Outside Bruce Springsteen's concert at Vienna's Ernst Happel football stadium – as part of the European tour that ended this week – you hear a lot of Hebrew. One of the most famous books in Tel Aviv, a well-known media personality who has been determining the musical tastes of Israelis for years, employees of government ministries, married, divorced, families with children.
There are Israelis here for the sixth time this summer in the European column of "The Boss". There are some, like me, who are having their first time ever at his concert. While it seems that Israelis flocked to Yesh Atid conferences this summer in the form of a Coldplay concert, or wanted to touch one of Beyoncé's glitters, the older generation of Israelis wanted to watch, probably for the last time or penultimate time, the singer who shaped entire generations here.
Springsteen takes the stage at exactly the appointed time or even a few minutes before it. In the next three hours, there will be plenty of answers to so many questions - about music, but first of all about life. Yes, it's a classic American musical show with backing singers and a load on the stage of an Alabama fair, with a basic rocky rhythm of two and four on the snare drum, with the harmonica, with the famous telecaster guitar, and even when he throws it in the regular and famous act, he immediately gets a similar one. And yes, singing here in public, but it's the experience that makes you ask questions about yourself and how you want to live your life. Nothing less.
Collective experience
On the face of it, Israeliness has no points of contact with the American collective experience that Springsteen sings about in his songs. The thing is, the local experience in his poems about the United States is actually collective to every human being. You believe Bruce Springsteen when he sings, you believe him when he performs, and most of all, you understand how a 73-year-old singer manages to take a stadium with 50,<> spectators and give everyone in the audience the feeling that he's singing only in their living room. But again, we're back to music, and Springsteen's performance is the order of life, not just culture and entertainment.
IN 2016, THE $900 MILLION SINGER RELEASED AN EXCELLENT AUTOBIOGRAPHY UNDER THE ANTICIPATED TITLE BORN TO RUN. Unlike many similar products that produce sticky saccharine, which serves a narrative of ghostwriters and sales agents, here, just like in the performance itself, the singer begins to gallop from the first moment and provide a glimpse into the depths of his soul.
As in his book and in his poems, from the very first moment Springsteen introduces us to the world into which he grew up: on the one hand a belief in a better future, in the hope that cohesion will take a person out of a bad place to a better place, and especially optimism that anything is possible if we can only choose this thought that anything is possible.
On the other hand, the poems present the grim reality in which they were written: violence, despair, boredom and darkness that requires courage to overcome it and not let it win. Sitting in the old-fashioned, illuminated European stadium in the late summer sun, the question arises whether the physical and mental struggle described by Springsteen in his songs is not our constant struggle, too, as spectators standing on the grass or sitting in tribunes. A struggle that lasted our entire lives, as well as the entire life of Springsteen, who never hid his battle with depression and his desire to concentrate on his tremendous success as a creator, singer and businessman. He insists on telling us he's just like us, and ten minutes into the 165-minute performance I believe him completely.
He starts the show with No Surrender, and on the third track lifts the stadium with the first hit of the evening, "Prove it All Night". He doesn't talk, doesn't stop to take a breath, and in fact only two hours into the performance and just before the encore takes a chair and sits down and lets his older band rest as well. Then they'll return for a 45-minute encore. He doesn't drink during the show unless he manages to do so secretly while changing guitars. He descends into the audience lightly, but one that does not hide the effort of a 73-year-old man. Hands out details, throws harmonica and shakes hands.
In the past, he would stand next to the audience and continue to play the guitar. This time she rests on his back like a weapon, and he sings without her. Does age take its course? Not exactly. This performance made me think about how I should live my life so that I would look like that at his age, too. In my life, I've flown three and a half hours each way to hear a rock concert, and I've come to the conclusion that a strict diet and staying fit are the key to a life that will allow you to do what you love until a later age. How did this happen?
Like singing the anthem
Somewhere in the middle of the show he took the harmonica and got an entire stadium to sing "The River" with him, which he wrote about his sister, as he recounted in his book: "My sister Virginia got pregnant at 17, and no one knew that until she was six months old." 43 years after it was written, on stage, it manages to get an entire stadium to stand up as if it were an anthem. It's not just the lyrics and melody that blink, it's the way Springsteen sings it.
The greatest basketball player in the world, Michael Jordan, once said that he always comes up to play thinking that there is someone in the audience who sees him for the first time. This all-American ethos, of course, also works in Springsteen's case.
An example of this is the matter of the ticket price for performances. The singer has long insisted that concert tickets remain affordable. For years he opposed tickets for rich and poor ("Golden Ring", "VIP") and set a reasonable price for his performances. Those days are gone, but the prices at his shows are still reasonable compared to colleagues from around the world. A ticket to a good place in the stadium will not exceed 700 shekels, and the cheap price that gives entrance to standing at the front of the stage, intended for usually burnt fans, will be around 250 shekels. Cheaper than Shlomo Artzi.
This importance of giving full value to those who just bought a ticket has accompanied him since the beginning of his career, and it continues to characterize him even today, as if to say: You paid a lot of money for a ticket, I will know how to reward you for it.
Macho - not a dirty word
The encore contains all the hits that Israelis who came to the concert were exposed to in real time in an era of two and a half radio stations and one television channel. The one that broadcast Courteney Cox dancing in the music video for "Dancing in the Dark" just before the "Arabic news", and now plays in a completely imperfect sound in Vienna, bringing Israelis back to the living room of their iconic home to a time when we missed the United States without most of us even visiting there or knowing anything about the place.
Born to run, which still scorches the local radio stations, comes just as the lights at the football stadium come on, because the European sun is also going to sleep sometime. Some of the audience sheds tears, everyone pulls out their phones, and only Springsteen waits for the moment when he tears off his shirt and shows the world American macho in all its glory. Voila, I can live with that for one night.
Born in the U.S.A. is not part of this repertoire and perhaps Israelis are disappointed. But there seems to be something about this song that the artist himself doesn't want to sing on purpose, as if to say - it's no longer who I am and who I was when I wrote this song.
Defensive wall from reality
On the way out, the Israelis around us, who have already stocked up on concert shirts and a souvenir glass, ask themselves how long it will take for this feeling of levitation to pass. Although Springsteen promised that he would soon return to Europe and then perhaps Israel would get a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see him in life-size, in the meantime our music is giving way to discordant sounds that have nothing between compassion and love.
Ostensibly, the sense of levitation dissipated in the first quarrel on the low-cost flight that brought us back to Israel, in which a flight attendant with a gypsy appearance and a Romanian accent tried to control the Israelis who just a minute ago stuck a strudel and visited Mozart's house and now behave brutally to each other. But Bruce Springsteen's performance is something you take with you far beyond the mundane mundaneness and shallow reality that surrounds us. It acts as a protective shield against heat and humidity, allowing you to see life more clearly in its proper form.
The question of why he was called "the boss" was answered on a particularly hot night in Vienna. She presented an artist who manages to say "after me" and make everyone follow him on a journey through the stations of his life, which are actually also the stations of our lives, for three hours which is the absolute escapism, but also a sense of truth that cannot be avoided.
I'm not a Bruce Springsteen fan, and I didn't grow up on his songs. And yet, if one day I have to choose certain moments from my life, there is no doubt that this performance will be on the short list. We were blessed to have won.
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