At eight o'clock at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, with the room loud and the band warm and the doors open for forty minutes, Bruce Springsteen walks out from a back hallway carrying a yellow legal pad. He has been scribbling on it since soundcheck. He hands a sheet to Roy Bittan, another to Max Weinberg, others to Garry Tallent, Steve Van Zandt, and Nils Lofgren. Each one is the night's setlist, written by hand thirty minutes ago, and each one is already wrong. By the third song he will yell an audible from the lip of the stage, and the next song will be one that is not on the page.
The E Street Band has rehearsed more than three hundred songs. Any of them could come on a given night. The discipline of the band is that the songs do not matter — the order does. Bruce reads the room from the apron the way a producer reads a take in playback. He sees a sign in the third row. He sees a kid on his father's shoulders who was not born when the song he is about to call was written. He calls it anyway, with reasons no one in the room knows yet but everyone is about to feel.
The setlist is the second composition. Not the songs you sing — anyone with a touring band can produce a list of songs — but the order in which they meet each other, and the order in which they meet the room. Every running order is an argument about what the night is for. The first three songs ask a question. The next four answer it. The middle has a song that does not seem to belong; you put it there because the room needs to breathe, or because two songs in a row would be unbearable without a pause shaped exactly that way. Then the climb, the descent, the door left open for an encore — which is not a victory lap but a second visit, a different song than the first.
Dylan reorders his own songs every night so the audience cannot sing along to its own memory. Aretha at the Fillmore West in March 1971 ended a night with "Dr. Feelgood" because she could feel the temperature of the room and the planned closer was the wrong question to ask it. The Grateful Dead never played the same set twice; the architecture of a Dead show was the actual composition, and the songs were the materials.
An album is a setlist too. Side A of Astral Weeks is twenty-eight minutes of architecture; rearrange it and you have not changed the songs but you have changed the record. Blood on the Tracks is a different record if you swap "Tangled Up in Blue" with "Idiot Wind." Sequencing is where the writer becomes a producer of his own work — choosing not what to say but in what order to say it, which is most of what saying means.
What is rehearsable in a live show is the playing. What is not rehearsable is the running order, because the running order has to be made in the presence of the people who came. The artist who treats the setlist as fixed before the doors open is performing for the room he expected. The artist who writes the order in pencil, walks out, watches, and rewrites is performing for the room that arrived.
The list on the yellow pad is not what the audience is going to hear. The list is a starting point, and the show is the long argument with that starting point, conducted in lights. By the time the encore comes, the night has decided what it was for, and the only person who could have written that order is the one who waited until eight o'clock to begin.
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