Live Archive: Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Omaha, NE, November 15, 2012
"yes yes, yes yes"
Setlist: REASON TO BELIEVE / JOHNNY 99 / ATLANTIC CITY / HUNGRY HEART / WE TAKE CARE OF OUR OWN / WRECKING BALL / DEATH TO MY HOMETOWN / MY CITY OF RUINS / DOES THIS BUS STOP AT 82ND STREET? / SHERRY DARLING / LOST IN THE FLOOD / STATE TROOPER / TRAPPED / OPEN ALL NIGHT / SHACKLED AND DRAWN / WAITIN' ON A SUNNY DAY / RAISE YOUR HAND / HIGHWAY PATROLMAN / BACKSTREETS / BADLANDS / LAND OF HOPE AND DREAMS - PEOPLE GET READY / THUNDER ROAD / BORN TO RUN / DANCING IN THE DARK / SANTA CLAUS IS COMIN' TO TOWN / TENTH AVENUE FREEZE-OUT
“Omahaaaaaaa, Nebraska!” Bruce declared, as he and the E Street Band made their entrance onstage in the Cornhusker state on a November evening 13 years ago. He put a harmonica to his mouth and blew a quasi-Bo Diddley riff sounding suspiciously – and auspiciously – like “Reason to Believe.” I knew this was a tour debut, and my eyebrows arched with just the slightest bit of curiosity.
The Imp of the Perverse woke up and peeked over my shoulder, whispering, “So what’s the next song going to be? Huh? Huh?” while we were barely into an excellent rendition of a full band version of “Reason to Believe,” similar to the modified version favored on the Magic tour, which borrowed liberally from its deconstructed form on Devils & Dust. It’s bullet mic and distortion (which wasn’t really working) along with Nils and Max on minimalist accompaniment, before Bruce yells again, Max Weinberg hits a drum roll, and the full court press of E Street slammed you in the face with an absolutely righteous riff and the whole place went nuts.
At the time, I swatted away the Imp, thinking, let us just enjoy the songs as they are presented to us!! And then the next song was the electrified, quasi-swing rendition of “Johnny 99” – with a particularly fine performance from Mr. Roy Bittan and some sharp solo and ensemble work from the horn section – and the Imp was trying to get me to do the Lindy Hop.
When an emphatic and particularly outstanding “Atlantic City” followed – Bruce’s voice is absolutely fantastic here, just a brilliant, inspired delivery – I stopped fighting the inevitable. The Imp and I were arm and arm, singing along together. Obviously this was not going to be a full album presentation – not when you open the show with the last song on the record – but all signs were pointing to YES on the E Street Ouija board.
This was a particularly inspired version of “Atlantic City.” Bruce has turned a melancholy murder ballad into a powerhouse of an anthem that engages every single person in that room with its fervent, rolling, roiling, building energy. (I also realized in this listen that “Atlantic City” is, in fact, a labor song.)
“Hungry Heart” up next broke the spell, and the Imp went to get a soft pretzel, leaving me to nurse my wounds while avoiding the inevitable pit crowd surge caused by Bruce’s crowd surfing, the polar opposite mood of anything Nebraska-esque. But that vivid fantasy on my part wasn’t entirely incorrect: by the time the night was over there would be no less than six songs from Nebraska presented in that album’s namesake, and it could have been seven as “My Father’s House” was on the written setlist (and had been soundchecked, as per Brucebase).
As I noted in my report for brucespringsteen.net, “By the time the night was over, there would be more songs played from Nebraska than Wrecking Ball!” I am not sure why that statement deserved an exclamation point; the Wrecking Ball songs were pretty great live and these are fantastic renditions of them, and I’m sorry that more of them haven’t survived. But all of Nebraska in Nebraska would have also been pretty fucking awesome.
“Hungry Heart” was the right call. You can feel the energy of the crowd explode on this recording. I was in the pit that night and while the people around me were excited and enthusiastic in a general sense, from my perspective, there was no recognition of the opening songs, much less that the opening songs were from Nebraska. The momentum from “Hungry Heart” carried over into a rousing “We Take Care of Our Own,” which was what was originally slated to come after “Atlantic City.”
