Bruce

Shortly after arriving in Santiago it was announced that Bruce Springsteen would be playing a concert on September 12.  I immediately scored a pair of tickets as Erin had never seen him in concert.  He's sold over 120 million albums, placing him in the company of The Eagles, U2, Billy Joel, Barbara Streisand, and Garth Brooks.  Interestingly, I took Lauri (mi esposa) to see Springsteen in 1984 for the Born in the USA tour.  She was 18 at the time.  Erin (mi hija) is 21.  That my friend, will make you feel old.

The concert was at the Moviestar arena, which is in the O'Higgins Park just behind the Universidad de Chile campus that I teach at.  The arena is an unusual dome shaped building.

People talk about how time takes on a whole new dimension in Spain and Latin America.  They are absolutely right.  We arrived about 90 minutes before the concert was to start as we had to pick up tickets from Will Call and didn't know how long that would take.  It seemed like there was only a couple hundred people around.  We met a couple women from Canada - one is a Bruce groupie and flew down just for the concert.  They heard Erin and I speaking English so yelled out to us.

 This is inside the arena about 45 minutes before the show was scheduled to start - 9pm.  Notice I say scheduled.  The show was announced as a sellout, but I was skeptical.  We went outside to get a Bruce t-shirt and were amazed at the line.

After that it was back to the arena.  Did I mention that buildings are often not heated in Santiago?  Bruce hit the stage about 9:40pm sharp.  (un punto!)

There were people literally coming in as late as 11:30.  The thing is, Bruce plays a long time and people that came in 2 hours and 30 minutes after the scheduled start time still had 2 hours of show ahead of them.  He plays a long time.  I've read of places that turned off the power to get him to stop.  Yes, it was a full house. People in Chile for the most part don't speak a lot of English - if any.  Yet it was clear that they were familiar with his music - why else would north of 10,000 Chileans show up?

The Chilean flag (above) had the words "Thank you for coming" in the white part.  There is something about Bruce that is unique and far different than any other performer I've seen.  He will walk through the crowd singing and playing his guitar many times.  He'll pull people up  on stage to dance, play, and sing.  He had a ramp in the middle of the floor crowd probably a 100 feet the other side of the Chilean flag - so maybe 150 feet from the stage.  When he was walking through the crowd singing "Waitin' on a Sunny Day" a little girl of maybe 8 or 9 held up a sign that said "Can I sing Sunny Day with you?" - everyone knew this as he held her sign up so the cameras could shoot an image up on the big screens.  He grabbed her by the hand and pulled her up to the ramp and gave her the microphone.  She let loose with one of the most out of key renditions you could imagine, but when she didn't know any more words to the song Bruce whispered them in her ear so that she could keep singing.  People in the crowd bordering the stage would hold up signs with song names asking for them to be played.  Between songs he'd grab a sign, show it to his band, then prop it up on his microphone stand so everyone could see it - and play the song.  He did this probably a half dozen times. One woman held up a sign that had the words "will you dance with my mom?" above a picture of an ultrasound...yes, he also pulled her up on stage.  He even gave her a guitar to play with the band.

Another time he went out to the ramp and while signing simply fell back into the crowd.  They caught him and put him back on the ramp.  He pointed to the stage and then fell back into the crowed.  They passed him up the 150 feet or so over their heads and placed him on the stage.  All this time he was singing. Of course, Bruce is only 5'7" or so - not everyone could pull this off.  I'm afraid Clarence Clemons would have crashed to the floor (6'5" and 'solidly' built).  Clarence played the tenor sax for Bruce's E Street Band until he died from complications of a stroke in 2011.  The E Street Band has a few trumpets, a trombone, a tuba, violin, multiple guitars, bass, drums, kind of a bongo drum set, three backup singers, and Clarence's nephew on the sax - along with another sax player.

There were a few times where Bruce spoke to the crowd in Spanish and he performed a song in Spanish as well.  It is this attention to detail and ability to relate to people that makes him such a popular concert draw.  He has many great songs, but I personally like Bob Seger's catalog better.  A lot of the Springsteen songs have a familiar/similar rhythm to them, and many have a dark, political, or almost blues type lyric.  Bob and Bruce are good friends and both have been on stage as a guest performer at each other's shows (do some YouTube research if you want to see it).  Bob is 5'10" - so you can see Bruce never had a future in basketball as Bob looks comparatively large next to Bruce.  

Bruce saved a lot of the familiar songs to the encore - Dancing in the Dark, Born in the USA, Born to Run, and so forth.  Unfortunately, this is when the sound system began to get tired and many of them were muddied up with feedback through the speakers.  I think to compensate for this he played even more songs than normal.

I mentioned that Bruce plays a long time...at somewhere between 1 and 1:30am we could tell things were winding down, but since the subway shuts down at 11pm we thought it best to get a jump on the crowd and grab a taxi before they were gone.  We were successful.  A friend that was also at the concert and stayed to the end had to walk about a third the way home before he found a taxi.

Erin had heard a few Bruce songs prior to the concert, and I could tell was genuinely impressed with the overall performance and particularly the effort Bruce puts into his shows.  Like Seger, he lets his musicians shine when it is their time to shine and neither has let the success go to their heads.  They have also learned to live with the fame graciously and not like the infamous flame out celebrities we so often have to bear.