The latest round of Jack White’s “No Name” tour recordings finds unparalleled, shattering versions of songs from the album of the same name, new interpretations of White Stripes classics, and impressive bust out covers of songs by the MC5, the Stooges, Cream, Hound Dog Taylor and THREE songs originally by blues master Robert Johnson.
Songs made up on the spot, with improvised lyrics? No less than six of them.
We are living through a truly wonderful, exciting time for fans of Jack White, rock and roll and the electrifying energy unleashed within these live performances.
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An exclusive archive from Jack White just dropped for streaming in the nugs.net app, featuring a batch of shows from the 2024 ‘No Name’ Tour! Sign up for a free trial now to hear all ten shows plus the entire Third Man Records archival catalog.
South Korea to Detroit to Sweden is one of the more ludicrous three show tour routings in recent memory, so it’s only fitting that the performances across Jack White’s current run of gigs have been equally as ludicrous. Day in and day out, these performances – announced mere days in advance, selling out in an instant – are garnering laudatory praise and “best concert I’ve ever been to” reviews across the board. A quarter century into his touring career, Jack White is playing the best shows of his life and the audio here is all the proof you need.
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August’s ‘Third Man Thursday’ release brings us a highly anticipated batch of official show audio from Jack White, featuring the first six shows of Jack White’s ‘No Name’ 2024 tour! Mixed and mastered by Bill Skibbe of Third Man Mastering, these shows are streaming exclusively in the nugs app with a free trial, and available to order on CD or hi-res downloads.
From Third Man Records’ archivist Ben Blackwell:
A little over two weeks ago Jack White and his band began what can only be described as an outright thrilling stretch of shows. From Nashville to Georgia to South Korea to Detroit, the shows feature the first ever live performances of songs from White’s critically acclaimed ‘No Name’ album in addition unexpected covers of gems like the Stooges “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning” and no shortage of showstopping jamming between Jack and long-time bassist Dominic Davis along with newly enlisted drummer Patrick Keeler (the Greenhornes, the Raconteurs) and Bobby Emmett (The Sights) on keys. As well as plenty of fan-favorite White Stripes tracks like “Black Math” and “Fell In Love With A Girl” and wild JW solo classics like “Lazaretto” and “Sixteen Saltines.”
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Say A Little Prayer For Her and Say A Little Prayer For Yourself
The White Stripes played fifteen shows in 1999. Only three of those occurred in any approximate vicinity of others (the late September sojourn opening for Pavement) meaning each one of the shows from ‘99 exists in a vacuum, with new songs flying in and different arrangements making themselves known, no real established running order or pacing/tempo/meter/cadence. All but four of these shows were recorded in some manner, which still feels like a tiny miracle given how unknown and unheralded the band was at this juncture.
Outside of the Stripes show from the Gold Dollar, August 14th 1997, this July 30th, 1999 gig is the White Stripes show that I have listened to the most in my life. No doubt I immediately popped this sumbitch into the cassette deck of the ‘95 Ford Taurus on the way home from the show and would continue to come back to it for years. It lives in my head rent free, iconic and memorized and encased in amber, a memory reinforced by the consistent reliving of it over the past twenty-five years that it’s foundationally unparalleled in my understanding of the band.
When I listen now, what immediately grabs me is the piano. The piano!!! Oh man, it felt like a huge coup to get the powers-that-be at the Bag to actually let Jack play the thing, a seemingly “fancy” instrument that lived on the stage but was always covered up when bands of their ilk were in the house. In comparison, the powers that be would not let the band use the projection/video screen (they softened that stance by the De Stijl album release show the following year).
Twenty years after the show, dear friend (and White Stripes roadie in arms) Brandon Beaver mailed me a stack of Polaroid pictures that I had taken at the show. I had completely forgotten about this, because, well, it wasn’t in the recording. They hadn’t informed my recollection, my mind canon of it all. I was surprised to see the piano, this grand (baby grand?) beast covered in the red-and-white stripes of an American flag that was previously used as a stage backdrop as depicted on the cover of TMR-345. The visual of it all is striking, it is visually compelling and indicates a modicum of extra effort that separated the Stripes from their peers at the time.
Couple that with the fact that in the rehearsals leading up to the show, Jack and Meg had repeatedly practiced a cover of the song “Do You Love Me Now?” originally by the Breeders. I still don’t know why they didn’t play it that night…the moments in rehearsal were solid and worthy of being trotted out on stage. It sounded damn cool. The fact that the band never recorded a version of this song is one of the bigger frustrations in the “Shit The White Stripes Should Have Done” list in my head.
The recording here is the first time that a piano or any keys are ever used live in a White Stripes performance and it’s beautiful.
Terry Cox was the sound man on this night. At the time he was the front-of-house engineer at the Magic Stick, so I’m not really sure why he was at the Magic Bag this evening. But with Terry behind the mixing desk, the band got a more-familiar set of ears working in their favor, as opposed to some rando without a clue as to what the band sounded like. The reverb on vocals “Love Sick” is a prime example of the special touch Terry brought to the mix. Reverb on the snare too. Actually, it’s just a shit ton of reverb. The whole show sounds “BIG” in a way that no other recording from this era ever would. God bless Terry.
“Love Sick” here is the Stripes first ever performance of the song, not even two years old by this point, the highlight of Bob Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind album from 1997. It sounds important. It sounds serious. It sounds like it is a harbinger of bigger things to come.
Followed by “Dead Leaves” which, by this point, still hadn’t truly found its form. A piano take on the song is still a rare outing, so even though it is by far the song the band played most in their career, I’m unclear if it was ever done exclusively on piano again.
The tension here is palpable. Between “Dead Leaves” and “St. James” someone shouts something in the crowd. At 2:04 and again at 2:07. You can just barely hear it. Wouldn’t be a stretch to think they’re screaming “Fuck you!” Whatever is said, Jack responds with “You’re a liar,” echoing Dylan’s retort at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966 to a member of the crowd shouting “Judas!”
Couple that with the intro to “Astro” where Jack extemporaneously sings “I’m gonna kill my brother Jack” from Meg’s perspective, to the tune of “Three Little Fishies” a child-like number 1 hit from 1939. I recall Meg responding to this moment with a dismissive laugh, but still, I remember feeling uncomfortable. It was awkward.
But at some point, it all changes, the air is cleared, so to speak. Everything feels…understood? Accepted? Light-hearted even? Having thought about this many times over the intervening 25 years, I just know that while the first half of the set embodies a tension, the second half emboldens a joy throughout. Listening now, I smile. I feel happy.
As Jack is ready to end the performance with “Broken Bricks” you can hear Kevin Peyok (The Waxwings, Jack White and The Bricks) and Ko Shih (The Dirtbombs, Ko and The Knockouts) repeatedly yell “SAME BOY!” while Jack is thanking the opening bands the Greenhornes and Clone Defects.
Isn’t it great when folks request an unreleased song? Kevin would know the song from playing it with the Bricks just three weeks earlier, but even so, the three Stripes performances of the song earlier this year were already enough to embed it into the consciousness of fan/friends in teh crow. And with an “aw shucks” manner Jack responds “You wanna hear ‘Same Boy’? Alright I’ll play that.”
Come the encore of “You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket”, another Stripes live debut that wouldn’t see a studio release for another FOUR YEARS, it all is sweet and dare I say wholesome. With just Jack and the piano, here is a worthy reminder that there’s no such thing as an off performance of “Pocket” as the tender emotion is palpable whenever it was performed and only more so if it was just Jack playing it.
With Jack asking “What do you want to hear?” it’s worth noting how rare it is to hear him openly take a request, especially in light of already taking one with “Same Boy.” Funnily enough, we don’t hear anyone yell anything in response. At the culmination of a blistering “Broken Bricks” Jack sheepishly gives notice that the gig is over…that he broke a string and that Meg has mono.
“She’s tuckered out…so say a little prayer for her and say a little prayer for yourself” he offers up. Jack didn’t have to say that. No one would have begrudged the band ending the show at that point without any indication as to why no more songs were performed. It was already a decently full set. But the sincerity, the honesty, the essence of “we have given you our all” coupled with a “you are released” sews up this oddity of a show perfectly.
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Our next batch of releases from the Snarchives is here!
Continuing to fill out the 2015-2019 experimental period, hear eight shows from that era PLUS one from 2021 and the first live recording release from the Empire Central era – Denver’s Mission Ballroom on June 5, 2022. With a set comprised entirely of songs from the collective’s latest Grammy-winning album plus fan favorites “Shofukan” and “Lingus,” get a feel for the groovy Texas sound that is so prevalent on the record.
To help you get started, we’ve curated a playlist of ten unique tracks, choosing one from each of the new shows. From the expansive Rhodes on “Young Stuff” from Esch-sur-Alzette to the atmospheric composition of “Honiara” from Denver, there’s so much to explore.
1. Young Stuff – May 10, 2017 Esch-sur-Alzette, LUX Chris Bullock leads the way on sax before Bill Laurance really opens things up in the second half on Fender Rhodes.
2. Strawman – June 4, 2017 Aarhus, DK Bullock shines on a clean-tone solo in the main section of this Snarky classic, and guitarist Bob Lanzetti trades with trumpeter Mike “Maz” Maher and violinist Zach Brock on the outro.
3. Beep Box – February 24, 2018 Portland, OR Laurance takes centre stage once again on a moody solo, starting on synth and switching to some wild pitch-bent piano work.
4. Grown Folks – July 8, 2018 Fontainebleu, FR Guitarist Mark Lettieri really takes his time building a vibe with hits from bassist Michael League on the main solo, and Shaun Martin lights up the end with some furious Moog playing.
5. Thing of Gold – May 12, 2019 Boston, MA A keyboard solo on the bridge of this song is an exceptionally rare occurrence, and Justin Stanton’s percussive Rhodes work shines perfectly with textural accompaniment from fellow keyboardists Martin and Bobby Sparks.
6. Quarter Master – June 4, 2019 Salt Lake City, UT Special guest Roosevelt Collier tears up the main solo section with some sparring against Lettieri’s guitar. Not content to finish there, the band goes full blues mode and Maz takes the mic for a cover of SRV’s “Cold Shot.”
7. Flood – October 24, 2019 Copenhagen, DK Lettieri’s gorgeous ambient intro informs his well-crafted solo over this unique lineup’s sound and drummer Jason “JT” Thomas trashes the outro.
8. What About Me? – November 26, 2019 Frankfurt, DE An atypical Rhodes intro from Stanton builds into the song, and legendary saxophonist Chris Potter joins the band and rips a hole through the open solo, continuing through the drum section via aggressive sparring with JT.
9. Chonks – November 5, 2021 Tucson, AZ With Stanton at the lead, League takes a vicious and distorted bass solo on the funk section and Sparks tears apart the outro on whammy clav.
10. Honiara – June 5, 2022 Denver, CO Brock gets angular on the first solo of his own tune and saxophonist Bob Reynolds dials in some subtle delay for the ethereal second part, bringing it to a close over a layered base.
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Jack White: June 14, 2014
Ten years and one week ago, Jack White unleashed what was arguably one of the best performances in the history of the Bonnaroo
festival.
In an expansive field in Manchester, TN, filled with approximately 70,000 fans, White let loose a tour-de-force, two-hour and forty-five minute career-spanning set. From White Stripes songs like “Hotel Yorba” and “Icky Thump” to Raconteurs numbers such as “Top Yourself” and “Steady, As She Goes” through “Blue Blood Blues” by the Dead Weather…not to mention a wide selection of his solo material and covers of two surf rock classics “Pipeline” by the Chantays and “Misirlou” by Dick Dale. And Led Zeppelin’s “The Lemon Song”? He did that too.
To be in the field that evening was to truly have one’s mind blown. As Jack pulled trick after stupefying trick as the set went stratospheric, all I could do was look to Ben Swank next to me and say “Can you even believe this?”
Originally released as a Vault package back in 2014, we’ve updated the setlist to include to previously unlisted covers…snippets of “Cool Drink Of Water Blues” by Tommy Johnson and “Fried My Little Brains” by the Kills both couched within medleys of other songs.
Listening back a decade later, these recordings hit just as hard as the initial blast of soundwaves reverberated off our bodies in that sweaty Tennessee field back then.
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Jack White: July 30, 2014
On July 30th, 2014 Jack White played one of the most captivating live shows of his career. With the friendly confines of Detroit’s Masonic Temple providing as much of a home field advantage as White could ever get, this tour-de-force, three hour plus, 38 song barn-burner of a set spanned the breadth of his recorded career and left all comers in its wake gobsmacked, a testament to the undiminished magnetism of a performer at the height of his powers.
Kicking off at breakneck pace with three sizzling fan favorites from the White Stripes back catalog, the impromptu song selection never loses focus and instead delivers body blow after body blow of unrelenting passion. Inspired, off-the-cuff covers of Beck’s “Devil’s Haircut” to Zeppelin’s “Lemon Song”, Hank Williams’ “Ramblin’ Man” to Junior Wells’ “Hoodoo Man” absolutely delight. White’s Dead Weather bandmates Alison Mosshart and Dean Fertita unexpectedly join onstage for a particularly heavy version of “I Cut Like a Buffalo.” Chock full of delightful stage banter, local references and even a laugh-out-loud takedown of a supposed icon (you’ll have to listen to know exactly), the performance manages to blow everyone’s mind, both satiating desire and yet quizzically also leaving them wanting more…such are the paradoxes of a truly transcendent evening.
Previously only available on a limited edition, one-time only vinyl pressing, Third Man is ecstatic to be able to share this unparalleled recording complete and unedited for the first time, truly the way that it was played on a sweaty Detroit night nearly ten years ago.
Stream this new show 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.
Sign up for a free trial now to hear this newly mastered show plus the entire Third Man Records archival catalog. From White Stripes archivist/historian Ben Blackwell on this month’s ‘Third Man Thursday’ release:
The White Stripes 1999 Tour Archive
There are moments, ever so brief, that feel like an entire room has catalyzed and are all speaking the same language. Even if speaking vaguely or in code, everyone understands fully.
So while I cannot speak for the rest of the 100 or so folks that were at the Magic Stick on April 17th, 1999, I can speak to how *I* felt.
For establishing purposes, exactly 25 years ago, on April 17th, 1999 the White Stripes played in the middle of a bill with Gore Gore Girls opening and the Compulsive Gamblers headlining. I was sixteen years old.
Barely a month earlier, it appeared that the White Stripes were done. With their cessation being reported in the Detroit News, the fact that a DAILY newspaper was covering such underground countercultural gossip still feels beguiling. Yet in the span of a few weeks, the Stripes had played a triumphant non-farewell show (March 13th, 1999) and were most definitely soldiering on, while Jack White’s other current musical concern, the Go, had unceremoniously kicked him out.
I guess this was relatively big news in the small world of Detroit garage rock. In hindsight, it seems pretty insignificant. So when the Stripes roll into “Astro” at the tail end of their set and Jack substitutes in the names of his former bandmates in the Go “Bobby”, “Marc” and “John” as “do(es) the astro” the feeling in the air, to me, was “oh man, he’s giving it to ‘em.”
To follow it up with the ending verse impromptu singing “Maybe someone has an ego!”
and “Why don’t you do what you want to, girl?” (with what I would interpret as foreshadowing of future attack-like songs as “There’s No Home For You Here (Girl)” and “Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine”) and it all had the allure of an up-to-the-minute newscast, made up in real time, for the couple dozens friends and scenesters gathered there that evening, all of whom knew the score.
As the song concluded, you faintly hear a request for the Go song “Meet Me At The Movies” to which Jack replies on mic “Somebody wanna hear “Meet Me At The Movies?” It’s the wrong band!”
The Stripes performance, overall, is just so different from any single show they’d ever played before or would play after. First ever appearances of gems like covers of Iggy Pop’s “I’m Bored” and Earl King’s “Trick Bag” (done in the style of the Gories) alongside Jack and Meg’s first ever performance of “The Same Boy You’ve Always Known.” They also cover Brendan Benson’s “Crosseyed” for seemingly the only time ever with Brendan himself smack dab front and center watching the proceedings.
Interesting little moments abound…the show-opening “I’m Bored” is quickly scuttled as Meg’s bass drum pedal snaps. She coordinates a quick replacement with Deb Agolli (drummer for openers the Gore Gore Girls) that precipitates Jack’s solo take on “Trick Bag”
(For years my recall is that I was up there helping Meg attach the borrowed pedal to her kick drum. But just now, at this moment, I’m half-thinking that I watched it from the crowd. In my head, I see Deb, coincidentally wearing red and white, behind the drums with Meg. But I also see myself crouched down, futzing in the dark, helping Meg. The video of the show conveniently shows neither myself nor Deb onstage during any of this. There’s a possibility my memories are lies)
But once all is back up-to-speed, Jack just starts “I’m Bored” from the beginning.
There’s a simplicity to taking the song from the top, an innocence to it, a “we’re gonna do this right” stick-to-it-iveness that I tend to think most bands would not actually endeavor. Most bands would just move past it and try to pretend that they never even attempted the song in the first place, let alone start their set with it.
