Bruce Springsteen: Dancing against the dark
With his own mortality weighing on his mind, Bruce Springsteen embraces life and music in a series of concerts documented in a new film.
Fifteen years ago Bruce Springsteen was sitting in a trattoria in downtown Toronto when a casual fan wandered over and asked the freshly minted sexagenarian when he was planning to retire. Springsteen smiled, put his napkin on the table and made a tight ball with his fist. Tapping the left side of his chest, he deadpanned “when the wheels fall off”. Enough said.
Now 75, Springsteen is still as deeply committed to his work as a recording artist as he is to serving the needs of his fans in the live arena. When covid hit in 2019, Springsteen quietly hoped that it wasn’t lights out for a life on the road that effectively began when he was 16. If it wasn’t, he swore he’d throw the biggest party he could.
That party was essentially a series of live shows that traversed America, Europe and the United Kingdom over 2023 and 2024. Now Disney+ are releasing a document of the tour, a film written by Springsteen and directed by his longtime accomplice Thom Zimny, aptly titled, Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.
Road Diary isn’t a traditional concert film by any stretch. Apart from Springsteen’s inner musings delivered as monologues, the documentary takes fans on an intimate look behind the scenes and eventually onto Springsteen’s stage.
At rehearsals the Red Bank Theatre in New Jersey we see a band that has effectively been off the road and on the blocks for six years now trying to find their gears. Some tinkering was required. Auxiliary E-Streeters, as Springsteen describes it, in the form of horns, percussion and backing singers were now augmenting their line-up and there was work to do.
“As it shows in the film,” Springsteen tells Review from his home studio in New Jersey, “we needed to get a feeling for tempos again, and then a feeling for how the songs should run together. Even after all the years we’ve been playing together, you’re shaking the dust off the band at that point. You’re greasing the wheels and getting it ready to get out on the road.”
After riding the zeitgeist through the 1970s and 1980s, Springsteen pulled back in the 1990s as he raised a family with his wife Patti Scialfa and released fewer albums. The venues he played were becoming more intimate rooms. Stadium shows looked to be a thing of the past.
He became increasingly prolific at the turn of the new millennium. Since 2001 he has released 10 studio albums, the most recent of which are the November 2022 covers album, Only The Strong Survive, and 2020’s LP of all original material, Letter To You.
So what sparked a startling rate of new music from a man then in his 50s? According to Springsteen, he “realised that the light at the end of the tunnel was an oncoming train.”
To a large degree, that’s what the film and the concerts from which the material is drawn are about: “life, death and everything in between”.
Letter To You provides a quartet of songs that form the emotional pillars of Springsteen’s onstage setlist and support the arc of the film. The album was a reaction of sorts to the passing of his friend George Theiss. It was Theiss who invited Springsteen to join his first garage rock band in 1965, The Castiles.
Inspired by seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show and taking their name from a Theiss shampoo bottle, the pair shared the same rock and roll dream until the band broke up in 1968. Springsteen became The Boss while Thiess only played occasional gigs until his death in 2018.
“It’s been a particular part of my life that I’ve been reliving over the past few years or so in a meaningful way,” says Springsteen. “I enjoyed actually revisiting those old bands and those old old friends and even though they’ve passed, I’ve enjoyed revisiting those experiences.”
As Springsteen now sings in the song of the same name, he is the Last Man Standing.
“The tour in the film was originally built around the basic themes of the Letter To You album, which obviously was mortality and what it’s like to lose people as you go. These are just things that are relatively … I wouldn’t say that they’re new in the rock canon … but there’s a lot of groups that are getting up there and these are subjects that have to be dealt with (laughs).
“It’s interesting to find yourself at that point in your life where these ideas are a big part of the issues that you want to write about and sing about and talk about and play about and have people go home thinking about at night … along with a variety of other things.”
One of the insights of the film is Springsteen’s realisation that accepting death enhances or expands his view of life.
“Well, I guess, my experience with it has been, I feel deeply the loss of that person and that friend. (But) you also gain something. You gain some fresh view and insight of living this life as it is today. You know the importance and the possibilities of how you can live tomorrow.
“So to me, it is just a natural exponent of that … that sort of ride in the shotgun seat of death enhances life in a very strange way. You’re given deeper insight into living now and to what that means and to what its possibilities are. And I always think about that a lot at night while we’re at work.”
Many of the E Street Band members appear in the film. Homage is paid to fallen members Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons. Bassist Garry W Tallent didn’t believe Springsteen actually liked him when they first met, but he’s been in the band since 1971 so things clearly worked out.
