I. Beginnings
“He’s just going to sit on my lap,” my mom said, pointing down at seven-year-old me. It was early evening in Chicago, September 30, 1999—a Thursday—as my parents and I approached a turnstile at the entrance to the United Center, home of the Chicago Bulls, and, on this night, host to Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band on the Reunion Tour.
The woman who’d sold us our tickets only had two to sell. This did not deter my mom; she bought both. And the usher—a woman whose only job was to make sure that everyone passing through the turnstile had permission to do so—waved us through.
There’s no accounting for such moments; you either accept the gift, or you don’t.
The show was and remains a blur. It’s only thanks to an internet search that I can tell you that they opened with “Take ’Em as They Come,” a song that would later become a favorite of mine.
Later that year, at my urging, my mom and I sat on the couch and watched the premiere of Live in New York City, an HBO concert film from that same tour.
That’s when my study of Bruce really began. In 1999, Bruce inaugurated a new era of his work with the E Street Band, much removed from the muscles and bandanas of the Born in the U.S.A tour; that particular hype had passed, and so, too, had the reactionary opposition to it. I was free to witness.
I’ve never looked back. Twenty-five years and nearly fifty shows later, I am as devoted as I’ve ever been. I know now that Bruce is an artist to accompany you through your life.
The Reunion Tour told a story—a story about friendship, reconciliation, vocation, the ties that bind. It had been ten years since Bruce had formally broken up the E Street Band and pursued other projects, some solo, and some with another band. The previous year, Bruce had been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist. The Reunion Tour, then, was about a return to the essentials; it was about a return to the people and to the sound that had first given Bruce Springsteen the keys to the world.
I didn’t have any of this context then, but context didn’t matter: I was mesmerized. I watched his every move—Bruce sharing a mic with guitarist Stevie Van Zandt, Bruce kissing an adoring fan during “Out in the Street.” His love for his bandmates was effusive, overflowing, over-the-top; he loved them unabashedly, without any modesty or reservation.
I see now that I was learning something that night that I’ve had to keep on learning, over and over, ever since.
During the show’s emotional centerpiece—a sprawling, 17-minute version of “Tenth-Avenue Freeze-Out”—Bruce is a revivalist preacher, testifying to the power of music and the transformative possibilities of friendship. “Tenth-Avenue Freeze-Out” is a song off of Born to Run, Bruce’s third album and the one that, after the underwhelming sales of his first two, saved his career. It’s a tall tale, the legend of the band. It opens with our protagonist, Bad Scooter, in despair. Everywhere he turns, it’s another dead end. He’s alone; he can’t go home. But something happens. A change is made uptown, and someone named the “Big Man” joins the band. From then on, Scooter and the Big Man are in command. A new world is born.
In the film of the Reunion Tour performance, Bruce expands on this mythology in a mid-song sermon in which he remembers a time, long ago, when he was a young man “paralyzed by my own fears.” In the story, a gypsy woman calls him over and says, “Son, what you need is a band. You need some help!”
Thus begins his introductions of his beloved bandmates, giving them each their own nickname and assigned mythic status. Professor Roy Bittan on the piano. Little Steven Van Zandt on the guitar. Mighty Max Weinberg on the drums. Garry Tallent, “the Tennessee Terror,” on the bass. Also on guitar, “the godfather of the guitar,” Nils Lofgren. On the organ, the Minister of Mystery, Dan Federici. Patti Scialfa, now his wife, whom he dubs “the first lady of love on the guitar and vocals.”
Only one remains: Clarence Clemons, the Big Man himself, the E Street Band’s towering saxophonist and Bruce’s onstage foil. The iconic cover of the Born to Run album, in which Springsteen, a scrawny white kid in a leather jacket, leans against the Big Man, the six-foot-five Black man, looking every bit the football player he had once been, had helped turn their relationship into a symbol of Bruce’s relationship to the band writ large.
“Last but not least,” Bruce says, and the crowd understands. “Do I have to say his name?” he asks, and the crowd lets him know. “Say who?” he asks, and the crowd, again, lets him know. Bruce drops to his knees at Clarence’s feet, singing, “When the change was made uptown, and the Big Man joined the band”—the moment of transformation achieved as Clarence solos. Bruce then rises to his feet, and he and the Big Man join hands, and together, these two grown men dance.
There’s something about the joy with which Bruce introduces Clarence and the other members of the band—it’s shot through with something like desperation, a sense of his own unworthiness. It’s like he cannot fucking believe he gets to be on stage with these people.
