· If you’ve by some chance never heard it, or haven’t listened to it all the way through in years, Darkness On The Edge Of Town is an absolute motherfucker of an album. Sure, Born To Run and Born In The U.S.A. have more name recognition — fair enough, they’re far more populist works — but it’s Darkness that really, really addresses the Philadelphian/human condition that hedges on risk and redemption and long epochs of struggle. I mean, they all do, sure, but Darkness doesn’t really have the Hollywood endings the other ones do. If, say, Born To Run and Born In The U.S.A. are Christianity, Darkness On The Edge Of Town is Judaism. We refuse to say more about this unless we all have the aid of a few drinks.
· But in any case, Bruce and the band delivered this whole album like they just cut it last week. It was sick. Sweeney couldn’t stop weeping at the beauty of it all for like the whole first three or four songs, so much so that the woman next to him in the press box asked, “Are you having a moment?” He was.
· Fun fact: When our esteemed editor and managing director first got together, they both participated in this art project by Julia Factorial in which she restaged the Darkness back cover shoot with a bunch of her friends. Julia, can we get some copies of these?
· They started “Rosalita” with the fanfare from Rocky. Fitting.
· More scenes from the press box: John DeBella and Pierre Robert sat next to each other and it was seriously the cutest thing ever. In the press box lobby, someone had covered the wall with old press clippings about Springsteen shows at the Spectrum throughout the years. You know, we don’t say this often, but it is a proud and noble thing sometimes to be part of the tradition of people who get paid to go see things and write about them. Howard Eskin was totally rocking out there, too. Sometimes we wish we could sit down with Howard and cut through all the bullshit and figure out what makes this guy tick. He seems to be one of the most complicated human beings alive.
· During one of the encores, “Dancing In The Dark” (sounding more like the band Suicide than ever, btw), Bruce pulled a girl out from the crowd to dance with him, just like in the video. When the dance was over, Bruce picked her up in his arms and handed her, gingerly like so much precious cargo, to the crowd, who pulled her back to Earth in the softest, most gentle way such a thing can be done. It was one of the nicest things we’ve ever seen a person do.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 12:32 pm.