When Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band resume their European tour Tuesday night at the Reale Arena in San Sebastián, they’ll be taking the stage without Steve Van Zandt. The guitarist recently underwent surgery for appendicitis, and will be missing the next few shows as he recovers.
“Got a sharp pain in my stomach, thought it was food poisoning, turned out to be appendicitis,” Van Zandt wrote in a message to fans via Instagram. “Got lucky with an exceptional hospital in San Sebastian. Operation was a complete success and I’m hoping to get back on stage for at least one of the shows in Milan. Thank you all for all the good vibes. See you soon.”
This is an unusual situation, but it’s not without precedent. In the spring of 2014, Van Zandt missed several weeks worth of shows while filming his Netflix series Lilyhammer. Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello took his place. And on Feb. 10, 2023, Van Zandt had to miss a show in Dallas when he tested positive for Covid. In that instance, Springsteen and Nils Lofgren covered his parts without additional help.
“Before the show I was like, ‘There are things I need to remember to cover,’” Lofren told Rolling Stone later that year. “But when you’re out there it’s like, ‘Oh shit, this part Steven did. I better jump on that.’ It comes to you, because we’re a well-oiled machine that’s used to hearing each other for hours and hours and hours on the road. So everyone stepped up and took care of each other to get it done. But it was a unique experience.”
That 2023 Dallas show was the first time that Lofgren and Springsteen were the only two guitarists onstage at an E Street Band concert since 1988. But it’s likely to happen again now that Van Zandt is recuperating. And don’t expect to see Morello parachute in to help them out. In a 2023 interview with Rolling Stone, Morello said such a thing wouldn’t be possible.
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“Oh, hell no!” he said when asked if he could step in for Van Zandt at a moment’s notice. “I learned 250 songs for that tour [in 2014]. Maybe with the appropriate cheat sheet. Maybe. But no. I worked really, really hard to get ready for that, and it’s been a few years. I mean, if they played ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’ seven times in a row, I’d be ready.”
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In other words, Nils Lofgren is going to have his hands full on Tuesday. And since Van Zandt says he’ll be back for the closing show in Milan at the latest, he’ll remain quite busy June 27 in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, and June 30 when they play Milan for the first of two nights.
There are no gigs on the books after Milan, but Springsteen recently told Rolling Stone he hopes to bring the E Street Band to Australia next year. He also said future tours will be much shorter. “Rather than do a 130-show stretch,” he said, “which we did this time because we had been off for six years, so I had to get back in touch with my audience, and it was fun playing with the band … in the future, I think we’ll probably play more often and less dates.”