Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band visited Boston on Monday and paid tribute to Beantown with a cover of The Standells‘ “Dirty Water”. The TD Garden show marked The Boss’ first performance of the proto-punk group’s 1965 one-off hit since a 2012 show at Fenway Park.
The bulk of Monday’s show featured a similar setlist to the previous stops on this first leg of Springsteen’s marathon 2023 tour. The main set was a broad overview of Bruce’s six-decade career, stretching back to ’70s classics like “Prove It All Night” from 1978’s Darkness On The Edge Of Town to the modern era with the title track to Springsteen’s 2020 solo album Letter To You. Along the way, he honored his ’60s soul influences with a take on the Commodores‘ “Nightshift”, followed immediately by Jimmy Cliff‘s “Trapped”. The main set has consistently closed out with “Badlands”.
Returning to the stage for what would prove to be an eight-song encore, Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band offered their first take on “Dirty Water” since August 14th, 2012, per Setlist.fm. Ed Cobb, the producer of L.A.’s The Standells, wrote the song as a mock tribute to the then-famously polluted Boston Harbor and Charles River. “Dirty Water” also lists other gripes with Boston including a midnight curfew imposed on women at Boston University and the infamous Boston Strangler. In addition to becoming an anthem for local sports franchises, the song has since become a geo-specific cover choice for bands visiting Boston, including Pearl Jam and “Weird Al” Yankovic, and is a consistent live favorite of Boston’s own Dropkick Murphys.
The tributes to the evening’s locale kept on coming on Monday, as Springsteen dedicated the ensuing “Thunder Road” to the doctors, nurses, and staff at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and encouraged fans to donate to the volunteers from the Greater Boston Food Bank stationed at the arena. The nearly hour-long encore featured hit after hit, including “Born To Run”, “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)”, “Glory Days”, “Dancing in the Dark”, and “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out”. Finally, after bidding farewell to his bandmates, Bruce closed out the show with a solo acoustic take on “I’ll See You in My Dreams”.
Check out a gallery of images from Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band in Boston on Monday courtesy of photographer Brent Goldman. Scroll down to see fan-shot videos. Springsteen’s tour continues on Thursday in Buffalo, NY. Tickets and a full list of tour dates are available here.
Setlist: Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band | TD Garden | Boston, MA | 3/20/23
Set: No Surrender, Ghosts, Prove It All Night, Letter to You, The Promised Land, Out In The Street, Kitty’s Back, Nightshift (Commodores), Trapped (Jimmy Cliff), The E Street Shuffle, Johnny 99, Last Man Standing [1] Backstreets, Because the Night (Patti Smith Group), She’s the One, Wrecking Ball, The Rising, Badlands
Encore: Dirty Water (The Standells) [2] Thunder Road [3], Born to Run, Rosalita (Come Out Tonight), Glory Days, Dancing in the Dark, Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out, I’ll See You in My Dreams [1]
[1] Solo acoustic
[2] Tour debut, LTP 8/14/12
[3] Dedicated to the employees at Dana Farber Cancer Institute
