On a recent night on the E Street Band’s world tour, the band were some way into their 1984 hit “Dancing in the Dark” when Bruce Springsteen suddenly commanded them to stop. The air stilled. The players paused and waited.
Before them, 60,000 faces lifted with fevered expectation. Springsteen held the silence for almost a minute before telling the band to strike up again. “It was the most amazing thing,” guitarist Steven Van Zandt says now, sitting in a suite at Claridges.
“The whole band stopped. It wasn’t in a place you would think to stop. Never stopped there before.
No reason to stop there now. But you gotta be ready for that.” To be part of Springsteen’s band is to be poised for such moments.
There is a delicate art to reading the singer’s cues – made with hand, shoulder, guitar – and to being so well steeped in a 60-year back catalogue that an impromptu request from the audience can be played on cue. In Thom Zimny’s new film, Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band – a study of the group as they return to the road after a six-year absence – trumpet-player Curt Ramm puts it best: “Bruce likes the band to be a little off-balance.” But Van Zandt holds a very particular place in the E Street Band; close enough to Springsteen that he might now be part of the singer’s centrifugal force, perhaps incapable of ever being thrown off-balance.
Today, he considers how it feels to step out each night beside Bruce. “I’m expecting to b.
