Bruce Springsteen played Gillette Stadium – 9/14

Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band wrapped up the second North American leg of 2016’s The River Tour with a four-hour marathon show at Gillette last Wednesday night. 

What more is there to be said about Springsteen’s epic run of shows this year? The Boss and the band marked the 35th anniversary of 1980’s double-LP The River with a comprehensive reissue and a plan to perform the whole thing, straight through, every night, on tour. That concept didn’t last past the tour’s first leg early this year, but ever-changing, crowd-pleasing setlists took the place of sequential runs through the album, and records were broken.

On this final night of the group’s late-summer run of stadium shows, this was essentially The River Tour in name only – all but two of its songs (“Out in the Street” and the essential “Hungry Heart”) were stricken from the set. The show instead focused on a wealth of early material from 1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park and The Wild, The Innocent and The E Street Shuffle before pivoting to a series of audience requests and favorites from elsewhere in the sprawling Springsteen discography. The unexpected inclusion of showstopping Born to Run closer “Jungleland” was a personal highlight.

Save for an encore break that barely qualified as such, Springsteen was indeed on stage for four straight hours, and by the time the band closed things out just before midnight, it looked like he could probably go another four if he felt like it. This was my introductory Springsteen show, and as a first-timer the whole thing was pretty astonishing to watch. It takes a superhuman talent to play a show that long where the momentum and the enthusiasm are so consistent. I was chilled pretty thoroughly by the wind up there in the Gillette nosebleeds (it’s honestly a little frightening how high up in the air those seats are), but I was grateful to be in that stadium. What a show.

Photo-wise, I was obviously not approved to shoot – Springsteen is a notoriously tough pass to obtain – but I did assemble a kit that I was able to get past security: my old Rebel T3i with an 85mm (which becomes a ~135 with that camera’s crop sensor) and my Fuji x100 for wide shots. Not ideal, but I fared a little better than Sabbath last month.