Get the latest gossip

Bruce Springsteen’s 3-Hour-20-Minute Show at L.A.’s Forum Resets the Bar for Epic Bossiness: Concert Review

Bruce Springsteen's opening night at the Forum, which ran 200 minutes, was an emotionally dynamic roller coaster on the way to becoming a pure party.

His song “Wrecking Ball” had a special resonance, then, in association with that dive that it can’t now: Springsteen’s current home in L.A., the Kia (nee: Fabulous) Forum, which he goes back to the ‘70s with, does jump, but no one’s going to go all Bette Davis and utter “What a dump!” about it in its refurbished state. The miracle is that he bobs and weaves with a dynamic setlist that needs that much expansiveness to sufficiently cover multiple moments of sorrow or grief and “Twist and Shout” (should you be so lucky to get that bonus track as a celebration of life, as Thursday’s crowd did). He pulled a huge banner up from the audience, claimed not to be able to decipher the spray-painted script — “Can anybody read this thing out there?” — and then led the band into “Jole Blon,” a traditional that found its way into E Street shows years back after he produced a Gary U.S.

Get the Android app