Every Friday at 5 pm ET, nugs.net founder Brad Serling hosts “The Weekly Live Stash” on nugs.net radio, nugs.net radio – SiriusXM channel 716. Tune in to hear his selections of the best new live music, and check out this week’s playlist below featuring professionally mixed recordings from Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros., Gov’t Mule, Greensky Bluegrass, moe., and more. Paid nugs subscribers may be eligible for 4-months of SiriusXM All Access (App Only), see your account page to take advantage of this offer. Offer Details apply. Subscribers can stream this week’s tracks from the #WeeklyLiveStash, only in the mobile app.
Every Friday at 5 pm ET, nugs.net founder Brad Serling hosts “The Weekly Live Stash” on nugs.net radio, nugs.net radio – SiriusXM channel 716. Tune in to hear his selections of the best new live music, and check out this week’s playlist below featuring professionally mixed recordings from The White Stripes, Eggy, Spafford, The String Cheese Incident, and more. Paid nugs subscribers may be eligible for 4-months of SiriusXM All Access (App Only), see your account page to take advantage of this offer. Offer Details apply. Subscribers can stream this week’s tracks from the #WeeklyLiveStash, only in the mobile app.
Lovely Day Neal Francis & Nigel Hall
5/5/23 New Orleans, LA
An exclusive archive from The White Stripes is now available for streaming in the nugs.net app, featuring a two night stand in Glasgow from January 2004. From long time White Stripes fan Mike on this month’s ‘Third Man Thursday’ releases:
January 2004: Glasgow, Scotland
Scottish Nation Army
Just weeks after the New Years Eve show in Chicago, the band were back across the pond once more, to perform a final run of concerts in the UK and France. These shows in Glasgow took place at the midpoint of the tour, and were the last stop before they’d be under the lights and the cameras at Blackpool. Being of Scottish descent, Jack and Meg were back in “the homeland”, playing to audiences of 5,000 fellow Scots in the aptly-named Hall 3 of the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre. On a tour where each show was a consistently excellent performance, what makes the Glasgow concerts special is that together they represent the moment when Seven Nation Army officially became an anthem.
While already on a steady path through the stadiums of Europe, the now ubiquitous “Seven Nation Army” riff had already been chanted by audiences at the band’s live shows pretty much right from the first time it was performed live. Having been released to radio just weeks before the start of the Elephant tour in February 2003, crowds quickly went from clapping in time to the riff at the opening show in Wolverhampton, to singing along to the riff at Manchester the very next night. Nearly a year later, and it’s at the first night in Glasgow where the participation from the audience would reach a kind of critical mass. With so many versions played at the shows before this, the ones at Glasgow are different. On the recording from the first night, you can even hear Jack’s reaction as he starts the song and the crowd of 5,000 immediately begin chanting the riff in unison, causing him to delay his entry into the first verse. The very next night, the crowd would do it again. Where other audiences may have chanted the riff or sung the lyrics to the first line before respectfully getting out of the way so as to enjoy the rest of the song, Glasgow is the moment when the audience didn’t get out of the way. Like a Scottish war cry, the audiences here aren’t just singing along, the band and the crowd are performing the song together.
As if the universe couldn’t possibly let this kind of moment happen without also letting its polar opposite exist within the same time and space, the triumph of the Seven Nation Army chant at Glasgow is met with an equally unique moment from the crowd, as it’s at the first show where a member of the audience throws a shoe which hits Jack square in the face during the encore of “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself.” Rather than let it ruin the evening, Jack responds by immediately launching into a defiant Astro and Jack the Ripper, with the audience roaring in approval in the background. Having completely erased any impact from the incident, he then closes the show by restarting “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself,” not missing a beat, with the audience again right there and singing along to every word.
After that first show, in an almost too-good-to-be-true coincidence, the second performance in Glasgow just happened to take place on Burns Night, the annual celebration of the birth of Scottish poet Robert Burns, the author of Auld Lang Syne. One of the most recognized songs in the world, the poem that Burns wrote was originally put to a different melody, but as it spread it eventually evolved into the song now known the world over, which gets sung every year on New Year’s Eve. As eloquent as the lyrics to that song are, many only get as far as the opening line of “Should auld acquaintance be forgot” before losing track of the words that follow, while the melody has a more permanent place in our collective consciousness, instantly recognizable from the very first notes. At some point, after a song reaches that level of popularity, it becomes a kind of folk music, where the people singing it, or chanting it, get to decide what the song means, or how it should be sung. Once that happens, it doesn’t really matter what the words are. Sound familiar?
