Friday, July 7, 2023

Last Man Standing


Bruce Springsteen on stage in Hyde Park, London, 6 July 2023. Photograph: Michal Augustini/Shutterstock

 Springsteen is in remarkable shape: fit, toned and bursting with vitality. He can still toss a guitar in the air; he can still rip open his shirt to reveal a bare chest, though now the gesture comes with a wink of self-deprecation at the absurdity of it. But he does not look like a man desperate to recapture his glory days. He is not, as Manzoor – whose boyhood devotion to Springsteen was depicted in the movie Blinded By the Light – says of Jagger, “perpetually stuck in his 20s”.
 On the contrary, this new show of Springsteen’s looks ageing and death in the eye.
 His bandmates are his contemporaries and don’t hide it: the giant monitors show closeups of gnarled, veined hands on guitar strings. His own performance is astonishing, but it never looks effortless.
 He speaks only once at any length, and that is to introduce a 2020 song about the band he played in with schoolmates when he was 15. He is, he tells the crowd, the only one left. “Death is like you’re standing on the railroad tracks with an oncoming train bearing down upon you,” he says. 
“But it brings a certain clarity of thought.” It pushes you to “seize the day”, to savour, with urgency, the time and the people you have left. And then he plays Last Man Standing, a song about the passions of youth, the time in your life when “it’s all hellos”, before they are outnumbered by “hard goodbyes”. 
 The result is that you hear the rest of the songs through fresh ears. Now it doesn’t sound absurd to hear a septuagenarian singing of childhood best friends running on the Backstreets, or of young sweethearts Born to Run, itching to break free of their small town. Now the joy and exuberance of those classic songs carries the extra poignancy of reminiscence and loss. And the two sets of emotions don’t fight each other. Instead, they make each other stronger – the Glory Days only more glorious because we know they are fleeting.
 Jonathan Freedland, read more.
 
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