Steve Van Zandt initially came into the band to play guitar so Springsteen could freely roam the stage. He couldn’t believe that Springsteen — once the most introverted person he’d ever met — could soon emulate the confidence of his soul heroes, the great black American stars James Brown and Sam & Dave.
Seeing the latter at clubs in the 1960s alongside Van Zandt and Tallent had a profound effect on the then teenage Springsteenthat still resonates today.
“Well, you know, we were deep into soul music,” he recalls, “and Sam & Dave played at a club called the Fast Lane, and then they played at a place called the Satellite Lounge in Fort Dix New Jersey. We saw them at both places. They were great both nights. I forget how far apart the shows were, but Sam & Dave were still smoking.
“They had a great band. They were great out front. I don’t know if they spoke to one another, but they didn’t seem to have to, you know, it was just life changing. It was a transcendent experience.”
The length and breadth of Springsteen concerts is the stuff of legend. He believes that the audience doesn’t turn up to “hear their favourite song or to see your ageing face — they come for the intensity of your presence, (for) how alive you are on any given evening”. His shows still routinely clock in at over three hours. At one point in the film Springsteen jokes to Van Zandt that people also come to a concert to hear the mistakes.
“Well, there’s some truth to that,” he laughs, “I think people come to see it ‘live’. They come to hear the mistakes if there are mistakes there. Or if there are not. Mistakes are often happy accidents, good things come out of them.
“They can turn the night on its head in an instant, and a night where you may have been just kind of pushing to get along, suddenly, boom, the show opens up and you’re on your way. So they can be very valuable.”
A joy of the documentary is the archival footage director Zimny has inserted into the film. Grainy black and white film from the mid-1970s shows Springsteen and his band on the road sharing a van. Conditions are cramped. “Tour bus” sounds too extravagant as the band literally share beds as they criss-cross America building the E Street legend.
“Thank God we were kids in our 20s,” laughs Springsteen, “I wouldn’t want to be doing it now. It was a trip.”
In recent times Springsteen has had health problems that led to a number of shows from his last tour being rescheduled into 2025. Suffering from a peptic ulcer, he bounced back and the caravan rolled on. Springsteen’s wife Patti reveals her own health battles during the documentary.
In 2018 during Springsteen’s Broadway run she was diagnosed with early stage multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer. The diagnosis explains why playing on stage with her husband is no longer a frequent occurrence.
“This affects my immune system,” she tells us in Road Diary, “so I have to be careful what I choose to do and where I choose to go. Every once in a while, I come to a show or two and I can sing a few songs on stage, and that’s been a treat. That’s the new normal for me right now, and I’m OK with that.”
With shows planned for Canada, parts of Europe and the UK through to mid-2025, every Australian fan wants to know when we’ll see the great man on these shores again.
“Well, we certainly will be there at some point,” Springsteen says. “I’d like to have gone last year or this year. But we’ve had a variety of complications. One, Patti’s health has been an issue for us as a family. That’s had a lot to do with how and when we book places, and how we can get some place, and how we cannot get some place at a given moment.
“We’ve got such great, great fans in Australia,” he says, staring down the barrel of his computer and sending a message out to the faithful. “Folks, I love you. We’ll be coming out there to see you eventually. We’ve just had so many great times down there.”
Pressing on Springsteen’s mind currently is the US presidential election. A few weeks ago he posted a video to his social network firmly endorsing Kamala Harris and the Democrats. “I believe that she’s going to win,” he tells me, “along with Jim Walsh. Me and many, many other Americans are praying that that’s going to come true. And I have a good feeling that it will. God bless.”
For Springsteen, the rock and roll life has provided a helluva ride. From first plugging an electric guitar into an amplifier in the mid-1960s to playing stadiums almost 60 years later, it’s no wonder he’s described the trade he plys as a magic trick “where one and one makes three”.
So after thousands of nights on the road, how does he perform on those nights when he’s fatigued or simply not feeling it?
“Those are the nights I double down,” he says, “and I find one fan singing my song back to me. And the energy I feel could light up an entire city.”
The film ends with a prayer of sorts that struck a chord with Springsteen. It’s from The Doors’ Jim Morrison.
“O great creator of being
Grant us one more hour to perform our art
and perfect our lives”
Springsteen saw the Doors play in August 1968 at the Asbury Park Convention Hall. Patti was also in attendance.
“I remember seeing that and thinking, ‘Wow, that’s a beautiful quote’. As we were working on the film, I said, ‘that’s the last thing people should really see. That’s what people should take home and remember’.”
Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band is streaming on Disney+.
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