Hello, Bruce

A concert for the experts, they will say. For the fans who follow him throughout the tour and contrast the setlists as if a change of song in the repertoire were a change in the prophet's sermon. It wasn't the concert with the most hits, but it also offered a good sample as the night progressed and the stadium warmed up. Broadly speaking, a heartwarming recovery of the albums Born in the USA and Nebraska and an incursion into soul (as I said, we went to a mass) in the most memorably performed piece of the night, Spirit of the night, giving us wings on our backs with trumpet choir blows. And a generous and uninhibited grand finale, with the good taste left by visits from friends who always make you smile. And who guarantee that, even if it doesn't seem like it, you will dance.

The signs of complicity with the Catalan community replicated those already existing on Thursday, the four-barred flag at the same level as that of the visiting state, and initial greetings in the native language. He didn't make us wait more than ten minutes, which is appreciated by that motorcycle driver who rushes until the end because he knows he can park, so to speak, at the door. It could have rained, but the summer clouds only wanted to give us air.

The tie-wearing Springsteen is now a mature and gentle man, with that very rare mix of greatness and humility that can only be explained through sympathy: in the United States many are beginning to hate him for his immodest liberal political stance, while here he simply seems like a guy who says reasonable things and who very often approaches the public to share a pinch of capital letters in the surname. Bruce seems like a normal man who, simply, wakes up every morning being nothing less than Bruce Springsteen and who will play at dusk with a band of friends, the E Street Band, impeccable in every sense. The sound, the fun, the precision of all of them, perfect.

The beginning of the concert was, as we said, for the less mainstream audience: My Love Will Not Let You Down, Lonesome Day, Ghosts, and so on until the working-class crowd managed to recognize Darlington County (with an explicit initial wink to the Stones), Racing in the Street or Waiting On a Sunny Day and began to feel the effects of the elixir (the latter, offering the microphone to a girl in the front row who executed her improvised part perfectly). Bruce finishes it off by taking us down The River, surely the piece one needs to hear him sing (and accompany him in the final howl) at least once in a lifetime. I consider myself more of a pop soul than a rocker, but the exception I make with Bruce (and which I also make with a few modern groups) has to do with that ability to transform each musical phrase, or almost every word and every chord, into a historical discourse. Not even the frivolities he allows himself are frivolous or superficial; everything has a profound meaning or a veneer of a great moment. Go ahead and try it yourself.

Jake Clemons and his precise, energetic, saving saxophone perfect any song that has the slightest temptation to be left unfinished. A small moment to remember the members of the first band he formed and, with Last Man Standing, admit the perplexity of knowing himself to be the sole survivor. Then The Rising, Badlands, Thunder Road, Born in the USA, Born to Run, Glory Days, in case we were short of hits, and a poppy Dancing in the Dark so it wouldn't be said that everything was about transcendental births, American folklore, and road prophecies.

Bruce makes us citizens of a kind of republic of hopes that never stops having its feet on the ground, but that knows that fruits must come from the earth