1/24/04 Glasgow – Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre – LISTEN NOW
Kicking off the only two-night stand of the tour to take place entirely on a weekend, the band return to Scotland with an epic show. As much as this one is all about the band’s excellent performance, it’s perhaps the audience who steal the show. You can hear them in full force from the very beginning, singing along to lines in “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground,” “Hotel Yorba,” and even singing along to the melodies of “In the Cold, Cold Night and I Think I Smell a Rat.” No surprise that they turn “Seven Nation Army” into a definitive moment where the sound of the crowd chanting is nearly as powerful as the sound of the band playing the song. The setlist also features multiple rarities, with “Stop Breaking Down” getting the first airing since the Livid Festival performance at Melbourne, complete with the adlib of Stones “In My Passway” by Robert Johnson. This night also gets an even more rare outing of “You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket,” followed by the final live performance of “Hypnotize.” Reflecting the intimacy and connection so present at this show, “We’re Going to Be Friends” gets dedicated to the red headed women and soccer players with long black hair in the crowd, which elicits an audible laugh from Meg. While a shoe-throwing attendee could have otherwise spoiled such a special show by hitting Jack in the face during the encore of “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself,” the band respond defiantly with a fantastic “Astro” and “Jack the Ripper,” before calmly returning to the song to close the show, again to full audience singalong.
1/25/04 Glasgow – Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre – LISTEN NOW
Night 2, and the band put the jukebox on shuffle. The fantastic run starting with “When I Hear My Name” goes all the way through a cover of Dylan’s “Outlaw Blues,” with the line “I might look like Jacky White, but I feel like Jesse James”, into “Cannon,” which includes the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Man,” “St James Infirmary,” “I Think I Smell a Rat,” and “Take a Whiff On Me” before returning to the “Cannon” solo and closing out with a single riff from “Ball and Biscuit.” The rarities continue at this show, as an excellent “Suzy Lee” gets followed by a funny moment where Jack briefly forgets the name of the song after it, “This one is called….uh, what is this called?…Truth Doesn’t Make a Noise!” “The Hardest Button to Button” gets the always welcome “brain that felt like peanut butter” line, and just as the audience singalongs were the highlight of the first night, here it’s the singalong that Jack and Meg do together on “This Protector,” making it perhaps the very best version of this understated song that you’re likely to hear. As the band plow through the rest of the excellent set, “Offend In Every Way” jump-cuts into “You’re Pretty Good Looking,” just as the beginning of “Union Forever” cuts to “Baby Blue,” which in turn gives way to “Ball and Biscuit” and “Screwdriver” to close the main set. Before “Seven Nation Army,” Jack declares the Scottish crowd the best in the world, with the song again featuring the now mandatory chanting from the crowd, before the band close the show with “Boll Weevil.” Next stop, Blackpool Lights.
Stream these three new shows and all other exclusive archive releases from Third Man Records with a 7-day free trial. Explore The White Stripes catalog and start your free trial here.
Every Friday at 5 pm ET, nugs.net founder Brad Serling hosts “The Weekly Live Stash” on nugs.net radio, nugs.net radio – SiriusXM channel 716. Tune in to hear his selections of the best new live music, and check out this week’s playlist below featuring professionally mixed recordings from Billy Strings, The String Cheese Incident, Gov’t Mule, and more. Paid nugs subscribers may be eligible for 4-months of SiriusXM All Access (App Only), see your account page to take advantage of this offer. Offer Details apply. Subscribers can stream this week’s tracks from the #WeeklyLiveStash, only in the mobile app.
There comes a point in every Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band tour when caution is thrown to the wind in terms of the setlist. While the spine of the show can remain intact, the number of changes from night to night goes up and the choices veer towards the daring.
The Wrecking Ball tour was the peak of the sign-request era, when fans in the audience asked for specific songs to be played by holding up signs that Bruce would see, collect, and from which he would typically grant wishes.
Sporadic sign requests go back decades at Springsteen concerts and have been acknowledged occasionally through the years. But on the Magic tour the practice became part of the fabric of the show, with Bruce acknowledging and de facto encouraging the practice. As soon as he threw down the gauntlet, “try to stump the E Street Band,” the audience upped its game.
The aforementioned point was in the rear view mirror when Springsteen rolled into Cardiff, Wales for a July 23, 2003 show at Millenium Stadium. This second European loop behind Wrecking Ball kept the spotlight on the album: these versions of “Death to My Hometown,” “We Take Care of Our Own,” “Pay Me My Money Down,” “Shackled and Drawn” and the title track still bristle with energy and purpose. Springsteen’s commitment to the Wrecking Ball album was undeniable every night.
But beyond set-closing and encore staples, everything else in 2013 sets was for grabs, duly illustrated by the contrast between Cardiff and the previously Archive Series-released Leeds July 24 set, just 24 hours apart.
Bruce swaps 16 tunes from Cardiff to Leeds, playing 49 different tracks across the two nights. The first 11 slots in each set share only two tracks in common, one of which is the not-exactly-ordinary “Roulette,” aired just 16 times in the Reunion era.
That sense of “anything can happen” at a Springsteen show is thrilling to experience, both for the chance to hear long-lost favorites and to witness extraordinary musicians tap their collective history and muscle memory as they rise to each sign challenge. Sure, they nail some more squarely than others, but on a night like they had in Cardiff, ragged but right prevails.
