I've seen Bruce Springsteen more than 20 times and still remember the Stanley Theater shows as my favorites, but Tuesday night's Mellon Arena concert is way up there.
I'm still floored that Springsteen covered "Like a Rolling Stone" -- and did it so magnificently.
As the Springsteen fan site backstreets.com pointed out, it was the "E Street Band's first-ever performance of the first Bob Dylan song Bruce ever heard. As he told it when inducting Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, ‘I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind.' "
According to Backstreets, it was requested last week in Albany, but we got the premiere. It appeared as though Springsteen had the lyrics on a teleprompter in the floor, because he was looking down for the first part of the song, but later into it, he had his eyes closed as he was singing it. Either way, it was phenomenal. I partly expected him to lapse into a Dylan parody, but he wisely resisted that urge, if he had it.
This morning I got an email from a woman named Michele, who had a hand in the request: "The ‘Like a Rolling Stone' request was from a woman my husband and I befriended [that] evening. She had two signs, and I helped her with the ‘Rolling Stone' one. The guys in front of me said ‘pass it up,' and when Bruce took the sign, I thought she was going to pass out. She is a die-hard Bruce fan and this was one of the many highlights in her career of following Bruce."
She made the night for a lot of us ...
Posted
May 20 2009, 01:33 PM
by
Scott Mervis