That is still a genius level segue. It is the juxtaposition of the Western noir of Nebraska deriving from and showcasing one side of America with a detailed and more modern reckoning. It is bulletproof and “Hungry Heart” couldn’t dilute it.
Bruce is absolutely ebullient tonight. A week and a half earlier, he’d been out stomping for Barack Obama prior to Election Day, with appearances in Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa (among others). He’d even written a song about being on the road (anyone remember “Forward”? I had forgotten until now.) He also only has a few more shows left on this third leg of the Wrecking Ball tour before heading off to Australia and New Zealand early the following year. Whatever the reason behind the positive energy, we’re all benefiting from it in spades tonight in Omaha.
For whatever reason, Bruce got an obvious kick out of the word “Omaha.” He’d already said it twice and now, in the intro to “My City of Ruins,” he does it again, with a long, drawn out “OMAHAAAAAAAA NEBRASSKAAAAAAA!” And then not one, not two, but three pairs of “yes yes,” our favorite vocal tic.
“The E Street Band is back in Nebraska tonight. And we’re here on a mission. That’s right. We ain’t leavin’ until your hands hurt, until your voice is gone, until your feet hurt, until your back killin’ ya, and until your sexual organs are stimulated.
-applause-
“That’s our job! We take it seriously!
“We’re here tonight with a lot of old faces and some new faces in the band. I see some old faces in the crowd, even older than me, maybe, I don't know, and I see a lot of new young faces out there.” This is when he finds the kid in the front row behind the stage just over Roy's shoulder, who, unlike your usual Bruce Bait, was absolutely there because he wanted to be there, highly excited and singing every word to every song thus far.
From my report for brucespringsteen dot net:
He later spotted a young child at the side of the stage, and asked him how old he was and what song he wanted to hear. The boy held up a sign for "Badlands." "The future is secure; there's a 10 year old with a 'Badlands' sign," Bruce declared, going on to explain that "it comes late" and "You don't gotta go to school tomorrow, tell 'em the Boss says so."
“This is a song I wrote about my adopted hometown, struggling to get back on its feet. It took 25 years for the Boardwalk to come back, and for the beaches to be full again. Long time, long time we waited. I walk down that boardwalk now like the Ghost of Christmas Past. It’s all different. But it’s good. And as you know, it got hit very hard a few weeks ago and they’re struggling to get back on their feet again, which they will, which we will. (He’s talking about Hurricane Sandy, which had come through at the end of October.)
“But this is a song about ghosts, it’s about people, or things, or places in your life that scar your heart in a way that you carry them forever. Whether it’s a lost brother or father or a sister or a mother or a friend, it’s about the ghosts that walk alongside us and accompany us every day, and remind us of the sweetness of life and the goodness of this moment. So this is a song tonight from our ghosts to your ghosts, whoever they may be.”
“ROLL CALL!”
MCOR is 20 minutes long and I remember now why we made “Roll call!” jokes back in the day. I mean no disrespect, either. I fucking adore this song, it is bracing and uplifting, it can inspire and comfort you. I was also very much in favor of the nightly invocation of our missing friends, onstage and off, it was important to the band, it was important to us, it was important that every single fan had the opportunity to stand with other fans and the E Street Band in a moment of remembrance for Clarence and Danny.
It was a lot sometimes, it could get a tad meandering, but on the other hand it’s actually kind of dynamite that Bruce decided that he was going to spend 20 minutes on paying tribute to the musicians he had with him and the musicians he no longer did, and he took it a step further by inviting everyone in the audience to bring in the memories of everyone they had lost. That last horn coda is heartrending, it is affirming and soaring, it is an old-time revival meeting. I think it could have been all of these things in 10 minutes, not 20. And I still miss its presence in the set.
I do appreciate that he does not just mention Patti Scialfa but that he reminds us that while she was not physically here, that she was there in spirit. I wish that element was still part of the show. But this is not about 2025 shows, this is about 2012.
