Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band Allphones Arena Sydney 19 February 2014

At this point we start to recognise that Bruce, or someone close to him, has a fair working knowledge of Australian rock history. Not necessarily a deep one, but with The Saints turning up in the setlist on a regular basis through Just Like Fire Would and nods to AccaDacca earlier in the tour you’d have to put a tick in the box beside general awareness.

Highway to Hell kicked off proceedings in Perth, which, if I recall correctly (and I’m not inclined to check) was Bon Scott’s home town, and they did it again to start the first show in Melbourne, another city with a reasonable AC/DC connection.

So you might not be surprised to find Friday on my Mind kicking off proceedings in The Easybeats’ home city, but it runs a little deeper than that.

There was an interview in (I think) RAM magazine where Bruce rated it as one of the all-time great rock songs, said he’d love to play it live but had a monstrous degree of difficulty in figuring out the guitar part. That would have been back in the days when guitar duties were shared between Bruce and Miami Steve, who’s not the greatest technical exponent of guitar intricacies or between Bruce and Nils Lofgren, who’s considerably more proficient.

But with (count ‘em) four guitarists available on stage and Soozie Tyrell if you happen to need a fifth, maybe some of those issues disappear.

In any case it was an ideal opener, and following it with Out on the Street, which seems to have been his attempt to have been his attempt to work the same territory (according to this interview with, of all people, Molly Meldrum, when I wrote it I was trying to copy one of my all time favourite songs, “Friday On My Mind” by the Easybeats … In my town, there was a particular place you drove to on Friday that was filled with teenagers and “Out In the Street” was my attempt at that writing about that image but with a Beatles type structure) definitely kept the vibe going, as did Cadillac Ranch. Those two aren’t exactly obscurities, but they’re not numbered among the obvious suspects for the set list rotation either.

Which is more than you can say for High Hopes, Just Like Fire Would and Spirit in the Night. The first two, however, are both on the new album, with The Saints’ cover apparently (I don’t listen to the radio) picking up airwave exposure. I could have done without either or both of ‘em, but if Bruce is going to preface Spirit with another reminiscence about something or other, that’s fine with me.

This time around it was an exposition about toilet technology he claimed to have never seen before, and the man is obviously a rather talented story teller. In any case there are a couple of aspects that spring Spirit into the usual suspects particularly, as was the case here, in a setting that allows him to crowd surf back to the stage while Jake wails away on sax. Jake wasn’t actually doing the wailing this time, having returned to the States following a family bereavement, but Ed Manion worked the same territory just as well.

Kinda corny once you’ve seen it a couple of times, but it still gets you in. Regular rituals and all that.

And when we’re talking regular rituals, with Born in the USA and Born to Run getting go to whoa run throughs in Melbourne, you’d probably figure Darkness on the Edge of Town for the same treatment here. I hadn’t really been overwhelmed by the decision to run through BitUSA, though I was probably one of a very small minority in that regard. BTR is slightly different because there are tracks there that don’t quite qualify as the usual setlist suspects (Night, Meeting Across the River) and it does have the title track, She’s the One and Jungleland.

But if I’d had to pick an album to get the treatment I would definitely have gone for Darkness. Like a shot. For one reason. Candy’s Room. But we’ll get to that, won’t we?

For all the glorification of America and things American, there’s a grimness lurking under the veneer, and we’ve got some of the same here, which makes the bookends of Badlands and Darkness as appropriate in this time and place as they were when they were written in the mid-seventies.

So we start with an incendiary Badlands, always a concert favourite, run the angst quotient up to the max with an angry Bruce guitar solo for Adam Raised a Cain and drop things back a tad as pianist Roy Bittan shines on Something in the Night.

And then there’s Candy's Room, a perfect statement of obsessive lust. Every time I hear that rattling rustle on the cymbals …

But it’s the sequencing and the light and shade that makes Darkness such a great album. After that howl of lust things drop back to everyday life and quiet despair for Racing in the Street and the reading here was magnificent, the instrumental ending stately and immaculately paced.

