Bruce Springsteen

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The Fonz finally met the Boss, and many others at the LA Forum, going by his twitter account pictures.










Last gig Bruce did at the LA Forum (17k), was in 1978, which was the biggest arena in LA until the Staples Center (20k) opened in 1999 in downtown LA and LA Lakers and LA Kings (NHL) moved there from the Forum.

Bruce from 1980 onward, played at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena (16k) which used to be the home of the LA Clippers before they also moved to the Staples Center. This arena is closer to downtown LA than the Forum is at Inglewood. Its built next to the LA Memorial Coliseum, and I'm pretty sure that like the Coliseum, it was part of University of Southern California's facilities. It was demolished about 8 years ago.

Steve Balmer ex CEO/COO of Microsoft and owner of LA Clippers bought the Forum in 2020 for $400m USD from Madison Square Gardens Company as a way to settle a legal dispute, as MSGC were doing everything they could to stop the new arena as he was building a new 20k home for the Clippers near the newish SoFi Stadium but it is also a couple of miles from the Forum.

As a result more concerts are being held at the Forum each year, than in the previous 20 years when big artists booked the Staples Center first. The new Intuit Dome will be used for basketball in the 2028 LA Olympics and the Forum for the gymnastics.


 
Dixie Flatline said:
I was never really a fan of INXS, but Don't Change is a great song and Bruce did a really excellent cover of it back when he toured Australia in 2014.

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Yeah this was great.

Was virtually front row for this.

Then they raced through BTR quicker than ever before lol
 
This review of Bruce's first show at the Forum, confirms the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena became Bruce's LA venue from 1980, and was indeed knocked down 8 years ago, and that The Forum is a great indoor arena. Good on Steve Balmer for keeping it despite building his new one for the LA Clippers a couple of miles and away and will be ready for the 2024-25 NBA season.

And the long review was pretty positive.

variety.com

Bruce Springsteen’s 3-Hour-20-Minute Show at L.A.’s Forum Resets the Bar for Epic Bossiness: Concert Review

Bruce Springsteen's opening night at the Forum, which ran 200 minutes, was an emotionally dynamic roller coaster on the way to becoming a pure party.
variety.com variety.com

The last time Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played Los Angeles, back in 2016, it was to formally close down the venerable Sports Arena — “The Dump That Jumps,” as he famously dubbed the about-to-be-demolished venue he’d played so often. His song “Wrecking Ball” had a special resonance, then, in association with that dive that it can’t now: Springsteen’s current home in L.A., the Kia (nee: Fabulous) Forum, which he goes back to the ‘70s with, does jump, but no one’s going to go all Bette Davis and utter “What a dump!” about it in its refurbished state. Occasionally, there’s an arena that was meant to live forever, against all odds, and the Forum — where Springsteen played Thursday and will again on Sunday night — is a girded, gilded survivor.

But “Wrecking Ball” remains a key moment in his set, not for how sentimental it makes us feel about basketball barns, but for how it makes us feel about us, its true intended subject. Like a lot of the standby songs and commentaries on his 2023 tour and now (following a sick-day pause) the ‘24 outing, this particular standout has to do with his most recurring theme of recent years, live and on record: the thin veil between life and death. In Springsteen’s advanced view of mortality, we’re all dumps-that-jump, in a manner of thinking. And he’s come back from enforced hiatus to throw us the best party, or wake, we could possibly have.

Springsteen hasn’t spoken so much publicly about the condition that took him off the road for six months, and which caused these particular L.A. dates to be postponed for four. But something about his first Forum show Thursday caused him to get a little bit chattier about the malady.

“We’re sorry we missed you last time,” he said during a spoken interlude in the middle of an epic version of “Tenth Avenue Freezeout,” being performed as the show’s penultimate number after the setlist had already passed the three-hour point. “I hope we didn’t put you out too much. But, man,” he elaborated, “I had the worst mother******* bellyache you could ever imagine.”

“When I sang, my belly ached,” he said.

“When I did anything, my belly ached,” he continued.

“But it’s not achin’ now.” With that assurance to the audience, he grinned and rubbed his hands together, in the universal gesture for enthusiasm, or avarice — a lemme-at-it motion that felt hilarious, in approaching the midnight hour, or just approaching this point in his career.

Bruce Springsteen has fire in the belly. Lucky for him and everyone else, it’s back to being a fire that does not consume.


At a length of three hours and 20 minutes, Springsteen’s opening Forum show pretty much set the bar for not gentle into that good Thursday night. Its 200-minute running time was 40 minutes longer than most other sets of his lately, all of which already test and transcend what a guy in his early 70s who recently recovered from illness ought to be pulling off. It’s reductive, though, to focus too much on the running time, which makes it feel like an endurance test or marathon. Yes, every minute added onto a show beyond the tour mean confers some kind of badge of pride on attendees, and it’s great fun to start doing the numbers as a show begins to expand… but the miracle is not just that he endures.

The miracle is that he bobs and weaves with a dynamic setlist that needs that much expansiveness to sufficiently cover multiple moments of sorrow or grief and “Twist and Shout” (should you be so lucky to get that bonus track as a celebration of life, as Thursday’s crowd did).

As fans have already noted during these first few weeks of the 2024 touring resumption, the setlists tend to be only about 75% set in stone. That’s to say, they’re much looser than when the E Street Band hit the road again in 2023, closer to how they used to be in legendary days of yore. For anyone who likes to go to more than one show on a tour, or just for anybody who enjoys knowing they’re in the presence of some free-spiritedness, this flexibility is a godsend.

