He was 31 years old, he was already a brilliant rock star and, for the first time, he was going to play in Spain, a remote country that only a few months before a colonel named Antonio Tejero had put in check a system of freedoms still under construction. Place and date of the event: Palau d'Esports de Barcelona, April 21, 1981. Only the 7,600 fans who were lucky enough to be there and Bruce Springsteen himself, who would later remember, really know what happened there: “The faces we saw at the concert were some of the most passionate ever seen on the entire planet. Despite playing for a few thousand, the ruckus they made shook the group and that was unforgettable. We would return”.
The Boss's idyll with Barcelona, a city to which he would indeed return many other times with the E. Street Band, had been fostered by the promoter Gay Mercader, who took him to dinner at the Amaya restaurant. They walked down the Rambla calmly, without anyone approaching them. “It was a whirlwind on stage. Very intense, because he was like that, very intense. He came to conquer, to take the city, and that is what he did”, he recalls.
Attendees included Dave Marsh, the biographer of the creator of The River, who would add to the clamor (“the best concert I've ever been to”) and a lucky photographer named Francesc Fàbregas. He worked for Vibraciones magazine and was the only one who was able to take pictures that night. His legs were shaking so much that he didn't have time to enjoy the concert.
The images of Fàbregas, which he himself was in charge of revealing in his home on a heart-stopping dawn, were distributed the following day by numerous national and international media and now, coinciding with the 42nd anniversary of that crush (“from now on I take you in my heart"), can be seen in the Palau Robert Gardens. The exhibition brings together thirty photographs, in black and white and in color (“the color of that moment”), accompanied by short chronicles arising from the memory of people like Loquillo, for whom that performance represented “the end of adolescence” for a week before joining the military service in the Navy.
The entrance cost 900 pesetas, but it was worth it. It is not always the case that what they give you is so brutal that it leaves the public "carved", in the words of Jordi Sierra i Fabra. “It was an ecstasy, a collective shot. And a party. It was not a rock recital, but a concert to make you dance. It was very little after 23-F, and at that time we needed something like that”.
Fàbregas had been given permission to shoot only during the first songs, "but since he's a bit of a pirate, when time was up I mixed with the public" and he was also able to capture the moment in which the musician, already in the final stretch of a three-hour performance, he takes off his jean jacket, revealing his biceps under his white shirt. "What saddens me is not having taken photos of the public," says Fàbregas. "Because, I learned there, the history of a concert is also in the faces of those who attend."
Reading his words, you don't have to show off your imagination to get an idea of the face that the scriptwriter and director Manuel Huerga must have had: “My head exploded seeing the beast on stage, enjoying it as much as he did and immediately noticing that the Records are fine, but that concerts have nothing to do with it and that this man can only be seen live, as many times as your life, or his, allows us to”. The next appointment, if the covid does not prevent it, on April 28 and 30, at the Estadi Olímpic.