On the couch, just a kid, I knew this was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I could almost feel what it might be like to love people this much, to love them over the long haul, and to live long enough to realize that you’re nothing without them.
II. The Price You Pay
The first death to befall the E Street Band was Danny Federici’s. The Minister of Mystery was mortal. It happened in 2008, in the middle of the Magic Tour. Danny had missed much of the tour while he underwent treatment for melanoma. I was seventeen.
Bruce and Danny went way back, back to the beginning. Danny was a member of two of Bruce’s early bands—had, in fact, invited Bruce, in the late ’60s, to be the singer in his band. He went on to play organ in Steel Mill, another early Springsteen band, and, finally, as a member of the E Street Band. Danny’s organ and accordion were the sound of the Asbury Park boardwalk.
Danny returned from his hiatus and took to the stage with the band for the final time on March 20, 2008, just weeks before his death. Danny chose a song he wanted to play: “Sandy,” a song from Bruce’s second album, about leaving the boardwalk behind. In his eulogy at Danny’s funeral, Bruce said, “He wanted to play once more the song that is of course about the end of something wonderful and the beginning of something unknown and new.”
It sounds strange, but the loss felt personal. The week of Danny’s funeral, I ran the 800 meters in my high school track meet. My mom wore her E Street Band t-shirt and called out “For Danny!” as I rounded the corner.
My dad hadn’t yet been diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, the terminal lung disease to which he would eventually succumb. He may have already been sick, though. By the end of that year, my parents would be making trips to Boston, meeting with specialists, trying to figure out why his breathing had become so labored. The diagnosis came in January 2009, and he was dead within fifteen months.
Dad drove me to school every morning, dutifully making the half-hour trip. I controlled the music, and I tried to design playlists that would keep him happy. When I played a song he hated, he wasn’t shy about making his displeasure known. Hearing Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” he said, “You actually like this shit?” That’s a wound I still live with.
Bruce was another story. While I can’t remember my dad ever criticizing a Bruce song, he had clear favorites, the ones he wanted to hear on almost every ride. He loved “The Rising,” for example. He loved everything on The Seeger Sessions album, and he loved Bruce’s cover of “Jersey Girl,” from the 1985 live album. One song stands above them all: “The Price You Pay,” off The River album, released in 1980.
“The Price You Pay” is not a particularly well-known Springsteen song, and it’s one, until recently, he almost never played live. The first time my dad heard it, he said, “I really wish I could write lyrics like that.” My dad was not a writer—not of lyrics nor of anything else—but that’s what he said. And it’s what he continued to say, every time we listened to the song. “I really wish I could write lyrics like that.”
I’ve thought a lot about those lyrics over the years, and why they so resonated with my dad. The specter of Vietnam hangs over the song, though it’s never mentioned outright. It’s a song about the choices we make and learning to live with them. “You learn to sleep at night with the price you pay.” But how? The characters in “The Price You Pay,” like the characters in so many Bruce songs, simply find a way to keep going—even when everything’s gone wrong, even when there’s seemingly no light to be found. “You’ve got to stand and fight for the price you pay.”
These characters keep going even though they know, and learn to accept, that they might not make it. The song’s fourth verse recounts the Exodus story:
Do you remember the story of the promised land?
How he crossed the desert sands
And could not enter the chosen land
On the banks of the river, he stayed
To face the price you pay.
Even as his condition worsened, even as he came increasingly to rely on oxygen tanks just to breathe, even as things got worse and everyone knew it, he kept driving me to school. And the song he kept asking for was “The Price You Pay.” In a song about the injuring world—and retaining our dignity as we pass through it—my dad had found lyrics that he’d wished he’d written, a language that spoke to his own heart. He knew that he was about to die, and he knew that his life, like all lives, would remain, in some fundamental way, unfinished.
He wasn’t a perfect man. He could be reckless. He could be irresponsible. His temper was legendary. This is a part of a legacy with which he grappled, even until the end. To me, he will always remain a great man, a great father—beautiful and broken, strong and vulnerable, a human being in full.
We honor the dead in ways we have available to us. The E Street Band halted the tour for a few weeks after Danny’s death. When they finally returned to the stage, they opened with “Backstreets,” a song about friendship and its loss; as Bruce wailed the song’s conclusion, a light shone on Danny’s organ. Bruce understood that the only way to grieve Danny, and to find him again, was to return to the place he loved.
