The fact that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band last played in D.C. just this past May didn’t seem to put a damper on the reception that the Boss and friends received when they hit the stage at the Verizon Center. After the jump and at the full gallery, check out some images from the initial moments of last night’s show.

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In which the author contemplates the Boss’ misguided affinity for an obscure New York no-wave duo.

Louis P. Mazur’s excellent Slate piece on Bruce Springsteen’s 1975 album Born to Run hails the hit record as the fruit of one visionary’s dogged persistence. Springsteen, laboring Lincoln-like through the 1970s, had twice failed to make good on the record industry’s big bets on his ramshackle boardwalk aesthetic—1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park and 1974’s The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle (1974) had pleased critics, but failed to move units.

According to Mazur, Springsteen’s problem wasn’t a lack of spontaneity, but bad editing. Born to Run documents Springsteen’s triumph over his own first thoughts. “What mattered to [Springsteen] was to sound spontaneous, not to be spontaneous,” Mazur writes. “It took him six months during the spring and summer of 1974 to record the title track.”

This devotion to excellence is why Bruce Springsteen can’t cover Suicide.

Suicide, the revolutionary, drummer-less duo formed by New York art fucks Alan Vega and Martin Rev in the ’70s, was reviled by punks. But, like many reviled things, Suicide still looks and sounds like the future. Here’s an undated performance of the ballad “Dream Baby Dream”:

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