Bruce Springsteen at Wrigley Field: The summer of superstar concerts continues.
It's been a huge year for megastar music performers to hit the road. Taylor Swift just finished the first leg of her tour with six sold-out nights in Los Angeles. Beyonce is in the middle of a worldwide tour that goes through September. And Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band is back in the USA with the third leg of his tour that began Wednesday night at Chicago’s Wrigley Field.
This is The Boss’s first North American tour since 2016. It began last February in Tampa, moved to a series of stadium shows in Europe and is now back in the US and Canada through the end of the year. There will be fifty-six shows in forty-eight cities. That's quite a run for a musician who is now seventy-three years old.
It’s amazing how this dude and his fellow musicians can do this high-energy three-hour show night after night for more than five decades. The setlist for the tour has been mostly the same tunes, so it begins with “No Surrender” and continues without a break for twenty-six songs. Hell, it’s tiring just watching this, much less performing it…and Springsteen looks like he barely works up a sweat.
The highlights include his classic tunes “Prove It All Night”, “Because the Night”, “Badlands” and “Thunder Road.” Then comes the six-song encore of “Born to Run”, “Rosalita”, “Glory Days”, “Dancing in the Dark”, “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” with the finale of “I’ll See You In My Dreams”, which was dedicated to Robbie Robertson, who died earlier that day.
At the Grammy Museum, in Los Angeles, there is a Bruce Springsteen exhibit. As part of it, there’s a list of the greatest live performers of all time. Bruce and The E-Street Band are rated at the top. It looks like Taylor and Beyonce could be headed toward that top spot, but let’s see if they’re still doing it in fifty years like Bruce and the band are.