When Bruce Springsteen makes the show

“I love to play long and give of myself“, emphasizes Bruce Springsteen in Born to runhis autobiography.

To track down the “stage beast” that is Springsteen, Grégory Philipps offers to listen to many excerpts and live recordings, “in public, to try to understand how, over the past 50 years, the singer-songwriter has been able to to impose itself on the stages of the whole world”.

Boss concerts often last three or even three and a half hours. “His record: 4 hours and 1 minute at Met Life Stadium in New Jersey, on August 30, 2016, at the age of 66”, recalls Grégory Philipps. “So yes, I’m going to try to make you hear the crazy energy that the Boss and the E Street Band deploy on stage, thanks to the single extract of Tenth Avenue Freeze outwhich Springsteen performs at Madison Square Garden in New York, on June 29, 2001. 16’07 of rock and roll, of which we only make you listen to the end, the moment when the Boss presents his musicians, and in particular his late saxophonist Clarence Clemons…”

So where does this energy come from, this incredible ardor deployed on stage?

The sources of this incredible passion of the Boss, we must go back to the rock and roll of the 1950s. Springsteen was 7 years old and lived in New Jersey when for the first time he saw Elvis Presley sing on television.

This is our archive for the day, taken from “Springsteen on Broadway”. Bruce Springsteen passionately evokes his jubilation in front of Elvis and the revelation:

“I sat with my mother, my 7-year-old brain on fire, watching a cathode ray tube: and suddenly joy! The truth ! The one that makes you shake your hips, move your buttocks, play the guitar, the one that changes minds and hearts, that inspires souls and creates happiness. And makes you more free! A sense of freedom has invaded every American home. An ordinary Sunday evening. And damn, the world had just changed. In an instant ! The genius of rock and roll had just come out of his lamp. And he told us that if we had been born…eeeeeeee in the USA! My dear compatriot, this feeling, this freedom, this joy, you were entitled to it! So I studied my new hero! Like me, he had 2 arms, 2 legs, 2 eyes. Yes, it was an Apollo. And I was…..just pathetic (creepy)!”