van Zandt and “Incident on 57th Street”, which was the favorite of Springsteen’s late cousin, Lenny, who committed suicide shortly before Springsteen’s last trip to Kansas City prompting the show’s cancelation, which the Boss apologized for during the show. In the show’s encore Springsteen played a heartfelt performance of the rarely played “My Beautiful Reward” in which he dedicated to his cousin.

Some of the show’s best performances followed the request portion including thrilling renditions of “I’m on Fire”, “Because the Night”, “Shackled and Drawn”, “The Rising” and “Badlands”. The intensity from both the band and the crowd was at full tilt during this segment of the setlist. “Because the Night” and “Badlands” would be joined by “Born to Run”, arguably Springsteen’s most notable song, performed during the encore as the best three performances of the night.

Toward the end of his main set Springsteen played “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day”, in which he brought a little girl up on stage from the crowd in hopes of getting her to sing the chorus. The terrified girl didn’t seem to want to in front of the packed house, but somewhat whispered a few of the lyrics into the microphone. After giving her back to her parents, Springsteen exclaimed the girl had been “scarred for life.”

Joining the emotional “My Beautiful Reward” and the rocking “Born to Run”, very likely my favorite concert performance ever by any artist, in the encore portion of the show was an energetic “Dancing in the Dark”, in which Bruce pulled audience members up on stage to dance with Lofgren and saxophonist Jake Clemons, the nephew of recently departed E Street Band member Clarence Clemons. Springsteen also pulled onto the stage a mother and daughter duo that got the chance of a lifetime to dance with the Boss himself.

Because the holiday season is upon us Springsteen, of course, had to perform his E Street Band-ized version of the Christmas classic “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”. Christmas tunes in general always seem corny, even when done by megastars like Springsteen, but in his hands the song really comes off as cool and badass as any other E Street Band song.

As Springsteen has been doing all tour long he finished the night with a fantastic and emotional version of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out”, in which the song completely stops during the point in which Springsteen sings “the change was made uptown and the big man joined the band” in tribute to the late Clemons. Earlier in the show Springsteen remarked about ghosts being with him tonight and during this part you could feel the spirit of Clemons alive and well within the Sprint Center.

Saturday night’s show pretty much proved to me that there are three kinds of concerts. There are good concerts, bad concerts and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band concerts and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band concerts have a way of making even the best of the good concerts come off like bad concerts.

The energy that Springsteen, Van Zandt, Lofgren, drummer Max Weinberg, pianist Roy Bittan, Jake Clemons and the rest of the large group play with is incredible and nothing like I’ve ever seen before and have a feeling I will ever see again. If you’ve never seen a Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band concert than I feel like you’ve never seen what a true concert experience is supposed to be.