And that’s just one of many reasons why the White Stripes were objectively great from such an early point in their career.
Other treats include an early run of “The Big Three Killed My Baby” that does not start with the trilling three scratches of the guitar. Seemingly every version performed afterwards would start just like the album recording…with those ominous trills. Jack introduces Meg as his little sister. Jack also, for the first time we’ve documented, signed off the show with a “My sister thanks you and I thank you.” Little Easter eggs all of them.
And while there’s no real evidence here to point to proving so, we all know that this is the evening that Jack White would pay a couple hundred bucks to Compulsive Gambler’s Jack Yarber for his red Airline guitar that in short order would become an iconic piece of the White Stripes imagery.
My favorite moment of the entire show unfolds in the middle break of “Astro” where Jack drops a curveball…
What did the hen dog say to the snake? No more crawfish in this lake Just a hair, just a little bit, just a hair, just a little bit Well what did the woman who came to the side, one hand on her leg, one hand on her thigh Good lord, have mercy, good lord, have mercy
This is a slightly altered take on George Johnson’s version of “Jack The Rabbit” as featured in the 1978 John Lomax film The Land Where The Blues Began. Johnson was a gandy dancer, a now-obsolete job of manual railroad track maintenance. This is a work song, plain and simple, Johnson’s repeated lines of “just a hair, just a little bit” actually instructions to the rest of his crew in regards to which increment or degree they should be adjusting the track. It’s chilling, it’s got unforced attitude, it’s beautiful.
In sharing this clip with Jack this week, twenty-five years later, he said he had absolutely no recollection of what it was or where it even came from.
But it felt so familiar, both then and now. Like a nursery rhyme I’d heard my entire life. Like something EVERYONE had heard their entire life, certainly everyone in the room. Like it was meant to be there, that it had always been there, and would always be there, smack dab in the middle of “Astro.”
The point I’m trying to make is that for these fleeting moments on this night, the demarcation of stage and floor were largely irrelevant. What was happening wasn’t a band playing for a crowd. What was happening was a conversation, an education, a therapy, a laugh, a finger-pointing, all wrapped into one. And so much of it, hell, maybe all of it, happened just that once, seemingly to be experienced only by those in the room. Fleeting.
So should you give a shit that this is effectively a spruced-up audience recording? Not in the least. Just sit back and enjoy all the swirling different factors and reactors that melted together to create a one-of-a-kind evening a quarter of a century ago.
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Two exclusive archives from The White Stripes are now available for streaming in the nugs.net app, featuring two 2003 shows; Boston on April 20 and Berlin on May 19. Sign up for a free trial now to hear these new shows plus the entire Third Man Records archival catalog.
From long time White Stripes fan Mike on this month’s ‘Third Man Thursday’ releases:
They’re Gonna Talk About You Still
When Jack White appeared in the film It Might Get Loud, he chose two influences to share with the cameras: Son House, the blues singer and guitarist – whose birthday it is today, and Flat Duo Jets, the two-piece band fronted by Dexter Romweber – who passed away last month. In tribute to those artists and the lasting power of influence, here are the White Stripes performances from Boston, where the band performed a cover of Flat Duo Jets’ Don’t Blame Me, and Berlin, where they brought Son House’s Grinnin’ In Your Face to the masses. Two of the band’s most widely shared concerts, each originally captured off the radio and circulated by fans. Like the music of those key influences, these performances are both familiar and essential, re-shared here upgraded and unedited for the first time.
With only 4 weeks between them, the concerts from Boston and Berlin reveal just how quickly the band’s performances were developing. Boston is a spontaneous run-through, with the new songs rapidly settling into their proper live versions, pure risk-taking live on the air. Berlin pushes the set further, resulting in an explosive ninety-minute go, one of the longest broadcasts the band had ever done. As soon as these shows hit the airwaves, they were immediately shared by fans as must-hear recordings from the tour.
During an interview before the show in Boston, the band were asked whether maintaining simplicity was still a goal, with Jack confirming “I don’t really want to evolve or grow in the band at all. I don’t want that false pretense, or to try and second guess things. We like living in this box we’ve created very much, and we don’t want to change.” And yet, even with that commitment, the Boston concert would be held at the Orpheum, a venue twice the size of the ones played on previous tours, and the Berlin concert would get moved from the Casino to the larger Columbiahalle, one of the first times that had happened to the band. So, while they may have been able to keep some things the same, they couldn’t stop others from evolving around them.
The spirit of wanting to preserve things would get echoed in other interviews, when discussing the band’s influences: “It’s wonderful to have influences. It’s wonderful to join that tradition of songwriters and storytellers, and join that family…telling the same story your way.” One of those stories was also Jack’s favorite song, Grinning In Your Face, by the blues legend Son House. Even though the band had been performing the song at shows going back to 1999, the Berlin broadcast would be the first time that most fans had ever heard it – included here as part of Death Letter. Notable too, as the song was from a record that wouldn’t have existed if not for a group of young fans inspired by the out-of-print recordings of the bluesman, going on a road trip in 1964 with the hopes that they could track him down and convince him to make music again. The result of that effort was the record “Father of Folk Blues” which Jack would discover by hearing John the Revelator played over the PA before a Radiohead concert. Just as John the Revelator would get memorialized on the White Stripes debut album, and Death Letter on De Stijl, the performance of Grinning In Your Face on the Berlin broadcast would serve as a key reference point of the Stripes covering the song. The band’s day in Berlin would turn out to be especially productive in that regard, as the soundcheck would also see them record a cover of Soledad Brothers’ St Ides of March, which would be released later that year as the B-side to The Hardest Button To Button.
Jack had been introduced to Flat Duo Jet’s “Go Go Harlem Baby” around the time he was working at an upholstery shop. And while Son House’s music would serve as a perfect example of the band re-telling a story their way, when the Stripes covered the Duo Jets, they played it faithful – true to the source. Don’t Blame Me was itself a cover, a story that singer and guitarist Dexter Romweber had re-told his way, but when the Stripes played it, they did it like Dex did. And just like Grinnin’ In Your Face at Berlin, the performance of Don’t Blame Me at Boston was also the first time that most fans had ever heard that song. The occasion was all the more significant because Dex was on the bill that night, performing with his sister Sara as the Dexter Romweber Duo, making the Stripes’ cover of Don’t Blame Me the rare experience of being able to pay tribute to someone who influenced you, with them actually in the room. When later asked how he felt about the impact that Flat Duo Jets had on others, Dex was gracious: “There are musicians that have influenced me that came before me that people don’t necessarily know about. It’s all just a natural lineage of stuff handed down. I’m not lost on the fact that people influenced me either. So, if Jack got something out of those records or he saw something that was valuable to him, I thought that was a positive thing because I had done the same thing.” In 2011, Third Man Records would reissue “Go Go Harlem Baby” on vinyl after being long out-of-print, continuing to pay that influence forward.
Everything has a source. Just as the mighty Mississippi starts as a small lake in Minnesota, that too gets fed by the creeks and springs around it. You can never fully go upstream, just as you can’t predict where something will go once it’s released, or how it might influence others. Just as these shows were spread by fans, here’s a reminder to go check out Son House’s “Father of Folk Blues” and Flat Duo Jets’ “Go Go Harlem Baby”, music kept in the light by those who understood that when you discover something good – whether on an out-of-print record, a song overheard at a concert, or a band’s performance on a radio broadcast – the best thing you can do is to share it with others, and let that love keep shining on.
Originally broadcast on the radio, Boston would be the first time that many fans would get to hear the new songs from Elephant performed live. Even though parts of the band’s opening concert from London had been broadcast a few weeks earlier, the performance from Boston is the one that feels like the proper return to the stage, especially given how accessible the show would be to fans. The concert at the Orpheum was the band’s second show this Easter Sunday, as they had also performed a brief set earlier in the afternoon for a group of contest winners at the nearby Paradise. For as familiar as this show is, it’s amazing when you realize how many risks the band took on this night. After the opening trio of Black Math, Dead Leaves, and Let’s Shake Hands, the first surprise arrives during I Think I Smell A Rat, with a cover of Party of Special Things to Do by Captain Beefheart, a rarity released as a 7 inch a few years before, but only played live a handful of times. You can hear Jack call out for the bass drum pattern “boom, boom, boom, boom…” just before kicking off the verses. This spontaneity can also be heard in the version of You’re Pretty Good Looking, with Jack pausing after the first verse to shout “gimme a click, Meg!”, singing the rest of the lyrics in the swing style that he would use at other shows throughout the year. Even though it was still early in the tour, the new songs were also getting updated, which you can hear in the performance of The Hardest Button to Button, with the vocals having shifted away from the deadpan delivery heard on the album to an all-out scream. Death Letter features the quote from Motherless Children before abruptly closing, indicating that something must have happened with the guitar. Rather than attempt a restart, Jack moves to the keyboards and performs an impromptu cover of Red Bird, an on-the-fly debut of the Leadbelly song. The show gets to a truly unique moment with the debut of Don’t Blame Me, an homage to one of Jack’s key influences, Flat Duo Jets. A special occasion, given that Duo Jets’ singer and guitarist Dex Romweber was the opener on this night, performing as part of a new duo with his sister Sara. Just like the show with Loretta Lynn in New York the night before, Boston is one of the few times when the band would get to share a bill with one of their musical idols. A week later they would do it again, opening for the Stooges at Coachella. As they close the show, the band go out on a high note, leaving the audience and the listeners wanting more, with Jack holding back laughter as he leads the crowd to the final verse in Boll Weevil.
Just as the broadcast from Boston felt like the band’s official return to the stage, the way they sounded on the broadcast from Berlin was as if they’d suddenly hit their live peak. Having been moved from the Casino to the larger Columbiahalle due to demand, the band’s setlist is similarly expanded here, a masterful 30+ song display. Coming just weeks after the breakout shows in April and the exploratory performances in Scandinavia, Berlin takes the Elephant set and firmly baselines it into a 90 minute powerhouse. Like watching a racehorse lap effortlessly around the track, over and over, they just sound so healthy here. From the whammy-and-feedback opening in Dead Leaves and The Dirty Ground to the final singalong in Boll Weevil, you get the full course – a virtual blueprint for the rest of the Elephant tour. The Hardest Button To Button gets a unique spot near the top of the set just after the openers, which extends the energy rush to great effect. Listen for the ad libbed line “Beating up Swanson and Damstra with a baseball bat!”, a funny reference to tourmates Whirlwind Heat during the marathon version of I Think I Smell A Rat, which also features When I Hear My Name, Take a Whiff On Me, and Mr Cellophane, now in its official live arrangement – complete with Jack letting the audience know when it’s time to adjust the rhythm of their clapping. After an excellent Hypnotize, Jack introduces the band to the audience with an appropriate “Hot and sweaty in Berlin!”. Death Letter follows and is just about perfect, complete with Jack yelling “Let’s go Meg!” which she responds to by joining him in a run that culminates with a fantastic burst on the kick drum. This sets up Grinnin’ In Your Face, one of the first times that listeners had ever heard the band perform the Son House song live. Again, just about perfect. There are performance highlights all over this show, including the adlib of “I can tell that we are going to be friends…Berlin, Berlin, Berlin” and the nod to Burt Bacharach and Marlene Dietrich before Look Me Over Closely. Even the out of tune guitar that pops up during the transition from Let’s Build A Home into Goin’ Back to Memphis still ends up resulting in a wonderful improvisation that they use to push through and close the main set. The encores play out like a continuous medley, including a complete version of Fell In Love With A Girl, the rare occurrence when they played the song in full. Having also used the soundcheck to record the future B-side cover of Soledad Brothers’ St Ides Of March, on this night they really could do no wrong. Do yourself a favor and fall in love with Berlin all over again, a mandatory performance from the Elephant tour.
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Imagine that years after your favorite television series had ended (be it Seinfeld, The Sopranos, Stath Lets Flats, Twin Peaks or any other), you learned that additional episodes had been shot during the show’s best years and were about to be released in pristine quality. Would it matter that you had already watched dozens of episodes from the same season?
No, you would be thrilled that more of the show you love–a sublime artistic creation for which your fandom had become part of your self identity–was newly available. Let’s say you even had a lower-quality video tape or a pirated download of one of those lost episodes. Would it diminish your interest in an HD version of the lost show, looking even better than the original series ever did?
It’s with that framing we welcome another Darkness tour show to the Live Archive series and complete the Capitol Theatre trifecta with the release of Passaic 9/21/78. It’s the final show of a three-night stand that would be the last small-theatre residency Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band would ever play in the Northeast. Let’s not forget these shows were something of an anomaly at the time, coming after a trio of gigs at the Palladium and the statement-making, three-night stand at iconic Madison Square Garden in New York City, both just a New Jersey Transit ride away.
Bruce was already many times bigger than the Capitol Theatre capacity, but his home state of New Jersey lacked an arena-sized venue until Brendan Byrne opened in 1981. The Passaic shows were a gift to those who lived across the Hudson River and especially fans on the Shore. When Bruce asks during the 9/21 show how many folks in the house are from Asbury Park, the roar is considerable.
The first night of the Passaic run was the legendary September 19 radio broadcast which spiked sales of blank tape in the tri-state area (presumably). That show and the more relaxed second night on September 20, are both essential titles in the Live Archive series. Now, the equally enthralling final concert joins them.
Comparing or ranking masterpieces is a pointless exercise; instead we should be grateful that we can now hear all three Capitol Theatre performances in outstanding, multi-track mix quality. That being said, the three Passaic shows are distinct.
Night three strikes an appealing balance of intensity and looseness, some of which can be attributed to its proximity to Springsteen’s 29th birthday, which would take place in two days’ time. The fans want to celebrate it and Springsteen lets them: he plays to the crowd and the crowd gives it right back in what might be the most interactive Darkness tour performance to be professionally recorded.
Amidst all the hand-wringing about setlist variations in recent times, some trainspotters have pointed out that for all the adoration showered upon it, the Darkness tour largely stuck to its core set and didn’t offer a great number of changes from show to show. That ignores the fact that when there were multi-night stands like Passaic, Bruce not only made surprise additions (usually covers, see below), but in the days leading up he prepped special material for the run. At the Capitol Theatre this included the return of deep cuts like “Meeting Across The River,” “Incident on 57th Street,” “Kitty’s Back,” and even “The Fever.”
Those older songs were clearly a nod to longtime fans from the area, but the key setlist-change feature of the Darkness tour was its rock ‘n’ roll jukebox covers: the exceptionally capable E Street Band regularly performed foundational rock songs like “Rave On,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” and “Summertime Blues.” With rollicking reverence, it’s obvious how much pleasure Springsteen got from taking each golden nugget for a ride.
September 21, 1978 was a hot day in New Jersey and the Capitol Theatre was surely warm and sticky when Springsteen kicked off the evening with Jerry Lee Lewis’ “High School Confidential.” This is one of nine performances of the song that year, and marks its first appearance in the Live Archive series.
Later in the first set, we get another Archive series debut cover, Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen,” featuring great baritone saxophone from Clarence Clemons and a spirited vocal from Springsteen that includes the fitting lyrical rewrite, “deep in the heart of Passaic.”
Preview of “Sweet Little Sixteen” – Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
Those are but two highlights in a sterling opening set that also includes the work-in-progress “Independence Day” and an interesting “Prove It All Night.” Max Weinberg drops the beat at the 1:07 mark, and in Jon Altschiller’s detailed mix we hear just how important Clemons’ triangle playing is to the rhythm and tone of the song’s enchanting prelude. Mix inspectors will also likely be pleased with the placement of Danny Federici’s fader throughout the show compared to other ’78 releases.
Set one ends with the perfect pairing of “Meeting Across the River” into “Jungleland.” If we needed further confirmation of Springsteen’s commitment to his performance, we get it in two signature, heightened “Jungleland” vocal lines, as he reaches to his upper range to punctuate “dress in the latest rage” and “desperate as the night moves on.”
Given how well it worked the night before, the second set opens with a very early “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” again complete with fake snowfall and Springsteen doing his best Darlene Love imitation at the end. Clemons’ fine percussion playing and some impressive flying cymbal work from Weinberg mark an excellent “Because the Night,” one of five unreleased original songs featured in the 9/21/78 set along with the aforementioned “Independence Day,” “Fire,” “Point Blank” (in a version with great glockenspiel from Federici and piano from Roy Bittan) and “The Fever.” While our familiarity with those songs means we take their inclusion for granted in a 1978 show, if five unreleased originals were to appear in 2024 sets, we’d be soiling ourselves with glee.
The second set features epics, too, including a long “Kitty’s Back,” in which Bittan turns in a solo that’s among his modern-jazziest ever, accented by more cymbal shimmering from Weinberg. Bruce eventually presents the audience with a choice between “The Fever” and “Incident on 57th Street,” but lucky them, he plays both.
