Five life lessons from a Bruce Springsteen concert

This is what happened. My sister and I were having dinner at a restaurant in the bylanes of Fulham in London. One of the dishes had mussels, a kind of seafood, in it. A few months earlier I had eaten mussels for lunch and then again for dinner and had a terrible attack of food-poisoning.

My sister warned me and asked me not to eat the mussels. But then my mental makeup at the time was like that of a quintessential Indian tourist who did not want to miss out on any experience in a foreign land. And so I ate.

Somewhere around 3am on 25 July I woke up with a terrible pain in my stomach (okay, I am using this term loosely here, like most of us Indians do.) Then I started vomiting. And I vomited more. And more. And more. For the next seven hours I was just going in and out of the toilet, over and over again.

If it had been any other day, I would have rested it out and probably been fine by the next morning. But it was 25 July—one of the most important days in my life in recent years. The main reason I had made this trip to London.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band were performing that evening at Wembley Stadium. While I knew the vomiting would stop in a few hours, I wasn’t sure about the seething pain. And there was no way I was going to miss this concert.

So I did the only thing I could (and I am not proud to say this): I self-medicated, popping a painkiller and hoping that I would be fine by evening. The pain eased and by around half past five in the evening we were at the stadium waiting for the Boss—as Springsteen is lovingly referred to by his fans—and the E Street Band to make an appearance.

Of course, an Indian trait was at work again: While getting into a stadium it makes sense to arrive a couple of hours early because you never know how much time it would take to get to your seat. Anyway, as we sat on our seats, I realized that I still had some pain in my stomach (I know, I know, I should say abdomen, but I grew up in an era when the stomach was just the stomach.)

At 7.15pm, Springsteen and the E Street Band stepped on to the stage and started singing, without any chitchatting. The first song they played was Lonesome Day. Fifteen minutes later they were singing No Surrender, my favourite Boss song. At that moment as I stood up and clapped and clapped and clapped some more, the pain in my stomach totally disappeared.

Halfway through the song when Springsteen said come on Steve, like he does every time he sings the song live, asking his bandmate, Little Stevan (Steven Van Zandt), to join him at the centre of the stage, to sing the chorus of the song together, I realised that my life as I had lived it, and as I hope to live it, had peaked.

I had seen Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band sing No Retreat No Surrender live. In my head I was the only one at Wembley Stadium, and the Boss and his band were playing just for me. And that feeling stayed, going up and down, as the band played some of my favourite songs, peaking again with what is possibly Springsteen’s most famous song, Dancing in the Dark.

The concert ended just before 10.30pm, before what they call the curfew set in, given that Wembley is a residential area. The band had sung non-stop for nearly 200 minutes. There was no opening act. No breaks. And no chitchatting, which so many new-generation singers do to kill time.

There was no “I would like to thank you and him and her and them" as well at the end of the concert. Springsteen sang and the band played. Non-stop. They started on time. They ended on time, starting with Lonesome Dayand ending with a Springsteen solo, I’ll See You in My Dreams.

Fifteen to twenty minutes after the concert ended, my sister and I were out of the stadium, and on the London underground, making our way back to the hotel, totally gobsmacked by what we had seen. And as we made our way to our hotel, thoughts about the concert started popping into my head. In fact, they still are.

1. It’s possible to enter a stadium/concert venue in 15 minutes and leave it in 15 minutes as well. The fact that it doesn’t happen in India, where one has to line up hours in advance and where getting out can be equally difficult, means something is not being done right.

The whole lining up on Marine Drive business to get into Wankhede Stadium took the fun out of the few IPL matches that I saw in the first few years of the tournament. I haven’t gone since. This was the main reason why I chose to miss the Ed Sheeran concert in Mumbai earlier this year. It took people hours to come out of the venue.

2. If you have a significant body of work or have enough to say, there is no need for chitchat. You can get to the point straight away and go with the flow, like Springsteen and the E Street Bank did. People will listen. Chitchatting happens only when the content on offer is weak.

This is true for standup comedy as well. Comics who have something to say rarely do crowd work, even though the crowd tends to love it. They respect their time on stage. (Okay, I know this has started to sound very LinkedIn-ish now. But sometimes I also need to do in Rome what the Romans do.)

Indeed, even after 200 minutes, the Boss and the Band didn’t get around to performing some of my favourite songs of theirs, including Girls in their Summer Clothes, Sherry Darling, Working on the Highway and Radio Nowhere. There were so many other songs that weren’t played.

The band played 31 songs that evening. In fact, if they had had the time and the energy to play 31 more songs, the 90,000 people at Wembley Stadium would havestillbeen around listening to those songs as well. I guess that’s what happens when you have such a significant body of work. Some of it has to be left out. Not everything can be performed.

3. The business model of music has changed over the years. While I was growing up I had to buy a cassette even if I happened to like just one song in an album. Of course, one always had the option of getting the song recorded on a cassette and make what was called a mixtape. But those recordings never really sounded the same as they did in the original cassette. The rise of digital music has changed that.