From there, The Promised Land offered the usual affirmation, always a concert highlight because if you’re the sort of person who goes to Springsteen shows you do believe in the promised land, don’t you. And you’ll roar out the chorus with the rest of the believers. Anticipation of hope out of despair is what it’s all about, but the frustration and mixed emotions of everyday existence are still there, as Factory reminds us.

Streets of Fire was committed and fiercely intense, Prove It all Night for my money did, especially during Nils Lofgren’s solo and Darkness on the Edge of Town wrapped things up neatly.

And to think we weren’t that far past half way through the show…

Darlington County balanced things up nicely after the intensity of Darkness, but it was a momentary thing. It did get Bruce off into the stalls eating potato chips and skolling beer but Shackled and Drawn delivers a reminder of what we’re still up against.

Which brings us to Waitin' on a Sunny Day, which, to be honest, I wish it didn’t. Sure, it’s a joyous little singalong, and you can get a certain amount of interest seeing if you can spot the kid Bruce is going to grab out of the pit to have a sing. But it’s becoming formula, and while it gives the crowd a buzz I wasn’t sad to see it missing from the first show in Melbourne.

There are probably those who feel much the same way about the Morello factor in The Ghost of Tom Joad, but it’s obvious that Bruce and Tom have a message, and it’s fairly pointed when Morello points to the Aboriginal flag on his shirt around the line about if there’s someone struggling to be free…

It’s an activist song, and played with an activist rage and intensity.

And it’s entirely appropriate to follow it with the anthemic Land of Hopes and Dreams.

That was it for the main set, but time wasn’t up yet. Take a bow, line the four guitarists out across the front of the stage, count the band into a chiming riff and watch the gradual recognition as the pincers realise they’re getting the INXS signature tune Don't Change.

Actually, you can hear the recognition on the recording, and it’s a bloody good reading. As stated earlier, Bruce obviously has a fair working knowledge of classic Australian rock.

The house lights were up for Born to Run and, for once, something went wrong on stage.  The band were in full flight and suddenly the wheels fell off. Don’t know why, but Bruce called a halt, they started again, got it right and the song was followed by the announcement that it was the fastest version ever. Or words to that effect.

But they still weren’t done. There isn’t a whole lot you can say about Dancing in the Dark and
Tenth Avenue Freezeout once you’ve seen the routines a couple of times, but they get the crowd up and moving and Shout  maintains the frenzy, which is what you want at the end, isn’t it?

But if that side of things seems stage managed (and it certainly is) there’s room for spontaneity.

There’s a bow, the band depart and Bruce appears, acoustic guitar and harmonica brace in place. Fine, we’re in for This Hard Land or something. Can’t be The Promised Land, that was on Darkness.

But wait. There’s a sign requesting Surprise Surprise, for Eddie, who’s just turned twenty-three, the age at which, Bruce reminisces he’d just written Blinded By The Light, noting my brain was fucking scrambled at the time. And with Surprise, Surprise we’re still not done. He hasn’t done the Food Bank public service announcement, and he’s got to play something after that to finish off.

Actually, after a remark about the song, you’d think Blinded By the Light might get a guernsey, but no, they wheel out a pump organ and it’s Dream Baby Dream, a mesmerising reading built around looped notes that gradually built until Bruce stepped away from the keyboard and let the machine do its thing as he belted out the lyrics. Stunning.

Setlist:
Friday on my Mind
Out on the Street
Cadillac Ranch
High Hopes
Just Like Fire Would
Spirit in the Night

Darkness on the Edge of Town run through:
Badlands
Adam Raised a Cain
Something in the Night
Candy's Room
Racing in the Street
The Promised Land
Factory
Streets of Fire
Prove It all Night
Darkness on the Edge of Town

Darlington County 
Shackled and drawn
Waitin' on a Sunny Day
The Ghost of Tom Joad
Land of Hopes and Dreams
Don't Change
Born to Run
Dancing in the Dark
Tenth Avenue Freezeout
Shout
Surprise Surprise
Dream Baby Dream

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band Allphones Arena Sydney 18 March 2013

Tuesday, 19 March 2013 

I didn't check the time when The Stones' Big Boss Man boomed out across the Allphones Arena, but I'm reliably informed it was 7:25, and a mistake at the end had me thinking we'd had a show that clocked in well over three hours, but the times on display in the Olympic Park station and a subsequent check on the phone suggested a running time around the two and three quarter hour mark.

