Tom Dunne: Páirc Uí Chaoimh was my favourite Bruce Springsteen gig
Bruce Springsteen at Páirc Uí Chaoimh in Cork in 2013. Picture: Miki Barlok
It’s one of the great truths of music that artists who are utterly inaccessible for interview in their main bands are acutely available when solo. Hence in recent years Frank Black (Pixies), Ronnie Wood (Stones) and Nils Lofgren (Bruce) were all, at one point, actually calling me.
“No Frank! No Ronnie!” I’d say, “I’m a busy man, promote your solo shows or your art exhibition elsewhere. These Thrills albums won’t play themselves!” I didn’t actually say any of that.
Thankfully I also didn’t commit the faux pas of feigning interest in their solo work before interrupting them to ask, “and how’s your real band?” It does happen, sadly, because often the solo stuff just isn’t that great. This can lead to some odd conversations; I once heard a quite famous guitarist pontificating at length on the Democratic/Republican divide in America.
It wasn’t riveting. It didn’t help in my continued quest to see band members as fantastic beasts concerned only with music and transcendental onstage genius. Not for them say a knowledge of bin night, or recycling, or voter fraud.
Nils Lofgren, thankfully, was everything I hoped for. Mind you, so too were Frank and Ronnie. It’s other people’s radio interviews I am disparaging here, not my own! I’m not mad.
Nils is a fascinating man. His 1975 debut is still a joy to behold, and his song ‘Keith Don’t Go’, was more 1970s than Watergate. In it, he urged Keith Richards not to attend trial in Toronto in case a guilty verdict there on a drugs charge might see him go to jail.
Nils’ interview was in advance of a rare solo show, and it was he who brought up his impending return to the ‘day job’ of touring with Bruce.
He explained that touring with Bruce is so physically demanding, so full-on, and runs for such long periods, that none of the band have any time for routine medical maintenance. There is no “time off” for any issue, however pressing. Problems must simply be nursed past the finish line.
But then it becomes open season. The E Street band presents themselves to have all necessary procedures carried out immediately. Issues with hearts, teeth, backs, knees, joints (now now), eyesight, hearing, arthritis, water retention, repetitive strain, need to be accessed and corrected ASAP!
It is a brief window and an opportunity that must be seized. Even if it means that the next time Bruce eyes you from across the stage, he’s really only seeing about 70% of the man he saw three months previously. Bruce expects bionic, Bruce gets bionic.
The covid layoff must mean that the E Street Band we get to see on these upcoming shows will be the most highly engineered, medically reconstructed version we have ever seen. I expect long shows. I expect handstands. I expect to see one guitarist sitting on another’s new shoulders.
It would take all of that to trump my best-ever Bruce gig: Páirc Uí Chaoimh, 2013. That gig has taken on mythic proportions in my mind’s eye. We were only able to book a single room and had to cram five people into it. Patrick Street felt like the fall of Rome.
At the gig, the bar queues restricted our imbibing, but we cared not. Bruce was magnificent from the start. It seemed to get better and better, but I knew a moment of truth was coming. Something in the lead-up told me ‘Thunder Road’ would be emotional.
He introduced it at length, telling tales of writing it, youthful Bruce, and all the intervening years. As he sang images of earlier performances flashed on the screen; Bruce as a young rock god, when all the world was young, and we were teenagers.
I welled up; something about those moments is cathartic. Life, past, present, and future seems to dance around you. At this, the woman in front touched my jacket. I looked over. She too was tearful and offering me a hip flask.
I took a hit, thanked her, and got back to being teary. Might have been whiskey. Might not. Scary face emoji. #Stillalive. #Relief.
Bruce mines those emotions like no-one else on earth. It is his gift. The songs hold up a mirror to us all. You look into them, and they look back at you. Who knows what we’ll see this time? Hope that woman is there again. Hope she still has the flask.