“The Fever” brings another memorable vocal moment, when Springsteen goes on an epic, Van Morrisonesque run through “But I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I — I’M GONNA BE ALRIGHT” at 6:15. Brilliant. As nature intended, “Incident” flows directly into “Rosalita,” and after vamping on the Village People’s “Macho Man” following the introduction of The Big Man, this deeply satisfying second set comes to a close.
The encore is a victory lap and maintains the energy of the main set with more vocal gems like Springsteen putting an exclamation point on his first utterance of “Baby we were BORN TO RUH-UH-UH-UN.” He elects to close the three-show homecoming with the night’s fourth cover, perhaps the most beloved encore song yet to be played in Passaic, Gary U.S. Bonds’ “Quarter To Three.” Led by Clemons’ wailing saxophone, the version runs some ten minutes before Springsteen and the band finally wave goodbye.
After they leave the stage, someone (promoter John Scher perhaps?) takes to the microphone to say, “It’s been a wonderful three nights. A great way to help Bruce celebrate his birthday.” True, but the real gift of Passaic is the recordings the Record Plant Mobile Truck made of all three nights.
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An exclusive archive from The White Stripes is now available for streaming in the nugs.net app, featuring one night in London and one night in Paris from early 2004. From long time White Stripes fan Mike on this month’s ‘Third Man Thursday’ releases:
Staring down one of the longest breaks they would have since first taking the stage at the Gold Dollar on Bastille Day 6 years earlier, Jack and Meg return to their “home away from home” in London, before heading to Paris to close out this phase of the Elephant tour at the appropriately named “Zenith”.
Having just completed the filming at Blackpool, rather than rest on their laurels for these final two shows, the band were still pulling out surprises and making each one unique right to the end, with London getting impromptu quotes from George M. Cohan’s The Yankee Doodle Boy and Leadbelly’s Red Bird, and Paris getting a performance of The Kills’ Superstition along with an uber-rare update of Diddy Wah Diddy – a song not performed live since 1999, when the band opened for the great Wayne Kramer.
The London performance would coincide with another milestone, as earlier in the day Jack would sit down for what would end up being the final interview with DJ John Peel, who would pass away later that year. The two spent the time playing records for each other, chatting about movies, and of course discussing the Stripes’ success – of which Peel certainly played a role in, having hosted the band on his show during their first visit to the UK back in 2001. When asked “So, where do you go next?”, Jack’s response was a mix of relief and closure: “We’re done with ‘Elephant’ and we’re not touring any more on that album. So, I just need a break. We’ve toured the world on it, and I’ve gotta get inspired again.” True to that feeling, the session ends with Jack performing songs solo on the acoustic – including covers of songs by Blanche, Loretta Lynn, and a song that he had written for Cold Mountain which the producers had declined to use. As if bringing the cycle with Peel full circle, Jack also performed Jack the Ripper, a callback to that first session in 2001, here a stripped-down version played at the DJ’s request.
In a way, the period between that first Peel appearance in July 2001 and the final one in February 2004 was like a 2 ½ year trek up a mountain, where Jack and Meg had gone from being the small band that few had heard about, to an internationally known live act who were days away from completing a successful world tour. Having enjoyed the kind of 360 degree view one would get from the top of a peak by traveling across the globe, it’s fitting that the final show of the tour would be at a venue named The Zenith. And while the performance in London happened to coincide with a final visit with Peel, who had helped kick off a sort of reverse Beatlemania for the band (the final interview also taking place on the 35th anniversary of the Beatles final live performance on the Apple rooftop), the performance in Paris just so happened to take place on the eve of La Chandeleur, the French observation of Candlemas, which marks the end of the Christmas period. One last day on tour, before the decorations finally get taken down.
And just as soon as they finished in Paris, they would fly to Los Angeles for the Grammys on February 8th, exactly 1 year and a day after the first live preview of Elephant at London’s Electric Cinema. Putting on the red and black trousers one last time, the band tore through an epic Seven Nation Army, complete with a surprise version of Death Letter included within it. A watershed moment, capped off by Seven Nation Army winning “Best Rock Song”, and Elephant winning “Best Alternative Music Album”.
The significance of the Grammys performance mirrors that of the first Peel broadcast. Where one was like a secret transmission audible only to those in the know, the other was a takeover of every channel on the dial, an instant conversion of the masses. It’s a funny thing when a band spends a year touring, and then has a moment like that, right as they go off the road. As if they should get right back out there and do it all again, to capitalize on that momentum. How many times have you seen a band suddenly become that visible (just days later, SNL would even make a sketch about them), only to look up their touring schedule and find out that they had already come around months, if not a year earlier? And for the fans who were there from the beginning, it’s as if now suddenly the entire world sees what you knew all along. Random co-workers ask if you’ve heard of this band. Relatives and friends tell you that they saw that group you like on TV. It’s one thing to reach a peak when only a few people know about it. When now everyone knows about it, that’s the true zenith.
Returning to the city where Elephant was recorded, Brixton Academy joins the Masonic in Detroit and the Aragon in Chicago as one of the three venues to get a repeat visit on the Elephant tour. Having previously broadcast a performance at the Academy when they last visited in April 2003, the release here closes the gap of 2004 being the only year when they played in the UK not to have some kind of “Live in London” out there. Like the December 2001 broadcast, where the band had also played London earlier in that tour and then came back for a closing show, this show feels a lot like a radio broadcast that never was, a perfect encore performance capturing the band putting on a near-flawless set. After the openers of Black Math and Dead Leaves, Jack greets the crowd with “London! Our home away from home!” and it’s right into When I Hear My Name, which features an impromptu verse from George M. Cohan’s The Yankee Doodle Boy, complete with Jack modifying the lyrics to reference his own birthday “A real life nephew of my Uncle Sam, Born on the 9th of July!”. While the UK had adopted them as family, an unabashed reminder of their American roots. The ending of the song features a frantic run of soloing with the whammy, which like the inclusion of Leadbelly’s Redbird in I Think I Smell A Rat, is proof of just how much they still had left in the tank, even as they prepared to close out the tour. Listen for Jack singing along to the end of In the Cold Cold Night, and Meg returning the favor by again singing along during This Protector, where you can just about hear a pin drop in the venue. The main set goes out heavy with Ball and Biscuit, with amateur video of the performance showing Jack close the song by thrashing around next to Meg’s kit, even knocking a stand over, before going to the floor and letting the feedback ring out as he leaves the stage. Before Seven Nation Army, Jack asks “Is everybody friends with the person next to them? You make sure of that now. Cuz Meg and I aren’t leaving until every one of you get a friend on either side of you, okay?” The version of Seven Nation Army here features the opening line of “I’m gonna kiss ’em off” which was unique to the three London shows. Before closing with Boll Weevil, Jack introduces it as “an old song”, as if now officially able to refer to the days before Elephant as being from another time in the band’s history. Even though this is the end of the tour, they leave the stage letting the crowd know that they won’t be gone too long: “We’ll see you guys at Reading and Leeds festivals in August, all right?”
With a 6 month break just days away, it’s fitting that the final show of the tour opens with the line “When I hear my name, I want to disappear” and closes with “I just don’t know what to do with myself”. Having ended their first show in Paris back in 2001 with Jack proclaiming “Lafayette, we have returned!”, he couldn’t have predicted just how far the band would rise since then, as he tells the audience at the Zenith, “Good Lord, there’s so many of you!”. No doubt happy to be closing out the tour, there is a feeling of movement in this show, as the band confidently go from song to song. Listen as Meg enters early in Love Sick, with Jack giving an audible “Yeah!” in approval. There’s another moment like this during Ball and Biscuit, with Jack heard asking for “just one now” and Meg responding with a single hit on the drums, right on time. Perfect reminders of just how tightly connected the two were on stage. While many of the familiar songs in the set would carry over into the band’s eventual return in August, In the Cold Cold Night would get its final performance of the year, not to be performed again until the Get Behind Me Satan tour in 2005. And even though the set is mostly filled with songs that they had played dozens of times on the tour, many of the performances feel as if updated for the occasion of this being the last show. During I Fought Piranhas, the line “Who puts up a fight walking out of hell?” never sounded so appropriate, and the version of The Same Boy You’ve Always Known is played as if having been written for that moment when it’s time to say goodbye. Never ones to go quietly, Cannon gets a rare inclusion of Diddy Wah Diddy, a song only played one other time back in 1999, and gets followed by The Big Three Killed My Baby with Jack riffing on everything from George Bush, the auto companies, and a declaration that “America’s mind is lazy!” before going into a chant of “I’m about to tell the news Meg!” – thoroughly getting it all in for this final performance. After Jack the Ripper they also slot in an impromptu cover of the song Superstition by The Kills. Unlike the quote of the song at LA on 9/22/03, here it gets played complete with the original riff. In the encores, Lafayette Blues serves as the perfect setup before they close the show with I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself, with Jack thanking France for being “the country that produced Michel Gondry”. Having now wrapped a year’s worth of touring going out on a high at the Zenith, the farewell of “My sister thanks you, and I thank you! Good night Paris!” is delivered as if literally shouted from the top of a mountain.
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Those of us who like to discuss Bruce Springsteen’s touring history often focus on a show’s narrative arc. Through his setlist choices and order, what story is he telling?
Tours tied to his new studio albums often start as showcases for that particular work and its ideas, but after several months on the road song selections turn wide ranging, at times drifting far from the shore to which they were originally docked.
The Ghost of Tom Joad tour is Springsteen’s purest in terms of holding onto its vision and telling its story night after night. That the tour eventually spanned three calendar years stands as a testament to how satisfying Springsteen found solo work and the songs he was performing.
The tour launched in late 1995 and those early sets offered a heaping helping of tracks from the album. By the time he reached Akron ten months later–a point at which deviation from the norm would be underway on most tours–Springsteen was digging even deeper into this music’s wellspring.
Akron begins with a staggering debut performance that immediately validates the inclusion of the show in the Live Archive series. Springsteen had been invited to appear at a special Woody Guthrie tribute concert in Cleveland on September 29, in preparation for which he performed the folk legend’s “Tom Joad” to open the Akron set.
Preview of “Tom Joad” by Bruce Springsteen in Akron, OH 1996
With command and focus, Springsteen breathes new life into Guthrie’s murder ballad about the plight of the poor heading west in the Dust Bowl era. The song is a darker, spiritual companion to Springsteen’s own “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” and the two share key words and phrases in their final verses. While the film adaption of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was a major reference for Springsteen’s “Joad” lyrics, the inspiration and influence of Guthrie’s “Tom Joad” is there too, and not just in the title track but across the album, and even as far back as Nebraska, where its style and shape inform compositions like “Johnny 99” and “Reason to Believe.”
From that unprecedented start, Springsteen moves purposefully through the weighty Joad tour set, which offers little in the way of fan service but remains unquestionable in its musical artistry. The seventh song, “Nebraska,” starts with a high-vocal musical prelude that drifts into the somber harmonica line, setting the dark scene that’s about to unfold. It’s a stark, intimate reading that ends with Springsteen subtly shifting into a character voice for the harrowing final line: “I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.”
The first half of the set includes “It’s the Little Things That Count” and “Red Headed Woman,” which bring welcome levity, before the fitting pairing of “Shut Out the Light” and “Born in the U.S.A.” Springsteen performs the b-side with feeling and fragility, while the A-side rides bluesy guitar slides in a swaggering reading that plays more as a cautionary tale than ever before.
A second high-vocal intro comes ahead of another Nebraska track, “Reason to Believe,” missing its original and thematically contrasting musical lilt, replaced here by a somber tone that’s chilling in spots. No one will misread the meaning of this version.
The main set heads towards conclusion on the back of five stellar performances from Joad starting with “Youngstown” (just 50 miles from Akron), “Sinaloa Cowboys,” “The Line,” the rarely performed “The New Timer” and finally a glimmer of hope from “Across The Border.”
After delivering the set’s central themes completely on his own terms, Springsteen acknowledges the Akron audience’s patience and respect with the rousing return of “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?” The song dates back to his own time as a Greenwich Village troubadour and is a fitting inclusion in an evening of folk music. A sweet “This Hard Land” further rewards fan faith, and the good vibes continue on a quick rip through “No Surrender,” a song about the bonds of friendship and what matters in the face of hardship.
“I appreciate coming out here and having the room to play like this,” Springsteen says sincerely in the encore. However one feels today about the music he was performing circa 1995-97, it meant everything to Springsteen. In early 1995 he was at a crossroads, having effectively finished a solo album in the vein of “Streets of Philadelphia,” only to pivot suddenly and reconvene the E Street Band to record new music and promote Greatest Hits. But that year, Springsteen ultimately rediscovered himself as a solo artist through The Ghost of Tom Joad album and tour.
If we support the idea that he had to make Nebraska before he entered the inevitable superstar spotlight with Born in the U.S.A., Springsteen needed to write, record and perform Tom Joad songs on his own before he could reunite with the E Street Band. This Akron recording is a compelling chronicle of that journey, including one key piece of the original source material.
Addio alla tua cara mamma Adele Springsteen 1925-2024
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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.
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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.
When news first emerged in late 1989 that the E Street Band had been dismissed indefinitely by Bruce Springsteen, it began nine years of uncertainty and speculation as to when, if ever, they would join forces again. They did come back together to record new material for Greatest Hits in 1995 and undertook a small series of promotional appearances in support of it, but the fact that they parted ways again without touring only made the odds of a full return feel even longer.
It was the release of Tracks box set in 1998 that would ultimately serve as the catalyst for what Shore Fire Media’s December 8, 1998 press release deemed was indeed a “reunion tour.” Our long, cold E Street winter was finally coming to an end, but not before Bruce and the band took the unprecedented step of starting a tour in Europe, which meant U.S. audiences would have to wait until summer to see their heroes.
This is the backdrop to July 15, 1999, the first U.S. arena show of the Reunion era and the earliest professional recording of the tour. Having been fortunate enough to attend the show, I can attest to the heightened anticipation in the building before the house lights went down, excitement you can hear just before Springsteen says, “Good evening, New Jersey. We’re gonna bring it to you.”
What follows is an exemplary and evolving performance that finds the men and women of E Street road-tested and ready for action, playing a 26-song set that follows the structural blueprint that would underpin the entire Reunion tour.
Born in the U.S.A. outtake and Tracks-essential “My Love Will Not Let You Down” opens the show, captured in an appealingly guitar-soaked mix by Jon Altschiller. For those of us seeing the Reunion tour for the first time, a triple whammy was in play: the E Street Band was back on stage for the first time since 1988; Stevie Van Zandt was standing stage left, officially rejoined after a 17-year absence, and Springsteen was playing outtakes many of us never dreamed would feature in a setlist, let alone open a show.
It wasn’t just Van Zandt who “might have been right all these years” about Springsteen’s treasure trove of previously unreleased material: here was “My Love Will Not Let You Down” (which, like other songs here, had circulated in mediocre sound among collectors on cassette in the mid-1980s) serving as the show’s storming start.
The first six songs of the set are sharp and provide endearing showcase moments to members of the band: Clarence Clemons blasting a big solo on “The Promised Land,” Stevie sharing vocals on “Two Hearts,” Nils Lofgren doing the same on “Darlington County,” Roy Bittan leading “Darkness on the Edge of Town” while Max Weinberg pounds away on drums, and Phantom Dan Federici pulling out the accordion for the first time in decades on a rearranged “Mansion on the Hill” which spotlights Miss Patti Scialfa on backing vocals.
Reunion needed to strike a balance between familiar and fresh and Springsteen largely got it right. Eight songs had never featured in an E Street Band show before 1999, including wonderful Tracks-liberated outtakes “My Love Won’t Let You Down” and “Where The Bands Are,” which was arguably even a bigger jaw-dropper to hear live having been cut for The River. Another BIUSA outtake, “Murder Incorporated,” had already become a showstopper in Europe; with nine-cylinder E Street power, it crushes here.
An electrified “Youngstown,” a faithful “The Ghost of Tom Joad” and a stately reading of the Oscar-winning “Streets of Philadelphia” (with solemn backing vocals from Van Zandt) brought Springsteen’s recent solo work into the fold, while vocal turns from Nils, Steve, Patti and Clarence recast “If I Should Fall Behind” from 1992’s Lucky Town as an E Street spiritual.
The encore features two other newcomers: the Joad-tour bred “Freehold,” Springsteen’s hilarious and poignant hometown confessional, and the first new E Street Band original of the Reunion era, “Land of Hope and Dreams,” which doubled as a mission statement for the entire tour and resurrection of the band.
The rest of the set is composed of classics and album cuts, some substantially rearranged like “The River,” while others offered nifty, subtle changes like the intros to “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and “Working on the Highway.” A feeling of renewed commitment even comes across in every-nighters like “Out in the Street,” “Born to Run” and “Bobby Jean” which are played reverently at this point in the tour.
This recording’s hot guitar mix and a strong lead vocal give “Backstreets” a charge of vitality and the fiery performance make this one of the night’s standouts. Similarly, “Badlands” is buzzed by electric guitars, reinvigorated to the point where you sense the joy that the E Street Band is feeling to play it together again.