When my dad died, I had no such outlet, save for Bruce’s music itself. But soon I returned to a place that was sacred to my dad—the basketball court—and played for hours, trying to feel close to him again. And I reached for words, scrawled in notebooks at the time, hoping to write something worthy of him, and of what he wished he had written himself.
III. Losing the Rain
My mom likes to tell the story about the early hours of May 6, 2010, when we emerged from the hospital into a hazy Boston morning in a world that no longer included my dad. As we walked to the car, I encouraged her to look on the bright side. “At least it wasn’t Bruce,” I said.
I actually don’t like when she tells this story, because people typically don’t know how to react. It makes me sound nuts. It was a joke, but there is truth in jest, and the truth was that I knew that an eventual Springsteen tour would play some part in repairing what was now so broken.
A little over a year later, that prospect suddenly seemed less certain. Clarence Clemons suffered a massive stroke on June 12, 2011, and died six days later. I was at an Eddie Vedder acoustic show when the news broke; Vedder had just dedicated a song to Clarence’s healing. I got home that night and popped in my DVD of Live in New York City, just to see that moment again, the one we’d never see again. Seeing Bruce and Clarence—Scooter and the Big Man—join hands and dance still spoke to me in a deep way. But now it made me weep.
The question for the band was, as ever, how to go on. Rock and roll is music for the young, built on a promise of immortality.
“We swore we’d live forever,” Bruce sings on “Backstreets.”
“No retreat, baby, no surrender,” he affirms on “No Surrender.”
But how to keep going while we still live in the shadow of death?
For Bruce and the band, the answer was to get back on the stage. And it was to somehow acknowledge the immensity of their loss—and, by extension, the rest of ours.
“Losing Clarence,” Bruce said, “was like losing the rain.”
How do you replace the rain? You don’t; you can’t. So Bruce didn’t replace Clarence with a new saxophone player. Instead, in preparation for the next tour, he enlisted a full horn section, and tasked Clarence’s nephew, Jake Clemons, with playing the solos. He also brought back the E Street Choir, a group of beloved backup singers.
The Wrecking Ball Tour opened at the Apollo Theater, and the show streamed live on Sirius XM radio. I sat alone in my college dorm room and listened. They came out on fire, and during the fifth song of the night, a gospel-tinged “My City of Ruins,” Bruce addressed what was on everybody’s minds.
“Roll call!” he declared, and proceeded to introduce, one by one, every band member “in the house tonight.” When he had finished his introductions, he paused, and said, “Are we missing anybody?” He said it a second time: “Are we missing anybody?” And then, a third time, with emphasis: “Are we missing anybody?” This is when I broke, and from the sounds of the crowd coming through my speakers—cheers, applause, a release of so much feeling—I could tell I wasn’t alone.
“That’s right,” he said, “we’re missing a few. But the only thing I can guarantee tonight is that if you’re here, and we’re here, then they’re here.”
He closed the show by going back to the beginning, back to the tall tale, the legend of “Tenth-Avenue Freeze-Out.” When he got to the part about Big Man joining the band, the music simply stopped. The band fell silent for more than a minute, as the crowd’s cheers became something more than cheers, as though Clarence and Danny, and everyone we had all lost, were present to us—because we loved them. And we were taking a moment to tell them, without modesty or reservation.
There in my room, I stood and applauded.
A few weeks later, my mom and I went to a show in Boston and witnessed this performance of communal grief and renewal firsthand. Bruce said it again: “If you’re here, and we’re here, then they’re here.”
And at that moment, my mom nudged me with her elbow, and gestured to the seat beside her, which she had just noticed, in this sold-out arena, five songs into the show, was empty.
IV. Nobody Wins Unless Everybody Wins
The years rolled on. More shows, more changes, more losses. My maternal grandmother, a woman who helped raise me, died three months after that Boston show. On our last drive home from the hospital—a drive in which I somehow got lost, adding thirty minutes to our commute, as Nan laughed—we listened to “Living Proof,” a Springsteen song about the birth of his first child.
“Looking for a little bit of God’s mercy,” he sings, “I found living proof.” Driving my Nan home, lost and struggling though we were, I felt I had glimpsed some of that mercy myself.
The E Street Band’s 2016 run, culminating in a stretch of shows that were the longest of Bruce’s career, was something of a miracle. I attended the three-night stand in Jersey, leaving each show with a feeling of exhilaration I didn’t know was possible this side of eternity.
