lot raze i'm trying to piece the set list back together from memory. i had a book full of my own words with me. i thought i might meet him. i thought he might sign it. he was late to take the stage. not just a few minutes. i want to say an hour. he offered an excuse i couldn't make out. the awfulness of the sound really threw me. i read about his exhaustive soundchecks. he would wander through every part of whatever venue he was playing before the show to make sure even the people in the nosebleed seats weren't getting shortchanged. i guess he took the night off when i was in the mezzanine. he opened with "the ties that bind". slipped into some ethereal wordless falsetto wailing when he was almost finished wading through "the river". belted out "darkness on the edge of town" while a stranger's pot smoke stung my lungs. the only other thing i remember is the extended intro to "tenth avenue freeze-out". that was when we made up our minds to walk out. the band sounded great from the parking lot. we probably should have stayed out there until the encore instead of driving home, defeated and half deaf. 240819 ... releaseofwarmth fwiw I'm not a festie, never have been and never will be. Miss me with the $10 budweisers and the cawing white girls on molly posting selfies to their socials without any regards to the musicians, the music, anything surrounding them including people, or where to put their trash. But Springsteen was well-suited to an outdoor venue, in my experience. Especially 10th Ave Freeze Out, which I think he's played at every E Street/full band show for 50 years. Touching rendition of a local classic too, with some commentary. I don't think my experience was quite as inspiring as Peter Gabriel's, and I chose to leave poor Sam Beam halfway through his set in order to see the boss, but it was a worthy experience for sure. 240819 ... raze it probably would have been a better experience all the way around if it had been an outdoor gig. i've rarely heard anything that was at once so loud and so impossible for my ears to unpack. painful, too. some harsh frequencies at play. and that was back when my ears were a lot less sensitive than they are now. it all could have been different if the tickets hadn't been sold out when he was touring solo behind "the ghost of tom joad" a few years earlier. that's a show i wish i could have seen. 240819 what's it to you? who go blather from