Because it stands as the start of Springsteen’s modern era, our perception of the Reunion tour is well established 24 years later. But listening to this earliest U.S. performance, the rebirth of the E Street Band is more thrilling to hear than you may remember.
To close out the 20th anniversary of the 2003 Elephant tour, it’s only fitting to go out big, just as the band did. For the final Third Man Thursday of 2023, here is the White Stripes New Year’s Eve concert from 2003, back at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago. A special performance to finish the year, featuring a little help from some friends, and artwork from longtime Stripes-collaborator Rob Jones.
What to say about 2003? Over 100 days of shows played across 5 continents. In clubs, theaters, sports arenas. At festivals, on the radio, on TV, at a primary school. A music video showing a girl with a broken wrist. A music video showing a boy with a broken finger. A record that turned from Gold into Platinum (and went double platinum earlier this year). Planes, trains, and automobiles. Interviews, interviews, interviews. And still, no two performances or setlists ever alike.
Here is the final show of the year, with the White Stripes bringing the Elephant back into the room at the Aragon. With parts of this show broadcast live on CNN, the return to Chicago was a party on a grand stage to close out a grand year, shared with a global audience of millions.
For this special occasion, the band had brought along two groups of friends. The first opening act on this night was the band Blanche, who’s members shared a history with Jack going all the way back to Goober & The Peas and Two Star Tabernacle. A cover of Blanche’s song “Who’s to Say” was featured on the single for “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself”, and they would be joining the band on the upcoming January tour of the UK.
The second openers on the bill were the Flaming Lips, a group who also had a connection with the band. While the Stripes had spent 2003 unleashing Elephant on the world, the Flaming Lips were also on the road, helping Yoshimi battle those Pink Robots. It would be at a show in Detroit the year before, where the Lips were playing as both opener and backing band for Beck (just as they would at this show for the Stripes), where Jack would present frontman Wayne Coyne with a gift that would be memorialized in the song “Thank You Jack White (For The Fiber-Optic Jesus That You Gave Me)”. After Jack had injured his finger in the car accident in July, the first concert that the Stripes would have to cancel would be the T In the Park festival in Scotland. It would be the Flaming Lips who would fill in for the band, taking to the stage dressed in red and white and opening with a reworked cover of “Seven Nation Army”, featuring lyrics that included bits from the Butthole Surfers’ “Moving to Florida”, which you can just make out on the performance of the song here, with Jack sharing the verses with Coyne, who can be heard singing through a megaphone, complete with air-raid siren.
The New Year’s Eve show is a wonderful capture of lightning in the bottle for both the White Stripes and the Flaming Lips. While the Stripes and their minimalism would be on their way to the UK to immortalize the power of simplicity on film, the Lips would soon be bound for Coachella, with animal costumes, floodlights, fake blood, and a space bubble in tow.
From the very start of the Stripes performance on this New Year’s Eve, there’s an audible sense of joy, with the band no doubt refreshed after having had a month off since the end of the November leg. Perhaps not surprising that the set here leans heavily on pre-Elephant tracks, including a few callbacks to the last time they played the Aragon on 7/2, by opening with “When I Hear My Name” in place of “Black Math”, and featuring adlibs of “Aluminum” and “Cool Drink of Water Blues.” The setlist is a perfect summary to close the year, featuring a little bit from every era of the band’s history, with a song like “The Big Three Killed My Baby” brought current with an adlib commenting on the ever-present political climate of the time.
The version of “We’re Going To Be Friends” is simply beautiful, with the Flaming Lips providing gentle backup on guitar and bass, while frontman Coyne can be seen in the footage from the show giving Jack a hug mid-song, smearing fake blood on his shirt. And of course that Stripes/Lips Seven Nation Army mashup, kicking off the New Year as a shower of red, white, and black balloons were dropped from the ceiling onto the crowd. This show is a fitting celebration to close out 2003, complete with party favors, as attendees were given a small viewfinder which showed a message of “Happy New Year 2004 from the White Stripes”.
While it was the end of an incredible year, the Elephant tour wasn’t quite at the finish line just yet, with more shows to come in January. As Jack would say after “Seven Nation Army”, now officially in 2004, “Well, we can’t stop now, right?”
The third and final leg of the Working On a Dream tour wrapped 25 months of near-continuous touring for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. The run started in support of 2007’s Magic, while 2009 was in service of its aforenamed follow-up.
With so many gigs already under their belts and multiple passes through key markets, Springsteen was looking for a way to shake things up. “We were trying to [do] some things that would make these last series of shows special for our fans,” he tells the Philly faithful gathered in what was once simply called The Spectrum — and home to some of the band’s greatest arena shows.
The idea they settled on was to perform his classic albums in full. On this night the selection is Darkness on the Edge of Town, “a record that means a great, great deal to me,” Springsteen says. “I think it summarized a lot of things that were going on in the world that I was in at the time. When it came out…it wasn’t greeted right away with the kind of affection that it’s gained over the years. People didn’t initially know quite what to make of it.”
While he has alluded to it before, Springsteen’s point of view that the album took time to resonate is fascinating to reconsider. In hindsight, it feels like Darkness on the Edge of Town was a seminal album from the start, but its status was earned over time, due in no small part to the songs, “being in our setlist…night after night for [33] years.”
A full performance of Darkness on the Edge of Town is the centerpiece of this fine October 14, 2009 set, part of a four-show stand that would mark Springsteen’s farewell performances at the legendary Spectrum.
As Springsteen notes, Darkness songs have been a persistent force in his setlists for decades, but this in-sequence reading resets our perspective on the material. “Badlands” is returned to a starting role opening the album, and there’s still bite in the old warhorse, aided by an exuberant audience reaction and singalong.
Sonic sharpness continues through a seamless transition to “Adam Raised a Cain.” The guitar tone is spot on, especially the solo, and Springsteen sings with conviction that belies the years that have passed since the song was written. From the angst of “Adam Raised a Cain” is the majestic “Something in the Night,” led by Roy Bittan’s emotional piano part.
Next, “Candy’s Room” combines the prettiness of “Something” and the edge of “Adam” into one of Springsteen’s most dynamic and appealing arrangements. Stevie Van Zandt’s backing vocals provide an extra jolt of urgency. Bittan takes center stage again for “Racing in the Street,” as he carries the unforgettable melody on piano, while Springsteen’s vocal cadence and phrasing have shifted in modern performances to emphasize weariness over wistfulness. The “Factory” whistle blows earnestly in Philly with fine pedal-steel guitar from Nils Lofgren and intriguingly angular fretwork from Van Zandt.
The stunner of the Darkness set is “Streets of Fire,” easily the least-played song from the album since 1978 in only its ninth appearance since the Darkness tour. Springsteen gets up for it, hitting the heightened vocal line “I heard somebody call my name” like you want him to and turning in scorching guitar throughout.
The spark of “Streets of Fire” helps ignite the final two songs of the album sequence. “Prove It All Night,” often played early in live sets, serves as more of a sizzling denouement with all three guitarists contributing meaningfully, including Lofgren’s Theremin-like solo. The title track also serves as the album closer, and the reading here is full-blooded and flawless, as again Springsteen reaches for and reaches his most emotive vocal range on lines like “I lost my faith when I lost my wife,” “I’ll be on the hill ‘cause I can’t stop,” and the song’s final, held “towwwwwwn.” It feels wholly appropriate that the expanded 2009 band line-up stood down to let the core E Streeters and Charlie Giordano perform Darkness On the Edge of Town as authentically as it could be in 2009.
While a child singing “Waitin’ on a Sunday Day” does shatter the spell woven by the full Darkness, the rest of the show that surrounds the album suite has its share of special moments. The first half of the show includes the only airing to date of “What Love Can Do” from Working On a Dream. It’s a shame the song has been slept on by the merits of this excellent performance in which the band is firmly locked into the arrangement and Springsteen and Van Zandt sing with gripping intensity. Fun fact: the song also gives this concert two different biblical references to Cain.
The second part of the show boasts the welcome inclusion of “Human Touch,” which, after ten previous attempts, crosses the line fully into E Street Band territory and declares its citizenship. This lively take offers plenty of guitar, lilting vocals from Patti Scialfa and a superb ending.
“Long Walk Home” follows, and doubles as a good title for this final stretch of the 2009 tour, when Springsteen gave the people what they wanted, full performances of his most beloved works, without it coming off as nostalgia.
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Two exclusive archives from The White Stripes are now available for streaming in the nugs.net app, featuring performances from Milwaukee, Indianapolis and Columbus. From long time White Stripes fan Mike on this month’s ‘Third Man Thursday’ releases:
November 2003 – Looking for a Home
Back in the US for a fourth round, the November leg would begin the journey to close out the year, and close out the tour. Kicking off with a trio of shows in Milwaukee, Indianapolis, and Columbus – they start the run by playing in the three states that border Michigan, as if deliberately making a point of playing everywhere but home. Detroit would have to wait until the end of the month, and even then they had already signed up for a New Year’s Eve show in Chicago. As they would look back on this leg, Meg would recall “We were like a moth right next to the flame. It’s like, do any more and you go down. We were so tired. One final lap, and then have a rest.”
Like the three shows in Scandinavia that kicked off the European tour six months earlier, these first shows of the November run are a complementary snapshot in time. Where those shows in May saw the band experimenting with the new songs and pushing the setlists and arrangements outward, by November the new songs were now long established in the set, and yet somehow the band were still able to keep the performances continuously evolving. Notice that each of the shows here opens with the same three songs (Black Math > Dead Leaves > I Think I Smell a Rat), and even with those otherwise familiar ingredients to work with, each performance is still very much a unique serving – even at this late stage in the tour. From the debut of Bob Dylan’s Outlaw Blues at Milwaukee, to an impromptu version of Sister Do You Know My Name? played as an intro to Death Letter at Indianapolis, to Jack singing into the guitar pickup on his Airline during Hello Operator at Columbus. Still finding ways to pull new rabbits out of old hats, night after night.
Having had to reschedule this concert twice (once earlier in the year due to scheduling conflicts, and again after Jack’s car accident), they finally make it to Milwaukee. Coming so soon after the October tour of NZ/AU/JP wrapped, this show nicely consolidates many of the highlights from that run, all within the same show. Why Can’t You Be Nicer To Me? gets included within I’m Finding It Harder to be a Gentleman, and Loretta Lynn’s God Makes No Mistakes is performed here within Screwdriver, both having been debuted at Adelaide 10/15. Girl You Have No Faith In Medicine features the adlib from the Beatles’ Boys at the end – the first since Hiroshima 10/26, and the Hardest Button to Button gets the Melbourne 10/14 “brain that felt like Pea-nut Butter” line. Milwaukee also features the debut of Bob Dylan’s Outlaw Blues, which follows after a blistering version of Ball and Biscuit. Out of the handful of times they would do this cover, the version here just might be the best one. “I might look like Robert Ford, but I feel like Jesse-Fucking-James!”
Other highlights include a funny play on words during Cannon, “I saw Guns! Tanks!…..Tanks, You’re Welcome!” The Death Letter/Little Bird combo is also excellent here, and during the intro you can just make out a tease of the slide riff from Sister Do You Know My Name? The next night in Indianapolis he would perform an impromptu version of the song in this spot. Later in the song, Jack ramps up the ending of Little Bird with a fantastic adlib of “Can’t you hear me knocking Meg?!” while he taps his slide on the fretboard. Listen for the shoutout to the local crowd before Boll Weevil, a throwback to their performances in town from earlier years: “Are we at the Cactus Club? My memory’s not so good. Hi Milwaukee, I forgot to say hello to you!” And later in the song, an acknowledgement of how the band were feeling by this point in the tour, so close to home, and yet still so far away: “See it’s funny, because you all have a home, I guess. But my sister and I, no such luck. Y’all here, you got Milwaukee, Green Bay, Oconomowoc. We used to have Detroit, but that was a long, long, long time ago.”
11/11/03 Indianapolis: Egyptian Room at the Murat – LISTEN
Where Milwaukee the night before saw the band seamlessly cutting in the latest additions from the October run, the crowd at Indianapolis got treated to a longer and more experimental set. There’s an abundance of one-off and unique performances here. Shine on Harvest Moon gets an airing in Cannon, having last been performed at Los Angeles on 9/22, and Mr Cellophane makes a return to the set – the second to last performance. This Protector gets performed complete with the off-mic spoken word intro, and Folk Singer by Brendan Benson gets the first airing since the debut in Madrid on 5/25. An epic 7 minute Ball and Biscuit features Jack singing lyrics from Howlin Wolf’s Smokestack Lightning, the only known time he actually sings along to the riff, which had been debuted back at Stockholm on 5/13. Seven Nation Army gets a one-off adlib of “make the sweat drip…drip”. I Fought Piranhas here is one of the longest known versions, hitting the 6 minute mark and ending in a wail of whammy and feedback.
The biggest surprise of the night is the impromptu version of Sister Do You Know My Name?, which gets played during the intro to Death Letter. Having been hinted at the night before, and one of only two performances on the Elephant tour, the version here is unique, as the Kay guitar is in a different tuning than the one the song is normally played in. As a result, Jack ends up doing a bit of on-the-fly improvising with the vocal melody and the guitar parts. A completely inspired and unexpected surprise. Later in Death Letter he does the quick version of the Motherless Children lines, like he did at Melbourne 10/14. For a bit of comedy, listen for the sound of a local radio station being picked up by Jack’s amp after Seven Nation Army and again after The Hardest Button to Button. Continuing the theme from the night before, there is yet another reference to not knowing where “home” is during Boll Weevil, with Jack making a joke to the Indiana audience saying “We love being here in Houston Texas!”. This show also features a unique milestone, as it’s the first one where Jack closes the show by stepping on the Big Muff pedal and letting the guitar feedback ring out as the band exits the stage.
Similar to the previous night in Indianapolis, where the show ended with Jack thanking the city of Houston, he takes the joke a step further in Columbus, referring to different cities throughout the show (Boise, Des Moines, Akron). Given the band’s long history of playing in Ohio, it’s safe to say that they’re clearly glad to be back and are in good spirits, as this is an excellent performance, with energy to spare. Many of the songs get an extra dose of enthusiasm, particularly in the vocals. While they were surely looking forward to the end of the tour, and pushing back against the fatigue of touring, there’s certainly no sign of it here. Listen to the version of I Think I Smell a Rat, where Jack throws in the line “Video Games! Tattoos! Body Piercings! I think I smell a rat!” – a comment on some of the distractions of the day. He’d insert this line again at New York on 11/18. During Let’s Shake Hands he adds in the line “Well you can do what you wanna do Meg….we’ve been playing this song for 6 years! So say my name!” As if in amazement of how long they had been together and how long they had been on tour by this point.
Or listen to the must hear version of Hello Operator, where Jack sings one of the verses through the guitar pickup in his Airline. Or Little Bird, where he sings the “When I get you home” lines while toggling the pickup selector on the Kay to cut the sound in and out, mimic’ing the stutter effect with his voice. This show also features a rare outing of Now Mary, the second of only two performances on the Elephant tour (the other was at Sydney 10/10), which in turn segues into a welcome appearance of Sugar Never Tasted So Good. After the encores of Little Room, the Joss Stone version of Fell In Love With a Girl, Apple Blossom, and I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself, where they’ve kept the energy they had at the beginning of the show all the way through to the end, they break the pattern of ending the show with Boll Weevil and instead close with Seven Nation Army, with the intro “Okay Akron, you’ve been very nice to us. My sister is very pleased, and I’m very happy too!”. Like the night before, the show closes with a wail feedback ringing out as the band leave the stage, the now official “ending” to each show that would follow on the tour from here.
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We are excited to announce a completely rebuilt nugs.net web player, along with other recent iOS and Android app enhancements including personalized queue functionality, picture-in-picture, and more!
All New Web Player
Our new desktop web player is here! An all new design with new feature sets and product enhancements, this is a major upgrade! See below for some highlights:
Follow Your Favorites The new player allows you to select your favorite artists so you can customize your app experience and stay up to date on the recent shows you care about the most.
Leave Show Reviews Hear an epic jam? See a show that moved you? In the new web player you can now leave show reviews to help other fans know what’s hot and shouldn’t be missed
Save Shows & Albums Keep your favorite shows saved for future reference. Click the heart button on the shows that you love and come back to them anytime online or in the app.
New Browsing Options You can now browse the nugs.net catalog in a number of ways: by artist name, by the year of the show and by song title.
Live Audio Streams
An all-new way to listen to music on nugs.net – you can now stream live audio from select concerts. Listen in to the show live as it happens on the nugs.net apps, or website. This feature is available to all nugs.net users – both free and paid subscribers.
App Queue Functionality
Mix your music for the mood you’re in. The new queue functionality let’s you personalize your playback queue, with options to organize and sort as you please. This feature also unlocks the ‘History’ of recently played tracks.
Picture-in-Picture Playback
Never miss a moment with Picture-in-Picture. Now you keep can keep watching the show, even while using other apps. This works on livestreams and our subscriber videos on-demand.
