Admit it—you feel a little goofy when you cheer in response to a musician shouting out Minneapolis or St. Paul or Minnesota from the stage. It’s a good kind of goofy, no doubt, all part of the fun of going to a gig. But we’re aware and so are they that everyone’s participating in a ritual. No matter how special they say we are, we know they say that to all the cities.
But every shout out to Minneapolis and Minnesota at the "Defend Minnesota" concert at First Avenue Friday afternoon felt like genuine recognition, and was received as such. Minnesota had earned it, through the disciplined and dogged resistance of our community to a violent federal occupation.
We needed that recognition too. As with every sister protest in another city or sympathetic piece of reporting in a national outlet, the testimony of each musician that Minnesota had inspired them stoked something more than our ordinary Midwestern need for validation. Efforts like ours feed off constant assurance that our actions are being seen, that they’re not submerged in the news-cycle churn or warped by algorithmic distortion.
The bill, headlined by Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and half of the Chicago punks Rise Against, also promised a “very special guest.” That guest, as many ascertained or at least hoped before they arrived, was Bruce Springsteen, who’d just written a little song about us. He’s also maybe the only guy who could get me to cheer not just for Minneapolis or Minnesota, but for “our good country, the United States of America” in 2026.
The afternoon began promptly at noon with Minnesota fave Ike Reilly, and the singer-songwriter shared that he’s from Libertyville, Illinois, the same town as Tom Morello. “He got out though,” Reilly quipped. His son singing low harmonies and joining in on guitar, Reilly started with “At Least Another Day,” a song written after the uprising following George Floyd’s murder; he closed with a song called “Fuck the Good Old Days,” and amen. “I thought you were saying ‘Fuck Ike,’” he joked about the chant that went up intermittently throughout the afternoon, and led us in a few rounds himself.
Few protest concerts feature an instrumental flamenco-jazz interlude, but that’s exactly what fusion legend Al Di Meola provided. The inclusion of his name as part of the lineup spurred a lot of “that Al Di Meola?” queries, but it was indeed the fleet-fingered Chick Corea collaborator, now a remarkably well-preserved 71 years old. A lovely, florid version of the Beatles’ “In My Life,” adapting the harpsichord solo and all, was a highlight, as was his genteel call to “Eff Ice.” The crowd was attentive and quiet, and not just out of polite respect.
“How do you follow a guy who played with fuckin’ Miles Davis?” asked Tim McIlrath of Rise Against, who was joined by the band’s lead guitarist Zach Blair. Well, one way is to intersperse some hometown choruses—from the Replacements’ “Bastards of Young” and, much more unpredictably, Soul Asylum’s “Misery”—into your own material. To close things out the duo reached back to Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.” For me, the verses always feel very specific to the Bush the Elder years—can anyone say we have a kinder, gentler machine gun hand in 2026? But never underestimate how a great chorus can keep a song evergreen.
Morello himself is a rabble-rousing pro, not that we rabble needed much rousing by the time he addressed us as “brothers and sisters” with a very MC5 fervor. “Thank you for welcoming us to the Battle of Minneapolis,” he said, later adding “I can confirm that we are the outside agitators sent to stir up trouble” and calling Minnesota “an inspiration to the entire nation.”
The show hit lift off when Morello kicked into what he introduced as “an old Native American war chant,” which turned out to be “Killing in the Name.” Rage frontman Zack De La Rocha was hardly missed as the crowd took over the lyrics without dropping a syllable. Chanting “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” sure feels more righteous when thugs have overrun the streets of your city than it did in the ’90s, when that chorus was just as likely to be seized by fratty malcontents looking for an excuse to collide with each other.
In addition to his activist exhortations, Morello shared an anecdote about the first person who got to listen in on a Rage Against the Machine rehearsal. That dude’s response? “Your music makes me want to fight.”
Morello’s guitar tone, a sound that mimics both turntable scratching and a malfunctioning transistor radio, remains a wonder, especially live. An extended instrumental medley of RATM oldies was followed by a shorter medley of Audioslave tunes. Then everyone who’d performed earlier came back out for a big-group rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” complete with a break where Morello acknowledged that this land is in fact Native land while underlying Guthrie’s anti-capitalist message.
Finally, Morello announced, “The future of democracy in this country will be decided on the streets of Minneapolis.” And with that, Bruce Springsteen ambled out onto the First Avenue stage for the first time in his career.
“The Streets of Minneapolis,” of course, is also the name of Springsteen’s most recent song, a protest number in the old Broadside ballad style that calls out Trump, Miller, and Noem by name and memorializes DHS-slain Minnesotans Renee Good and Alex Pretti, while also pronouncing Nicollet correctly.
The song has caught a few stray critiques for its earnestness, and Bruce seemed to acknowledge that. He mentioned writing and recording the song quickly, and then asking Morello, “Don’t you think it’s kinda soapboxy?” He quoted the guitarist’s response: “Bruce, nuance is wonderful, but sometimes you have to kick them in the teeth.” (As Springsteen explained, “Tom is an excitable man.”)
I’m with Morello. Yes, a younger, snider me might have wrinkled his nose at Bruce drawling about “the winter of ’26” or instantly endowing the frantic events we’d all recently lived with a folksy, bygone traditionalism. I’m a Bruce fan to my core—I grew up just one New Jersey Turnpike exit away from his hometown and turned 14 the year Born in the USA dropped—but his antiquarian tendencies have always put me on guard.
I know better now. Some moments need to be treated with a weighty formality, a way of insisting that what has happened will be remembered and is connected to other powerful moments in the past. “Streets of Minneapolis” is Springsteen’s way of reading the events of January 2026 in Minneapolis into the historical record. Hearing him perform the song here, onstage, alone, now, drove that point home.
Morello and his band returned to join Springsteen for “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” The title track of a bleak, largely acoustic album that he released in 1994, Springsteen re-recorded it in 2013 with Morello, whose guitar work provided just the electrical shock to jolt Springsteen’s literary reference into the present.
As moving a number as “Tom Joad” is, it’s not exactly a fist pumper. So to close out the afternoon we got an all-hands-on-deck singalong to John Lennon’s “Power to the People.” Morello clearly had no interest in exploring the wonders of nuance this afternoon, and he was right not to.
I’ll leave it to the historians to determine whether we had indeed experienced “the greatest brunchtime concert in the history of Sixth Avenue,” as Morello declared with bravado. It was the second time he’d flubbed the name of our treasured venue, but no one seemed to mind much. With all the recognition that we needed, we entered back into daylight, where protests were once more shutting the city down, tens of thousands already gathered in the streets of Minneapolis.
