DAVID SANCIOUS, KEYBOARD PLAYER IN the early E Street Band, has a good story about a Texas show, nearly 50 years ago. The band had played all the songs they knew, ending with Rosalita, and then For You, with Springsteen solo on piano. “You could have heard a pin drop in a place where the roof had just come off minutes earlier,” Sancious tells us. “Once the rest of the world discovered what Houston knew, it would blow up.”
Half a century on, an E Street Band concert remains a crucial rite of passage for millions; a rock’n’soul epiphany; a reliably spectacular reassertion of music’s uniting power and moral force. In this issue, as the band’s first tour in six years rolls on through Europe and back towards the States, we catch them in full flight in Edinburgh. And, notably, we hear from Bruce Springsteen himself, as Warren Zanes takes a trip in the Boss’s El Camino back to the house where Nebraska was written. It’s the perfect spot for Springsteen to consider a duality at the heart of his work: how a fascination with the solitary American sits alongside the communal vitality of his band. “We’ve lasted a long time, amazingly enough,” he says, “but there’s been a psychological progression in the band itself that has allowed us to remain as connected as we are today. Bands break up ’cos they can’t make that psychological progression. They don’t have the skills or ability… We’re one of the few bands who really made that leap of consciousness.”