Enjoy these enhancements, our full streaming catalog, exclusive listereams, and more with a 7-day free trial. Sign up today!
We’re stoked to announce the 13th-official Widespread Panic Archive multi-track release, Boone 1999! Recorded on 4/22/1999 at the Varsity Gym at ASU in Boone, NC, this hometown show for Michael Houser has been a longtime fan favorite from their red-hot 1999 Spring Tour, with early takes of “All Time Low” and “Red Hot Mama,” and a “Low Spark > Drums > Low Spark” for the ages.
Professionally mixed by Panic’s longtime producer, John Keane, this multi-track recording will see it’s official release on Friday for streaming and order, exclusively on nugs.net. Before the street date, join us Thursday, August 17th at 8 pm ET for the worldwide debut and listening party, free for everyone! A must listen, and you just need a free nugs account to join the live audio stream.
Exclusive to nugs.net, this month’s Third Man Thursday release brings us The White Stripes’ October 14, 2003 performance from Melbourne. From long-time Stripes enthusiast and expert Mike:
Coming on the heels of last month’s premiere of Seven Nation Army at Wolverhampton, this show in Melbourne is the return to the city where the riff was first played, during that infamous soundcheck at the Corner Hotel. This time around, the band are upgraded from a Hotel to a Palace.
This show takes place during the underrated New Zealand-Australia leg of the Elephant tour. The natural point of comparison for this show in Melbourne is the Sydney performance at the Enmore Theatre a few days earlier on 10/10. Whereas that show captured the band out to wow the audience, the energy is at times frantic, with Jack going song to song almost recklessly. If Sydney is the getaway car barreling down the alleyway, crashing through the trashcans, Melbourne is the other side of that coin: the same car, the same driver, but why not take the long way home?
Like Sydney, this show in Melbourne is also a marathon set, clocking in at around 1hr 40min. But whereas Sydney hits most of the familiar numbers from the Elephant live repertoire, with no time to stretch out on any one song too long, this set at Melbourne is less about the inclusion of this song or that song, and more about how the songs themselves get performed just a little bit different. Throughout the set, there are many unique change-ups and extra doses of improvisation here, making for an excellent and relaxed performance
Many of the surprises here are subtle. Listen as Jack moves to the keyboards for the first verse of Dead Leaves, or how I Want To Be the Boy To Warm Your Mother’s Heart gets an extended outro in place of the final verse. Other surprises are more obvious, such as Death Letter getting stretched out to over 10 minutes, including a unique rapid-fire delivery of Motherless Children and adlibs at the end of the song proclaiming “Your mother was a mother now!”, before wrapping with a quote from Little Bird. Cannon gets a unique whispered vocal delivery for the opening verses, before switching out the John The Revelator section with improvised lines inviting the audience to “come into my home” for “something you ain’t never had before”. The fourth wall gets broken again during Look Me Over Closely, with the line “every girl in this room, I’m singing this one to you” before ending the song with a saturated burst on the guitar. The Hardest Button to Button also gets an extended intro and an adlib about a brain that “felt like Pea-nut butter!”. The same songs already played many times on the tour, done just a little different here.
And then there’s the truly unique moments, which includes the where-the-hell-did-that-come-from performance of Caravan by Duke Ellington. Broken Bricks also gets the first known performance since 2002, with yet more of those whispered vocals and a “slow version” treatment, before setting up an excellent Small Faces and yet another one-time-only cover, this time Love Me by Elvis Presley – complete with adlibbed Buddy Holly style vocals. So yeah, not your typical Elephant show. Other nuggets include Jack playing some lines from the Peter Gunn Theme during Jack the Ripper, the audience singing the verses during I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself, and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quote from Wichita Lineman during Seven Nation Army, before closing out with Boll Weevil to bring this one home.
Exclusive to nugs.net, this month’s Third Man Thursday release brings us The White Stripes April 7, 2003 performance from Wolverhampton. From archivist Ben Blackwell:
Twenty years ago, give or take a couple of weeks, the White Stripes purchased a Random Access Digital Audio Recorder. RADAR for short. It cost $8000. When recently asked about the impetus behind the move, long-time Stripes manager Ian Montone said…
“Many artists I respected – musically and from a business standpoint – always recorded their shows. Frank Zappa specifically. We wanted to implement something similar given we already owned our studio master recordings. So it made sense to record and own everything the band (and Jack) did moving forward. Live shows included. Because every show was different. There was no setlist. Everything was special. We wanted to capture that for posterity’s sake – hence the RADAR.”
In terms of the archival footprint of the White Stripes, the importance of this decision cannot be overstated. Previously, sanctioned live recordings were largely limited to whenever I was there AND the club had a cassette deck wired to the soundboard. With the end result being a static two-channel board recording subject to the whims and preferences of a house sound engineer’s real-time mixing, it left a lot to be desired.
For example…my obligations as a mediocre Detroit college journalism student with a scholarship meant that for the entirety of 2002 (a year the Stripes played nearly 100 shows) I was present for a mere seven performances, two of which were purely coincidental as my band the Dirtbombs were slotted as the warm-up act.
Thus, the number of proprietary live recordings from 2002 in the archive? Shit, barely any. I count one, give or take one.
But come 2003 the White Stripes would have the raw masters of their on-stage inputs digitally preserved. This gave the band the ability, after-the-fact, to have whomever they desired to properly and precisely mix every live show they performed, regardless of whether or not I was there to slide the sound guy a tape that night. This was $8000 well-spent.
Thank god for RADAR.
The April 7th, 2003 gig in Wolverhampton was the first show the White Stripes recorded with this digital system. More importantly, this show is the kick-off to the Elephant world tour, approximately 14 months of whirlwind travel, Whirlwind Heat, sold out shows, not sold out ethics, finger breakings, Grammy takings, global gallivanting and “oh oh oh oh oh ohhhh oh” chanting.
The performance, shockingly, has not been heard in ANY form since the amps powered down that evening two decades ago. I guess no one in Wolverhampton was doing surreptitious audience recordings at the time. Photos of the gig? I found none. Concert poster? I’ve never seen one. Please, prove me wrong. I welcome it. Contemporaneous accounts of the evening? A dumb brief write-up from the NME, one slightly more informative from the Independent and that’s it.
As Jack humbly tells the crowd that Elephant hit number 1 on the charts this day…the gig…you’d think there’d be more proof that it really existed. Things here feel big. They seem important. A chance whiff of greatness. The weight of it all is palpable on the recording.
So the wait to hear this show is most definitely worth it. The first-ever public outing of a clutch of songs off Elephant is the definition of historic.
The fact that Meg switches to her snare hits late on the first verse of “Seven Nation Army”? I LOVE it. Perhaps the only time ever she didn’t 100% nail that song. Jack’s nerves evident on “In The Cold, Cold Night”? Endearing. The premature ending of “The Hardest Button To Button”? A combo of “wow” and “holy shit” said in wonderment.
These are by no means the best versions of ANY of these songs. But they are precious for what they presage…the eventual enshrinement of said tunes in the bombastic canon of a band well on its way to their peak form.
Beyond that…the first time ever covering Public Nuisance’s “Small Faces.” What a moment! And the extra special treat of what we’ve titled here “Talking Pillow By My Side Blues.” An improvised song done in the “talking blues” style pioneered by Chris Bouchillon, appropriated by Woody Guthrie and yet further popularized by Bob Dylan, “Pillow” is one of the more realized extemporaneous songs to emerge from a White Stripes live show of any era. Which is fortunate to have been captured here, as it never shows up again, anywhere, ever.
Thank god for RADAR.
Though I must stress, the method was not perfect. As The White Stripes front of house engineer Matthew Kettle would say “Despite being the best thing we could get at the time, the RADAR was occasionally unreliable, and as we weren’t carrying a sound desk everywhere at that point, not every show was recorded successfully.”
With that in mind, there’s a handful of songs that failed to be recorded in Wolverhampton. “Dead Leaves” and “Black Math” and “I Think I Smell A Rat” seem to be songs from the top of the set lost to the ether on this night. Which isn’t too bad in the grand scheme of things, considering there’s an entire WEEK where Kettle’s best efforts were thwarted by the finicky digital interface and thus, we’re left only with our imagination and collective recollection trying to discern what happened at half dozen shows in June of 2003.
Otherwise the RADAR material was immediately put to use…the accompanying audio to “Black Math” live vid from the Masonic Temple, the Berlin soundcheck b-side recording of “St. Ides of March” and the promo-only triple LP Live In Las Vegas are all proper public-facing mobilizations of these recordings. Third Man didn’t even attempt to crack these suckers open for another ten years until prepping the Nine Miles From The White City live LP included in Vault Package 16 from 2013.
At that point, upon handing mix engineer Vance Powell the necessary drives, he audibly winced.
“What?” I asked him, perplexed and, let’s face it, ignorant.
“These drives have moving parts. Good luck getting anything off of them,” Vance replied.
To which point I said “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”
“No, I’m not,” he said. “These things are ten years old.”
I learned a very crucial lesson at that moment…that any digital format is only reliable for a couple years before it’s usurped by something more streamlined and less cumbersome – OR – it just stops working. The need to constantly update and re-archive digital files is downright maddening. There is no long-term, futureproof, failsafe digital carrier. Ever. It would be another five years before all drives were properly transferred to a relatively stable LTO format. And even then, not without RADAR drive “G” requiring a $1761.60 “clean room” recovery to save seven shows that would have otherwise just disappeared.
It sounds comical now, but wearing my “businessman” hat I broke out the calculator to amortize the proposal…deciding with an almost embarrassingly “duh” quickness that $251 per show was a reasonable enough fee to reclaim those ephemeral moments. Because there’s spirit in all these recordings. The unforeseen nostalgia of memories yet to be uncovered. Instances where the power of an assemblage of strangers in a room together can divine a psychically shared experience. Time that mattered to someone. Moments could now last forever,
One of those moments, cast off with barely any consideration, a seconds-long thought formulated into action in a more simple manner, appeared when Jack White signed the venue guest book after the show.
“Thanks Civic, you made my day and I shan’t forget it.”
And because of a wise $8000 investment made nearly a generation ago, you won’t either.
With the first Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band concerts in six years now fewer than 50 days away, a return to where their rebirth began feels fitting. East Rutherford, NJ 7/18/99 was only the band’s second US date on the Reunion tour. It followed a 36-show European leg that saw them playing beloved outtakes (finally released on Tracks), exploring the depths of their own catalog, and rounding into form ahead of an audacious 15-night stand at Continental Airlines Arena to kick off the American run.
The 7/18/99 recording, newly mixed from multitrack masters by Jon Altschiller, bears a strong sense of purpose and urgency for reconnection. How thrilling it must have been to not only hear “I Wanna Be With You” for the first time, but to take Bruce’s title statement literally as he calls in the band members one by one in the song’s intro. We want to be with you.
As commonplace as “Prove It All Night” might feel in hindsight, longtime fans hadn’t heard it played with the E Street Band in 14 years, and surely many others in attendance never had. These early Reunion shows were marked by bang-bang pacing at the top as the first two songs roll right into “Two Hearts.” Nils Lofgren may take the solo in “Prove It,” but Stevie Van Zandt’s return to the band is undeniable in his call-and-response backing vocals, which extend into “Two Hearts.”
“Trapped” was a standout when the band christened this building back in 1981; in 1999, Patti Scialfa’s vocals lift the chorus higher while modern keyboard textures from Roy Bittan and Danny Federici give “Trapped” a subtle recharge. “Darlington County” teases the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” for several bars before the rowdy road trip begins, giving Clarence Clemons his fifth fine showcase of the night already.
Following that crowd-pleaser, three radical rearrangements show the Reunion tour isn’t here just to play the past by rote. The country arrangement of “Factory” shifts the tone of the song entirely, removing the drudgery-implying repetitive thump of percussion to yield something more contemplative about the meaning of “the working life.” Lofgren’s work in particular shines.
Bittan and Federici similarly recast the tone of “The River” with a long introduction behind Bruce’s mournful harmonica. The spare reading, accented by Danny’s accordion and Lofgren’s pedal steel, bears some influence from Bruce’s recordings for and around The Ghost of Tom Joad. Not every fan liked the rearrangement, but there’s no denying its disquieting impact and the bold choice to reinterpret a classic.
The full-band “Youngstown” might be the most successful of the three. With a trio of players on stage, the Reunion tour had a fatter, richer, and more forward guitar sound than the 1984-85 or 1988 tours. “Youngstown” makes the case that the E Street Band can be a full-throttled rock band whenever they like, and “Murder Incorporated” reinforces the point, riding Max Weinberg’s big beat in a sharp, stunning performance.
One has to admire Bruce’s sequencing as “Badlands” arrives to take us over the top and end a nearly flawless first half of the show. The de facto second set begins with the joyous invitation of a zippy “Out in the Street” in another appealing reading that the audience eats up.
After barely addressing the crowd to this point, Bruce takes to the E Street pulpit during “Tenth Avenue Freeze-out,” which features forays into “Red Headed Woman” and Patti’s own “Rumble Doll,” plus a nod to the great Curtis Mayfield with snippets of “It’s All Right” and “Move On Up.” A reverent “Loose End” follows, and again one has to readjust one’s mindset to remember the years when it was unimaginable “Loose End” would ever be released let alone played in concert.
The summer setting brings “Sherry Darling,” led by the Clemons’ horn, and Brendan Byrne ‘81 vibes abound. “Working on the Highway” makes a light-hearted companion before Bruce shifts gears down again with a solemn reading of “The Ghost of Tom Joad” that starts acoustic before the band adds gentle accent colors.
The full sense of return simmering all night is sealed by the first few notes of “Jungleland.” As great as the show has been to this point, the magisterial appearance of the Born to Run epic seals the deal between Bruce, the band, and the fans. Clarence Clemons meets the moment and plays his saxophone solo with complete confidence. They. Are. Back.
The set ends with a lively, guitar-drenched “Light of Day” and more snippets including “I Need a Train,” “I’ve Been Everywhere,” and a delicious snatch of Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn Theme” (Brucebase, how did you miss that one?). While “Light of Day” only served two tours of duty (1988 and 1999-2000) as an E Street set-closer, it did so with distinction, wrapping the set with momentum.
The encore opens with Springsteen in the confession booth, revealing secrets great, small, and embarrassing with admirable candor in “Freehold.” The song first appeared at Bruce’s solo acoustic show at his old high school in 1996 and its inclusion the first six nights of the 1999 NJ stand seems to suggest that as much as Bruce is back home as a local hero, he’s equal parts humble local man.
“Stand On It” is the final Tracks song in the set and features some dazzling displays from Bittan and Clemons in one of only 21 performances ever. From there, “Hungry Heart,” “Bobby Jean,” “Born to Run,” and “Thunder Road” give the people what they want, each sounding fresh after a long layoff.
On an evening firmly focused on the recommitment of Bruce and the band, “If I Should Fall Behind” delivers the sentiment with spotlight-sharing vocal turns from Nils, Patti, Clarence, and Steve on a song recorded and released while the band was on hiatus.
The night closes with a dedication to the Kennedy family–following the passing of John F. Kennedy Jr. two days prior–as the intro to “Land of Hope and Dreams.” Bruce’s modern day “People Get Ready” (so much so that he shares the writing credit with Curtis Mayfield) captures the American spirit as much as any song in the canon.
The 7/18/99 recording is the earliest Reunion show yet to appear in the Live Archive series, and it shows just how ready they were to begin what we now see as their modern era, one that will enjoy a new chapter come February when Bruce and the band will roar back to life.
We’re happy as all get-out to announce that twenty legendary live-concert and live-radio recordings from the country music genre are now available for streaming on nugs.net. We already have a robust bluegrass catalog and a diverse representation of country shows from the likes of Johnny Cash, Tyler Childers, Waylon Jennings, even new-age ‘Cosmic Country‘, and now our subscribers can stream some of the most notable live performances from some of the biggest names in the history of country music.
Recorded live at Perkins Palace in Pasadena, CA on 5/15/1980, the show featured the two bands with Sam Bush performing Leon Russell originals and covers from The Beatles & The Rolling Stones.
Gram Parsons – Gram Parsons & The Fallen Angels: Live 1973
Recorded on 3/13/1973 in Hempstead, NY, the country-rock icon’s final recording, features Parsons and Fallen Angels Emmylou Harris (pre-solo career) and Jock Bartley (pre-Firefall) in peak form!
Recorded in a series of California honky-tonks during the middle of 1982, this live-album release features covers of classic tracks from Gram Parsons to Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Buck Owens, Conway Twitty, and more.
This historic set presents remastered and expanded editions of landmark classic albums released during his Atlantic Records years, as well as a 1974 live concert at the Texas Opry House
Recorded live on 9/14/2015 at Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium, this concert also featured John Prine, Sam Bush, Vince Gill, Alison Krauss, Jerry Douglas, and more.
