Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are coming back to Philly. Is it still ‘the greatest show on earth’?

POSTPONED: Hours ahead of his first of two shows at Citizens Bank Park, Bruce Springsteen announced his two Philadelphia shows are postponed citing personal illness. Read more here.

Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band are coming to Citizens Bank Park for two nights this week for their first summer stadium shows in South Philadelphia in seven years.

It’s going to be great, a soul-searing rock-and-roll revival meeting, a grand gathering that will be potentially life changing for first timers and spirit sustaining for true believers.

Isn’t it?

» READ MORE: The Boss’ guide to Philadelphia

The Springsteen live concert experience has always brought with it an expectation of transcendence.

Every marathon evening spent with the Boss and his trusted cohorts is a truly authentic sweat-soaked thrill ride that — especially in Philly — comes with more than its fair share of surprises.

But in 2023, at age 73, can the Boss still live up to those outsize expectations?

Springsteen (and the initial iteration of the E Street Band) played his first Philadelphia-area show in October 1972 at West Chester University. He was the third act opening for Cheech & Chong and a cappella group the Persuasions.

Springsteen’s set was cut short because the stoner duo’s management didn’t expect him to even be on the bill.

But only a few months later, the Springsteen live mystique was born at the Main Point, the Bryn Mawr coffeehouse that also hosted such luminaries as Tom Waits, Bonnie Raitt, and Muddy Waters. His first show there was on Jan. 4, 1973, a day before the release of his debut, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. By the time the Main Point run was finished — two years and 45 shows later — the word was out.

A bootlegged WMMR-FM (93.3) broadcast from the Main Point was passed among fans, spreading the word of the scrawny singer with a reputation for an incandescent live show.

» READ MORE: Bruce is Back — again. Everything you need to know about Springsteen’s Philly tour stops

When I first saw him, I was 18 and super stoked, primed by rare live footage with the E Street Band in the No Nukes concert film. (Full performances from those Madison Square Garden shows were finally released in 2021.)

South Philly shows at the Spectrum in December 1980 surpassed my sky-high expectations. The first time was the night that John Lennon was killed, followed by a cathartic performance the next night in the late Beatle’s honor. I’ve been blathering on about it ever since.

After a pretty much flawless eight-album run up through Tunnel of Love in 1987, Springsteen’s recording output has been uneven. But the live show has continued to deliver a “Prove It All Night” emotional release, from songs of isolation that cut to the core to galvanic ones that bind fans together.

That’s been particularly true since the E Street Band reunited in 1999, and it’s surely been felt in the summer shows at Citizens Bank Park in the last decade, all of which have been corkers.

The Boss’ Philly touring pattern in recent cycles has been to play a winter arena date, followed by a baseball season double header while the Phillies are out of town.

That’s the case this year, starting with the super sold-out show in March at Wells Fargo Center that was part of a tour in which Springsteen faced intense criticism for Ticketmaster dynamic pricing that drove some prices as high as $5,000.

» READ MORE: Why I’m saying goodbye to Bruce Springsteen | Opinion

Springsteen’s Aug. 16 and 18 dates at the park across the street will see him playing to four times as many people as he did in March. Tickets are cheaper and easier to get.

There’s always a seriousness to Springsteen’s work, a story being told about a struggle to keep faith in your self and find your way toward a greater communal good. But in the past as the shows have moved outdoors, they’ve generally loosened up and become more freewheeling.

Fans look forward to unexpected set list additions, especially those that reach back to the 1970s, confirming Philadelphians’ core belief that they have a special relationship with the Boss.

Cases in point include the Labor Day 2012 show, which began with five straight songs from 1978′s Darkness on the Edge of Town. A 4-hour, 4-minute show from 2016 — the longest ever on U.S. soil — started with 12 consecutive pre-Born to Run tracks.

Most big-time concert tours vary little from night to night. There are too many production cues to hit. That means fans keyed into social media usually know what’s coming. Taylor Swift’s ingenious solution: Play the same 40-plus songs every night, do two out-of-the-blue surprises for fans to obsess over.

So far on this tour — in U.S. arenas and outdoors in Europe, where rave reviews included Billboard calling it “still the greatest show on earth” — the set lists have been static by Springsteen standards. Born in the U.S.A.’s blistering, steadfast “No Surrender” is the usual opener, and closing with the elegiac “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” from 2020′s Letter to You.

That’s led to online carping from fans and some push back from E Street Band members. Last month, when one complained that “the rinse and repeat shows are the opposite of greatness,” bassist Garry Tallent clapped back: “You are [expletive] kidding, right??”

What the Springsteen set list this tour really demonstrates is Springsteen’s new mode of storytelling. Since he last played Citizens Bank Park, the Boss has both published a memoir and performed a long-running Broadway show.

His epic concerts have always had well-thought-out story arcs, but in his post-Springsteen on Broadway-tour-life, he’s more deliberate and scripted in putting his chosen narrative across.

On this tour, the story the septuagenarian rocker is telling is about mortality, life-sustaining relationships, and irreplaceable loss. That’s why “Last Man Standing,” about being the lone survivor of his teenage band the Castiles is followed every night by “Backstreets,” the most powerful song about friendship he’s ever written.

And it’s also why “Night Shift,” a Commodores song I never particularly liked, about late soul singers Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson, is the song from Springsteen’s Only the Strong Survive he plays every night. It fits the theme.

Will the set lists open up now that Springsteen & the E Streeters are back in the U.S. playing outdoors? That remains to be seen. Philly is the second tour stop after Chicago.

But longtime fans hoping for one more transcendent Springsteen experience will be better off not counting on him to pull deep-cut surprises out of his hat, and instead paying attention to the story he has to tell.