Proud and tenacious, he overcame his limitations in front of the 58,000 people gathered at the Olympic Stadium
It always happens. The individualized crowd is an annoying cacophony of conversations, but when his presence is sensed, it turns into a single voice unified by emotion, converging into one overwhelming shout, “Bruuuuuucccceeeeee.” It happened again yesterday, at an Olympic Stadium with 58,000 people witnessing the determined vigor of a nearly 75-year-old man. Just as Bill Withers stopped stuttering when he sang, Springsteen is revitalized every time he faces a stadium. And it always happens the same way: a ritual with slight variations repeats itself. The audience, knowing they will have a good time, ends up having an even better time than expected. This small secular miracle occurs over and over. For years. It seems endless. The Virgin of Lourdes for agnostics. It doesn’t cause healings, doesn’t appear in a grotto, and unlike the Virgin, it promises happiness here and now, not in the afterlife.
In his first Barcelona concert of this extended tour, which also passed through the same place last year, Bruce Springsteen, the Boss, made a crowd happy once again. It seems like a miracle. He’s on his way to matching the 18 appearances in Barcelona that the shepherdess Maria Bernarda Sobirós witnessed in the Massabielle grotto. The only difference between that little girl and last night’s 58,000 is that one was astonished, and the crowd shouted out of pure amazement. He did it with the opening “Lonesome Day,” imposing that sonic happiness on the hubbub that still erupted on stage with “My Love Will Not Let You Down,” “Cover Me,” and “Radio Nowhere,” a new addition to a setlist that included almost the same songs as in Madrid but in a different order, excluding the novelties of the third concert in the capital. That’s what happens when you have a big but stripped-down stage, lack special effects, and don’t have dancers: you just need to decide the changes and shout “one, two, three” like Springsteen does. The rest follows naturally.
Until the eighth track, “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” there was no respite, not even for his voice, which in this song aimed to sound full, as if to correct a faltering start where he didn’t quite hit the note. But even in this, Springsteen is different: while some artists fail despite age, trying to push higher and higher, expecting gratitude from the audience just for the boldness of challenging nature, Springsteen climbs as much as he can without straining his voice, maintaining a more than acceptable and consistent tone. Techniques like having the audience sing, as at the beginning of “Hungry Heart” or later in “The River,” or lowering the pitch to reach comfortably, as in “The Last Man Standing,” and always relying on soulful choruses are tricks of an old hand who knows his limits and understands that his job isn’t to sing like in TV talent shows.
By the way, speaking of “Last Man Standing,” a song about life in the face of death, dedicated to George Theiss, a companion from his youth, both his speech and the song’s lyrics appeared on screens with Catalan subtitles. Bruce used this language on several occasions, a usual courtesy from him. “Una nit preciosa” (a beautiful night), he even said. From the thirteenth song, “My Hometown,” Bruce and his now splendid band, with Little Steven definitely being more of the Lilyhammer character on stage than the one from The Sopranos, tackled the unmovable part of their setlist, the hits that offered the most visually engaging moments for the audience: waving their arms, fluttering their hands as if thousands of butterflies were flying just above them, dancing, bouncing, and apparently even moving Bruce himself, who added one more song to the setlist, John Fogerty’s “Rockin’ All Over The World,” before finishing acoustically with “I’ll See You In My Dreams.”