Recorded on 1/28/2006 at Wild Adventures Theme Park in Valdosta, GA, this is the only concert recording in existence from the only tour by the brothers
Travis Tritt – Live on Soundstage (Classic Series)
Recorded in August 2003, in this Soundstage concert, he wows the audience performing favorites such as “Modern Day Bonnie and Clyde,” “Great Day to Be Alive,” and “Anymore.” Soundstage was an American live concert television series produced by WTTW Chicago.
Recorded 9/12/16 at the Hotel Café in Los Angeles, California, this show features Brandy in pared down, intimate setting with only a guitarist accompanying her
We’ve already got a robust catalog of live shows from the multi-platinum, Grammy-winning group, adding to this is their 6/2/2004 performance at the famous Stubb’s BBQ in Austin.
Listen now to all these recently added archives and the entire nugs.net streaming catalog with a 7-day free trial.
If there’s any period in modern Springsteen history that continues to grow in admiration it is the 2007-2008 Magic era.
There was always something appealing in the idea that Bruce and the E Street Band weren’t reuniting after an extended separation (only a few years since Vote For Change) nor called to service by historic events, but simply touring behind an excellent new album. Better still, the Magic tour created the setlist model we’ve had ever since.
The 1999-2000 Reunion tour marked the long-awaited return of the blood brothers and was tied to the release of the vaults-clearing Tracks, which liberated vital studio outtakes we only dreamed would someday be released. Several Tracks songs featured in the Reunion shows, and the exercise of producing the box and preparing for his first ESB tour in 11 years had Bruce looking at his catalog from a fresh vantage point. The result: setlist surprises on a regular basis—you didn’t know what Tracks song or vintage cut might turn up on a given night, putting long-lost classics like “New York City Serenade,” “Blinded By the Light” and “Lost in the Flood” back in play.
In addition to featuring 12 strong new songs from the 2007 album, the Magic tour suggested a similar reflection had taken place, but this time on the performance history of Bruce’s songs, with an eye toward the underplayed. Spurred by fan-sign requests, which took hold in 2007-2008, a trove of unusual cover songs appeared, along with choice rarities, upping the setlist wildcard factor practically every night. This awareness of what came before would continue on the Wrecking Ball tour, as requests persisted and got even more specific (e.g. “Prove It All Night ‘78”) in 2012-2013.
Nashville 8/21/08 exemplifies this “embrace the present and tap the past” approach. The concert immediately prior to the towering St. Louis show on 8/23, a previous Live Archive release, Nashville offers convincing performances of contemporary material, career-spanning classics, and special additions with deep roots in Springsteen’s performance past suggested by the fans. This delightful show also bears the unmistakable feeling of Bruce and the band enjoying being back on the job.
In a rare opening slot, “Out in the Street” sets the stage for a communal night between band and fan. The first half of the Nashville set runs strong with modern material (“Radio Nowhere,” “Lonesome Day,” “Youngstown”) and period heavy-hitters (“No Surrender,” “Murder Incorporated”), but things really open up when Bruce begins collecting request signs after “Spirit in the Night.”
“I’m gonna test the band,” he says with a wry smile. “We played this at the Capitol Theatre in 1978.” Credit him for remembering correctly: “Good Rockin’ Tonight” earned 17 airings in its premiere run on the Darkness tour (including the Capitol in Passaic, 9/20/78) and three more on the River tour before going dormant for 28 years. Did they nail the arrangement? Not exactly (though Roy Bittan’s piano playing is extraordinary). Did they tap Darkness tour spirit? Absolutely.
This ragged-but-right “Good Rockin’ Tonight” is an in-the-moment charmer, no more so than when Bruce shouts, “Go back a verse, Dan,” acknowledging crew member Dan Lee, who runs Bruce’s on-stage Teleprompter and helps make lost songs and other requests a welcome reality.
Preview of “Good Rockin’ Tonight” Live – Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
Darkness tour spirit also infuses a sweet “Growin’ Up,” complete with the “selling the pool table to buy the Kent guitar” story. A surprisingly rare “I’m Goin’ Down” follows. It’s the only song from Born in the U.S.A. performed fewer than 100 times, trailing even “Pink Cadillac” (125 to date). This one of three appearances on the Magic tour is lively and terrific.
If that isn’t rare enough for you, how about “Hungry Heart” b-side “Held Up Without a Gun,” played for only the fourth time ever? Bruces seamlessly slips back into the vocal cadence and tone of the original, and the band hits it like an every-nighter.
There’s no time to catch our breath before another River rarity, outtake “Loose End” (changed from “Loose Ends” as of the release of the Ties That Bind box set) in a sharp reading that again taps vintage vibes in a manner that suggests something beyond muscle memory is afoot in Nashville.
The most striking example of this uncanny ability to recall the past comes before “She’s the One.” The song was a staple of Magic tour sets, but on this night, seemingly out of nowhere—especially since he began the song as he did every 2007-2008 version—Bruce breaks into the classic “Mona” intro from the Darkness tour (and once in 1981) and damn if it doesn’t sound just right. Stevie Van Zandt catches on and brings his own vintage licks to the segment.
A few songs later divine inspiration strikes again, and Bruce calls out chord changes—“B” then “E”—to intriguingly append Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” to the start of “I’m on Fire,” a song that’s all about crossing lines. A brilliant coupling.
The back half of the show is anchored by a trio of recent rockers: “The Rising,” a potent “Last to Die,” and the underrated “Long Walk Home,” the arrangement of which is an exemplar of the modern E Street sound. “Badlands” finishes the main set before an encore that starts on a rousing “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” (it is August, after all).
“Thunder Road” and “Born to Run” follow before the last tour premiere of the night, a cover of The Bobby Fuller Four’s “I Fought the Law,” played for only the fourth time since 1981 and barely aged a day—as is the theme this evening.
For those of us not old enough to see ’70s and ’80s shows in person, the Magic tour provided a time machine to a taste of what a few of those special song performances were like. May those vibes return in 2023.
While his Born to Run book and Springsteen on Broadway performance served as overt autobiographical projects, Bruce Springsteen’s 1996 homecoming shows in Freehold and Asbury Park were equally if not more confessional.
Sprouting from seeds planted at 1990’s Christic Institute benefit concerts (available in the Live Archive series), Bruce’s return-to-the-Shore shows break the fourth wall and at times seek to provoke the audience by intentionally revealing parts of himself that didn’t necessarily comport with the image of rock’s everyman superstar.
Coming home—not just to New Jersey, but the very towns where his music, band, and lifelong friendships were born—is an act of making peace with one’s past. As Springsteen writes in “When You’re Alone,” performed so poignantly here, “I left and swore I’d never look back,” only to be sent “crawling like a baby back home.”
Bruce has been a storyteller since the early days, spinning yarns about Ducky Slattery and the magical meeting of Scooter and the Big Man. But that became part of the mythmaking.
Back in Asbury Park for the first time in decades, he’s in a different sort of dialogue with the audience—not exactly a two-way street (though he does respond to audience shouts on a few occasions), but consciously revealing his truths and gauging response. Case in point: As he makes unambiguously clear introducing “Red Headed Woman,” Springsteen was (and hopefully remains) America’s foremost advocate for cunnilingus.
For all that’s been said over the years about how he became the musician that he is, the story he tells ahead of “Across the Border,” drawing a parallel between the pop music his mother played on the radio and The Grapes of Wrath might be the most instructive. He eloquently connects the roots of the two key themes of his formative work: the yearning to escape one’s circumstances and the desire for human connection.
Both themes are in full display on Asbury Park 11/26/96, the final night of four Shore shows and the closing night in AP. The November 24 performance was previously released in the Live Archive series, where Bruce was joined by Danny Federici, Patti Scialfa, and Soozie Tyrell. That trio returns for the last show, joined by several figures from those seminal Shore years including Stevie Van Zandt, Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez, Richard Blackwell (who played percussion on The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle), and the late, great Big Danny Gallagher, on whose living room floor Bruce wrote “a lot of my early work.”
The show immediately acknowledges those early days as Springsteen is accompanied by Federici on “For You” to open, followed by a solo turn of “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the CIty.” There’s nothing retro about the performances, which sound vibrant and in the moment, with Bruce in fine, strong voice. For “Saint,” his strumming adopts the low acoustic sound from the Joad tour arrangement of “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” which propels the song to the rafters. On that point, the same can be said of the entire performance, which practically bursts from the stage to the audience. In contrast, Springsteen’s next solo outing, the 2005 tour in support of Devils & Dust, can be categorized as more of a lean-in experience, brilliant as it was.
“Atlantic City” gets a passionate if traditional reading. Curious that the song wasn’t part of the original Joad setlists, but it became a staple starting with the European shows in the spring of 1996. The brilliant “Straight Time” was part of the Joad tour core, but curiously it has been played only once since, in Copenhagen 2005.
Scialfa and Tyrell first take the stage for “Tougher Than The Rest,” played only in Freehold and Asbury in a rare acoustic arrangement. “Darkness” is assayed at a blistering pace, and the urgency felt in so many of the night’s performances rings true as Bruce sings, “lives on the line where dreams are found and lost.”
There’s a washboard quality in the rhythmic strumming intro to “Johnny 99” as Bruce blasts harmonica to what sounds like the riff of U2’s “Desire.” It’s another pacey rendition, and Bruce’s heighted Joad voice shifts wildly from high to low, hard to soft, demanding the audience engage.
Next, the first of those old friends, as Richard Blackwell takes the stage on congas for a one-off performance of “All That Heaven Will Allow,” dormant since the last night of the Tunnel tour. Bruce brings out Blackwell with a story about randomly running into him in the woods a long way from the Shore—near the Esalen Institute in Big Sur—after driving cross-country in late 1969. Blackwell is then joined by Tyrell on violin for the comforting return of “All That Heaven Will Allow.”
With Federici rejoining on accordion, Tyrell and Springsteen revisit “Wild Billy’s Circus Story,” and again Springsteen’s singing is spirited and invigorating, even contemporizing the Wild & Innocent classic.
The aforementioned cunnilingus advocacy precedes “Red Headed Woman,” though perhaps stumping would be a better word choice. Bruce makes a rare foray into political impressions, doing his take on Senator Bob Dole by way of positing the theory that Dole could have won the 1996 Presidential election if only he’d said, “This is Bob Dole. Bob Dole stands for a strong America; prosperity in every home. Bob Dole stands for cunnilingus.”
“Two Hearts” arrives just in time to turn off the steam, as Patti and Soozie join for this calmer expression of love, teeing up one of the night’s true highlights. “When You’re Alone” was released on Tunnel of Love in 1987, but never appeared in a Tunnel of Love Express Tour set. Springsteen finally debuted the song live at the 1993 tour’s Count Basie Theatre warm-up before its more formal resurrection for these 1996 Shore shows, tour-premiering in Freehold.
Why these shows? Bruce gives “When You’re Alone” no meaningful introduction, but the second-verse lyrics are highly apropos of the occasion. In this stripped-down arrangement, Bruce carries a lot of the original melody in his vocals, enhanced by Patti’s rich harmonies, and the result is special. One of only 12 performances ever, this is the last “When You’re Alone” until 2005.
Preview of “When You’re Alone” Live – Bruce Springsteen
Former single-mates “Shut Out the Light” and “Born in the U.S.A.” are paired masterfully, with the B-side played first, featuring sympathetic support from Danny, Soozie, and especially Patti on vocals. The 1984 title track always merits reappreciation in its original acoustic form.
The NJ shows deviated significantly from the baseline Joad set, but the end of the 11/24/96 show reverts to form for “Sinaloa Cowboys,” “The Line” and “Across the Border.” As they were night after night, each of the three is brilliantly realized, and the addition of “Racing In the Street” between the final two is both a fascinating and fitting addition. Bruce reads “Racing” not unlike a Joad song (that influence can be felt on some of the 1973 songs as well), and the shifted telling makes for an engrossing rendition.
To the encore, and wonderful moments of Bruce seeing and celebrating the local friends who helped get him there. It starts with Stevie Van Zandt, who joins all prior guests and shares lead vocals with Bruce on his own classic “I Don’t Want to Go Home” in its only tour appearance and a unique acoustic arrangement. “Spirit in the Night” is suddenly an ode to the spirit on this night, with Lopez and Gallagher joining the fray on backing vocals.
A shambolic “Rosalita” ensues, where the spirit of the performance is again what matters most, and a video would do more justice to see the joy on the faces of these reunited Shore brothers (and sisters).
Danny and Bruce handle a joyous “This Hard Land” on their own, but not before reminding the audience that the show is a benefit for the Asbury Park Fire Department and the Women’s Center of Monmouth County. The evening closes with “4th of July Asbury Park (Sandy),” Bruce’s beloved ode to the city, the culture, and the people who brought him to John Hammond’s office and eventually MetLife Stadium.
“I got a chance the other night to just watch my kids running around the theater,” Bruce says in his intro to “Sandy,” “bringing the whole thing sort of full circle.” The same can be said for his own return to Asbury Park in 1996 for one of the most heartwarming shows on the Joad tour.
The Bruce Springsteen Live Archive catalog on nugs.net expands again with the addition of ten more shows from the 2016 River tour. The summer east coast leg included three homecoming dates at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ, plus massive outdoor gigs at Nationals Park in Washington D.C., Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia and Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, MA. Bruce and the E Street Band also performed arena shows at United Center in Chicago, Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater in Virginia Beach and Consol Energy Center in Pittsburgh.
All of these concerts opened with Springsteen’s 1973 magnum opus “New York City Serenade” augmented by a string section, save for Virginia Beach which began with Bruce at the piano playing “For You.” Tom Morello makes a guest appearance at MetLife on August 25, while Rickie Lee Jones does the same on August 30, the third and final night in E. Rutherford in a set that featured “Kitty’s Back,” “Summertime Blues,” “Pretty Flamingo,” “Living Proof” and “Secret Garden.”
The first show in Philadelphia on September 9 offers its own welcome rarities, chief among them “The Fever,” “Thundercrack” and “Streets of Philadelphia.” The tour’s closing night in Foxboro is 33-song keeper, highlighted by six songs from Bruce’s 1973 debut, Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ and all three tracks found on side two of its follow-up, The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle.
Note: These concerts are only available to U.S. and Canada subscribers, and can be streamed now with a free trial to nugs.net.
Erik Flannigan is a music archivist, producer, author and manager. He has been writing about Bruce Springsteen’s live performances and recordings for more than 30 years.
Learn more about the previous exclusive Bruce Springsteen audio drops
For audiophiles, we also offer a HiFi tier that allows you to enjoy 24-bit MQA streaming, as well as select Springsteen recordings in immersive 360 Reality Audio. Start your free trial and delve in.
Red Bank is the fifth and final drop of Bruce Springsteen Live Archive catalog recordings on nugs.net, completing the addition of nearly 200 shows circa 1975-2017 to the streaming service.
The 44 show Red Bank drop begins with five from Bruce’s beloved 1988 Tunnel of Love Express Tour with the E Street Band, including the US leg closer at Madison Square Garden on May 23 (which featured a rare cover of Jackie Wilson’s “Lonely Teardrops”) and Stockholm, July 3, originally broadcast live across the US on Fourth of July weekend 1988.
Next, two of the most extraordinary performances of Springsteen’s career, the November 16-17, 1990 acoustic performances to benefit the Christic Institute, held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Sharing a bill with Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne, Bruce performed his first solo shows in 16 years, debuting six new songs in the process, including the definitive reading of “Real World.” He also rearranged catalog classics to deliver riveting versions of “Darkness on the Edge of Town” on 12-string acoustic and “Tougher Than the Rest” on piano. These are truly essential recordings.
Most of the new songs debuted at the Shrine were later released on the companion albums Human Touch and Lucky Town in 1992. Springsteen assembled a new band for that tour, four shows from which are included in Red Bank: Meadowlands Arena, July 25, 1992; Boston Garden, December 13; Berlin’s Waldbühne, May 13, 1993; and the nearly four-hour, penultimate tour performance back at Meadowlands Arena on June 24 with guest appearances by Little Steven, Joe Ely, Southside Johnny, Max Weinberg, Clarence Clemons, Soozie Tyrell and the Miami Horns.
Five years after the Christic Shows, Springsteen mounted his first solo outing in support of The Ghost of Tom Joad, represented here by five concerts spanning the tour’s earliest days (a December 9 set at the Tower Theater, Upper Darby, PA, where he last performed in 1975) through the 1997 European victory lap (Palais des Congrès Acropolis, Nice, France on May 18). Also featured are special homecoming gigs at Bruce’s primary school, St. Rose of Lima in Freehold, NJ, November 8, 1996, and the Paramount Theatre in Asbury Park sixteen days later on November 24.
Last but not least, the 28-show European leg of 2016’s River tour rounds out the Red Bank drop. These performances include return visits to two of Springsteen’s favorite continental venues: Ullevi Stadium in Gothenburg, Sweden, June 25 and 27, along with San Siro Stadium in Milan, Italy, July 3 and 5.
