2009-10-09 Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, NJ

Scheduled: 19:30 Local Start Time 20:27 / End Time 23:36

Info & Setlist | Venue

Final Giants Stadium show and a 31-song set, including the Born In The U.S.A. album. The Rolling Stones' "The Last Time" gets a fitting premiere in its only tour performance, last seen on the final night of the Darkness Tour in 1979, played by sign request. Jay Weinberg on drums for "Born To Run". "Raise Your Hand" includes a few lines from "You Sexy Thing". "American Land" includes a snippet of "Theme From Shaft" in the midsection. Final tour performances for "Tougher Than The Rest" and "Jersey Girl".

Curt Ramm (Guest)
Jay Weinberg (Guest)

Intro to “Wrecking Ball”
“This is the last one, let me hear you (crowd cheers) alright…we wrote this one especially for Giants Stadium (crowd cheers) where we have had many victories (crowd cheers) and sucked up our share of glory…here we go…”

Intro to “Spirit in the Night”
“Can you feel the spirit? (crowd cheers) can you feel the spirit now? (crowd cheers) can you feel the spirit? (crowd cheers) can you feel the spirit now? (crowd cheers)…”

Middle of “Working on a Dream”
“Yes, yes, yes…good evening, New Jersey (crowd cheers) we’re so glad to be here tonight (crowd cheers) at Giants Stadium (crowd cheers) oh, the last bastion of affordable sport seating…the E Street Band has been touring and touring and travelling and travelling and practising and practising just for this night (crowd cheers) that’s right…and we’re here tonight to fulfil our solemn vow…to rock the house! (crowd cheers) and our promise to build a house right here on the floor of this stadium tonight (crowd cheers) we’re gonna build it out of love, we’re gonna build it out of faith, we’re gonna build it out of happiness, we’re gonna build it out of joy, we’re gonna build it out of hard times survived and good times, we’re gonna build it out of Jersey soul (crowd cheers) and we’re gonna build it out of music and out of spirit and out of noise…now, the mighty E Street Band is here tonight and we’re gonna bring down the power of the music on you…but, New Jersey, we…need…you …to…bring…the…noise! (crowd cheers) come on, come on (crowd cheers) come on, come on (crowd cheers) now sing it like you mean it…”

Intro to “Born in the U.S.A”
“Yes, yes, woo!…as we…as we made our way towards these last five shows we tried to think of something we could do that would make these nights special (crowd cheers) so we played “Born to Run” last night…played “Darkness” last week all the way…and tonight this is sort of, this was, this was the song…(?) we started out the first time we entered this arena (crowd cheers) so…I’m gonna do this for an old friend of mine, who on this very date 55 years ago was born in the U.S.A (crowd cheers)…”

Intro to “Tougher Than the Rest”
“Thank you (crowd cheers) thank you (crowd cheers) these are the guys that made the music (crowd cheers) and Phantom Dan Federici (crowd cheers)…come on, Pats, sing one with me, girl… give me a mike…come on, girl…”

Intro to “Raise Your Hand”
“Alright, alright, alright, what do we got out there? (crowd cheers) ‘cause all I wanna say is…play it, Steve…
(…) Yo!…the international greeting for New Jerseyans: “Yo!”…I live the dream, baby…”

Intro to “The Last Time”
“Never before performed, perfect (?)…perfect request for this evening…”

Middle of “Waitin' on a Sunny Day”
“Let me hear you (crowd sings the chorus) once more a little bit louder (a kid sings the chorus) that’s good (the kid keeps singing) (crowd cheers) ssshh (the kid continues singing)(crowd cheers)…”

