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Springsteen & the E Street Band: Milan, July 3, 2025

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Over the years, an expectation has occasionally been built in the Bruce fan community that a tour finale will be a spectacle.  There is certainly precedent for that: In 2000, the Reunion Tour ended with a blowout at Madison Square Garden, including rarities and even a world debut. In 2009, the Working on a Dream tour ended in Buffalo with a once-ever performance of the entire Greetings from Asbury Park  album, and also other rarely and never-played songs. So for this final Milano show in the extreme heat, this final rescheduled show from 2024 and the last go-round for this 20-day tour's E Street Band, it could hardly be a surprise that fans arriving at San Siro thought maybe there'd be a bit of that once-in-a-lifetime experience at a building that has produced so many prior memories. This was not that  show. If you saw Monday's show, you pretty much saw this one. This isn't a bad  thing: Bruce was in great spirits, playing with audience members again and egging on t...
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Springsteen & the E Street Band: Milan, June 30, 2025

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Sab Siro isn't like other locations where I've seen Brue Springsteen play. Here, the attitude is, "he's one of ours. " People came from around town, from around Italy, from around Europe, and from the United States as well, to take it in. Walking around Milan Monday afternoon, I spotted Springsteen shirts of all sorts. Then Bruce came on and smashed any expectations. There are a few differences in setup between San Siro and the typical US experience: For one thing, there's an extensive midway outside the stadium with food sellers, mostly selling variations of the same wretched sandwiches as if to prove that yes, you can  get bad food in Italy. Also, smoking -- at least tobacco smoking -- was permitted inside the stadium. The crowd mostly got to their seats early, and by 15 minutes to showtime, a loud singalong to the familiar "Badlands" theme was going through the stadium. The E Street Band took the stage 5 minutes before the scheduled start time o...
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Springsteen: Tracks II

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The most exciting day for any day is the day when the next album leaks. This is a tradition that goes back more than 30 years, and today -- 6 days before the official release of Bruce's "Tracks II" -- is the day. Sure, it's mp3 files this time, and I'll be purchasing the full thing, but these are still the days. In this case, the release is a monster --  seven full albums of material, comprising 83 tracks that were originally recorded between 1983 and 2018. Most of the 83 tracks have never been released before in any form, and only 2 ("County Fair" and "I'll Stand By You Always") have been previously released in the form they appear on here. "Tracks II" is divided in to 7 distinct albums. "LA Garage Sessions '83," "Streets of Philadelphia Sessions," "Faithless," "Somewhere North of Nashville," "Inyo," "Twilight Hours," and "Perfect World."  Much of the mater...
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The Graduates

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Aaron and Ezra, May 4, 2025, outside Crisler Center, Ann Arbor The moment it hit me was at the start of Aaron's Nursing School graduation at Johns Hopkins . The ceremony started promptly at 9am at the school's lacrosse field, with Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance" being piped over the loudspeakers. The last graduation. After more than a quarter century of pre-schools, elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges and, finally, this post-graduate degree, this would be -- to the best of my knowledge -- the last one. Earlier this month, Ezra went through the graduation ceremony at The University of Michigan. While the two suites of ceremonies were vastly different, they both provided closure. One child struggled mightily during the COVID-19 pandemic and arguably because  of the pandemic, ultimately withdrawing entirely from two full semesters and nearly a third semester before finding a path back to completion of two majors. The other thrived in the isolat...
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Completely Unknown, and Somewhat Unknowable

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I prepped for this movie. The catalyst, for me, was watching Martin Scorsese's dry-as-bones film "Beatles '64,"  that so diced-and-spliced things up, mashing together the things I cared about with things that seemed irrelevant to me (I suppose it's interesting in the abstract to see Leonard Bernstein dissect the time signature variations within the 1966 song "She Said She Said," but, really? ), that I found myself going back to the Maysles brothers' film "The First US Visit"  just to see again how exciting and fresh the Beatles were to Americans  in 1964. So I got what I could find to prepare for this film: D.A. Pennebaker's  groundbreaking film about Bob Dylan's 1965 UK Tour, "Don't Look Back,"  that revealed Dylan in metamorphosis yet leaving events to speak for themselves. Then, Scorsese's "No Direction Home,"  a thrilling 200 minute document covering Dylan up through the end of his 1966 UK tour, a...
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Stevie Wonder in Detroit: October 22, 2024

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Stevie Wonder at Little Caesar's Arena, Detroit. October 22, 2024 I've seen Stevie Wonder several times over the past 40 years, going back to a stadium show in Malmö, Sweden, that I remember mostly for getting there in the first place, and then for him doing a hilarious - and spot-on -- Jackson 5 medley. So it seemed almost a surprise to realize it's been almost a decade since I've seen him headline a show . Not that there have been many opportunities; he's basically been off the road since then. This tour was only announced 5 weeks ago, and covers just 10 dates, mostly in election battleground states. But don't accuse Stevie of lacking preparation! Stevie came in with a full band and horn section, a 20+ person orchestra, and was supported on some songs by a local choir. By the time of the finale, "Another Star," there were more than 50 people on the stage -- and somehow it all worked. There was a clear political tone to parts of the show. Before the...
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Springsteen & the E Street Band: Asbury Park, September 15, 2024

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Imagine the scene: Barefoot on the beach, a perfect cool breeze coming in off the water, and there in front of tens of thousands of celebrants, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. That was last night, for a unique performance to conclude the 2024 Sea Hear Now Music Festival . The festival was spearheaded by rock photographer Danny Clinch  in 2018; this was the first performance of the E Street Band. In order to be able to see Bruce and the band without the aid of giant video monitors, there were two basic options: either procure very limited and pricey "VIP" and "Platinum" tickets, or arrive many hours early to the 7th Avenue Beach where the Surf Stage was located. I arrived at the Surf Stage around 1:15pm; many had lined up before sunrise and no doubt would have done so earlier had it been permitted by event staff. Getting to the stage early also meant catching three preliminary acts: Joy Oladokun , Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Kool & the Gang , an...
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