Note: These concerts are only available to U.S. and Canada subscribers, and can be streamed now with a free trial to nugs.net.
Erik Flannigan is a music archivist, producer, author and manager. He has been writing about Bruce Springsteen’s live performances and recordings for more than 30 years.
Learn more about the previous exclusive Bruce Springsteen audio drops
For audiophiles, we also offer a HiFi tier that allows you to enjoy 24-bit MQA streaming, as well as select Springsteen recordings in immersive 360 Reality Audio. Start your free trial and delve in.
In high school, I got the chance to serve as a page in the Washington State Senate, a gig that allowed me to not only miss a week of school fully excused but get paid $150 for doing so. When I cashed that check, I knew exactly what I would do with the money.
A small record store had opened up across the street from Stewart Junior High, and on my first visit I saw an unusual record locked up in a glass case. It was Bruce Springsteen Piece de Resistance, credited as a September 1978 live recording from Passaic, New Jersey. While it was a three-LP box set, $35 still seemed like a lot of money to me at the time — that is, until my Senate-page windfall.
I didn’t know enough about Springsteen collecting to realize Piece de Resistance was sourced from a radio broadcast, but I did recognize it was a bootleg. My dad was a big record collector, and though his rock interests were limited to Bob Dylan and The Beatles, he did own a couple of boots. I told him about the store and the $35 Springsteen triple, to which he replied, “Bootlegs sound crappy.”
Ignoring his advice, I went out the next day and bought Piece de Resistance. I can still remember my trepidation as I dropped the needle on the LP hoping it didn’t sound too crappy.
From that point forward, finding and listening to Springsteen live recordings became a lifelong passion, with the Darkness tour the sentimental sweet spot of my quest. I’ve surely listened to the five 1978 radio broadcasts (thankfully all now available in the Live Archive series) several hundred times; the best soundboards and audience tapes nearly as often. Mediocre recordings, sure, plenty of those as well to catch rare songs. But I never listened to Atlanta, October 1, 1978, the provisional final show of the Darkness tour.
Springsteen’s legendary 1978 trek opened in Buffalo on May 23 and ran for 86 shows through what was to be the final stop, back-to-back concerts at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. Though Springsteen would return to the road in exactly one month, at the time, night two at the Fox was meant to be the tour finale. Soon thereafter it was decided Bruce should make “one final push,” as Jon Landau’s letter to Columbia Records put it, “concentrating on those markets where we have created very real excitement, and where, with one more concert coupled with imaginative promotion, we can finish the job.”
Back to Atlanta. The first night on September 30 is the fourth of the aforementioned radio broadcasts, and as many long speculated, the Record Plant Mobile Truck remained on site to preserve the second show on 24-track, 2-inch analog tape.
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band took the Fox stage that Sunday night believing it to be their last gig and gave a performance fitting of the occasion. The 10/1/78 set is like a supercut of special inclusions familiar from the Roxy, the Passaic stand, and early tour sets combined with ATL specials to yield a tremendous, peak ‘78 recording new to (almost) all of us.
“This is the last night of our tour, tonight,” Bruce says at the top, “our 86th show. So one more time for the last time.” What could be a more fitting opener than a reverent cover of the Rolling Stones’ “The Last Time,” with Stevie Van Zandt as Keith Richards on background vocals to Bruce’s Mick Jagger lead. After its premiere in Atlanta, Bruce reprised “The Last Time” for what ultimately proved to be the true final show of the Darkness tour, Richfield, OH, January 1, 1979.
It’s a joyous start to a stonking first set as Bruce sings in his special-show, heightened-vocal range, and the E Streeters score perfect 10s from the judges. A crackling “Badlands”and lusty “Spirit in the Night” serve as the preamble before Springsteen says, “Tonight our story begins in the Darkness on the Edge of Town.” It’s a tremendous take, with every bar from “Tonight I’ll be on that hill” to the end exemplary of Bruce and the band’s commitment.
The vocal showcase continues with “Heartbreak Hotel” and Bruce in full Elvis mode. In this slower arrangement (compared to The Roxy), one can feel emotional resonance when he sings to “all the broken hearts in the crowd,” as he says in his introduction, from “way down at the end of lonely street.” That lyric never jumped out to me before, but it is clearly a place Springsteen knows all too well and a perspective from which some of his greatest work originated.
“Factory,” a lively “Promised Land” (with some fresh details in the bridge and a great closing vocal), and a guttural, 11-minute-plus “Prove It All Night” extend the winning streak before the return of “It’s My Life.”
The Animals’ classic was a staple of 1976-77 setlists, presented as an epic showpiece tied to stories about Bruce’s relationship with his father. Performed on those tours, the song was a defiant statement of independence to come. In its short, seven-show reprise on the Darkness tour, the tone shifts to reflect a protagonist no longer aspiring to but living his pledge. The Atlanta performance is the final one (to date), perhaps because Bruce outgrew it. Fun fact: “It’s My Life” premiered at C.W. Post College on December 12, 1975, meaning the first and last performances of this classic cover are now included in the Live Archive series.
A distinct Roy Bittan piano introduction comes ahead of “Thunder Road,” the musical bed for Bruce to recall meeting a kid backstage the night before who told him he had formed his own band. “It meant a lot to me,” Bruce says earnestly. “It reminded me why I started doing all of this stuff in the first place. See you out on ‘Thunder Road’.” It’s a sweet moment that only adds to the uplifting power of this version.
“This is a song we don’t play much at all,” Bruce proclaims before a warmly received and instantly recognized “Meeting Across the River,” played but five times on the Darkness tour and incredibly, one of only 70 known occasions to date, making it one of the rarest in-concert tracks from the classic canon. It leads, as it should, into an immense “Jungleland.” “The latest rage,” “a real death waltz,” “the poets,” the extended, soaring “hoohhhhhhhs”—he crushes them all.
To open the second set, Bruce reaches back to “For You,” an every-nighter early in the tour not played for the better part of a month before or after this appearance. It’s another captivating cut that peaks with the line, “You laugh and cry in a single sound.” He then lets “Fire” “go a little longer” to lighten the mood before turning serious in a stunning sequence of “Candy’s Room,” “Because the Night,” and “Point Blank.”
“Candy’s” has always been a self-contained masterpiece, so distinct in the catalog and explosive in live performance as it is here. For my money, the 1978 versions of “Because the Night’ are THE versions. The guitar work in the intro and the end, coupled with drama the band infuses into the arrangement behind Bruce’s desperate vocals, was never better. While the guitar amps are cooling, Bittan and Danny Federici take over and set the scene for the noir romance of “Point Blank,” another Atlanta performance that rivals the very best.
It’s time to give the band some, and with that “Kitty’s Back” purrs to life on a night packed with firsts, lasts, and infrequents. This would prove to be the final appearance of “Kitty’s Back” with the E Street Band for nearly a quarter-century. After 13 minutes of back-alley majesty, Bruce says those words we all want to hear: “[Let’s] do some more stuff off of Wild & the Innocent.” He goes on to dedicate “Incident on 57th Street” to his lighting designer Marc Brickman. “He’s like a member of the band. There’s nobody better.” “Incident” would also go unplayed for the rest of the tour and, save for its officially released one-off performance at Nassau Coliseum in 1980, wouldn’t appear again on E Street until 1999.
It speaks volumes that Atlanta 2 features “Meeting Across the River” into “Jungleland” AND “Incident on 57th Street” into “Rosalita.” That Double-Double only happened three times (the others being Palladium 9/17/78 and Capitol Theatre 9/21/78), all in the last 15 days of the original Darkness tour routing, a stretch that merits consideration as one of the best in Springsteen’s on-stage history.
“Rosalita” brings the night to crescendo, and the encore-opening trio of “Born to Run,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-out,” and “Detroit Medley” is a flawless blast of joy from seven musicians in top form.
Before “Quarter to Three,” Bruce takes a minute to shout out several members of the crew by name, going out of his way to point out what they do so well and thanking them for their hard work. Bruce’s choice of “Quarter” as the presumptive final track of the tour is fitting. It’s a song he passionately loves; one that he knows will get the audience moving (“If you don’t dance to this, slap yourself in the face, you might be dead”); and a vehicle to allow the band to sing in full voice (they effectively take all the vocals from 2:30-3:20) for this raucous, ten-minute rendition. Crew, audience, and band, all given their due.
Eight years into the Live Archive series and 40 since I bought Piece de Resistance on the State of Washington’s dime, the thrill of hearing a vintage live recording in this quality for the first time hasn’t faded. Atlanta 10/1/78 is the great lost show of the Darkness tour.
The Grateful Dead are bringing their live concert experience back to cinemas worldwide for the 2022 Meet-Up At The Movies.
In addition to today’s archive release of Madison Square Garden 1981,tickets are now on salefor this this year’s Grateful Dead Meet-Up At The Movies! Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the legendary Europe ’72 tour, this year’s Meet-Up brings to the big screen the previously unreleased Tivoli Concert Hall performance from 4/17/72.
The sixth show on the Grateful Dead’s famous Europe ’72 tour was a return engagement to the Tivoli Concert Hall in Copenhagen, Denmark, on April 17, 1972. This ground-breaking concert broadcast event was the Dead’s first major live concert broadcast, and a first in Danish television history. Now, fully restored and color corrected in High Definition with audio mixed from the 16-track analog master tapes by Jeffrey Norman and mastered by David Glasser, Tivoli 4/17/72 features nearly an hour and a half of the Grateful Dead at a peak of their performing career. The show’s many highlights include an overview of the Dead’s 1972 touring repertoire, including magnificent versions of “China Cat Sunflower>I Know You Rider”, “Big Railroad Blues”, “Truckin’”, and many more of the Dead’s classics, as well as the first live performance of “He’s Gone”, and other new songs including “Ramble on Rose”, “Jack Straw”, and “One More Saturday Night”. Pigpen, on what would prove to be his last tour with the Grateful Dead, is well-represented by three songs, including the broadcast’s opening number, “Hurts Me Too”.
The 2022 Grateful Dead Meet-Up at the Movies is set to hit big screens worldwide on Tues., Nov. 1, with additional screenings across the U.S., Canada, and select territories on Sat., Nov. 5. Tickets can be purchased here.
A fourth wave of Bruce Springsteen concert recordings arrives on nugs.net this September. Belmar is the latest monthly drop adding Springsteen’s Live Archive catalog to the streaming platform.
Belmar is anchored by five shows from the biggest tour of them all, Born in the U.S.A., including three 1984 arena performances in E. Rutherford, NJ and 1985 stadium gigs at Giants Stadium and the Coliseum in Los Angeles. Together they represent some of the most popular performances of Springsteen’s career, and feature not only songs from the chart-topping album, but powerful band performances of Nebraska material as well, including “Atlantic City,” “Highway Patrolman” and “Open All Night.”
The 1984 New Jersey concerts were part of a ten-night stand at Brendan Byrne Arena, the finale to which was the legendary August 20 performance featuring a surprise cameo from Stevie Van Zandt, who had left the E Street Band at that point to pursue his solo career. He returns to share the microphone with Springsteen on an extraordinarily moving cover of Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away.”
Bruce wouldn’t tour again until 1988, but in 1986 he did make a special appearance at Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefit Concert where he was joined by Nils Lofgren and Danny Federici. This unique set is also part of the Belmar drop and highlighted by the first ever acoustic performance of “Born in the U.S.A.”
To those six shows Belmar adds the complete North American leg of the 2016 River tour. These 38 concerts featured full-album performances of Springsteen’s 1980 double album The River, plus plenty more in the rest of the set, including choice River outtakes “Meet Me In The City,” “Be True,” “Loose Ends” and “Roulette” The passing of three music icons during the 2016 tour led to an equal number of stirring tribute performances. Opening night in Pittsburgh on January 16 it was “Rebel Rebel” to honor David Bowie. At the next show in Chicago on January 19, an acoustic take of The Eagles’ “Take It Easy” was performed to remember Glenn Frey. In late April, at the final dates in Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, Bruce and the band gave a triumphant reading of Prince’s “Purple Rain.”
Note: These concerts are only available to U.S. and Canada subscribers, and can be streamed now with a free trial to nugs.net.
Erik Flannigan is a music archivist, producer, author and manager. He has been writing about Bruce Springsteen’s live performances and recordings for more than 30 years.
Learn more about the previous exclusive Bruce Springsteen audio drops
For audiophiles, we also offer a HiFi tier that allows you to enjoy 24-bit MQA streaming, as well as select Springsteen recordings in immersive 360 Reality Audio. Start your free trial and delve in.
Exclusive to nugs.net, this month’s Third Man Thursday release brings us The White Stripes June 30, 2007 performance from Edmonton. From archivist Ben Blackwell:
Another entry from the ’07 Icky Thump tour, the middle of this set features a mind-bending run of short, quick song teases all in a row (“I Think I Smell A Rat” to “Cannon” to “Wasting My Time” to “Screwdriver”) which lands directly on top of a stellar “The Union Forever.” From there, the combo of “Cannon / John The Revelator” melts effortlessly into “Little Room” which jumpstarts immediately into a frenetic “Hotel Yorba,” all followed up with a take on “I’m Finding It Harder To Be A Gentleman” that turns on a dime when Jack substitutes the lyrics to “Now Mary” while still playing the tune to “Gentlemen.” Which then morphs into a unique “The Denial Twist.” All that to say, for my money this is the most impressive ten song run I ever saw the White Stripes do.
Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground Icky Thump When I Hear My Name I’m Slowly Turning Into You Effect And Cause I Think I Smell A Rat (tease) Cannon (tease) Wasting My Time (tease) Screwdriver (tease) The Union Forever Cannon / John The Revelator Little Room Hotel Yorba I’m Finding It Harder To Be A Gentleman / Now Mary (medley) The Denial Twist Catch Hell Blues A Martyr For My Love For You In The Cold, Cold Night Black Math Passive Manipulation We’re Going To Be Friends You Don’t Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You’re Told)
Encore Astro Jack The Ripper The Big Three Killed My Baby Little Ghost The Same Boy You’ve Always Known Jolene Ball And Biscuit Seven Nation Army Boll Weevil
There are few periods in the post-Reunion era as busy as 2005-2009, a five-year stretch that saw the release of four studio albums each with accompanying tours, surely none more fun for Bruce Springsteen himself than 2006’s sojourn in support of The Seeger Sessions.
It’s easy to think of Springsteen’s work with the Sessions Band as an isolated outlier, but listening to Rome 10/10/06, the third release from the tour in the Live Archive series, there’s a case for it as the meaningful bridge between Devils & Dust (released in 2005) and Magic (2007), as well as a precursor to the extended band line-up we saw on Wrecking Ball in 2012.
Of the Seeger Sessions Tour’s three legs, two of them were in Europe — that reflected how this rootsy style of music was embraced more wholeheartedly there than it was in the States, which seemed to respond with a collective, “If it isn’t solo and it isn’t with the E Street Band, then what is it?”
What “it” is, of course, is a survey of American roots music, centered around the folk movement with forays into blues, jazz, and country, as well as an alternate reading of some of Springsteen’s own music through that same lens.
The Rome audience could not be more welcoming to the set-opening “John Henry,” which gets the show off to a rollicking start. It’s clear the crowd is well familiar with the Seeger Sessions album and, better still, recognizes that the type of music, presented by a band of this scale, demands their participation, which only feeds Springsteen all the more. Happy fans, happy band.
Rome eats up stellar renditions of the core Seeger Sessions material, singing along in full voice to “Old Dan Tucker,” chanting their approval of the horn section, clapping in unison after “Erie Canal,” and embracing the call-and-response of “Pay Me My Money Down.” If you ever needed confirmation of the role an audience plays in the concert dynamic, Rome 10/10/06 is the proof.
The fans’ recognition of Springsteen originals is equally impressive, getting “All the Way Home” straight off the opening chords, then singing the chorus well after the band stops playing. The arrangement of “All the Way Home” is relatively faithful to the Devils & Dust studio version though enhanced by the big band, especially Marty Rifkin’s lyrical pedal-steel solo. The song was only played three times on the 2006 tour and hasn’t been played since, making it a vital inclusion here.
Elsewhere one has to marvel at the rearrangements of classic cuts of the canon. “Atlantic City” started life as a high, lonesome folk song on Nebraska, became an electrified pile-driver with the E Street Band, and transforms yet again into a widescreen murder ballad with the Sessions Band. This reading of “Atlantic City” has the fastest tempo of the three arrangements, a storming pace that belies the song’s somber subject matter, which is reflected tonally in the guitar, organ and vocal parts. The contrast is compelling.
Springsteen changes his vocal inflections and cadence in a striking interpretation of “The River,” which adopts gospel and even waltzing Tejano notes. The story remains the same, but the metaphor of the river itself gains stature and turns the song into more of a parable than ever before.
The most E Street moment of the night is “Long Time Comin’,” another D&D track that hews to the original album structure only to be supercharged by the horn section and wonderful organ work from Charlie Giordano. “Long Time Comin’” is SUCH a tremendous band song, it’s bewildering it only made four setlists with the E Street Band post-Sessions, especially gIven the horns-and-singers lineup that debuted in 2006 was essentially recreated for the Wrecking Ball tour.
