"This Band Was Built For Hard Times"

Bruce and the boys are out on tour right now, swinging through Southern America and the West Coast (minus the Northwest). They've been putting on some incredible shows, of which the clip below from Johnny 99 makes evident.

Johnny 99 is another cut from the Nebraska album, reworked from its original, humble acoustic beginnings into this fiery rock n roll number we see here. The irony of watching songs from that album live in recent years, tracks like 99, Reason to Believe, Atlantic City and the outtake songs that missed the album like Murder Incorporated and Pink Cadillac is that at the time Bruce simply couldn't find a way to make these songs work with the band. Twenty-plus years later, he has.

And they're really something.

In a recent interview, Bruce talked about the tragic economic situation this country is facing, and said that he decided to go back out on tour almost immediately after the end of his last one. "Our band," he said, "was built from the beginning for hard times. That was the music we wrote, that was the way that we played."