Intro to “American Land”
“I wanna thank everybody for coming out to the wrecking ball (crowd cheers)…
(…) Little Steven (crowd cheers) the First Lady of the E Street Band, Miss Patti Scialfa (crowd cheers) Curt Ramm on trumpet (crowd cheers) Curtis King (crowd cheers) Sister Soozie Tyrell (crowd cheers) the Mighty Max Weinberg (crowd cheers) Garry W. Tallent (crowd cheers) Professor Roy Bittan (crowd cheers) Charlie Giordano (crowd cheers) Cindy Mizelle (crowd cheers) one of the greatest guitarists in the world, Nils Lofgren (crowd cheers) and the biggest man on the New Jersey Turnpike (crowd cheers) auteur, Clarence “Big Man” Clemons (crowd cheers) Giants Stadium! (crowd cheers) Giants Stadium! (crowd cheers) Giants Stadium! (crowd cheers) Giants Stadium! (crowd cheers) Giants Stadium! (crowd cheers) Giants Stadium! (crowd cheers) you’ve just seen the last of the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, earth-shocking, hard-rocking, booty-shaking, earth-quaking, love-making, Viagra-taking, history-making, legendary (crowd: “E Street Band” and fireworks go off)(crowd cheers)…”

Intro to “Jersey Girl”
“Alright…you ready for the last dance at Giants Stadium? (crowd cheers) this is one for the old Jersey girl (crowd cheers)…”

After “Jersey Girl”
“We love you (crowd cheers) we’ll be seeing you (crowd cheers) dedicated to all the crew and staff that’s worked all these years here at Giants Stadium, we thank you (crowd cheers)…”

^{Compiled by : Johanna Pirttijärvi.}

Hondo	Left us hanging at the last show… We didn't need any guest appearances but the audience was shocked when the show seemed to end abruptly…. He should have come out for Twist and Shout or Quarter to 3 and sent us out dancing in the dark !
McMurphy	Didn't need any special guests. What for? I got Bruce and the E Street Band playing a solid night of hard-driving rock and roll with all the soul and heart of a band half their age. They put everyone else to shame. Great show! Great 5 night stand! Classic — especially the 2nd and 3rd nights! Now, before the tour ends, all we need, all the fans really want, is a night of The River album. Now that would be a show! Love you guys. Thanks for the party!
The Poet	Great show, but not my #1 of the NJ stand. Maybe best encore night with Last Time, 7 Nights, Kitty and Jersey Girl…man, those cats can rock and groove like nobody's business. Anyone putting these shows down needs to go check out some pop band that plays a little over an hour and thinks they've done a hard nights work. The music is timeless, visceral, now, locked into the moments of life we all continue to experience every day. If Bruce ever sat and wrote a book, it would no doubt end on the shelves along side Hemingway, Faulkner and Steinback. Favorite night goes to Night 4—just simply kicked ass from start to finish and had me wanting more.
Tom Cantillon	We got rock 'n' roll music blastin' from the T-top… Bruce and band tore thru the Born in the USA material as if playing it all for the first time and eager to show what a powerhouse of an album it is. Extended jams on Cover Me, Working on the Highway and Glory Days were all amazing. It was great to finally get Spirit in the Night; been waiting for that one. Took a while to score some cheap ticks, but finally got some GAs for $30 and got in plenty of time to get close and enjoy the show. Tougher than the Rest — nice choice. Killer Long Walk Home! Great encores: Staring us off with Raise your Hand, before blasting into the Stones' Last Time, 7 Nights to Rock and easily one of the best versions of Kitty's Back — rockin' and jamming as they kept the stadium crowd on their feet. Jersey Girl — a beautiful version, truly heartfelt, but was hoping for Thunder Road or Travelin' Band to close the show. Been a memorable 5 nights at Giants Stadium: Cheap parking lot ticks for the floor every night, great crowds, a real treat to hear 3 albums in their entirety, especially Born to Run and Darkness, and what better way to spend a night than in the swamps of Jersey listening to the greatest Rock 'n' Roll band play their hearts out. Thanks Kyle and Illya for the overall fun, especially with trying to score cheap ticks at the last minute — and always being successful. And a special thanks to Ang, for coming along for the ride and for living with your Bruce nut of a husband. Sad to see the shows come to an end, but thankful for having been able to be there and experience a part of rock 'n' roll history!

