In The Land Without Time

Something happens when you pass through the concourse and reach the edge of the crowd at a Bruce Springsteen concert. Time stops, but not in a cliché sports-movie way. Rather, time stops in a way that renders time itself, and all things related to it, completely and utterly irrelevant. It’s not that it slows or moves backward, it’s just negated. You stop thinking about it. You stop caring about it. You’re in a constant state of pure presence for the next … well, who’s to say how long; it doesn’t matter anyway.

The people you pass as you move down the steps share the same timelessness. They’re the most familiar strangers you’ve ever met—instantly your neighbors and friends. They look at you and smile because they can tell right away it’s your first time here. Couples in their 50s—it might be their sixteenth or seventeenth time—sing to each other and hold hands and steal looks at each other and laugh. Adults down in the pit run back and forth in faded, fraying tank tops. Behind you the stadium seating goes up and up, and on the edges of every railing people are hanging and waving and swaying. They reach out over your head and you turn back and there he is. Bruce.

Bruce Springsteen is a wonder. You can’t stop watching him. No one can stop watching him. He’s the catalyst of this timelessness. There’s no shred of embarrassment or shame or apathy or tire in any aspect of his performance. He does everything he’s always done with the same passion and intensity and fire and intention and you have the sense there’s zero difference between the live experiences of today and yesterday. Bruce Springsteen and his glorious, walloping, phenomenal E Street band do nothing less than give you everything you want. It feels personal, yet communal. Small, yet massive. Spectacular, yet grounded.

And as the songs go on, and Bruce goes on, and the crowd goes on, things begin to fall away. The hours pass and you don’t realize it. The ebb and flow of the set-list— itself a presumed masterpiece in structure—has an ethereal feel. It’s addictive. Each song has the energy of an opener and the rousing triumph of a finale. Things turn in a cycle and it could be the tenth time, the twentieth time, the thirtieth time you raise your hands with everyone else and cheer and shout and clap—who cares? Some people cry during certain songs, and two songs later they laugh and jump up and down, and in two more songs they cry again.

Nothing feels old here, but it’s wrong to say everyone’s young again. In this world of eternal anthems and glowing faces, the past isn’t found again, because the past is the same as the present here. No one used to love this music; everyone loves it right now. No one used to fall in love, drive too fast, dance all night to these songs; they still do, right now. You don’t move forward or backward or revisit the glory days at a Bruce Springsteen concert; you just dwell in the present, apart from everything. It’s such a pure, romantic, wonderful feeling.

You wonder why more rock concerts aren’t like this. You wonder why more crowds don’t have the abandon, the freedom, the joy of the people here. You wonder why more performers aren’t this ecstatic, this professional, this reckless. You wonder where it all went. It’s not gone—clearly, it’s not—but it’s different. This paradise of gigantic music, where the one-more-times are infinite, exists in microcosm. When you step outside the arena gates, the time elapsed—three hours and fifty minutes—startles you. The heat, the lights, and the energy fade almost at once. The sweat on your back is cold. The road home is dark. You’re exhausted and you ache. There’s a residue of astonishment and spectacle, but it’s thrown against the reality of corporate mechanics and brand-building and stylistic excess. The pain of a Springsteen concert comes in the moment you realize it wasn’t like anything else. The freedom, the boundlessness, the running: It was impossible.

Yet, something lingers. You remember Bruce on the stage. He wasn’t old, he wasn’t young again, he was just Bruce. His band, a cycle in themselves, was new (Jake) and old (Stevie) and raucous and reverent. The people to your right and to your left weren’t washed-up or desperate or looking for the fountain of youth. They were just fans, the way they always were. They dance the same way. They pump their fists the same way. They know all the words. There’s something about that place, when the lights go up and for the first time you can spin around and see everyone in the arena, thousands and thousands of them, and it’s the same as it always was. You’re not in the present, but you’re not in the past either. Going to a Bruce Springsteen concert isn’t stepping into a time machine. It’s right here. It’s right now. It doesn’t make sense, but it can’t be any other way.

And that’s the last thing you realize when you step outside the world of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. It’s the realization that, in the place without time and without change, where the band plays forever, you, yourself, are somehow changed. It feels sad, but hopeful too. You cling to it. You wonder if you’ll ever see it again.