Going Back for a Second Helping Proves Fulfilling

Watching Bruce Springsteen on Monday in his second night at the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim got me thinking of Paul McCartney. And toy trains.

Back in 1976, I treated myself to see one of my heroes--McCartney--on back-to-back nights of his Southland tour stop at the Inglewood Forum. It was the first time I’d caught a performer twice on the same tour, but rather than doubling my pleasure, I came away slightly disappointed after Night 2 after hearing Paulie’s charming and seemingly spontaneous between-song comments from the first night duplicated word for word on the next. The song list, too, was virtually identical at both shows as I recall.

Springsteen must have had a similar experience somewhere in his early concert-going, because he does almost everything he can to guarantee that never happens to his fans.

Further, Springsteen’s music--and the fire with which he and the E Street Band play it--almost forces everyone in the audience to make such connections with watershed moments in their own rock ‘n’ roll histories, because everything about his performances is built on connection, musical and emotional.

That’s where the train comes in. The core elements of each Springsteen show are like a basic figure-8 train-track layout, and each song is a piece of track. Anyone who’s fiddled with opening up the figure 8 to add extra pieces knows how tinkering with just one piece quickly alters the whole shebang. Springsteen treats the hundreds of songs imprinted in his memory like new pieces of track to play with, and appears constantly ready and willing to play.

On Monday, instead of opening again with “Don’t Look Back,” as he had Sunday night, he got things rolling with “Take ‘Em as They Come,” from his 1998 “Tracks” box set of B-sides and unreleased recordings. Where he had moved from “Don’t Look Back” into “Prove It All Night,” for the second-night crowd--many of whom also were there Monday--the next tune was “Promised Land.”

And so on and so on, until the show became virtually an entirely new design created by splicing numerous wild cards among this tour’s staples--”Born to Run,” “Badlands,” “Youngstown,” “Murder Incorporated,” “Out in the Street,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” and “Thunder Road,” among others.

Springsteen also hurls out at least one big new curve each night. On Monday there were two: “Roll of the Dice” and the encore rendition of Van Morrison’s “Gloria,” which Springsteenites on the Internet say was the first time it’s popped up during the E Street Band reunion tour. In all, 11 of the 24 songs played Monday were not on the Sunday set list, adding up to 34 different songs over the two nights.

Of arena-level performers, it’s possible that only Bob Dylan and Neil Young mix things up more from night to night.

That helps keep things interesting for the band and the fans, though there’s no denying the lost sense of discovery that was a major contributor to the magnificence of E Street Band shows 10, 15 and 25 years ago when most of these songs were new.

It’s also inevitable that any member of the audience will find one or more songs they’d jettison in favor of something else they’d rather hear. I could have done without “Out in the Street” both nights--a song as close to self-parody as Springsteen has come--in favor of “Trapped” or “For You.”

In addition, the extended rock ‘n’ roll preacher rap the Boss weaves nightly into “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” with only minor variations might become tiresome hearing it over the course of many nights, though that’s hard to imagine with as much playful passion as Springsteen gave it at both shows.

Besides, it’s hard not to forgive some of the built-in repetition--which seems to spring naturally from his ritual-heavy Italian Catholic upbringing--because of the emotional healing such ritual can lead to.

It certainly seemed to heal the shards of a voice Springsteen started the night with. Markedly strained early on from the blistering three-hour show the night before, his vocals miraculously became purer and more consistently on key as the show progressed.

The Temple of Rock ‘n’ Roll Redemption indeed.