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Springsteen’s TD Garden show was a ferocious, rock-filled fight for America
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Ordinarily, a Bruce Springsteen show is a ferocious, three-hour rock-and-roll display. But his performance Sunday at TD Garden was no ordinary Springsteen show. It was a ferocious, three-hour, rock-and-roll display of righteous anger, a conscious political act. Dubbed the “Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour,” Springsteen made plain what it was about in the tour’s announcement: “we will be rocking your town in celebration and in defense of America — American democracy, American freedom, our American Constitution and our sacred American dream — all of which are under attack.” It is no accident that the tour kicked off in Minneapolis, the city where, a few months ago, Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed by ICE agents, an event that precipitated the latest song from the Boss, “Streets of Minneapolis.”
Of course, Springsteen has never shied away from political commentary, both in things he has said and done and in songs he has written. But his current endeavor takes that to another level — one commensurate with the threat he sees us facing.
He began the evening with a Memorial Day prayer for the men and women in service, followed by a brief statement of purpose; he and the E Street Band were there, he said, “in defense of the values and ideals that have sustained this country for 250 years.” Then he launched into a three-hour show bookended with Edwin Starr’s “War” and Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom.” In between, he returned again and again to his theme.
There was an incendiary take on the Clash’s “Clampdown” (“let fury have the hour, anger can be power, you know that you can use it” bellowed Springsteen) and a wild, extended version of “No Surrender,” with its chorus — “no retreat, baby, no surrender” — repurposed for the moment. “Streets of Minneapolis,” channeling Springsteen’s inner folkie, was prefaced with praise of the inhabitants’ resistance; “they told us that this is still America, that the Gestapo tactics of this administration will not stand.”
There were many more such moments, from “Long Walk Home,” which Springsteen offered as “a prayer for our country,” to his raucous immigrant song, “American Land.” But the peak might have been two songs taken from the album Springsteen made in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — first, the gospel intensity of “My City of Ruins,” with the crowd joining the singer in roaring its soaring chorus of “C’mon, rise up!,” and the anguished resilience and hope carried by “The Rising.”
Interspersed among these offerings were the favorites that are a part of every Springsteen setlist, from “Born to Run” and “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” to “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and “Because the Night,” all delivered by the well-oiled machine that is the E Street Band and by a man who, now 76 years old, can still go full-tilt for three hours, even if he is finally starting to manifest the effects of time. But the point of the performance was found in the mission that Springsteen has taken upon himself — not only to call out “this corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration,” but to point beyond it to the work of resurrection and restoration and to the recovery of what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”
