In 2020, the world shut down. There was not much of anything happening, besides fear and unease in overwhelming abundance. There certainly was no live music. There were no audiences gathered for the catharsis that only a community experiencing music together could bring. Bruce Springsteen was in mourning.
Narrating the beginning of the new documentary Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, Springsteen says, “I made a promise to myself, to my fans, and to my band that if we got through this, I’d throw the biggest party I could.”
He made good on his word.
The new film, premiering Friday on Hulu, tracks the making and then ecclesiastical execution of the blockbuster Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band world tour that launched in 2023 and has been selling out stadiums and arenas around the globe ever since. The shows, as any of the hundreds of thousands who have attended will tell you, couldn’t be described as a concert or even a party. They’re a religious experience, in the most raucously spiritual way.
“I know this from directly just talking with him 50 years ago: Bruce’s goal was to give you a show that you didn’t remember for a year or two years, or that you would say was your favorite show of the decade. His goal is to give you a show that you’ll never forget,” Jon Landau, Springsteen’s longtime manager and producer tells me. “That’s what he and the E Street Band are out there doing every single night. They want you to walk out of there with an experience that you will never forget.”
There was no guarantee that such a singular experience would happen.
I’m talking with Landau and E Street Band icon Steve Van Zandt ahead of the Road Diary streaming release, each remarking on how vividly the documentary captures the unsureness and palpable emotion that accompanied the joy of reuniting with the band and, later, with the fans.
It was the band’s first tour together in over six years. Springsteen is 75 now, and was 73 when the tour kicked off; many veteran E Street musicians were in their seventies, too. The deaths of bandmates Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici weighed heavy as they started to jam again. For the first time, Springsteen wanted to stick to a strict setlist rather than the typical freewheeling, improv’d show. Key songs from the band’s most recent album, 2020’s Letter to You would provide the scaffolding the rest of the set would be built around.
Grief, mortality, aging, legacy, regret, and the love and hope that grounds all of those unwieldy things: They’re themes that echo throughout Letter to You, but also were high on mind for Springsteen and the band. To wit, the originally planned tour was put on hiatus as Springsteen battled health issues. His wife and E Street Band member Patti Scialfa would only participate in some tour dates owed to, as announced in Road Diary, a blood cancer diagnosis. Each show ends with the audience in tears as Springsteen, onstage alone, performs an acoustic version of “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” a musical promise of reconciliation down the road with those we love and those we’ve lost.
It’s a whole new way of experiencing Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band for fans who have been following them for over five decades.
“The theme of the show was going to reflect the record, which was mortality, and we knew that we had to come out like a hurricane to make sure that we balanced that mortality with vitality,” Van Zandt says. “Because I’m sure the audience didn’t know what to expect after six or seven years, you know, with people getting older. So we wanted to make sure we came out and were stronger than ever.”
That’s easier said than done.
When the band first gathered for rehearsals, they were admittedly rusty after not having played together in tour mode for over six years. Springsteen’s style of working and of storytelling had evolved too, especially after his experience doing his 2017 Broadway show.
In the film, Van Zandt remarks that he’s nervous that the rehearsals have been so much more casual than he’s used to. The E Street Band’s drummer Max Weinberg says it became clear very quickly that everything was being played far too…slow.
“We played ‘She’s the One’ so slow, it’s a ballad,” Weinberg says. “People would expect musicians in their seventies to play that loping thing, which would be unfortunate.”
“To those audience members who hadn’t seen Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in 1976, you gotta transmit that excitement,” he adds. “We had to recall some of that manic, out of control way we played 50 years ago.”
Eventually, Van Zandt took over leading rehearsals from Springsteen. Springsteen also no longer was as obsessive about soundchecks as he had notoriously been. Van Zandt says he feared audience members would think about the show, “It’s nice, but these old men are just going through the motions.” That wouldn’t do: “I wanted to go out and blow their f---ing minds.”
Springsteen eventually made Van Zandt the official music director of the tour. His amusing reaction in the film: “Nice. Whatever. Forty years later, but fine.”
The sheer amount of time these musicians have played together is recalled often in Road Diary. So is the amount of time they’ve had a relationship with the band’s fans.
When you walk through the security checkpoints and the ticket turnstiles during the Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band world tour, you’re walking up with people whose entire lives have been soundtracked by their music—whose life milestones are on a timeline alongside the various Springsteen tours they’ve seen.
Couples who went on first dates to a show are now attending the current tour with their adult children. Every song is a flood of decades of memories. Every blare of the horn section, drum breakdown, and vocal riff between Springsteen and Van Zandt turns a new page on a family photo album.
Especially at this stage of their lives, and on a tour so curated around that idea of what a lifetime of relationships means, the E Street Band is keenly aware of that connection. It’s part of why they’re on the road again all these decades later.
Landau is the person who, in a now-famous 1974 article in The Real Paper, wrote “I saw rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen!”
Five decades later, Van Zandt tells me, we’re seeing what that crowning really meant.
“Bruce Springsteen is a wonderful spokesperson for this generation, in a sense that he is out there taking it seriously as a job,” he says. “It’s not just entertainment, it’s a job. And what is the job? The job is transportation and transformation. We want to transport the audience to a place, get them out of their daily problems for three hours. Transport them and then, hopefully, they will be transformed by the end of that show, and leave with more energy than they came with, with more hope than what they came in with.”
“John recognized that way back in ’74,” he adds. “That’s what he meant by the future. Meaning, OK, you have this art form handed to you guys. Now, what are you going to do with it?”
What they’re going to do with it is not stop.
No one involved with this tour is naive. They’re aware of their age. They’re aware that everyone is wondering, “Is this it? Is it the last one?” There’s this massive tour. There’s Springsteen’s recent health issues. There’s a biopic coming out starring Jeremy Allen White. There’s this documentary. There seems to be such a focus on legacy, that it’s easy to assume retirement is the stop on this tour.
Landau’s response to that: Don’t be foolish.
“The ambition and the determination to continue has really grown over the decades, and it’s never burned brighter than it is right now,” he says. Landau has the unique vantage point each night of watching the 18 members of the E Street Band come off the stage before Springsteen’s acoustic finale. “They’re both drained because of the demands of the show and they’re exhilarated and thrilled at what they’ve just been able to contribute.”
Road Diary ends with what Landau calls a prayer. Springsteen quotes Jim Morrison, “O great creator of being, grant us one more hour to perform our art and to perfect our lives.”
“He’s 75 years old, and he may not be at the beginning, but he’s right stab in the middle of it,” Landau says of Springsteen. “He’s not at the end of it.” The idea of retirement, especially to anyone who has seen this tour or watches this film, is, he says, “ludicrous.”
And rest assured, Springsteen says as much himself: “I stuck closely to our original set list on this tour because it told the story I wanted to communicate: Life, death, and everything in between. Playing music as you get older is an interesting and tricky business, and I plan on continuing until the wheels come off and for as long as the band will follow me. There’s one thing I know, after 50 years on the road, it’s too late to stop now.”
