Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band finished off their two-night stand at the TD Banknorth Garden last night by offering some deep catalog set-list swaps, entertaining a visitor in longtime buddy - and Springsteen encore mainstay - Peter Wolf, and at times barely drowning out a maddeningly chatty, sold-out crowd. Six weeks into the tour, and Springsteen and the band are in an interesting spot. A touch of road-weariness is colliding with the appreciable fine-tuning that has come with steady touring, meaning they sound great but there's a low-grade enervation that occasionally rears its head. While the thrust of the epic two-hour, 20-minute performance was as solid as ever - especially the increasingly blistering solos of Springsteen and Little Steven - there were fluctuations in energy. Urgency came in surprising wrappers. The juxtaposition of the light-footed ``Working on the Highway'' and the theatrics of the funereal but melodic ``Devil's Arcade'' worked despite their stylistic differences. The bass propulsion of ``Darkness on the Edge of Town'' and the ebbs and flows of ``4th of July Asbury Park (Sandy)'' also offered anchors for the eager-to-sing-along crowd. Those last two were among the shifts from Sunday night's song list. Other substitutions included the similarly vintage ``E Street Shuffle'' and ``Candy's Room.'' It was almost as if Springsteen and the band were conserving their strength for what they knew was going to be a near-crazed encore. The spike in intensity when the band kicked into ``Girls in Their Summer Clothes'' was practically tactile, as the audience already took up the new song and took over for a chorus of its own. The atmosphere only improved from that point as Wolf offered up crazy legs and theatrical support for ``Tenth Avenue Freeze Out'' and the big, beefy blues swagger of ``Kitty's Back'' kept cresting as if there was no limit to its peak. ``Born to Run'' was its trademark galvanizer as Springsteen threw up his hands in exhortation before lighting into the reeling Celtic rhythms of ``American Land.''
Source: The Boston Globe
