Live 1975-85

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band

Columbia Records, 1986

http://www.brucespringsteen.net

REVIEW BY: Jason Warburg

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 11/14/2008

In addition to his many other claims to fame, Bruce Springsteen is one of the most bootlegged artists ever.  Like the Grateful Dead, Springsteen inspired an entire community of bootleg buyers, sellers and traders due to the hunger of his fanatical followers to replicate the ecstasy they experienced seeing his live shows.

By 1986, fans had been begging for an official live release for almost a decade; he was a national act by 1975 and filling arenas by 1978-80.  But in typical Springsteen fashion, he wouldn’t give in to pressure from any quarter and didn’t turn his focus to issuing a live album until he was good and ready.  A small prod from producer/manager/guru/sidekick Jon Landau didn’t hurt either, as catalogued in this album’s liner notes.

The wait was worth it.  In 1977 this would have been a single album; by 1979 or 1980, perhaps a double.  Thanks to the multiplatinum smash album Born In The USA, though, by 1985 Springsteen was a superstar, one of the biggest selling acts in the world, filling stadiums wherever he went.  And so, when this album came out, he was able to offer his fans not just one or two LPs’ worth of music, but five.  (The subsequent CD version squeezes the same track list onto three CDs.) 

The roster of cuts here covers every album in his catalogue up to that point while sprinkling in several unreleased songs (“Paradise By The C,” “Fire,” “Because The Night,” “Seeds”) and fresh covers (“Raise Your Hand,” “This Land Is Your Land,” “War,” “Jersey Girl”).  More to the point story-telling-wise, it also ranges in time and venue from an intimate October 1975 show at LA’s Roxy Theatre to an epochal September 1985 show down the road a piece at the Los Angeles Coliseum, with plenty of cuts also from arena and stadium shows back home in New Jersey.

This album has typically gotten a mixed reception from Springsteen’s hardest core of fans.  In lifting cuts from 15 different shows spread over 10 years, it loses the sense of capturing a single defining moment that is achieved by some of the more revered bootlegs, even with their inferior audio quality.  There’s no denying, however, that my_heart_sings_the_harmony_web_ad_alt_250 Live 1975-85 offers high-quality live recordings of the bulk of the man’s very best songs, in a sequence that both makes musical sense and flows like a real version of one of the group’s legendary three-and-a-half-hour shows.  In that sense, this collection accomplishes exactly what it set out to.

Thunder Road,” besides being the earliest recording represented here, is a natural opener, even retaining the nightclub emcee’s intro from the October 18, 1975 Roxy show.  This version, done in the more typical live arrangement with just Bruce on vocals and harmonica and Roy Bittan on piano, is simply gorgeous and worth the price of the album on its own.  The rest of the first CD, taken mostly the 1978 Darkness On The Edge Of Town tour, concentrates on Springsteen’s first four albums.  One of the best decisions Springsteen and Landau make here is to include not just the music, but some of Bruce’s infamous onstage monologues, perhaps the best of which is his pitch-perfect rumination on his own family life in the middle of “Growin’ Up.”  Other early highlights include a hard-rocking, organ-heavy “Backstreets,” a ten-minute pull-out-the-stops rendition of “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” and, as we transition to bigger venues, a massive sing-along to “Hungry Heart” from a 1980 Nassau Coliseum show.

The second CD grows steadily more purposeful and serious, with material mostly taken from Darkness On The Edge Of Town, The River and Nebraska.  A list of the best moments would have to include: the crowd singalong near the end of the driving “Badlands”; the lengthy guitar solo at the climax of the blistering “Because The Night,” popularized previously by Springsteen’s co-writer Patti Smith; and the steely intensity of “Candy’s Room,” “Darkness,” and the trio of semi-acoustic tracks from Nebraska.

Disc three opens with Springsteen delivering an extended monologue about getting his draft notice while introducing “The River,” which leads right into the band’s explosive cover of the Barrett Strong-Norman Whitfield classic “War.”  A reordered performance of most of the Born In The USA album follows, and then you’re into the powerhouse encore set.  “Born To Run” is every bit as electrifying as it should be (the video version is a classic, too), “No Surrender” is transformed into an acoustic elegy to lost innocence, “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” swings hard with the Miami Horns on board, and a cover of Tom Waits’ “Jersey Girl” makes for a bittersweet closer.

In the final assessment, for all its remarkable moments, Live 1975-85 is neither as riveting nor as uplifting as actually seeing Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band live.  In that sense, it is less than it could be.  The fact that, in spite of that shortcoming, it remains one of the greatest live albums ever issued, tells you both how transcendent the real thing can be, and how hard that feeling is to capture in a recording.

Rating: A

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© 2008 Jason Warburg and The Daily Vault. All rights reserved. Review or any portion may not be reproduced without written permission. Cover art is the intellectual property of Columbia Records, and is used for informational purposes only.