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For Springsteen and Giants Stadium, a Raucous Last Dance

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — Giants Stadium heard its last sha-la-las — at least, the amplified kind with tens of thousands of voices singing along — on Friday night, when Bruce Springsteen played the final concert before the stadium is demolished. During the three-hour set, sha-la-las filled this year’s “Working on a Dream,” the 1984 song “Darlington County” and Tom Waits’s “Jersey Girl,” the finale that Mr. Springsteen called the stadium’s “last dance.” It was Mr. Springsteen’s 24th performance since 1985 at Giants Stadium, where the audiences are his most fervent fans: fellow New Jerseyans.

So in a way, Mr. Springsteen could identify with the place, and he did — at least half-seriously — in “Wrecking Ball,” a robust, guitar-strumming song he wrote to start off each of his five final concerts at the stadium. (A video performance is at brucespringsteen.net.)

It may be the only song ever to make Giants Stadium itself the narrator, “raised out of steel in the swamps of Jersey.” It remembers games played and blood spilled and envisions the stadium’s fate when “all this steel and these stories, they drift away to rust/ and all our youth and beauty’s been given to the dust.” Typically, Mr. Springsteen was thinking about work, mortality and a sense of place on his way to a chorus where everyone could join in.

He wasn’t overly sentimental. Later he pointedly called Giants Stadium “the last bastion of affordable sports seating.”

At each of the Giants Stadium concerts Mr. Springsteen played one of his albums all the way through, and the one he chose for Friday was his 1984 blockbuster, “Born in the U.S.A.” Before he began the title track, he said it was “the song we started out with the first time we entered this arena.”

The album inaugurated Mr. Springsteen’s stadium era, when he strove to draw mass audiences, though still on his own terms. “Born in the U.S.A.” is an album of big riffs and broad strokes. It was also an album about home: a country (the U.S.A.), a hometown (“My Hometown”) and houses holding personal memories. And it was a paradox.

The lyrics, by and large, are about hard times and irreparable losses, even in the hits: “Born in the U.S.A.,” about a neglected Vietnam veteran, and “Dancing in the Dark,” about depression with the barest glimmer of hope. Yet most of the music is celebratory, brazening through setbacks with rock ’n’ roll: the Rolling Stones twang of “Darlington County,” the merry carousel-organ chords of “Glory Days” or the rockabilly boogie of “Working on the Highway,” which ends with its narrator in prison.

The musicians who made “Born in the U.S.A.” are all still in Mr. Springsteen’s E Street Band except for the keyboardist Danny Federici, who died last year. The concert had no celebrity guests; this was the home team.

Performing the album 25 years later, Mr. Springsteen sang with deeper nuance; he was more desperate in “Born in the U.S.A.,” angrier in “I’m Goin’ Down.” And the band has slightly bulked up the music without cluttering it. There was a seismic drum interlude by Max Weinberg in “Born in the U.S.A.,” and Nils Lofgren played frantic, searing guitar solos in “Cover Me.” The songs have not faded.

The rest of the concert spanned Mr. Springsteen’s major-label career, reaching back to “Spirit in the Night” from his 1973 debut album. It reaffirmed the band’s camaraderie; Mr. Springsteen kissed Patti Scialfa, his wife and E Street backup singer, and Clarence Clemons, the band’s saxophonist. The set riffled through styles, from the swinging “Kitty’s Back” (with Roy Bittan splashing jazzy piano chords and Mr. Springsteen playing barbed, bluesy lead guitar) to the Irish jig of “American Land” to chiming anthems like “Badlands.”

There was a glimpse of politics in “Last to Die” and a rush of redemption in “The Rising” and “Born to Run” (which had Jay Weinberg, Max’s son and occasional E Street Band replacement, on drums). And there was the constantly renewed bond between Mr. Springsteen and his audience. He strolled walkways where fans grabbed his legs, he picked up signs with requests — choosing “the perfect request for this evening,” the Rolling Stones song “The Last Time” — and he crowd-surfed in “Hungry Heart.” The video screens kept intercutting Mr. Springsteen and the musicians with fans singing verses and choruses, as if to say the songs were theirs now, too.