The band took a break, and Bruce opened Springsteen on Broadway, an acoustic show that found him playing in New York City five nights a week. I went twice. In that show, he mixes song performances with spoken monologues, largely drawn from his memoir. He concludes the show as he concludes the book—with a story of returning to his hometown, looking for the tree he had climbed as a child. On this night, he finds that the tree has been chopped down. He sits on the ground, gathering himself. But soon he starts to feel a kind of consolation, a kind of grace. He feels his tree’s presence, just as he feels the spirits of departed friends, bandmates, and family. He writes:
My great tree’s life by county dictum or blade could not be ended or erased. Its history, its magic, was too old and too strong. Like my father, my grandmothers, my aunt Virginia, my two grandfathers, my father-in-law Joe, my aunt Dora and aunt Eda, Ray and Walter Cichon, Bart Haynes, Terry, Danny, Clarence and Tony, my own family gone from these houses now filled by strangers—we remain. We remain in the air, the empty space, in the dusty roots and deep earth, in the echo and stories, the songs of the time and place we have inhabited. My clan, my blood, my place, my people.
Then, sitting there in the place where his beloved tree once stood, feeling the presence of his loved ones, he prays the Lord’s Prayer. On the line, “Deliver us from evil,” he pauses, then adds, “all of us, forever and ever.”
This has been Bruce’s dominant preoccupation in recent years—what we lose, and what remains. He seems to have arrived at a notion of universal salvation, the ultimate restoration of all things. We remain. All of us.
I think of his oft-stated conviction: “Remember, in the end, nobody wins unless everybody wins.”
There’s no me without you. There’s no you without all of us.
And as we await that final day when every tear is wiped away and we see the truth face to face, we allow the gifts we’ve been given to nourish our faith. These are the gifts Bruce is always gesturing toward, the real sources of meaning in our lives. Our families. Our friends. Our communities. Our hometowns. Our places of worship. The songs we sing. The people we build our lives alongside, and the people we lose. People with all their struggles and frailties, who nevertheless shine like the sun.
Who can risk seeing life this way? To see the people among us with the reverence they’re due? To treat even the fragile works of our hands as deeply meaningful?
I know I fall short. My God, I fall short. Even now, remembering the days when my family was complete, I wonder if I appreciated them enough. Did my dad know how much I loved him? I think so. I hope so. I’m saying it now, knowing that this, too, is part of what this music has given me—a chance to see people in their full grandeur, and to risk loving them, even when it’s hard, even if it breaks me.
V. Last Man Standing
There was a time, starting that night in Chicago, when I only ever went to Bruce shows with my mom. Sometimes my dad would tag along, but there wasn’t any doubt about it—this was my and my mom’s thing.
As I got older, I started going with friends. Why wouldn’t I? My mom would usually be somewhere in the arena, too, and we would compare notes afterward. This arrangement seemed to suit us just fine. Or it suited me just fine, anyway.
In 2023, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band embarked on their first tour through the United States in seven years. They had released an album, Letter to You, in the fall of 2020, in the depths of the pandemic. Touring was impossible. I started to wonder whether I had seen my last E Street show. But as the world opened up, Bruce let us know of his intention to get back out there. No retreat, no surrender.
I flew to Orlando to see the third show of the tour with a childhood friend, and then I drove to Boston to see a show with my cousin and some friends from college. These shows were electric, and I left each one stunned that the band still sounded this good, that Bruce remained indefatigable into his seventies. But I also felt the tragic inevitability that awaits the band, that awaits Bruce, that awaits us all: This will someday end.
This idea was built into the way Bruce structured the show. He opened with songs of youthful defiance—“No Surrender,” “Prove It All Night”—that called to mind Dylan Thomas’s admonition to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Other songs circled that theme, including “Wrecking Ball,” which tells death, in effect, to bring it on.
Around the show’s midway point, though, in a one-two punch of emotional resonance, Bruce made the tour’s themes explicit. Alone on the stage, he strapped on an acoustic guitar and introduced a new song called “Last Man Standing,” explaining that the song draws its inspiration from the 2018 death of his friend, George Theiss. George had been a member of Bruce’s first band, The Castiles, and with his passing, Bruce had become the last surviving member of that band. “Backstreets” followed, with a spoken-word interlude, in which Bruce, addressing George, vowed to carry him “right here,” placing his hand over his heart and closing his eyes. “Until the end.”