Next is a brisk and sparkling full-band version of “Bus Stop” that is not served well by the percussion interlude. I spent the entire 2012 tour not knowing that Everett Bradley was a member of Bon Jovi’s band (because I honestly did not care, and only learned it recently thanks to the JBJ documentary) and I understand now why I was not thrilled with him as a member of E Street.
“All right, what have we got in the request farm?”
“Sherry Darling” gets pulled out of the pile of signs, and while Kevin is clearly putting lyrics on the prompter (“Are we ready back there? We can play this song!”) some people start throwing Santa hats onstage, to which Bruce replies, “It’s not even Thanksgiving! They push it on you too early, it’s pushed on you too early, I’m telling you. Why??”
And if you thought that the band were perhaps taking a long time to get their acts together for a song they played almost every night on the River tour, the stats reveal that it was actually more of a rarity than I gave it credit for at the time. They had to work at this! When Ed Manion gets to the sax solo at the end, Bruce had to remind him, “Play it again, Ed! Keep going!” And at the end, when Bruce used to stop the band to let the audience sing back, the band might have been rusty but the audience was absolutely not.
The next sign was apparently very creative (“Many long hours on the living room floor,” Bruce described it. I wish I remembered it.) but it got us an incredible full-band “Lost In The Flood” that sounded as fresh as if it had just been written. Every single band member deserves a shoutout on this one, tight, powerful, dramatic. Let us shout out Roy Bittan and his definitive, declarative piano work, let us praise Charlie Giordano sneaking color over the horizon on the organ and then continuing to gently throttle it into the body of the song. Let us recognize the entire band the way they absolutely fucking land their entrance with authority and power. Bruce’s lyrical delivery is a model of control and escalation, but his guitar solo at the end is what I described as “bone-crunching,” describing it in detail: “Bruce twisting the bottom tuning peg back and forth, invoking the sound of a car revving up and then pulling away.”
Bruce switches guitars to a Gretsch and then there’s some droning A minor and D chords and that can only be one thing.
New Jersey turnpike
riding on a wet night
The Imp of the Perverse returns to elbow me gently as I stand there, mouth agape. HOLY SHIT, “STATE TROOPER.” Pure and unadorned, it could be 1984, it’s just Bruce and the Gretsch, so much command, he’s not using the falsetto he favored on the Devils & Dust performances. It’s stunning. It’s immediately evocative, you felt like you were embedded in the song and the moment.
Time for HOLY SHIT #2 as the intro to “Trapped” begins. You can hear that the crowd doesn’t quite recognize it as they’re doing the sort of vague attempt at clapping along instead of being instantly enraptured. Every time I hear this song, I’m brought back to the summer it came out, where you heard it blaring out of every car that drove by. A beautiful implementation of the backing singers and the horn section. “Trapped” was not a rarity on the Wrecking Ball tour, it was a perfect thematic and energetic fit, but it is never unwelcome in any context.
“Are you swinging? You’re gonna be swinging in a minute,” Bruce insists, as Roy Bittan plays the boogie woogie riff that signals the jump swing version of “Open All Night” from Seeger Sessions. Man, I love this song, but I do not love this particular flavor of it. No fault of the band, who do a fantastic job, especially (again) the horn section. This version made sense on Seeger Sessions because the tour was about giving Bruce a chance to mostly shake his ass, but I do not think it has aged well. (And on Seeger Sessions the best part of the song was the Andrews Sisters harmonies from Patti, Lisa and Soozie at the start, which were gorgeous but fit the song even less. My biggest issue with Seeger Sessions was that I actively disliked many of the arrangements of songs I actually liked quite a lot.)
"Open All Night" isn’t one of the dark songs from Nebraska, it’s the comedic relief, it’s the Chuck Berry homage, it’s the image you have in your mind driving back to NYC from down the Shore and that moment on the Turnpike when, to your left and your right, are the refinery towers. And “Hey ho rock and roll / deliver me from nowhere” is an utterly fantastic line.
