Bruce Springsteen in Milwaukee: At 73, he’s a little more open about final goodbyes. His tour brings him to Chicago in August.

Bruce Springsteen stood beneath a muted stage light and fingered an acoustic guitar and told a long story. If you’ve seen Springsteen and the E Street Band before, you know this moment; he’s been doing this same thing for 50 years. He spoke, lost himself in his words, paused then stopped strumming and just spoke, the audience going stone silent. For decades, these stories were about his father, his guitars, his relationship with authority. At 73, on stage Tuesday night at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, it was about death. “At 15, it’s all tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow,” he said with that familiar wary cadence, more Dust Bowl now than New Jersey. “But later on, it’s a lot more goodbyes.”

That led into “Last Man Standing,” a spare farewell of a song, about realizing he was the last living member of his first band. The death of an old bandmate from cancer brought on “a clarity of thought and purpose.” Again, you’ve seen this Springsteen. Pensive, thoughtful. Later, loose and rollicking. Much of the nearly three-hour show was the usual rave-up bombast, but something new was here: an uneasy embrace of mortality. He sang about meeting “you brother and sister on the other side.” During “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” the moving finale, he stood alone, flipping the coin on all those songs about endless Julys: “I’ll see you in my dreams, when all our summers have come to an end.”

On the dark warhorse “Backstreets,” about friendship, beach-town aimlessness and the big promises of youth, as the band fell back to only Roy Bittan’s piano, Springsteen fixated on a single set of words, turning those big promises into a kind of life sentence:

“Until the end ... until the end ... until the end ...”

If I’m honest here, I feel unprepared for this Springsteen. I’ve had plenty of notice: For the past 20 years, in concert, once-slamming anthems have grown deliberately slower. His penchant for striking poses that parody the rock-god image is still there — only now, they’re more statuesque. The old gritted intensity remains, the warmth, a commitment to endurance and leaving you sweaty and tired. Springsteen played 27 songs with such focus the band never took a customary break to leave the stage before an encore — they pushed straight through.

But this Springsteen is also foregrounding loss and age.

He doesn’t throw himself across a stage anymore; he doesn’t slide on his knees into the arms of bandmates. He glances down at his feet as he bounds between stage levels. He leans into the crowd and mugs playfully at fans like a grandparent cooing into a baby carriage. Though his performances have always been minimal on stage effects, he shows a video reel now celebrating dead E Street members, Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici. Springsteen looks fit and terrific, but he’s done trying to outrun time. He’s staring at mortality. The old joke was that he was either trying to kill himself with marathon shows or kill his audience. Increasingly, as devoted fans age, and the band creeps into its 70s — with no one eager to stop — it resembles more of a pact.

This latest tour — his first in six years (arriving in Chicago this summer for a pair of shows at Wrigley Field) — has been beset by E Street Band members in and out with COVID. If you’ve seen cellphone footage from earlier dates, you noticed Springsteen has replaced the old urgency with ache. The workingman exhaustion of legendary E Street Band concerts can seem replaced with genuine exhaustion. As someone who gets winded taking out the trash, I should be so lucky at 73. But it’s startling.

You don’t need to be a Springsteen fan to know what I’m talking about.

Among the disturbing images circulating online these days is concert footage of rockers of a certain age — Mötley Crüe, David Lee Roth, Bon Jovi, Roger Daltrey — struggling with their legacy, muttering through songs and barely keeping up, all while wearing the usual stage costume, as if auditioning for a rock-opera “Sunset Boulevard.” Aerosmith reportedly sidelined its longtime drummer for a bit when the band complained he wasn’t keeping time. Phil Collins performs mostly seated in a chair now for most of his shows. Ozzy Osbourne stopped performing entirely after a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease.

