MONTREAL, CA | When Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band have played on past Halloweens, he’d sometimes start by emerging from a coffin. For the first big concert since he turned 75 weeks before, that spooky symbolism might have hit a little too close to home.
So he kicked off his Halloween show at the Bell Center in Montreal with something more goofy—a cover of “Ghostbusters.” The ever-professional, super-augmented E Street Band could acquit the Ray Parker Jr. oldie well, of course, and to their credit only did a couple of verses, before moving to the more bracing rocker of economic unrest, “Seeds.”
Known to wear the occasional Halloween getup over the years, Springsteen stuck to his recent stage uniform of a kind of hip maître d’ in white shirt, tie, black vest and rolled-up sleeves. The Montreal show was, like dozens of stops on his fraught 23-24 tour, a makeup date (that takes the tour into 2025). Originally scheduled for last November, it instead kicked off a seven-city fall Canadian tour.
Despite the ghostbusting, spirits of the past would repeatedly arise in the long set, from “Ghosts” and the title track from his 2020 Letter to You, a work inspired by the death of the last other member of his original Jersey band The Castiles, George Theiss, who died in 2018. Inheriting his friend’s guitar, books and records inspired songs on that album (intended as a message to him), as it did the E Street Band’s first tour since 2017, much delayed by the pandemic and other illnesses.
The theme would arise in the coda to the three-hour show, “I’ll See You In My Dreams” as well in the heart of the show, of where, following a stark “Last Man Standing,” he paused for spoken word remembrance amid the escalating drama of “Backstreets.”
There was mortality, too, in the one song from his last album of R&B covers, 2022’s Only the Strong Survive, a nicely grooving “Nightshift,” the Commodores hit noting the passings of Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson in 1984. And he paid tribute to his late bandmates Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici, whose faces appeared in a backing video for “Tenth Avenue Freezeout.”
For all the remembrance, though, this was a show with a lot of life, well balanced with anthems from the early days of band in “The E Street Shuffle” and “Rosalita”; its commercial heights with “Thunder Road,” “Born to Run,” “Hungry Heart,” and “Dancing in the Streets” and highlights from this century in “Lonesome Day” early in the set, and “Wrecking Ball” and “The Rising” near the end.
The augmented E Street Band is a mighty aggregation—18 strong—with the originals flanked by a four piece horn section, four backup singers, an added percussionist in Anthony Almonte, as well as longtime band fiddler, guitarist and backup vocalist Soozie Tyrell, who’s been also somewhat of a stand-in for her old friend Patti Scialfa (missing in Montreal).
There were nice showcases, though, for the underrated pianist Roy Bittan on the coda to “Racing in the Streets”; for Nils Lofgren, burning up a solo on “Youngstown”; and more participation from Steven Van Zandt on guitar, duet vocals and generally being a foil to Springsteen’s antics. Here, he was also credited by Bruce as “musical director” as well, which means he may have had more to do with shaping these shows than previously thought.
Perhaps because he was north of the border, Springsteen said surprisingly little about the impending US Presidential election, though he had performed in a pair of Kamala Harris rallies in Philadelphia and Georgia the week before.
And when he did bring it up, mentioning “a very hard week in my country” coming up, his song choice was a surprise. Not “Land of Hope and Dreams,” which he had performed at the rallies, but the more subtle “Long Walk Home,” which he presented as a kind of prayer for his nation. In it, he talks wistfully of a town where “everybody has a neighbor / everybody has a friend / everybody has a reason to begin again.”
The George W. Bush-era song, he once explained, was about a place he thought he knew. “The things that he thought he knew, the people who he thought he knew, whose ideals he had something in common with, are like strangers. The world that he knew feels totally alien. I think that’s what’s happened in this country.”
And certainly, the most powerful of his songs still spoke to the existential depths of his country, where “the dogs on Main Street howl “cause they understand.” “Blow away the dreams that tear you apart,” he calls in “The Promised Land.” “Blow away the dreams that break your heart. Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted.”
It struck hard in another song from Darkness at the Edge of Town as well, “Badlands”—“Talk about a dream, try to make it real. You wake up in the night with a fear so real. You spend your life waiting for a moment that just don’t come.” The crowd, young and old, thrust their fists up, demonstrating the feeling is rife across the whole of the continent and not just the states.
The concert was a triumph for a man who’s been leading this band for more than half a century and had just turned three-quarters of a century last month. To be sure, he did far less running around the stage than he did even back in the summer on large arena stages. He only strolled to the each side of the stage sparingly, and a catwalk behind the pit that would allow him center ice advantage was used just once in the encore. And don’t even think about the kinds of knee slides and piano top dancing that used to accompany things like “Rosalita.”
And when it came time for a natural end of set and encore, at song number 22 of an eventual 29, they just stayed on stage and plowed happily on (it was apparently a long walk home to the green room as well). No trick, all treat.
The Springsteen Canadian tour continues through November 22.
