2012-07-05 Palais Omnisports De Paris-Bercy, Paris, France

Scheduled: 20:00 Local Start Time: 20:59 / End Time: 00:36

Info & Setlist | Venue

A spectacular 31-song setlist for the second night in Paris with Bruce taking the concept of a varied set on night two and blowing it out of the water. A six-pack of classics (including the second "Something In The Night" of the tour) kick-off the show before we even get to the the usual opener "We Take Care Of Our Own". This wasn't the plan - the setlist shows "The Ties That Bind" going straight into "We Take Care Of Our Own". Both "Incident On 57th Street" and an 11-minute "Racing In The Street" with an extended coda are played - the last time that both songs were played at an E Street show was back in 1978. Also in the set: "I'm Goin' Down", "Easy Money" and the tour premiere of "For You", played solo on the piano. Bruce drags daughter Jessica on stage for a dance during "Dancing In The Dark", and the walk-on music is "Au clair de la lune", played by the accordion duo of Roy and Charlie. "My City Of Ruins" includes "People Get Ready" and a snippet of "Sad Mood". First ever performances in France of "Something In The Night" and "Incident On 57th Street".

Intro to "The Ties That Bind"
“Bon soir, Paris! (crowd cheers) etes-vous prets? (crowd cheers) etes-vous prets? (crowd cheers) etes-vous prets? (crowd cheers)…”

Intro to "No Surrender"
“Steve! “No Surrender!”…”

Intro to "My City of Ruins"
“Bon soir, Paris! (crowd cheers) ca va? (crowd cheers) ca va? (crowd cheers) etes-vous prets? (crowd cheers) oh yeah…oh yeah… oh yeah…hit it, Max!…this is a song about the hellos and goodbyes we have to say to friends in our lives…c’est une chanson de bonjour et au-revoirs…a song about things that we lose when they go and the things of theirs that we keep forever…(?)(crowd cheers)…”

Middle of "My City of Ruins"
“(Horn players take turns soloing)…That’s Clark Gayton, Curt Ramm, Barry Danielian, Ed Manion and Jake Clemons – the E Street Horns (crowd cheers) take me higher…take me higher…take me higher…we got Everett Bradley, Curtis “Cowbell” King, Cindy Mizelle, Michelle Moore of the E Street Choir with us tonight (crowd cheers) Max!…roll call…I wanna know who’s in the house tonight (crowd cheers) I wanna feel who’s in the house tonight (crowd cheers) I wanna hear who’s in the house tonight (crowd cheers)
Professor Roy Bittan’s in the house (Roy plays) Brother Charlie Giordano’s in the house (crowd cheers)(Charlie plays accordion) Sister Soozie Tyrell (crowd cheers)(Soozie plays violin) incredible Nils Lofgren (crowd cheers) (Nils plays) oh, I’m looking for my baby…I’m searching for my baby…I’m looking for my baby…I’m searching for my baby…is there a red headed woman in the house? (crowd cheers) is there a red headed woman in the house? (crowd cheers) Patti, Miss Patti Scialfa (crowd cheers)(Patti sings a bit of “People Get Ready”) oh, thank you, baby (crowd cheers) Little Steven’s in the house tonight (crowd cheers)(Steve plays) play it, Steve…Mighty Max Weinberg (crowd cheers)(Max drums) and Mr. Garry W. Tallent (crowd cheers)(Garry plays) are we ready for a house party? (crowd cheers) are we ready for a house party? (crowd cheers) we’re gonna have a house party tonight (crowd cheers) we’re gonna have a house party…I always remember when you had those parties in the summer you’d always be noticing who was here this year, who was missing this year…oh, I’m in a sad mood tonight…I’m real sad…are we missing anybody? (crowd cheers) are we missing anybody? (crowd cheers) are we missing anybody? (crowd cheers) are we missing anybody? (crowd cheers) (?) sing with me… are we missing anybody? (crowd cheers) are we missing anybody? (crowd cheers) are we missing anybody? (crowd cheers) are we missing anybody? (crowd cheers) come on, I can hear ‘em in your voices (crowd cheers)…”

Intro to "Spirit in the Night"
“I can feel something in this room tonight (crowd cheers) I can feel something in this room (crowd cheers) but I think, I think we’ve got to wake it up (crowd cheers) we’ve got to shake it up (crowd cheers) we’ve got to make it up, goddammit! (crowd cheers) that’s right…the E Street Band’s come thousands of miles and we’ve come to ask you one question…can you feel the spirit? (crowd cheers) can you feel the spirit now? (crowd cheers) we’ve come to ask you that one question and if you’ve got an answer, I want you to shout out “Yeah, yeah!”…can you feel the spirit? (crowd and band: “Yeah, yeah!”) can you feel the spirit now? (crowd and band: “Yeah, yeah!”) can you feel the spirit? (crowd and band: “Yeah, yeah!”) can you feel the spirit now? (crowd and band: “Yeah, yeah!”) we come here tonight to bring you the news, the bad news, the good news, the news with the beat, the news that make you wanna holler (crowd and band: “Yeah, yeah!”) that make you wanna holler (crowd and band: “Yeah, yeah!”) let me hear you holler (crowd and band: “Yeah, yeah!”)…”

