page_title: Magic Tour (Bruce Springsteen)
section_title: The show
hierarchical_section_title: Magic Tour (Bruce Springsteen) / The show
caption_attribution_description: English: Bruce Springsteen's 2007 Tour opener at Hartford Civic Center. Stage view as first song "Radio Nowhere" is played.
context_page_description: The Magic Tour was Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's 2007–2008 concert tour of North America and Western Europe.
  The tour began October 2, 2007, in Hartford, Connecticut, and concluded August 30, 2008 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This was his first tour with the E Street Band since 2004's Vote for Change shows and the first prolonged outing with them since the 2002–2003 Rising Tour.
  After the conclusion of the tour's first leg on November 19, 2007, organist Danny Federici took a leave of absence from the tour, to pursue treatment for melanoma. He was replaced by Charles Giordano, who had played with Springsteen on the 2006 Sessions Band Tour. Federici made his only return to the stage on March 20, 2008, during the tour's third leg, when he appeared for portions of a show in Indianapolis. He died on April 17, 2008; the next two shows of the tour were postponed.
  The Magic Tour was one of the biggest tours of the year and won the 2008 Billboard Touring Awards for Top Tour, Top Draw, and Top Manager. The Magic Tour had the second-highest gross worldwide for 2008 in Billboard's rankings, with $204.5 million and trailing only Bon Jovi's Lost Highway Tour.
context_section_description: When the tour opened at the Hartford Civic Center, several things were immediately apparent.  The show was clearly shorter than in years past, beginning at around 8:30 and ending at around 10:45.  However more songs were played than could be extrapolated from this time, given past practice, due to the omission of elongated numbers with stage hijinks, and in particular no long monologues or band intros.  As guitarist Nils Lofgren said of the tour's start, "Bruce tried to do an experiment with condensing everything, covering all the emotional territory he needed to."
  Soozie Tyrell, while now clearly not an official member of the E Street Band by analysis of publicity material, tour T-shirts and the like, was nonetheless a full member on-stage, appearing on every song with some combination of violin, acoustic guitar, and backing vocals.  On the front line of the stage, age was taking its toll: on one side Clarence Clemons was once again sitting in a chair when not playing his saxophone or percussion parts and needing a steadying hand for getting on and off stage, while Danny Federici was also looking a little frail.  On the other side, not only was Springsteen's teleprompter (a fixture since the early 1990s) still in view, but sidekick Steven Van Zandt had his own (for lyrics) as did wife and band member Patti Scialfa (for guitar chords).  In the latter respect, however, the show featured a breakthrough:  the first Scialfa song played in its entirety, the mid-set "A Town Called Heartbreak", which would continue to be played intermittently on the first leg of the tour.  Drummer Max Weinberg also had a small teleprompter within his drum kit, showing lyrics, unusual in that Weinberg does not sing onstage.
  The set list heavily leaned on Magic material, as might be expected, with The Rising initially also well represented.  The 1970s were also featured, with a number of songs off Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town.  Thematically, the show was organized in recent Springsteen fashion, with certain fixed sequences that appeared every night, interspersed with "wild card" sequences in which a variety of recent or old songs might appear.  Shows usually began with a calliope playing "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" as the band took the stage, followed by several calls out from the darkness by Springsteen — "Is there anybody alive out there!?"  Then, as might be expected, Magic's first single "Radio Nowhere" and its expression of social longing began the concert.  This was followed by some older number such as "The Ties That Bind" or "No Surrender" that supplied that social connection, and then by The Rising's "Lonesome Day" to balance the equation.   The next part of the show brought out ''Magic'''s political undercurrents, first with a spoken introduction to "Magic" that made clear that song's understated lyric:  "This is about living in times when the truth gets twisted into lies and lies get twisted into truth.  So, it's not about magic. It's about tricks."  Thus set up to follow was just that, a trick: yet another at-first-puzzling rendition of the always challenging "Reason to Believe".  The Nebraska closer was transformed from a low-key acoustic number to a heavy-hitting, harmonica-driven, boogie-woogie blues rock version, with Springsteen pumping up the audience with phantom overhand throwing motions ... all for a song that represented, despite frequent misinterpretations, a void empty of hope; only a return of the Devils & Dust Tour's ultra-distorting "bullet mic" at the end served to reveal a bit of the deceit.  An explicit public service announcement rap during "Livin' in the Future" listed Springsteen's complaints about developments in American during the George W. Bush administration, including extraordinary rendition, illegal wiretapping, voter suppression, no habeas corpus, New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and the continuing Iraq War.  "The Promised Land" followed by wild card slots would then alleviate the mood.
  Another fixed, socio-political sequence occurred at the end of the main set, "Devil'
caption: "Radio Nowhere" opens the tour at the Hartford Civic Center. October 2, 2007.
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