October 1, 2003 Shea Stadium New York
Well,
at least Bruce waited till the end of the tour to
stoke the still sensitive nerves of NY’ers by
performing the most politically charged and controversial show since releasing
The Rising in the summer of 2002. The night was already historic based upon the
baseball venue most musically famous by virtue of the Beatles legendary
performances there around 1965 or so.
Bruce
opened the NY shows with odd voice-overs of George W Bush repeating the phrases
“world peace” and “weapons of mass destruction” before ripping into a great
version of Souls Of The Departed. While the
audience was expecting something special for sure, this opening was the musical
equivalent of having a tub of Gatorade dumped on your head in the middle of
January. Besides the song choice being kind of
obscure, this opening put everybody on their heels and set an unfortunately
down tone that was never overcome.
Some
of the down mood may have been due to a mid week performance on a cold October night, in addition to
much of the audience having already attended more than a few NJ shows. The
Jersey performances were nothing short of exhilarating night after night but
for whatever reason, Bruce was pushing the peace, love and Woodstock buttons
tonight. Plus after seeing him in so many shows in the
past year, I could clearly see that
Bruce was just about completely drained and probably could not hold back
the old hippie sensibilities any longer.
Nevertheless,
a great one-two punch was noted with back to back
performances of Tunnel of Love which segued into Brilliant Disguise.
A hootenanny version of Johnny 99 was
unexpected as was a burning version of The Fuse (pun well intended).
Continuing with the button pushing, Bruce chose tonight to re-introduce the
racially charged anthem American Skin (41 Shots) which was met with mostly stunned silence and a fair
amount of boos (not to be confused with Bruuce) from
the NY audience.
I
think the song does share both sides of the tragic Amadou
Diallo story (an unarmed black man was shot 41 times
in a known drug-peddling housing project by white NY policemen). However, not
everybody hears the yin (“you can get killed just for living in your
American Skin”) balanced by the yang
(“is that a gun, is it a knife, is it a wallet, this is your life”) so I can’t
blame the NY cops who either turned their backs or just walked right out of the
show during this number.
In another example of yin-yang, Into the Fire, which eloquently describes the heroics of police, and firefighters who climbed the smoky stairs of the Twin Towers and into their smoky graves followed this song. This was followed by the metaphoric Creedence Clearwater Revival hit Who’ll Stop The Rain so all I can say is that this was a really weird night, despite a great band performance! In fact, Ralph was with me for the 4th time on this tour and he thought that this was the best show he had seen. I reminded him that he bailed out on the July 24th show but did agree that it was right on the money, musically if not philosophically speaking.