That might have made it the shortest of the three but what it dropped in time it definitely made up for in sheer oomph.

It also put the kibosh on any notions that someone backstage had been watching the audience filing in and saying Hang on, they're not all in yet.

Or maybe someone had been and Bruce decided enough was enough.

In any case, the three song opening salvo had each title getting a first airing for the tour. American Land was a belated St Patrick's Day offering, and had me reflecting how much Bruce's current style, repertoire and modus operandi has been shaped by The Seeger Sessions album and extensive touring. That has probably been obvious for a while, but American Land and the mid-set Pay Me My Money Down helped underline it.

But it's not all new direction, and a Prove It All Night had the long term fans roaring along before a sign request produced Adam Raised a Cain. Bruce actually grabbed two placards from the pit, returning the one that produced Adam, and stowing the other, seemingly for future reference or souvenir purposes. It'd be interesting to know what was on the orange Day-Glo one...

Things seem to have settled down into a regular pattern as far as the next bit is concerned, with Wrecking Ball and Death to My Hometown holding down roughly the same slots each night once the opening salvo is out of the way.

There's obviously a point being made, and once it had been it seems there's a recognition that things need to be lightened a bit, and Hungry Heart certainly did that. The crowd roared out the first verse, Bruce took a wander along the side around to the walkway behind the pit and surfed his way back to the stage.

This section of the show seemed to be heading into formula territory with My City of Ruins delivering the regular remembering the old faces and acknowledging the new routine. Working the front of the pit Bruce found another youngster, got a quick acknowledgement of the relative youthfullness of the identified party and seems to have settled into grabbing them for a singalong in Waitin’ On a Sunny Day.

Spirit in the Night seems to have grabbed a regular mid-set spot, and had the silence for those who are no longer with us bit, and from there, with what seemed like a couple of formalities out of the way things headed off towards let's loosen things up territory with High Hopes, Youngstown and (the one I'd really been waiting for) Candy's Room.

High Hopes works very well, Youngstown rocked with righteous anger and frustration and segued quickly into that characteristic drum pattern that signifies an impending visit to Candy's Room, which soared the way it should do and morphed very nicely into She's the One.


As Bruce started a your butt is going to start moving of its own volition rap after StO I thought we were in for another Open All Night, which had been my highlight of the previous show. That didn't eventuate, but a rousing Pay Me My Money Down worked the same sort of territory and made for a more than adequate substitute.

From there it was back to set piece territory, with Shackled and Drawn a regular inclusion that needed to be followed by something lighter. Waitin’ on a Sunny Day certainly fits the bill in that department, and the slightly different angle this time around gave a head on view of the interaction that got the singalong kid onto the walkway in front of the pit.

You can't help wondering how long this one will continue, and while you can spot it coming it's the sort of thing that's guaranteed to deliver a roar of approval from the audience. Calculated? Quite possibly. A bit of fun? Quite definitely.

It's also the cue that we're heading into the succession of heavy hits that's going to round out the main set, and this time around that started with The Rising, delivered another powerful Springsteen-Morello double act on The Ghost of Tom Joad and ran out through Badlands, Thunder Road and Born to Run.

The encore bracket (Seven Nights to Rock, Dancing in the Dark and the seemingly inevitable Tenth Avenue Freeze-out wound things up rather nicely.


Setlist:

American Land

Prove It All Night

Adam Raised a Cain 

Wrecking Ball

Death to My Hometown

Hungry Heart

My City of Ruins

Spirit in the Night

High Hopes

Youngstown

Candy's Room

She's the One

Pay Me My Money Down 

Shackled and Drawn

Waitin' on a Sunny Day

The Rising

The Ghost of Tom Joad

Badlands 

Thunder Road

Born to Run

Encore:

Seven Nights to Rock 

Dancing in the Dark

Tenth Avenue Freeze-out

Neil Young: Brisbane and Sydney March 2013

Thursday, 14 March 2013

For a while, fool that I was (and, arguably, still am) I was thinking two Neil Young and Crazy Horse concerts would be enough.