Given that the surprises each night are added onto the surety of some of the most powerful song sequences he’s ever constructed for a tour, a 2024 Bruce Springsteen show is really something that gives “overstuffed” a good name.

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The biggest surprise of the night: the return of Patti Scialfa, who performed on a few 2023 shows and then disappeared from public view. (“Where’s Patti?” isn’t quite up there with “Where’s Shelly?,” but it still remained a question.) Now we knew, without the FBI being called in: His bride is just living her post-E-Street life, happy to show up for a cameo instead of being tied to a recurring gig. “My baby’s back!,” Springsteen exclaimed, kicking off the first of two numbers the couple performed as a team. The recently rare “Tougher Than the Rest” featured Scialfa leaning in close on their single mic for harmony, followed by “Fire.” That number, Springsteen said, hadn’t been played “in a long time. We did do it on Broadway,” he clarified, but “Patti’s never done it.” By which he possibly meant never performed it as a full-on duet; his wife unexpectedly got the first verse of this ‘70s perennial all to herself. (Patti as a Pointer Sister, to name the group that really made the song famous? Live long enough, and all sorts of things can happen.)

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Talking of Patti, I read the following on a music forum a few weeks ago and dug around to find an original quote. From a 2019 article.

For maybe 30 years I have thought that the words and stories Don Walker wrote, were very similar to many of Bruce's songs. I can see why now, after Jimmy's comment below.


In The Weekend Australian Magazine today, I write about singer-songwriter Jimmy Barnes, whose forthcoming album My Criminal Record was influenced by his recent experience of telling his troubled life story in two best-selling books. While speaking with Barnes when reporting this story, talk turned to Bruce Springsteen, the American musician with whose later career he shares a few parallels. They sang The Boss’s 1987 track Tougher Than The Rest together on stage at Hanging Rock in 2013, and Barnes’s cover of that song closes the new album.

“I’m a huge fan of Bruce’s, and I have been since 1973, when Don Walker forced me to listen to Greetings from Asbury Park — and he was right, I loved it,” Barnes told me with a laugh. “He’s just a down-to-earth bloke. I went and saw his show in Broadway last year, just after I’d finished my tour, and it was really beautiful. To see someone like Springsteen sit and tell a story then play a song with an acoustic guitar, it just showed the power of a great song. But three quarters of the way through the show, he did Tougher Than the Rest, and his wife Patti [Scialfa] walked out and sang it. It was just gorgeous; I had a bit of a tear in my eye.

“I went out the back later to say hello, and Bruce was obviously tired; he’s just done a big show, and done 300 shows in a row or something like that. He was very polite and nice, but I’d never met Patti before. And I went up and said, ‘Patti, I’m Jimmy Barnes’. She goes, ‘I know who you are — you sing Flame Trees. That’s one of my two favourite songs of all time.’ And I thought, ‘That’s a big statement coming from Bruce Springsteen’s wife!’

“I just think he’s amazing,” added Barnes. “I read his book [2016’s Born To Run], and there’s that whole element of sadness and a darkness to him, which I think is probably why I connected with someone like that, and why I connected with his songs. It comes out in everything he writes; he’s the real deal. And the other thing was, getting on stage with him, not only did he work like a maniac and drove the band really hard, but he was as loud as f . . k, and he was f . . king aggressive. I loved it. It was not what I expected; it was really intense. His amps are all pointing up, so you don’t hear it [when you’re in the crowd], but you get up on stage next to him and it’s deafening. It’s fantastic. He’s a beautiful guitar player, too; I love his playing.”

Is there a chance Springsteen could possibly be as intense a performer as Barnesy, a man who devotes his entire being to every note of every song? “I think he is,” he replied with a laugh. “It’s a different intensity, but he’s as intense as anybody I’ve seen.”
 
Forgot to put this up a few weeks ago, but the ABC on Friday 5th April, then again on the next Tuesday or Wednesday, showed Bruce's Western Stars doco.

Its up on iView if you haven't watched it / want to watch it again. It doesn't say when they are taking it down, so might be up for a few months.


iview.abc.net.au

Western Stars

Bruce Springsteen's first studio album in five years, Western Stars marks a departure for the legendary singer/songwriter while still drawing on his roots.
iview.abc.net.au iview.abc.net.au
 
RussellEbertHandball said:
Forgot to put this up a few weeks ago, but the ABC on Friday 5th April, then again on the next Tuesday or Wednesday, showed Bruce's Western Stars doco.

Its up on iView if you haven't watched it / want to watch it again. It doesn't say when they are taking it down, so might be up for a few months.


iview.abc.net.au

Western Stars

Bruce Springsteen's first studio album in five years, Western Stars marks a departure for the legendary singer/songwriter while still drawing on his roots.
iview.abc.net.au iview.abc.net.au
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As much as i listened to this up and down the Hume I just couldn’t get into it; same as the R&B covers from a couple of years back

But Letter to You, wore the cassette out. Just loved it to death and that documentary was superb; I felt a tinge of sadness as that camera glided over that snowy landscape in that final scene
 
Gasometer said:
As much as i listened to this up and down the Hume I just couldn’t get into it; same as the R&B covers from a couple of years back

But Letter to You, wore the cassette out. Just loved it to death and that documentary was superb; I felt a tinge of sadness as that camera glided over that snowy landscape in that final scene
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Yeah I couldnt get into it, but I enjoyed the doco, probably because of some of the scenary and watching the orchestra playing.
 
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