Now, this is not the space to get into the history of how the business model of music has changed. So I will talk in slightly simplistic terms to make a broader point.

In the book Move Fast and Break Things—How Facebook, Google and Amazon Have Cornered Culture and What It Means For All of Us, Jonathan Taplin quotes Bob Lefsetz, a music blogger, as saying: “You can make an album, have fun, but don’t expect people to buy it or listen to it."

Then Taplin goes on to write: “Lefsetz is saying that the only way musicians can get paid is the same way they got paid in the seventeenth century: rent a room, lock the doors, and make people pay to get in."

It’s not as simple and straightforward as this. Nonetheless, as I said earlier, I am just trying to make a broader point: Concerts are now a very important part of the business model of music and musicians.

A December 2023 newsreport points out that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band made close to $380 million during the year through concerts. Their average ticket cost was around $110. The band stood at the third position as far as concert earnings go, with Taylor Swift and Beyonce ahead of them.

In fact, the total earnings of the top 100 concert tours in 2023 stood at $9.17 billion. Of this, the top 3 (Swift, Beyonce and Springsteen) made nearly $2 billion, or close to 22% of the total, with the remaining 78% being shared among the other 97 performers.

Further, Taylor Swift’s concerts made $1.04 billion and those of Beyonce made $580 million. What does this tell us? As Cass R. Sunstein writes in How To Become Famous:Lost Einsteins, Forgotten Superstars, and How the Beatles Came To Be: “Fame gets locked in… The winners are spectacularly successful, and they are relatively few." This is true for cultural markets, like books, films, TV series, etc., in general, given that what is known as the Matthew Effect kicks in.

The Matthew Effect was identified by sociologist Robert Merton in 1968. It was named after a verse in the Gospel of Matthew: “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath."

In simplistic terms, a modern-day version of this would be that the return on capital goes up at a faster pace than increase in salary or regular income. This ensures that the rich continue to become richer. (This is a newsletter on economics, so I need to build in some economics into it as well. I can’t keep pontificating about my life all the time.)

4. Clearly, the Boss and his band make a lot of money playing concerts. But is that why they do this? Maybe. Nonetheless, money cannot be the only motivating factor once one has seen how much fun the band has on stage. Almost all of the band is over 70 now.

Springsteen turns 75 on 24 September. Garry Talent, the band’s bass guitar player, turns 75 in October. Roy Bitman, better known as the Professor, and the band’s piano player, is 75. Max Weinberg, the band’s drummer, is 73. Little Steven, who plays the guitar, is 73. Nils Lofgren, who plays the guitar among other instruments, is also 73. Patti Scialfa, who plays the guitar and percussions (at the concert I saw, I think she also played the violin), is 71. Clarence Clemons, who was the band’s original saxophonist, died in 2011 at the age of 69. If he was still alive, he would have been 82. Jake Clemons, who replaced Clarence in the band after his death, is 44—the only youngster in the band.

What makes these 71-75-year-olds still go out there and perform, and perform for as long as they do? More money? Probably. But the happiness that one could see in their eyes on the big screen at Wembley on that day tells me they love what they do and want to continue doing it over and over again. That’s the long and the short of it. As someone told me recently, Joe Biden and Mick Jagger are both the same age, but you can see the difference.

I sincerely wish that when I am in my seventies I have this kind of passion left for the three things that give me the most pleasure in life: writing, reading. and listening to music—I cannot live a life of drawing meaning from the lives of my children because I don’t have any.

5. Of course, all of us cannot be lucky in our lives to follow our passions and make money from it. There are parental and personal consumeristic ambitions to fulfil. Buy a car. Buy that latest iPhone. Buy a home. And more homes—how else do you tell the world, look, look, I have so much money. Your stocks, mutual funds and gold can’t talk. Real estate can. Then there is all that travelling to be done. Instagram posts to be put up. A passion doesn’t always throw up so much money. At least, not for everyone. Also, most importantly, in a lifetime of running with the herd, there has to be a passion to start with.

If you don’t have a passion or have one but can’t make money out of it or have put it on the backburner in the larger scheme of things, and once you are done paying EMIs, and fulfilling some parental ambition, given that it never seems to end, at least follow those who have a passion.

Watch a good play. See the concerts of musicians you love (and those who play actual live music on stage, not just sing to recorded music being played). Read a good book. Go to a literature festival. Watch sports live in a stadium. Check out the museums, the secondhand bookstores, and have friends with whom you can actually talk about things beyond who is making how much and who is sucking up to whom. Live your life given that you only live it once. Experience the newer experiences. Or at least embrace the spirit of what Nicholson Baker writes in U&I: “What-new-fields-can-we-conquer-now?"

And finally, listen to what you are being told. Don’t be an uncle. And don’t eat mussels a day before you are supposed to go to listen to a Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band concert.

Now, that leaves me with just one question: How do I feel the same kind of peak I experienced on 25 July all over again? There is just one answer: Robert Allen Zimmerman, here I come.