Predictably, they're not, though any attempt to increase the NY/CH quotient would result in an automatic reduction in the Springsteen allocation over the next week or so. Sure, I could have headed on to Melbourne for another two shows during the week and weaken in my resolve to avoid winery shows on the weekend, but that'd rule out the two Bruce shows in Brisbane. Oh well...

Looking at these matters in the cold hard light of rational reality, you might think two Horse-driven shows are at least one more than necessary, and on a strictly rational application of logic you might have a point.

I landed in Brisbane pretty sure of what I was going to be getting.

Over the years, watching these matters from a distance, there's an invariable wow, he played that! factor on the first show or two of a tour, but after the second, or maybe the third assuming you're looking at something lengthier than a ten-show swing across Australia and New Zealand, things are more or less set in stone and there's not much room for variation.

In other settings, with other musicians, you might find a bit of variation in the set list, but when we're talking Neil and The Horse you might as well forget it. "They all sound the same," some Frenchman in the crowd called out in 1996, producing a Neil riposte suggesting that it's all one song.

Which it is. Neil dons the harmonica brace for Heart of Gold and Twisted Road, and heads over to sit behind the piano (the upright piano, which explains the girl carrying the guitar case) for Singer Without a Song but for the rest of the just under two and a quarter hours it's fairly obvious what you're going to get.

Anyone walking out of one of these shows and lamenting the absence of the hits either failed to notice the & Crazy Horse on the ticket, or hasn't realized the significance of the two words after the ampersand. This is the behaviour Rusties (members of the on-line aggregation of Neil fans a.k.a. The Rust list) and Winterlongers (the Australian subset thereof) characterize as HoGTT territory.

And if you are, in fact, a Heart of Gold Toe Tapper who wants a set list heavy on Harvest, Comes a Time, Harvest Moon and Silver & Gold you either don't shell out the bucks for a Crazy Horse show  or, having realized your mistake, cop it sweet and exercise due diligence next time around, because, somehow, I don't think Neil's going to be changing his modus operandi Horse-wise any time soon.

But if you're there for loud and electric you're almost guaranteed a good time.

That almost comes with a nod in the direction of well, you do realize he'll be playing a selection of his most recent stuff, don't you?

Assuming you've got all those bases covered (loud, electric, will contain recent material so there's not much room for older material) you're almost certainly in for a good time, from the opening chords of Love and Only Love to the last squalls of feedback at the end of My My Hey Hey and on through whatever Neil decides is going to constitute the encore this time around.

Love and Only Love, from where I'm sitting is close to the ideal opener in these circumstances, driven by a solid riff that allows the quartet to stretch a bit and blow whatever cobwebs might be in the vicinity away. That, I think, is an important consideration. Crazy Horse, in all it's ragged garage band glory, doesn't sit in the virtuoso I practice two to three hours every day, man sphere, and they need a chance to loosen up and find the groove. Love and Only Love certainly allows them to do that.

With the preliminaries out of the way, the groove located and the beast warmed up it's sort of into Greatest Hits mode for Powderfinger, which mightn't have been an actual hit, but occupies a significant place in Neil's epic repertoire. A nod to Rust Never Sleeps, and a classic song that's an almost perfectly self-contained saga.

From there Born in Ontario occupies the same sort of role as its cousin brother Homegrown, delivering a chunk of stomp along groove that equates to a bit of light and shade after Powderfinger in the lead up to what you'd have to describe as the first real set piece on the show.

Walk Like a Giant comes across pretty strongly as one of the centre pieces on Psychedelic Pill, but on stage it reveals a sense of rage that doesn't quite come across in the studio version. That's most obvious towards the end when plastic bags and sheets of newspaper start drifting across the stage as Neil and Old Black deliver squalls of sonic assault that equate to the end of the world as we know it.

That's my take on it, anyway. Walk Like a Giant takes the inner rage Neil mentions in Ontario and turns it into an apocalyptic vision that's diametrically opposed to the old T.S. Eliot not with a bang, with a whimper. It seems, as far as Neil is concerned, we're not going quietly into the night....

