So what do we get?
You Can Look (But You’d Better Not Touch) with plenty of Bruce/Steve mugging action.
A great Sherry Darling with Ed Manion blasting away on lead sax.
Save My Love, originally recorded for Darkness on the Edge of Town album and released years later on The Promise. That’s pretty obscure. It was just too fucking happy to get on that album.
Fade Away, with the revelation that it’s Miami Steve’s favourite song and needs to be played somewhere along the line every tour to keep him happy.
And then we reach a critical turning point. It’s obvious the original plan was to run through The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, and you’d guess the string section had been called in because they’d be needed late in the piece. But the Greetings material earlier on mightn’t have gone down as well as expected, the signs are delivering an interesting mix, so which way to go?
The actual issue, and I’m being just a tad cynical here, might have been a curfew, but Bruce has been known to flout those. But it might be too late in the night to run through the album, presumably on the basis that he’d need a certain amount of usual suspects time to wind things up and send the punters away happy.
Maybe just the second side. That’d be fine with me since it’d guarantee a Rosalita. Added benefit: would mean the string section gets to come back to do the job they’d probably been hired for, assuming Stayin’ Alive was an afterthought. Yeah, we could do that, and the strings would fit in nicely, sort of thing.…
So there’s a choice. The second album, or the signs? You decide.
Now, from where I was sitting, the response to each question was pretty much the same, which is why I suspect we ended up getting the second run through the album in E Street Band history. Hard core fan heaven, and in Brisbane, of all places.