Before we get to the true chestnuts, Cardiff commences with “This Little Light of Mine ” from the Seeger Sessions (it is also reprised in the encore), lending a spiritual revival vibe to what was a warm and balmy day in the Wales capital. “Long Walk Home” keeps the rejuvenating spirit flowing and works great this early in the set. How nice would it be to see this underappreciated song return to 2024 sets?
The band (and especially the horn section) get cooking on a stomping “Adam Raised a Cain” that goes to extra time as sign requests are collated. “We’ll do an easy one first,” says Springsteen before another Darkness classic, “Prove It All Night,” performed straight down the line.
The requests then move from easy to unimaginable. “This has never been played… partly because it’s ridiculous. Completely ridiculous. It’s a very silly song,” Springsteen says as he flips a sign that says “Seaside Bar Song” on one side to reveal “TV Movie” on the other. The Born in the U.S.A. outtake had been rumored for years and was even namechecked by Max Weinberg as a memorable leftover before being released on Tracks in 1998. It’s one in a long line of sell-deprecating tales like “Local Hero” that take shots at what stardom gets reduced to.
Springsteen holds a few moments to try the song out and find the key, then says, “The Professor’s very important on this” (only to say the opposite during the song) before gamely launching into the roots rocker. After a wobble or two Springsteen and the band get it to ride pretty smoothly, though he does say at the end, “You heard it first. You heard it last.”
Whether your response to “TV Movie” is “That was fun!” or “WTF?,” that Springsteen and the band are confident enough to play a song on the spur of the moment that they recorded in just a few takes 30 years prior is pretty fucking awesome in the grand scheme of things. A triple-shot of Tracks ensues with “TV Movie” followed by the charming “Cynthia,” another BIUSA outtake, and River holdover “Roulette.”
After a mid-set pass through Wrecking Ball material, “Spirit in the Night,” “Hungry Heart” and “My City of Ruins,” another surprise. “I have a friend who’s going to sit in tonight,” Springsteen says. “When I was trying to get that guitar out of Western Auto, it was because I wanted to play and sing like this guy.”
His heartfelt words were for Eric Burdon, leader of The Animals, who takes the stage to sing “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” Back in 1975-77, Springsteen’s cover of The Animals’ “It’s My Life” (written by the late Carl D’Errico) was a centerpiece of his live shows. In November 1976 at the Palladium in New York City, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” became another classic Animals cover in the E Street repertoire. At the special 2012 SXSW performance in Austin that helped usher in the Wrecking Ball era, Burdon joined Springsteen and the band to sing his classic. In Wales they did one more time with aplomb.
Inspired by the moment, Springsteen calls for another sixties blues banger, John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom,” best known on E Street from its Tunnel of Love tour appearances which also featured a horn section. Energy from an excellent reading lingers and “Cadillac Ranch” keeps the engine chugging on a warm summer night, riding some especially hot guitar work from Stevie Van Zandt and solo turns from Soozie Tyrell and Jake Clemons.
Now in the zone, Springsteen moves seamlessly from “Cadillac Ranch” to “Summertime Blues,” with Stevie deputizing admirably on backing vocals for the late Clarence Clemons. There’s more good Van Zandt business on “You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch),” which keeps up the breakneck pace for the fourth straight song before the gas pedal is eased for “Pay Me My Money Down” and “Shackled and Drawn.” The set returns to previously scheduled programming through “Badlands” to close the main set.
A compelling 10-song encore opens with a rare-for-the-tour “Tougher Than the Rest,” played only six times circa 2012-’13. With Patti Scialfa away, interestingly it’s Van Zandt who fills the essential backing vocal with support from Tyrell, creating a distinct version of the song that’s well worth a listen. The evening’s fifth and final River song (not counting “Roulette”) features another unusual switcheroo as Roy Bittan plays the customary organ solo in “I’m a Rocker” on piano.
Following a lively reprise of “This Little Light of Mine” that feels like the last song of the night, Springsteen returns to the stage to close with a solo acoustic version of yet another Born in the U.S.A. outtake, “Janey, Don’t You Lose Heart,” rearranged with tender melancholy and used as a prelude to “Thunder Road” into which it melts. The Born to Run opener is performed beautifully unaffected and the result is an especially poignant and lovely cap to a night of welcome surprises.
2023 was a banner year of touring for many of our artists, with the app boasting nearly 3,000 shows from 2023 available for streaming. Among the myriad of standout moments, we’ve gathered the most-listened-to shows as determined by you, the fans!
From the last bow on Dead & Company’s Final Tour to Goosemas, Metallica’s M72 World Tour kick off and Bruce Springsteen’s New Jersey homecoming, there’s something for all tastes in this list. Dig into each artist’s catalog and discover new favorites with these as a jumping-off point. There’s so much to uncover from the year in live music!
The official and professionally-mixed audio from all these concerts are available to stream in the nugs app. Sign up for a free trial to listen, or for a limited time, save on a year of streaming with our Year End Sale!
2023’s Top Streamed Shows:
(In order of most listens in 2023, including shows from 2023 and New Year’s 2022. Inclusions are capped at one show per artist.)
