This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

For fans of Bruce Springsteen, and there are a lot of us, this has been a complicated year.

Some shows had personnel changes because of COVID, and some of the

fall tour was canceled in the end as Springsteen recovered from an ulcer. But in 2024,

he'll go back out on tour all over the U.S., Canada, and Europe from the spring through next

November. This guy can't be stopped. Now, I'm not really impartial here.

I first set eyes on Bruce Springsteen in June of 1973.

I was 14, a boy from North Jersey,

and I told my parents some kind of lie,

and I took a bus across the river all by myself to New York City,

and I had a $4 ticket in my pocket to see a band called Chicago, which was huge at the time,

if you're old enough to remember, 25 or 6 to 4 and all that stuff.

Anyway, I climbed to the highest seat in Madison Square Garden, the old blue seats, and outtrundled

this opening act, a skinny guitar slinger and songwriter from down the shore.

And it turned out this guy was outrageous.

He was singing, dancing, stabbing at his guitar, leading the band with a crazy urgency,

bursting all the while through the indifference of an

arena crowd that had not come to see him at all. They had come to see Chicago. But in every sense,

he was brilliant. Now, Springsteen hated those gigs at Madison Square Garden as a backup,

but they were a breakthrough. His career took off,

even as he re-entered the realm of smaller arenas. And now 50 years later, 50 years later, he's

...