The E Street Band is so good tonight that I’m even enjoying listening to “Waiting On A Sunny Day.” It’s brisk, it doesn’t linger. I’ll never, ever be upset about “Raise Your Hand” being in a setlist -- it was on my outgoing answering machine message when I first owned one after college, Bruce yelling “Miami Steve, if you please!” from the 7/7/78 Roxy show, via Live 75/85 -- and this is one of the numbers where you can truly appreciate how the horn section was firing on all cylinders.
After a brief false start, “Highway Patrolman” would be the final of the Nebraska songs, and it was one of those moments where you want to hang on every word, every note, for as long as you can. Getting to hear any of the less-popular Nebraska songs always feels a little bit like entering a time machine, where you’re both going back to the world Bruce has created within the songs as well as wherever you were in your own life the first time you listened to them. The full band alt-country arrangement is absolutely perfect here, a little steel guitar from Nils, some tasteful accordion earlier on, and the E Street Choir on the choruses is subtle, tasteful, adds to the overall pathos.
(The Imp blows me a kiss as they disappear into the crowd. It's fine! I'll take six out of 10. It'll never happen again.)
“Backstreets” up next is so many emotions at once. It’s no he is NOT and then of course he absolutely is putting these two numbers back to back on purpose, and it’s stunning and brilliant and affirming and heartbreaking. But this version of “Backstreets” in particular is triumphant. Thematically it’s absolutely perfect and correct: both songs are about family, chosen or not, about brotherhood, about choices, and the prices of living with them. You don’t have to make any of those thematic connections to understand that this is a magnificent version of “Backstreets,” you just have to have ears, a heart and a soul.
It's fun to ponder “Badlands” closing the set vs “Badlands” early in the set. Sometimes it’s punctuation, sometimes it’s the entire point, sometimes it’s just an interim landing place. “Badlands” into “Land of Hope and Dreams” with the horn section is utterly glorious, just the whole band at its apex.
The Food Bank for the Heartland gets the shoutout before a textbook version of “Thunder Road,” the gateway to a joyful, picture-perfect Springsteen encore. I’ll be honest, when I saw that this show was the official archive release, I thought, “Really?” but man, I get it, everything about this night is even better than I remembered it, and I remembered it fairly highly.
more from the dot net:
“Dancing In The Dark” can often result in surprise moments onstage, but few more surprising than tonight. A sign reading, “Bruce, I love you, but can I please dance with Max?” was successful and the sign’s owner made her way onto the drum riser. Max then stood up and tried to dance and keep drumming. Bruce noticed this state of affairs and came running up to the drum riser to take over for Max so he could continue dancing, to mixed (and amusing) results.
(You can hear this happening at about the five minute mark.)
Despite Bruce's earlier consternation, the holiday spirit clearly got the better of him and here's the jingly intro to "Santa." But they haven’t played “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” since Clarence joined the ancestors, and there was a moment where Bruce (and probably everyone else up there) realized that Clarence wasn’t there to do the initial “Ho-ho-ho’s.” Bruce took on that duty, arms outstretched, beseeching the heavens: “Big Man, we need you!” which made our hearts break one more time, all together. But when the song reached “you better be good for goodness’ sake” and he realized there was another Clarence part, Bruce just levelled with us: “We need help!” and the crowd filled in admirably, it caught him again the second time around and this time it was just “HELP!”
"Big Man, we need you!"
“Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” closes us out, one more time, the nightly ritual, Bruce standing in the middle of everyone as Clarence and Danny’s images are broadcast on the big screens and we all just get to cheer and cry and yell and stomp our feet and pay tribute to our family members for a minute and a half. I love that those interludes are left in these recordings.
“You’ve just seen the hard rocking, pants dropping, earth shocking, legendary… E STREET BAND!”
This is a truly fabulous recording of a great, highly enjoyable show from this particular era. I don’t know what they are doing over in the archive factory that has benefited the fidelity of most all of the recent releases but please keep doing it.
