EL PAÍS (16 July 2008)

The night The Boss did not want to leave is not the title of an impossible dream, but the urgent summary of an endless concert, there in the red-and-white stadium, on the banks of the Manzanares. Springsteen, Patti Scialfa and the E-Street Band arrived at Vicente Calderón seven years after another endless night, the one at Barcelona’s Palacio de Deportes, with the overwhelming grooves of The River — for many the summit of Springsteen summits, and for others not, of course, which is what Born to Run or Darkness on the Edge of Town are for.

Two decades on, how easy to remember The Promised Land, Badlands, Adam Raised a Cain or Sherry Darling, how current that distant shiver feels in the 32-degree ferragosto of the Forum. Above all, how easy to feel again those incredible sensations shared with more than 50,000 souls, before the avalanche coming down as a supernatural event: two and a half hours after taking the stage, Springsteen and family were still there roaring rock. It was more or less simple: that night the E-Street Band did not want to go. Why, ah, nobody knows.

When, in theory, Springsteen and his people should already have been at the airport, they were still playing at the Calderón.

There was even a poor trainee reporter that night, lent a colleague’s house next to the Calderón to save time. “Take the keys and go home, write and send the piece at full speed, but for that you’ll have to leave before the concert ends, otherwise we won’t make the deadline,” someone ordered the intern. Fine. But around midnight — when in theory Bruce Springsteen and his troop should already have been on the way to Barajas airport toward new stages of the European tour — the ignorant, terrified cub was praying: “Let them finish, let them finish, let them finish..”. But that night of 2 August ’88 was the night the E-Street Band did not want to leave. Curious. There are, there were, in the history of rock and roll, great bands able to offer wonderful evenings in about 50 minutes, the Ramones, for example. And there are bands for whom the nights are too small, like the ESB of those effervescent 80s. Musicians who, on the scene of the time, had no clear rivals when it came to staging rock adrenaline.