Intro to "The Way You Do the Things You Do – 634-5789"
“Soul music!…do we have any soul music fans out there? (crowd cheers) the E Street Band is a rock and soul band…that is at the heart of what we do…soul music was music of blood…and sweat and work and joy…of effort…of the earth, of air, of sex, of love, of regret, of anger…of heart, of life…of soul…soul music was about the world as it stands in front of you…and the struggle that it is to get through it and the transcendence you search for…soul had shoes in muddy ground but always reaching to…the heavens…without ever quite getting there…it was music about trials and tribulations of being human…it was also music that made exquisite study of the beauty of life that was in front of your eyes in the simplest language…this is a song by one of the most elegant songwriters followed by a song by one of the most gritty soul singers…so…here we go…”

Intro to "For You"
“Yes, yes! (crowd cheers) thank you for that (?) that’s fine ‘cept I can’t read these (chuckles) oh yeah…”

Intro to "We Are Alive"
“Time for a testimony…I finished, uh, working on finishing Wrecking Ball…a lot of hard luck stories…a lot of hard times people going through back home, I know here too, people losing their houses, lost their jobs…I was looking for a song at the end of the record… that would…somehow point to the future…somehow bring a little light into the record…and I couldn’t come across anything, everything we tried sounded…fake…so I started to think about the past and how the generations before dealt with their hard times… ‘cause it’s going on over and over again in the 1800s and the 1930s and the 1970s and it always falls on the heads of the same folks… and when I was growing up myself…and while I didn’t think about it, I realized that I had the example about how those things were dealt with…how hard times and death and terrible tragedy fall into your life without taking your life and that example was my mom (crowd cheers) she had it hard…yet somehow got up every morning, went to work, always had a smile and somehow always had love to spare so (crowd cheers) when we were kids, we used to go out into the graveyard around dusk, me and my sister, my mother used to put flowers on my grandmother’s grave and me and my sister used to run off through the graves and climb over the gravestones till it got dark and we thought we started to hear things…so…this is a song about listening to the voices of the dead or the voices from the past…and the way they inform the present and point towards the future…so I’ll do this one for you tonight, Mom (crowd cheers) so there we are, we’re at the old Freehold cemetery, it’s right around dark and me and my little sister are going grave to grave to grave to grave, it’s getting darker and we’re listening and we’re listening and we’re listening and suddenly we hear…There’s a cross over yonder…”

Intro to "Glory Days"
“Fatigue? (crowd: “No!”) fatigue? (crowd: “No!”)…”

Middle of "Glory Days"
“We gotta get going, Steve (Steve: “We do?”) I gotta go see the Eiffel Tower before it closes…(Steve: “It never closes”) I’m telling you it closes (Steve: “It never closes”) it closes!…(?)…”

Intro to "Dancing in the Dark"
“Fatigue? (crowd: “No!”) fatigue? (crowd: “No!”) fatigue? (crowd: “No!”)…”

Middle of "Dancing in the Dark"
“(dances with Jessica, then escorts her back to the side of the stage)…That’s my little girl…”

Towards the end of "Dancing in the Dark"
“Fatigue (crowd: “No!”) fatigue (crowd: “No!”)(lays down on the stage) merci…fatigue (crowd: “No!”)…(Steve pours water from a sponge on Bruce’s face, twice, then he finally gets up)…

Towards the end of "Tenth Avenue Freeze-out"
“Paris! (crowd cheers) Paris! (crowd cheers) Paris! (crowd cheers) you’ve just seen the hard-rocking, house-rocking, earth-shaking, heart-breaking, Viagra-taking, love-making, history-making, legendary (crowd: “E Street Band!”)…”

^{Compiled by : Johanna Pirttijärvi}

^{© All credits to the original photographer. We do not monetize a photo in any way, but if you want your photo to be removed, let us know, and we will remove it.}

The Hype Is Real

The Wrecking Ball tour was big on multiple levels, from the length of the shows (eventually reaching four hours, breaking Bruce’s all-time record), to the number of band members on stage (hitting 17 on occasion), to the scale of the venues—especially in Europe, where the 2012 tour hit stadiums across the continent… save for one special stand in Paris.

For reasons that have never been explained, when Springsteen brought the Wrecking Ball caravan to France to open the second half of the Euro leg, he downsized from stadiums back to arena-scale for just one pair of shows that fell on the fourth and fifth of July. Those back-to-back performances, which featured an impressive 44 different songs between them, have long been lauded as some of the best of the tour. In that spirit of bigness and in celebration of the ten-year anniversary of the gigs, it seemed only fitting to add both Paris 2012 shows to the Live Archive series.

The Paris concerts combined offer over seven hours of music and a bounty of special moments and performances. Here are several worth noting.

