Bruce Springsteen, John Legend, and Barack Obama team up on a spirit-raising rally for Harris

When Bruce Springsteen comes to Philadelphia, that usually means it’s time for a marathon concert that spoils his fans with three hours — at least — of redemptive rock and roll.

On Monday night — two months after Springsteen and his E Street Band put on two such shows in South Philly at Citizens Bank Park — the Boss was back in town, but with an allotted stage time that allowed for not three hours, but three songs.

And this time, without his longtime compatriots in the E Street Band, he played a solo show, opening for his Renegades podcast buddy, former President Barack Obama. His act followed soul singer and activist John Legend’s set at a get-out-the-vote rally at the Liacouras Center on the Temple University campus, in support of Kamala Harris’ candidacy in next Tuesday’s presidential election.

The star power of that triple bill brought a packed house of 10,000 to the Broad Street arena, with Legend half-jokingly referring to himself as “a warm-up” for Springsteen and the 44th president.

Springsteen came on stage following an impassioned intro from Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, who cited lyrics from the 2012 song “We Take Care of Our Own,” linking the Boss’ line about “lookin’ for the map that leads me home” to Pennsylvania’s key role in next Tuesday’s election.

The three-song set started off with two spirit-raising hits well suited to the political occasion, each a statement of concern for the state of the union, as the song’s narrator asserts his insistence that America can be a place whose shared values are still worth believing in.

The challenge of that one-two punch of “Promised Land,” one of his benchmark, fist-punching anthems, and “Land of Hope and Dreams,” a gospel-shaped call for all misfits, outcasts, winners, and losers to climb aboard a train of inclusion, is that he performed them without his trusted compadres in the E Street Band.

» READ MORE: Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama exhort Philly supporters to get out and vote for Kamala Harris

Instead, it was a solo acoustic exercise in which the Boss broke the songs down into their quietened, sometimes whispered constituent parts, before building them back up into sturdy sing-alongs urging the crowd to take up the task at hand.

After those two serious numbers, Springsteen made his case in support of Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and in opposition to former President Donald Trump and his vice presidential nominee, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, calling them “folks who want to fundamentally undermine the American way of life.”

He closed with “Dancing in the Dark,” which he introduced by saying that John Legend’s version of the song is the most beautiful he had ever heard. (Leading to the unanswered question: So why don’t you bring him out to sing it?)

His own version of the crowd-pleaser was alternately hushed and frisky, firing up the room without bashing the song out, but inviting the crowd in to carry the weight with him.

This wasn’t Springsteen’s first Philly get-out-the-vote rally before a presidential election. In 2008, he played a free show on the Ben Franklin Parkway in support of Obama, and he also performed at Independence Hall on election eve in November 2016 for Hillary Clinton.

That night, he sang “Long Walk Home,” a dirge about a divided nation and the long work of healing that lay ahead after a divisive campaign that he believed would end with Trump’s defeat.

Springsteen has been singing that song on his current concert tour, introducing it as “a prayer for our country.” But instead of including such a pained, sorrowful tune in his set list on Monday, he replaced it with “Land of Hope and Dreams,” a song that would rouse those in the crowd to exercise their democratic prerogative next Tuesday, if they hadn’t already done so.

Early voters lined up at the satellite election offices a few blocks north of the rally on Monday afternoon just as Springsteen, Legend, and Obama were lined up at the Liacouras Center.

After Obama followed Springsteen and finished his own speech, “Land of Hope and Dreams” played again: this time the recorded full-band version, letting the former president end on a high note. That was followed by a song that Democratic voters hope will apply to the U.S. after Election Day: Beyoncé's “Run the World (Girls).”

Before Springsteen took the stage, Mayor Cherelle L. Parker took over hype duties, walking to the stage to McFadden & Whitehead’s 1979 Philadelphia International Records hit “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” and shouting out “John Legend is here! The Boss is here! President Barack Obama is here!” She went on to introduce Legend, who was stumping in Philly for the second straight day after attending church services with Casey on Sunday.

Backed by a three-piece band and three backup singers, Legend got right into the classic socially conscious soul music canon with Sam Cooke’s civil rights anthem, “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

The echoey Liacouras Center is no one’s idea of an ideal acoustic listening room, but backed by booming drums, Legend had no trouble communicating with his grainy, gospel-schooled vocals, though he did sound like all his stumping might have left him with a minor head cold.

He followed Sam Cooke with Teddy Pendergrass, taking a seat at the grand piano and announcing, “I want to play a little Philadelphia soul music,” before dipping into the Philadelphia International catalog with Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes’ “Wake Up Everybody,” the 1975 hit that in turn inspired Legend and the Roots’ 2010 album, Wake Up!

Legend talked up his Philly roots, saying that his years at the University of Pennsylvania were “some of the best years of my life,” and recalled opening for Alicia Keys at the Liacouras Center in 2005. Then he belted out his breakout hit “Ordinary People,” which he said was written for his twice-married and twice-divorced parents.

He then got preacherly, making his emphatic case for Harris over Trump, whom he called “unprepared, incompetent, and woefully unserious” and “a career con artist.”

Legend finished his set with his own civil rights song: a stirring version of “Glory” from Ava DuVernay’s 2014 film, Selma, that brought the biggest response from the crowd up to that point.

As the Liacouras Center filled up and anticipation built for Obama, Springsteen, and Legend to take the stage early in the evening on Monday, Philly hip hop party starter DJ Diamond Kuts warmed the crowd up in between brief speeches by Democratic Reps. Malcolm Kenyatta and Joanna McClinton.

She pumped up the room, spinning Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and Steve Winwood, plus Ludacris and Mystikal’s “Move Bitch,” on which she ad-libbed and changed the lyric to:

“Move Trump, get out the way, get out the way!”