The environmental apocalypse gets another airing in Hole in the Sky, one of two so far unrecorded numbers in a fairly small setlist, and it may stay unrecorded because it may only exist as a wind down from what went before leading into an acoustic mini set in the middle of proceedings. Lyrically, it's a case of There's a hole in the sky and not much more, but the Horse harmonies help it work in ways a more verbose statement mightn't.

Both nights the appearance of the acoustic guitar and the neck brace produced a fairly hearty roar, suggesting the presence of a healthy contingent of HoGTTs and a strong hint of finally, here's something we know. Predictably, something we know turned out to be Heart of Gold, which might have been something but probably didn’t equate to much if you’re coming out of HoGTT Territory.

From there we got Twisted Road, another one I could have done without but can appreciate the reasons for its existence and inclusion in that particular slot.

And it's obvious there is a certain amount of thought that has gone into the presentation for these shows. Neil obviously wants a piano song in there, otherwise the piano wouldn't be there, and Singer Without a Song is going to be it. Seat him behind the old-fashioned upright on stage right, however, and he's out of sight of a fair section of audience. Billy Talbot's on stage to deliver some harmonies, and Poncho Sampedro has an acoustic guitar around his neck, but there's not much visual interest there. In that setting an attractive girl carrying a guitar case adds something. At least that's the way it looked from where I was sitting.

With the quiet bit out of the way the volume went back up for the second set piece, the quite magnificent Ramada Inn, like Walk Like a Giant one of the centre pieces of Psychedelic Pill, twenty minutes of thunder leavened with the harmonies on the And every morning comes the sun bit. HoGTTs can moan all they like about unfamiliar material and the lack of the likes of Down by the River, Cortez the Killer and Like a Hurricane, and, admittedly it would be nice to hear them, but when Neil can still produce something that's this good I, for one, won't be complaining.

Your mileage may vary on this, but the thirst piece highlight comes in the form of the mildly notorious Fuckin’ Up, which has been a regular part of the setlist since Ragged Glory and has evolved into an interesting piece of staged presentation that really takes off if the right people with the right gestures are in Neil and Poncho's line of sight. There was a fairly substantial Winterlong contingent along the rail, and they were right into goading and gesticulation mode, which made for some interesting visuals on the big screens on either side of the stage.

Not that they were looking at the big picture, of course.

After Sydney I ran a remark about his moment of prominence past the inimitable Stub King and got a Was I? In return, which of course explains why he ended up on the screen in the first place. It's fairly obvious Neil and Poncho are having fun with the current version, and that, I suspect helped shape what followed.

I've heard my share of concert recordings over the years, and most of them have been fairly light on for the on stage repartee, but something has changed over recent years.  Where once you might be lucky to get anything beyond a couple of How ya doin?s, the time machine sequence that leads into Cinnamon Girl is positively verbose, with wry remarks about those in the audience who wouldn't have been there yet as far as Zuma and Tonight's the Night are concerned.

Cinnamon Girl rocked, My My Hey Hey did likewise and you really got a sense of the mount of fun Neil and the Horse are having on stage when it gets to the obligatory encore. Perth had Roll Another Number, Adelaide got Like a Hurricane and I would have been happy to see LaH reprised in Brisbane or Sydney.

Instead, in Brisbane they led off with Opera Star (not played since the European tour in 2001) before heading off to Roll Another Number, while in Sydney two chords were all I needed to recognize Prisoners of Rock & Roll, which segued nicely into Opera Star.

Looking back, you might be inclined to think, despite Hughesy's enthusiasm, that one show is about enough, but with the interval between Sydney and the time this review makes its way onto the blog and into the Reviews section of the website there's one additional factor that suggests it's a case of too much Neil isn't nearly enough.

I refer, of course, to Wednesday's show at The Plenary, with Cortez the Killer, Dangerbird, Barstool Blues and Sedan Delivery turning up in the set list in a show that ran close to three hours.

Neil's inclined to the predictable once things have started moving but that doesn't necessarily mean he's going to stay that way. After two quite stellar shows you might be disappointed to have missed one that sailed right off into the stratosphere, but that's the way things are.

Should Neil be headed back this way with The Horse in tow, Hughesy's going, come hell or high water. Now for a triple serving of Bruce...