When the E Street Band reunited in 1999 for the run-up to The Rising, Bruce Springsteen seemed to shed 25 years. He was funky and clownish, not the stiff and, frankly, dull creature captured forever in the "Dancing in the Dark" video. The Boss was harking back to the funny, jive, beat-infused hustler persona of his early career. It was great—a sop to his real fans, but something of a lateral move for the artist. For this tour, Springsteen is still and deliberate. He's all alone up there, and the stage mirrors the musical austerity: a single table, a lamp, a cup of water, and two video screens that offer lingering images of his heavy-set, midlife face and his plump fingers. With all the bombast removed, Springsteen can tackle "Because the Night" as a soft piano ballad. For "Reason to Believe", he stomped on the floor and sang through a vintage bullet microphone, making for what sounded like a field recording by Alan Lomax. "State Trooper" became a metallic, nightmarish rocker, and "The Line" was so intense and fully formed that it seemed like an orchestra had been smuggled in. Springsteen found endless latitude in all this simplicity. In "Cynthia", he pounded the body of his acoustic guitar, and finished with a lascivious growl straight out of "Pretty Woman".

However, the two-and-a-half-hour performance was programmed to be more than an extravaganza of revisionism. Having introduced his son Evan early on—he's his proud dad's guitar tech—Springsteen made several references to parenthood, adding weight to the final verse of "Long Time Coming", with its already heart-rending lines "I reach 'neath your skirt, lay my hands across your belly, and feel another one kickin' inside. I ain't gonna fuck it up this time". He deliberately pulled back from the mike in places, and as a result it felt like we were eavesdropping on a conversation with his boy. Tellingly, Springsteen ignored both Born in the USA and Born to Run, the two career landmarks that have bedevilled this shape-shifting artist. Perhaps he couldn't find the possibility for reinvention inside those ossified structures. A reading of "The River", on the other hand, was as sad as anything you've ever heard. It made the original seem callow, while "Two Hearts" had a gravity that the younger artist lacked. Springsteen's early, fruitier musicality has been replaced with directness and wisdom. The emotional fulcrum of the night came midway, with "The Rising". It inspired a short ovation from the crowd, in answer to Springsteen's repeated phrase, "Dream of life", which he imbued with grim, intractable belief. With GM Place seeming impossibly intimate, the now overtly politicized Springsteen invited us to appraise him as a father, and a man apparently concerned about the regretful state of the Union.

Not that the show was all heaviness. Introducing "Blinded by the Light", he admitted that he intends to start using drugs when he's old. "It'll give me something to do," he said. During "Jesus Was an Only Son", he vamped a section about Jesus and Mary Magdalene opening a bar in Galilee, "on the beachfront". Christ knows how that routine is going over in the red states. He also confided, "When people ask me what it's like to be the Boss, I feed 'em a line of humble bullshit. I tell 'em, you know, it's just like anything else.” He ended with a cover of "Dream Baby Dream", originally recorded by the ultra-nihilistic New York synth duo Suicide. If that's not remarkable enough, Springsteen turned it into a sort of celestial anthem of hope, played on a pump organ. It was breathtaking, but not as breathtaking as the overall impression of an artist who might, incredibly, be coming into his prime, again.

Georgia Straight, August 2005