Sometime in the 1980s — when Springsteen was in his 30s and singing about “Glory Days” — there was a rash of stories in the music press about the apparent crisis of aging bands. Former Beatles and Stones and so forth were still playing into their (gasp) 40s. These were rock stars who wanted to die before they got old, and now what? That was the refrain. Youth was still so closely associated with the first decades of rock, there was no contingency plan for surviving. (In fact, being a “survivor” of the industry was itself a headline.) The idea that Eric Clapton and Stevie Wonder may not be alive someday felt improbable and was pushed to the back of minds; at worst, we assumed new artists would replace old. That’s happened somewhat (see the Taylor Swift ticket fiasco), but year after year, annual roundups of the top-grossing tours are full of bands north of age 60.

At the same time, age means there are fewer of those acts, while attrition has rendered some bands that refuse to quit unrecognizable. The last original member of Lynyrd Skynyrd died this week, but that’s not stopping them from playing Tinley Park in August.

I asked some people seated near me, how old is too old to do this?

The consensus was: As long as you don’t hurt yourself, don’t stop. Some wore “Born in the U.S.A” T-shirts, faux-vintage replicas. Some had oxygen tanks. Millennials and Gen X and Boomers, in harmony at last. A woman from Madison who didn’t want to be identified — she works on a podcast and told a co-worker she was sick so she could skip their meeting and come to this show instead (it was a whole thing) — noted how much Springsteen looks like Joe Strummer from The Clash now, hair trimmed on the sides, a Teamster face in work shirts. Her point, partly, was that Springsteen, despite his age, is no nostalgia act. And yet, maybe he’s still too much of a people pleaser, I pushed back.

Maybe, she argued, the job’s a duty.

Like Batman, I guess. He’s needed out there, he can’t just stop. Springsteen’s smaller acoustic tours were so smart, I sort of long for a full E Street band tour that doesn’t take the shape of a marathon, that’s less athletic, less familiar, though no less meaningful. And yet, Springsteen, older than many of the performers who have embarrassed themselves on YouTube, still feels like an exception. With an asterisk: A student of music history, he’s knowingly incorporating our ambivalence with decline into the show.

The E Street Band is, no joke, up to 19 members (though Patti Scialfa, his wife, sat out Milwaukee). There are five horns and four backup singers and a percussionist — all of which Springsteen uses smartly to bring early ‘70s jazzy jams to life. There’s that big ol’ sloppy energy with “Rosalita” and the punk-adjacent roar to “Candy’s Room.” Nils Lofgren, a sometime Neil Young collaborator, carries a Crazy Horse-sludge into “Because the Night.” But the biggest moments are in a whisper. It’s telling that one of the few covers on Tuesday was the Commodore’s “Nightshift,” a eulogy for soul and connection.

After 50 years of this, as well as a few years of contemplative Broadway shows and a depressive memoir that tore apart his own working-class image, the old Springsteen intimacy with his audience resembles a joy and a willing burden. His face is stonier now. At times he talks out lyrics, a hand oscillating to the rhythm of the lines. The wild-eyed goofy younger Springsteen cracks through, but never lightly, always with poignance. His contemporaries are dead, on farewell tours or already retired. He’ll be gone someday, too. His legacy will be this live act. Recordings exist, video exists, memories remain.

But his lasting gift is the impermanence of it all, the insistence that it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive, but also the reminder that one minute you’re here, next minute you’re gone.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

Springsteen & E Street Band setlist from March 7 at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee:

“No Surrender”

“Ghosts”

“Prove It All Night”

“Letter to You”

“The Promised Land”

“Candy’s Room”

“Kitty’s Back”

“Nightshift” (Commodores cover)

“Pay Me My Money Down” (Weavers cover)

“Burnin’ Train”

“Death to My Hometown”

“The E Street Shuffle”

“Last Man Standing”

“Backstreets”

“Because the Night”

“She’s the One”

“Wrecking Ball”

“The Rising”

“Badlands”

Encore:

“Land of Hope and Dreams”

“Thunder Road”

“Born to Run”

“Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)”

“Glory Days”

“Dancing in the Dark”

“Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out”

“I’ll See You in My Dreams”