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band at Palais Omnisports De Paris-Bercy, July 4, 2012
The charms of the expanded 2012 band bear fruit in a delightful, unhurried version of “The E Street Shuffle” performed as a sign request. The song was played more in 2012 than any other year since 1975, when it thrived in a completely different arrangement. The Wrecking Ball tour edition takes advantage of the horn section, Everett Bradley’s percussion, and the E Street Choir on background vocals for a fully realized rendition that follows the original album structure of prelude, main song, and a storming, extended coda. In Paris, the crowd keeps singing the melody after the whole thing ends, indicative of just how into the show they are, and it compels Bruce to start the “E Street Shuffle” back up again for a second coda.

Springsteen keeps the Asbury Park setting, linking “Shuffle” to “Sandy” in his transition: “And then, down from town, about five blocks in on the boardwalk… if you listen hard, you could hear…” He sings the accordion-led, Fourth of July special in a low voice at times, adding a bit of age and wisdom to the tale, which on this night includes the sometimes-omitted third verse about the “waitress who lost her desire for me.” The background singers bring lushness to the final chorus as the sun sets on the boardwalk via Paris.

When Bruce opened his Fourth of July playlist for this show, he clicked them all—which means “Darlington County.” Stevie Van Zandt veers the song towards the edge of the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” before Bruce sings his first line about that memorable drive he and Wayne took from New York City all those years ago. The Paris take is long, with an extended horn and sax section at the end.

With Patti back on stage for the first time on the Euro tour, “Easy Money” returns to the set in one of only 18 performances ever. Bruce’s untamed falsetto vocals start things out, and one has to credit the Paris crowd for their consistently high level of participation as they sing along strongly here. Patti’s vocal contributions are a key element to “Easy Money,” which is why the song wasn’t performed without her.

In the most special nod to the occasion, Bruce moves to the piano for a rare solo-piano performance of “Independence Day.” Bruce released a video of this version in 2012 on his official YouTube channel, and it is great to have the audio available through the Live Archive series. Having played the instrument every night of the Devils & Dust tour, Springsteen’s piano playing is more confident than ever. Listen to the fine solo he takes in lieu of Clarence’s memorable sax before the third verse. Like so many older songs performed in this era, the bit of age in Springsteen’s voice only adds gravitas.

No Fourth of July performance would be complete without “Born in the U.S.A.” in its still-awe-inspiring, full-band arrangement. Bruce has no trouble finding his 1984 vocal range “forty years down the road” in a crackling rendition that puts the electric guitars on a level playing field with the synthesizers. Max Weinberg is also up to the task: while the horns add heft to the outro, Max smashes his legendary fills as hard as ever.

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band at Palais Omnisports De Paris-Bercy, July 5, 2012
If anyone needed a sign that the second show in Paris would be materially different from the first, look no further than the top of the set when Bruce and the band reel off six songs in a row not featured the previous night. Deviating from his own written setlist, the band starts what sounds for all the world like “We Take Care of Our Own” only to shift gears into a bright “The Ties That Bind,” led by Roy Bittan’s piano and rich with the voices of the background singers in the chorus and bridge. Jake Clemons takes a sharp solo, too. The stellar reading of “Ties” is followed in bang-bang succession by breathtaking runs of “No Surrender,” “Two Hearts,” “Downbound Train,” “Candy’s Room,” and lastly a scintillating “Something in the Night.” Fans in attendance said the July 5 show was truly something special, and you can hear that imprinted in Jon Altschiler’s full-bodied mix. The six-song start of the second Paris set is as good as it gets in the post-Reunion era.

“Something In The Night,” Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band Live in Paris, 7/5/2012
In all, Paris night two boasts 15 changes from the previous show, including three certified epics starting with “Incident on 57th Street.” As vocal as they have been all night, the Paris audience treats the Wild & Innocent masterpiece with fitting reverence. Bruce tells Nils to take the initial guitar lead, which rises above Charlie Giordano’s swirling organ.

“Working on the Highway” and “I’m Goin’ Down” add a dose of levity and self-deprecation to the evening. The horn section and background singers give “Working on the Highway” a big jolt of energy, while the audience does the same for “I’m Goin’ Down,” yielding reinvigorated versions of both songs.

After a solo “Independence Day” on July 4, Bruce sits at the piano bench night two and delivers “For You.” This one is triumphant, reaching the heady heights of the song’s solo outings in 1975 (such as the extraordinary take on the Live Archive release of Greenvale, NY 12/12/75). Like “Indy” the night before, Springsteen plays the piano brilliantly, and he commits to every line of the lyrics to staggering effect. He also hits the last note resoundingly when he sings “When it was my turn to be the God.” As the kids say, “Chills.”

From “For You” straight into evening’s epic denouement, “Racing in the Street”—another time-defying performance. It can be difficult to describe in the written word what it feels like when a performer is in the moment, not simply performing their music, but embodying it, living the words and melodies anew. But you can hear it. That goes for every member of the band, too—special credit to Bittan and Bradley, first among equals in this performance of “Racing.”

The sequence of “For You” to “Racing in the Street,” and the top of the July 5 show as well, all capture Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performing in the moment. For years, they did so more consistently than any other band in concert. On this fantastic recording of Paris 2012, so many years down the road, they undeniably do so again.

^{By Erik Flannigan via Nugs.net.}

Brucebase Wiki

Site Navigation

The Hype Is Real