It was nearly Fall, 1978, and I had just recently started what was to be my junior year in high school. Earlier that summer, I had fulfilled two of my purchase obligations to Columbia House record club by picking up Billy Joel’s Turnstiles, and Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run. I had been familiar with Bruce and the album’s title track ever since 1975; I can still remember riding in the back seat of Coach Jack Brent’s car, crossing the Trenton Makes bridge from New Jersey back into Pennsylvania after our grade school soccer team lost to Marie Katzenbach School for the Deaf by something like 8 to 1. Terry McGovern urged Mr. Brent to turn up the radio as the song’s beginning drumroll, guitar and saxophone muscled through the car’s stereo speakers. It wasn’t long thereafter when Bruce appeared on the covers of both Time and Newsweek (in the same week) but for some reason I did not pay much attention to Bruce or his music. I was in the 8th grade, still being weaned on Elton John and his non-stop string of 70’s pop hits. Bruce Springsteen was not a pop star – he was too rough around the edges for my tastes. Having been prevented by court order from releasing any new recordings while Bruce fought his then manager for nearly two years, Bruce fell off of my radar screen.
Jump forward to the summer of 1978. I had graduated from 8th grade in 1976 and was soon to be a 15-year-old high school junior with raging hormones and a lot of growing pains. My musical tastes were still pop-oriented, but had grown more diverse in the previous two years. And so it was in mid-summer 1978 when I placed my turntable’s needle to the black vinyl LP and lay back on my bed for my first listen to Born To Run. I’m not sure if I had ever heard any of the songs before, but I do know that after listing to the complete album, I was blown away. I promptly fell off my bed, flipped the album over, and listened to it again… and again. I was immediately a Bruce Springsteen fan.
Jump forward a few months. It was mid-September and I was watching some forgotten show on TV when a commercial came on. It was completely silent, except for the sound of a typewriter “typing” on the TV screen something about a Bruce Springsteen live radio concert to be broadcast on Philadelphia’s Q102 (WIOQ) on September 19th, in support of his new album Darkness On The Edge of Town. I immediately made a note of the date and time, and anxiously waited for the night of the 19th to arrive. I had my cassette deck and blank tapes ready to record the show in its entirety: all of the pre-show DJ banter, all of Bruce’s onstage comments and intros to the songs, everything. When Bruce and the E Street Band hit the stage that Tuesday night, I was waiting. For nearly 3 hours, I recorded the complete show, except for one song: Thunder Road. The first side of the tape simply ran out. I wrote down the complete set list with the song name (or what I thought was the name, as some songs were totally new to me and to the rest of the audience as well.) Once the show was finished, I knew immediately that I had witnessed something truly special: Bruce and the band were at their absolute finest, and the radio broadcast was near perfect. I listened to the tapes for a while, my own little piece de resistance. It wasn’t until much later, nearly a year, when I began to share my tapes with some schoolmates. I edited the tapes down to remove the DJ banter before the show, at intermission, and between encores. I made copies of copies to assemble the entire concert chronologically on one tape. I let some friends borrow the tapes. Eventually, the tapes degraded, became garbled when they were chewed up inside various tape decks. What had once been a pristine capturing of the entire Capitol Theatre show became virtually unlistenable. Some years later, around 1981, in an Afton Avenue record shop I found a vinyl copy of the show preserved on 3 discs, but all of Bruce’s onstage song intros had been edited out, and the recording just lost its magic.
Jump forward 20 years. September 19, 1998 is my wedding date – coincidence? Jump a year or two later and internet file sharing through services such as Audio Galaxy, Kazaa, and of course Napster, were suddenly facilitating the sharing of all kinds of files but mostly .mp3 formatted audio files of songs that had not previously been available anywhere else. Suddenly, what was once old was now new again, including old radio concert broadcasts from 1978 of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey. Every track, including the onstage banter. I do not know who it was that shared these tracks, but I am eternally grateful to be able to listen once again to the complete show recording, almost exactly as I had now 30 years ago, and to be able to share this show recording with those who might have missed it the first time, or maybe forgot exactly how perfect this show really was. It is my pleasure to share it with you now.
Bruce and the band take the stage to wild cheering; he asks “New Jersey, can you believe it? Are you ready?” He then counts off “One, Two” and the band launches into…
- Badlands
- Streets of Fire
- Spirit in the Night
- Darkness On The Edge of Town
- Independence Day
Later released on 1980’s The River.
- The Promised Land
- Prove It All Night
All I can say is, “Wow!” A scorching 2 minute intro by Roy Bittan, Bruce and Max Weinberg is followed by an explosive rendering of this song; the song ends where it started, with Bruce and Miami Steve Van Zandt trading powerful leads.
- Racing In The Street
Bruce relates the story of the inspiration for the Thunder Road title between songs…
- Thunder Road
Bruce interacts with the home crowd, who bestow on him gifts for his upcoming birthday on September 23rd; he opens one gift printed on green and white fan-fold tractor feed paper, which he takes to be a letter indicating “You bank account is overdrawn.” It is actually an old mainframe computer-generated portrait of the Boss. He indicates, “What a likeness!” He receives another gift of a hat, and replies, “It fits too! How’d you know my head was so big?”
- Meeting Across The River
- Jungeland
Break
Bruce opens the second part of the show with a song “for all the folks in Philadelphia who are listening in”
- Kitty’s Back
- Fire
- Candy’s Room
- Because The Night
Again, wow. This is sung with a different lyric than as written when Bruce gave the song to Patti Smith and the band matches the energy of Prove It All Night from the first part of the show.
- Point Blank
Later released on 1980’s The River with re-written lyrics. This version is sung with a different lyric, as the song had been evolving during the summer of 1978.
- Not Fade Away
- She’s The One
- Backstreets
Sung “for all the folks up around Boston” this version includes variations on Drive All Night and Sad Eyes
- Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)
First Encore
- Fourth of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)
- Born To Run
Second Encore
- Tenth Avenue Freeze Out
- Detroit Medey
Performance from the Madison Square Garden later released in an edited version on the No Nukes soundtrack. This version is better!
Third Encore
- Raise Your Hand
Bruce calls a shout out to each of the cities that are broadcasting the show live before finally, after nearly three hours and 25+ songs, Bruce and the band complete their performance to a thoroughly drained and exhausted crowd.
I was playing with iTunes yesterday, particularly with the new Ping feature which incorporates Twitter-like social networking directly into the application. I noticed when playing a particular song, the iTunes Ping sidebar indicated that a certain someone named Bruce Springsteen also likes that particular artist. “Cool,” I thought, “let me click on this guy and see what else he’s about” and as it turns out it really is The Boss himself (or at least someone in his employ) posting “pings” on iTunes. His ping from September 10th indicates that there is a new release coming out on November 16th: The Promise: The Darkness On The Edge Of Town Story which includes a 90 minute documentary The Promise: The Making of Darkness On The Edge Of Town and an additional 21 previously unreleased songs from the Darkness sessions.
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