My mom was at the Boston show, too. Days later, she sent me a text. “We have to see one,” it read.
She paid more than she should have to get us tickets to the April 1, 2023 show at Madison Square Garden. Our seats were behind the stage, but close. Now sixty-three, my mom looked like a true Bruce fan that night, of ’80s vintage, rocking a jean jacket and a ball cap.
By this point in the tour, it was understood that the set list wouldn’t be changing much—Bruce had a story to tell, and he was sticking to it. I felt I knew what to expect.
What I didn’t expect was that the sight of him taking the stage in New York City would bring tears to my eyes, as I listened to what I’m certain is the loudest ovation I’ve ever heard in my life. Is it possible that the arena was shaking? It certainly seemed to be. I don’t know. What I do know is that the cheers, before Bruce counted the band in, achieved a sort of yearning, beseeching quality.
Don’t let this end, Bruce. We still need you, man.
During “Last Man Standing,” I looked over at my mom, whose collar was popped and whose hands were in her pockets. She had tears streaming down her cheeks. Later, she explained that she was thinking about Dad and Nan, and how, of the home she had helped create for me, she was the last one left. The last woman standing.
Aging or not, there she was, the one who wouldn’t be deterred, the one who willed our way into that first show and changed the course of my life. The one who blasted The River on the CD player in our living room and danced with our dog. Always up to mischief, ever a pain in my ass, she who won’t take “no” for an answer: the mighty Susan Boyle-Glidden. I felt how much I would miss her. How much I would miss this.
But that’s how love is; that’s the price you pay.
“When you’re fifteen,” Bruce had said, introducing the song, “everything is tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and hello, and hello. And later on, there’s so many more goodbyes.”
Behind us I heard a man shout, “Not yet!”
VI. Born to Run
E Street Band shows typically end with a party. The lights come up, the hits come out. It’s an hour-plus of nonstop, exhilarating, exhausting joy. Bruce empties himself during these encores. He goes and goes and keeps going, eventually asking us, his audience, if we’ve had enough. And of course we say no, in fact, we haven’t had enough.
“Do you want to go home?” he asks. He hears us out, weighs the evidence. Then he says, “Nobody wants to fucking go home!”
The party starts with “Born to Run.” Once the first note sounds, the house lights are turned up all the way. The message is clear: For the rest of the night, we’re all in this together.
“Born to Run” was the song Bruce wrote when he wanted to write the last song anybody would ever need to hear, a rock and roll anthem for the apocalypse. It’s a song of youthful romanticism: our singer wants to grab his girl, get in his car, and run. He has questions – “I wanna know if love is wild/Wanna know if love is real”—and he’s willing to run until he finds his answers.
But things changed. Years after the song’s release, Bruce remarked upon how the song “seemed able to open up and sort of let the time in.” A song that had once been about the pursuit of freedom had become a song about the search for something more enduring. “I realized that, in the end, individual freedom, when it’s not connected to some sort of community or friends or the world outside, ends up feeling pretty meaningless. So, I guess that guy and that girl, they were out there looking for a connection. And I guess that’s what I’m doing here tonight. So this is a song about two people trying to find their way home.”
When those lights come up, what I see is a bunch of people—thousands of us, many of whom have been accompanied by Bruce’s music for quite some time—on their way home. The show gestures toward that transcendent horizon. The song cries out for it:
Someday, girl, I don’t know when
We’re gonna get to that place
Where we really wanna go
We’ll walk in the sun
But ’til then, tramps like us
Baby, we were born to run
We’re not where we want to be just yet. But we’ll get there—someday. We’re walking each other home.
The lights are up, and I can see clearly, and I know I’m nothing without you.
I number you in this song. My friends, my family, my fellow travelers. The band is in flight, and Bruce is taking in the world he’s helped create. All the moments converge. I see one friend weeping during his first show, and I see another with his eyes closed and hands aloft, as if in a trance. I hear friends and strangers belting out every word. A friend leans over to tell me about a favorite song, while another shimmies to my right. I feel my friend’s arm around my shoulder as he notices that this show, yet again, has rendered me a speechless, blubbering mess.
I’m driving my Nan home, and she hears Bruce through the speakers, and she says, “Isn’t he amazing?”
My mom is dancing through the living room while the dog follows her lead.
My dad’s got his hands on the wheel. He wishes he could write. He wants to jot down some lyrics to explain how he feels about life. But he’s glad that Bruce has already done so. He’s at peace, and he’s on his way.