If only for stamina alone, Bruce Springsteen is a phenomenon. At this year’s South By South West festival the man known to the world as either “The Boss” or “Bruuuuce” (stretched as long as a single breath can go) gave a keynote speech that detailed the history of rock’n’roll and his part in it. (He owes his career to The Animals, apparently, whose songs he claims to have ripped off.) Then, that evening, he performed a concert that went on for the best part of three hours, took in all manner of special guests, and even included the unlikely sight of Springsteen crowd surfing. And he appeared to love every minute of it.
For this triumphant set, Springsteen got back together with his E Street mainstays, Steve Van Zandt and Nils Lofgren, and, not letting the fact that he divorced her get in the way, Patti Scialfa on acoustic guitar. From the outset this tightly knit group were wildly animated, huddling together on the stage and then bursting out to occupy each corner of it. As Springsteen led the extended sixteen-piece band through We Take Care Of Our Own, his patriotic but critical response to post-911 USA, he seemed as American as the title of the song, that throaty voice earnest in a way we British could never emulate but steeped in entertainment culture too.
Big singalong moments came with exhausting but exhilarating regularity. Badlands, from the classic 1978 album Darkness On The Edge Of Town, got the crowd on their feet, but so did the Civil War chant of Death To My Hometown, from the just released Wrecking Ball. The E Street Shuffle was another highlight: the band formed a line at the front of the stage as a conga player held the rhythm. Springsteen seemed like the engine of the band as much as its front man; lost in the camaraderie that music can bring.
Various guests came and went. Tom Morello of the semi-revolutionary punk-rap band Rage Against The Machine went into an onanistic, unnecessary guitar solo on The Ghost Of Tom Joad, but when the reggae legend Jimmy Cliff wandered onto the stage to casually knock out a rendition of The Harder They Come, it was magical. Then — and it seemed like too much of a coincidence to be true, but apparently it was — Eric Burdon of The Animals emerged from the wings to sing We Gotta Get Out Of This Place, the song Springsteen claimed to have ripped off more than any other in his keynote speech earlier that day.
Apparently Burdon happened to be in town and got wind of the speech, so he decided to pay a visit. He did look slightly surprised to be there.
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There was no Born To Run or Born In The USA, and no encore. Springsteen ended instead with Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land, filling the stage with all manner of guests — The Arcade Fire on stage right, folk revivalists The Low Anthem on stage left — and making the crowd sing along to this anthem of togetherness. It was a fitting end to a concert that felt generous, from its sheer length to the dizzying levels of energy Springsteen injected into it.