They were songs full of hardworking people, and Mr. Springsteen’s last goodbye to his home stadium was to them: he dedicated “Jersey Girl” to “all the crew and staff that’s worked all these years at Giants Stadium.” Some had probably been singing sha-la-la too.

^{By Jon Pareles via The New York Times.}

Springsteen Closes Down Giants Stadium With Powerhouse “Born in the U.S.A.” Show

When Bruce Springsteen first played Giants Stadium in the summer of 1985, he was at the height of his fame. Born in the U.S.A. yielded an astonishing seven Top 10 hits that were inescapable on the radio and MTV. Last night, 24 years and 24 Giants Stadium concerts later, he returned to the New Jersey venue to play the final show there before it’s demolished. In honor of the event, he played Born in the U.S.A. in its entirety in the middle of an epic three-hour-and-20-minute farewell party. Despite predictions that it would rain all night, barely a drop fell until the the very minute Springsteen walked offstage with his arm around Clarence Clemons — at which point it began pouring.

As he did at the previous four Giants Stadium shows, Springsteen opened the concert with “Wrecking Ball” — a defiant tune written specifically for these gigs. The song is written from the point of view of the stadium itself, but weeks after Springsteen’s 60th birthday it was impossible to not hear a dual meaning with lines like these: “Now when all this steel and these stories, they drift away to rust/And all our youth and beauty, it’s been given to the dust/And our game’s been decided, and we’re burning down the clockâ€¨/And all our little victories and glories, have turned into parking lots.”

Early on, during a crowd sing-along of “Hungry Heart,” Springsteen ran onto the general admission pit on the field. Unlike prior shows, where he circled the pit before walking back to the stage, he made what looked like a spontaneous decision to crowd surf across the entire length of the rather deep pit. It was precarious and at times his body began sinking down and it truly looked like the crowd was going to drop him, but not only did he continue singing while flat on his back, he kept signaling to the band to elongate the song’s outro while he made the slow journey back on the hands of hundreds of fans. His wife and bandmate Patti seemed much more concerned for his well being than he did.

Soon afterwards he kicked off the complete performance of Born in the U.S.A.. 1984 was the year of the mega album (Like a Virgin, Purple Rain, 1984, Sports, Private Dancer), but hearing Born in the U.S.A. straight through for the first time in ages made me realize how different it is from the rest of those LPs. The 1980s drum and keyboard sounds made most of the songs radio-friendly, but the subject matter is quite bleak: a struggling Vietnam vet (“Born in the U.S.A.”), a town torn apart by racism and unemployment (“My Hometown”), saying farewell to a best friend (“Bobby Jean”) or longing for the past (“Glory Days”). Even “Dancing in the Dark,” which brings to mind a frolicking Courteney Cox, seeps with frustration and pain. Still, singing along to every word with 50,000 other people, the whole thing still felt like a celebration.

During the encores Springsteen scooped up request signs from the floor while singing “Raise Your Hand.” He settled on the very appropriate choice — the “The Last Time” by the Rolling Stones — which he claimed the band had never played or even rehearsed. They still managed a near note-perfect rendition. As the clock inched towards the three-hour mark, the band launched into 1973’s “Kitty’s Back” — one of the longest tunes in the Springsteen catalog. It was extra long, as Bruce let nearly every member of the band take a solo in what was one of the greatest versions of the song I’ve ever heard.

Fireworks exploded over the stadium at the end of “American Land,” but after bows the band returned to their instruments for one last song, “Jersey Girl.” It’s a bizarre irony that one of Springsteen’s most beloved song about New Jersey is actually written by Tom Waits. Cheers erupted after every reference to Jersey (there were lots) and the entire stadium seemed to be swaying in unison as they sang “Sha la la la la la.” After the band walked off, Springsteen briefly turned around and held up his guitar with a huge grin on his face, savoring one final moment onstage at Giants Stadium.

^{By Andy Greene via Rolling Stone.}

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