The Boss Wants a Word: Bruce Springsteen on Broadway

You'd almost think that Bruce Springsteen doesn't want to be at home with Patti and the kids. Having spent a frenetic year running around the world with the E Street Band, The Boss decided to recharge his batteries by announcing an eight-week, one-man show residency in Broadway's Walter Kerr Theater.

When all those dates sold out in nanoseconds, the October 3-November 26, 2017 run was extended to June 30, 2018 and then again until December 15.

That's two hundred and thirty-six shows, all jammed and ecstatically received by those lucky enough to have won the ticket lottery to get in, turning over a whopping $106.8 million at the box-office. According to US financial bible, Forbes, Bruce's share of the spoils was close to $2.5m a week. Add in the $20m Netflix have paid for the streaming rights - Springsteen On Broadway makes its digital debut the same day the curtain comes down for the final time in the 975-capacity Walter Kerr - and you can bet on Bruce being top of his bank manager's Christmas card list.

Also making a financial killing were New York's scalpers who, $479 Hamilton tickets be darned, were relieving fans desperate to see Bruce of an average $2,280. Indeed, the only Stateside event that out-scalped him this year was the Superbowl.

"The flights over cost considerably less than the tickets, which I had to get from StubHub, but it was worth every cent," Gavin James noted in his recent Hot Press cover interview.

Bruce could have left his guitar and harp in the Walter Kerr dressing-room and come back after Christmas but there's an album's worth of songs that he's desperate to record. Determined that the TV experience should mirror the theatrical one as closely as possible, Bruce insisted on there being just half-a-dozen cameras dotted around the stage and no, repeat no, fancy special effects added afterwards. Weıre pleased to report that Netflix did what they were told.

The show starts with the admission that his whole musical career has been a con job.

"I've never held an honest job in my entire life," Bruce 'fesses as he strums the chords to 'Growin' Up', from Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. "I've never done any hard labour. I've never worked nine to five. I've never worked five days a week until right now. I don't like it! I've never seen the inside of a factory, and yet it's all I've ever written about. Standing before you is a man who has become wildly and absurdly successful writing about something of which he has had... absolutely no personal experience! I made it all up, that's how good I am!

"I'm sure youıre wondering how this miracle came to pass..."

A hundred and fifty-three riotously entertaining minutes later youıre wondering no more! The Boss' language throughout is rich, expressive and often tinged with nostalgic awe.

Thusly, Elvis' 1956 TV debut on The Dorsey Brothers Stage Show, which seemed to scandalise anyone over 18, is "a sweating wet orgasm of fun. The bliss of a freer existence exploded into unsuspecting homes; the world had fucking changed in an instant. The revolution had been televised."

When the pre-teen Bruce is taken to rent, not buy, his first guitar, the cheap acoustic in question was "the key, it was the sword and the stone, the staff of righteousness."

The tree in the Springsteen's front-yard is "the grandest in town. It was a towering, beautiful Copper Beach. On sunny days, its roots were a fort for my soldiers and a coral for my horses, and I was the first on my block to climb high into its upper reaches, leaving behind a world I didn't care for much already. Up near the top I had the wind in my face and all the dreaming room you could want."

His growing belief in the redemptive powers of rock 'n' roll was tempered by an equally growing realisation that all was not well - in both his hometown and the rest of civil rights-era America.

"Here we lived in the shadow of the steeple crookedly blessed in God's good mercy, one and all, in the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, race-rioting, soul-shaking, redneck, love and fear-making, heart-breaking town of Freehold, New Jersey," Bruce solemnly recounts before his tinkering on the piano turns into 'My Hometown'.

It's the first (but definitely not the last) time that the hairs on your body will stand up.

By his own admission, most of Bruce's adult life has been spent coming to terms with his childhood and, in particular, a father who he loved, feared and revered in equal measure.

A goodly part of his 2016 Born To Run autobiography is devoted to Douglas Frederick Springsteen, but it's onstage in the Walter Kerr where, in a few short, huskily intoned sentences, Bruce finally gets to the nub of their relationship.

"When I was a young man and looking for a voice to meld with mine, to sing my songs and to tell my stories, well, it was my father's voice because there was something sacred in it to me," he explains. "When I went looking for something to wear, I'd put on a factory worker's clothes because they were my dad's clothes. And all we know about manhood is what we've seen and what we have learned from our fathers. My father was my hero and my greatest foe".

"What I was too young and too stupid to understand was his depression," he says as he launches into a rejigged version of 'My Father's House' - "I awoke and I imagined the hard things that pulled us apart/ Will never again, sir, tear us from each otherıs heart" - that reminds you just how essential a part of his canon the Nebraska album is.

If Douglas was part of the darkness in The Boss' early life, his charcoal-haired mum, Adele, was the sunshine.

"I'm going to release you from suicide watch, right now," he jokes as he starts to paint a picture of a woman who was "bright, happy and would gladly make conversation with a broom handle."

Whenever there's a danger of the show turning into a sermon, Bruce bursts his own bubble with self-deprecating humour.

"The man who would, at 21, shortly write 'Racing In The Streets', had never driven a block, he deadpans before providing the detailed account of his vehicular ineptitude that tees up 'The Promised Land'.

The same mix of Springsteen-ian wit and wisdom is evident as he tells us about his Jersey Shore heroes; youthful run-ins with the cops; that early slog round the toilet circuit; leaving home and scurrying back with tail between denim-clad legs; discovering Ron Kovic's Born On The 4th Of July Vietnam memoir; kicking against pricks like Trump; and all the other people and moments that have shaped his, the E Street Band's and, by musical extension, our lives.

Rarely have journeys down the rock 'n' roll highway been so exhilarating.

The Springsteen On Broadway film and soundtrack album are available now for your respective viewing and listening pleasure.