The last two originals of the night show the incredible range of the 2006 band. “Open All Night” is recast as a swing-jazz jumper in the style of “Pennsylvania 6-5000.” “Ramrod,” led by Girodano’s accordion, finds these immensely talented musicians channeling Los Lobos with verdadero estilo.
To the core Seeger Sessions tracks and E Street redux, Bruce adds a few choice covers, the most notable being one of only ten performances of “Long Black Veil,” written by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wikin, and covered by countless country artists including Johnny Cash.
Bruce and the band turn this stark infidelity ballad (a touchstone, lyrically, for Springsteen’s own “Nebraska”) into a sweeping epic that borrows some of its arrangement gravitas from, of all things, Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away,” a song famously covered by Springsteen and the E Street Band in 1984 with Little Steven. On this night, Marc Anthony Thompson trades verses and lines with Springsteen in a striking performance that is a welcome addition to the Live Archive catalog.
A belissimo Roma evening comes to an close with “American Land,” born of the Sessions Band and later fully embraced by the E Street Band on tours ever after. In front of what had to be among the most appreciative audiences of the entire tour, Bruce Springsteen and his Sessions Band show their virtuosity and interpretive prowess, and in the process draft a blueprint for what Springsteen would do on stage just a few years later.
The fact that the word “penultimate” exists exclusively as an adjective for next-to-last situations feels almost egregious. I mean, did we really need an eleven letter word to describe this scenario when a three-word combination totaling ten letters does the job just perfectly?
Because let’s face it…second-to-last things are kinda just whatever. All the penumbra and history and tall tales sprout effortlessly from every last whisper about the LAST of something, the finality, the never-again crushing darkness of an abyss of nothingness for the rest of eternity.
So for me to roll in and tell you just how good the White Stripes were in their penultimate live show…I understand the urge to call bullshit. But honestly, truthfully, with all personal bias removed from shading of opinion here…this show is phenomenal.
Visits to an Original House of Pancakes, a record store and some antique shops all replay as relatively ordinary for daytime activities. If anything, my memory of the day sticks out as being oppressively hot. With afternoon highs in the 90s, temps at Sloss Furnaces – the supposedly haunted turn-of-the-century pig iron producing blast furnace turned concert venue – would hover into the 80s well into the Stripes performance that night. Factor in the crush of 2400 bodies crammed into the rudimentary shed-like structure with unforgiving open air walls and my recall of the event is overwhelmingly punctuated by the feel, smell and general annoyance of sweat.
Add in the decrepit, rusted, tetanus-y surroundings of the rest of the campus and the knowledge that the number of workers who died there was rumored to be in the hundreds, their falling or being pushed into the red hot fires of the furnaces only to be instantly incinerated and the unshakable pall that casts on a spot even some five decades after the last flames there were extinguished…needless to say it didn’t feel like an ordinary show by any means.
Opener Dan Sartain would play in front of the biggest hometown crowd of his career and the highlight for me (playing drums for him on this leg) was his inquiry to the crowd “So…how many genuine Alabama rednecks we got here tonight?” After a strong response from the crowd, Dan replied “Well, you made my life a living hell for 26 years. Thank you.”
Just…perfect in every way.
The show kicks off with “Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground” and finds Jack taking liberties (for the better) in a song where he usually did not. The particularly gnarly first note of feedback curves into some choice guitar syncopations. As the most-frequent set opener across the band’s career, it feels odd that this would be the last time the Stripes ever started a show with “Dead Leaves” as their final gig would begin with a cover “Stop Breaking Down.”
“Icky Thump” rolls into the fray wildly. To hear the assembled crowd, without prompting, perfectly nail the patter of twelve “la’s” sung in rapid succession at the end of the second verse, all mere weeks after the song’s release…it is a great reminder as to how WIDE this record reached so quickly upon deployment.
Leading into “When I Hear My Name” Jack, particularly chatty this evening, says “Meg and I knew we was Alabama bound!” and despite any hammy undertones, it ultimately comes off as sincere and heartfelt. Leading out from there, “Hotel Yorba” hits as particularly vivacious, Meg’s accompanying vocals both vivid and spot-on.
Jack’s unusual beginning to “The Denial Twist” and the improvised divergent lyrics in the second verse, which seem to say “It’s the way you rock and roll!” leave the Stripes’ final performance of this song as striking.
While the extended, elegiac intro to “Death Letter” stands strongly as a haunting slice of slide guitar, Jack’s improvised lyrics on the third verse delight. Similar to his moves earlier in “Dead Leaves”, taking a specific part of a song that, to my memory, was seldom if ever switched up, and reworking it on the spot, it all feels significant. Especially in light of the fact that the song would essentially run out of its evolutionary runway in another 24 hours. So for him to sing…
It looked like ten thousand
Women around my front porch
Didn’t know if I’d listen to ‘em
Or keep on lookin’ north
I’m just reminded of the fact that no song should ever be considered complete or finished or beyond reinterpretation.
Acolytes of St. Francis of Assisi may be surprised to catch Jack’s in-the-moment name drop of Brother Sun, Sister Moon in the midst of an extended rant toward the end of “Do.” Though it may bear repeating that “Little Bird” and its “I wanna preach to birds” lyric is explicitly inspired by the 13th century saint, it should require no leap of faith to imagine the 1972 Franco Zeffirreli film depicting the life and times of Francis being viewed by Jack as a prepubescent altar boy. Eschewing his wealthy upbringing for a life of piety and monasticism, Francis would become patron saint of Italy, the first documented stigmatic and the creator of the first live nativity scene. If there’s a Catholic Hall of Fame, St. Francis of Assisi is definitely a first-ballot shoe-in.
Nuggets like Jack’s borderline goofy drunk introduction of Meg for “In The Cold, Cold Night” with “Miss Meg White takes center stage!” belies a truly stellar performance while brief, blink-and-you-missed-it riff inversions on both “Astro” and “Little Cream Soda” are delicious little surprises to revel in. And I’ll be damned if the organ-driven take on “I Want To Be The Boy To Warm Your Mother’s Heart” is a welcome reminder that every last live version of this song is worth listening to. It never fails disappoints, it always satisfies.
But the juiciest plum in this set is the unexpected, abrupt abandonment of “Seven Nation Army” a mere ninety seconds into the song. When Jack says “I don’t know if we should play this song in America anymore…I guess it doesn’t translate well…lost something in the translation” he says so without knowing it’d be the last time that he and Meg ever played the song together.
I remember this happening that night, but at the time I never mentioned it or thought to bring it up.
But 15 years later I had to.
So in an email with the subject line “dumb white stripes question” I reached out to Jack for clarity on the situation. His response…
oh i think i was just joking because it had become such a soccer chant at the time and that europeans loved it “more” than americans for a minute there
and they weren’t singing any english lyrics just saying “po po po po” in Italy, so i was joking that americans didn’t understand the “foreign language” of “po po po po po po po”
That reads nicely.
But I cannot help being reminded that in 2007 George W. Bush was still in office and folks were still wildly pissed about his mere existence AND the ongoing overseas US military boondoggles. That year would see a total of 904 American armed forces casualties in Iraq alone, the single highest yearly total in the entirety of said occupation.
So in Alabama, I dunno…a bunch of self-identifying, sweat-soaked rednecks chanting along…it had just the faintest twinge of jingoistic misappropriation originating from the crowd…that basso ostinato chopping along with the sinister Dorian mode overtone. It sounds ominous. “Army” is in the title. I mean, it’s not a stretch.
At the time I remember just having half the half-second thought along these confused political lines and then literally have not thought about it since. The only contemporaneous review I can find of the show, written by Andy Smith, attributes the scuttled “Seven Nation Army” as an effort to prevent “the righteous and violent rigor of the lyrics (to) be misinterpreted as condoning an unrighteous war.”
So even if we do take Jack at his word here (which I think we should), what he says his intention was, it’s worth noting that the perceived notion in the air that night, at least to some, was of an entirely different tone. These are the shortcomings of interpretation. They will never rectify themselves.
So for Jack to switch the opening “Ball and Biscuit” lyrics to be…
Yes I am the Third Man, woman
But I am also the seventh son
…to me it reads as almost stentorian “LET ME SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU”-level of painting a picture just perfectly clear in light of the supposed confusion or misinterpretation of anything earlier in the set. With gusto.
Yet the impromptu lyrics on “300 MPH Torrential Outpour Blues” are deadly…
There’s all kinds of emotions that a phone call ain’t gonna fix
You took me to the brink woman, took me everywhere I didn’t want to go but I went anyway I never want you to question where I was headed, yes that’s where my head is nowadays
The complexity and grasp of human condition displayed in an off-the-top-of-the-head exclamation, deftly cramming all those syllables into precise meter and landing on the rhyming couplet, all while giving off the impression that the severity and pathos contained therein surely must’ve been labored over intensely for hours, days, weeks even…well, isn’t that just the way to knock us all over?
Ending with “Boll Weevil” just a short trip up I-65 from the actual boll weevil monument in Enterprise, Alabama, and some on-mic praise of Sartain is a perfect way to put that specific, local, “we know exactly where we are” stamp on the entire evening. When Jack implores the crowd to not go looking for any ghosts on the property after the show, you have half a mind to respect those wishes.
We in the touring party would not respect those wishes. After the show, a bunch of us (including Meg, but not Jack) climbed the stairs, single-file, to a precarious perch overlooking the vast, murky stretches of the complex. From above the entirely insufficient artificial light dappled the tiniest spots and failed to make a dent in the existentially overpowering void.
Even more dread-inducing was the spectre of a pitch-black decommissioned railroad tunnel. From entry to exit, the path we were led to couldn’t have been more than 200 yards at most. But I do not exaggerate when I say there was a complete absence of any outside illumination in this stretch. Pure, unadulterated emptiness. Cannot see your own hand in front of your face insanity. The shit that so many horror film plots are predicated on and has kept the night light business booming since the passing of the torch from candle to light bulb.
We got our hands on a single, meager flashlight, yet between the 8 of us (or so) that were on the endeavor…it felt wildy inadequate to the point of palpable, impending fear.
But there’s a funny little thing that happened within this little group of friends upon venturing into the ghastly, haunted space. We were all still buzzy from the after effects of such a stunning live concert in such unconventional environs. Simply put…we laughed our fucking asses off. Hysterically. The entire time. What took us maybe five minutes to traverse passed in seemingly five seconds. No one seemed like they could even be bothered with being scared. In the face of the uncertain, of the overwhelming chasm…one light and each other was all we needed to lead the way. To illuminate. To get us to the desired destination.
In the end, we’re all just chasing ghosts, looking for something to get us through.
Setlist Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground I Think I Smell a Rat Icky Thump When I Hear My Name Hotel Yorba The Denial Twist Death Letter Do I’m Slowly Turning Into You In The Cold, Cold Night I Want To Be The Boy To Warm Your Mother’s Heart Seven Nation Army Astro Jack the Ripper Encore Gap
Encore Little Cream Soda A Martyr For My Love For You One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below) 300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues We’re Going To Be Friends I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself Ball and Biscuit / Cool Drink of Water Blues Boll Weevil
More classic Bruce Springsteen concerts come to nugs.net this August with the arrival of Long Branch, the third of five monthly drops bringing Bruce’s Live Archive catalog to the streaming platform.
Long Branch adds 33 concerts circa 1980 to 2017, starting with six extraordinary nights on the 1980-81 River tour. These include Bruce and the E Street Band’s famed three-show stand at Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, NY, culminating with a 38-song set on New Year’s Eve 12/31/80. From Summer ‘81, there are striking performances at Wembley Arena in London on June 5 and Brendan Byrne Arena in E. Rutherford, NJ on July 9.
The Long Branch drop also showcases five gigs from 2009’s Working On A Dream tour, including three special sets that featured full-album performances of The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle (Madison Square Garden 11/7/09), The River (MSG 11/8/09) and Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ (Buffalo 11/22/09). The 2012-13 Wrecking Ball tour is represented by eight concerts, including tour kickoff at the legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem, March 9, 2012; a birthday special at MetLife stadium September 22, 2012 (which didn’t end until the wee hours of September 23, Bruce’s actual birthday); and the Springsteen’s longest concert ever at Olympiastadion in Helsinki, Finland on July 31, 2012, which lasted over four hours. Long Branch wraps with Australia/New Zealand 2017, the E Street Band’s last 14 shows to date ahead of their return to arenas and stadiums in 2023.
Note: These concerts are only available to U.S. and Canada subscribers, and can be streamed now with a free trial to nugs.net.
Erik Flannigan is a music archivist, producer, author and manager. He has been writing about Bruce Springsteen’s live performances and recordings for more than 30 years.
Learn more about the previous exclusive Bruce Springsteen audio drops
For audiophiles, we also offer a HiFi tier that allows you to enjoy 24-bit MQA streaming, as well as select Springsteen recordings in immersive 360 Reality Audio. Start your free trial and delve in.
As measured by cultural impact and mass popularity, Bruce Springsteen’s 1984-85 World Tour was the apex. Considering its stunning scale, playing multi-night stadium stands, it’s easy to forget that 1984 was a rebirth of sorts, the start of a new era as much as a continuation of what came before it. On the biggest tour of his career, Springsteen was rebuilding the engine while the plane was flying.
Synthesizers like the Yamaha CS-80 had been part of Springsteen’s sonic signature since The River tour, albeit in a subtle manner that was more about background tones and mood. With Born in the U.S.A., synths moved front of the mix (playing lead, so to speak) on the title track and the smash single “Dancing in the Dark.” Fun fact: Did you know a CS-80 tips the scales at over 200 pounds?
When the tour kicked off at the St. Paul Civic Center in June 1984, Springsteen hadn’t performed a proper concert in nearly three years, but he had released two new albums, including Nebraska, his first-ever solo and acoustic effort. How would those songs work on stage with the E Street Band?
There were moves on that Street too, with longtime foil Steven Van Zandt exiting stage left to pursue his own solo career. Nils Lofgren stepped in stage right to take his place, bringing fresh energy and new textures to the band’s already evolving sound, bolstered further by the addition of backing singer Patti Scialfa, restoring E Street’s gender diversity first established by violinist Suki Lahav in late 1974.
The Live Archive series already features the first two shows and the final night of Bruce and the band’s ten-show stand at Brendan Byrne Arena in New Jersey. With the addition of 8/19/84, the penultimate show of the run, we get perhaps our clearest picture yet of Springsteen flying live without a net when the stakes were highest.
While he doesn’t come in for praise as often as other band members given his position in the sonic landscape, Garry W. Tallent is the anchor of the E Street sound, and he stands out especially loud and proud in Jon Altschiller’s new multitrack mix of August 19. His playing is thicker than ever in “Born in the U.S.A,” especially the bridge before the final breakdown, and Garry and Max carry a powerful “Atlantic City” that’s as good as any captured on tape.
Bruce’s own guitar strumming in the opening verse of “Atlantic City” is crystalline crisp. His vocals here and throughout the night are in peak form, a model of power and total control. Tallent’s bass part in the song’s final verse and chorus is sinewy, moody, and, as always, flawless. There’s also fine work from Danny Federici on organ as Bruce sings, “Put on your stockings, babe, ’cause the night’s getting cold.” Lastly, Lofgren’s background vocals in the final chorus ring true just before Bruce yells, “Draw blood!” They crushed it.
The 8/19/84 Nebraska mini-set offers two other striking turns. “Reason to Believe” is the one track from this show featured on Live/1975-85, but it gains additional meaning heard here in context immediately after “Atlantic City” in a different mix that again spotlights Garry Tallent’s superb bass arrangement.
Then there’s “My Father’s House,” in only its second performance ever and one of but five on the entire tour. Bruce introduces the song with a short anecdote about sneaking through the woods at dusk, “and then I had to get home and get by my old man…Sometimes that was scarier.”
In what might be the vocal highlight of the entire show, Bruce sings “My Father’s House” with vivid frankness, backed by the sympathetic support of Tallent on bass, Lofgren on mandolin, Weinberg on brushes, and Bittan on synth. When Springsteen’s rich voice rises with the line, “It stands like a beacon, calling me in the night” you’ll feel the chills. The solo acoustic “My Father’s House” from the Christic benefit show performed in 1990 and released in the Live Archive series is excellent, but this rare band arrangement is stunning.
The rest of the first set remains true to form for the period, with a nice stretch of BIUSA songs coming out of the Nebraska trio and classics like “Badlands” and “Thunder Road” leading into the break. It’s worth noting that 8/19/84 offers notable readings of “Darkness On the Edge of Town” in the first set and “Prove It All Night” in the second. Both benefit from Springsteen’s stirring vocals and guitar work, and, in Van Zandt’s absence, Lofgren steps up. You can feel him meshing with Bruce, resulting in refreshed performances of two Darkness stalwarts.
The second set is as good as the first, and momentum is building. After the playful trio of “Hungry Heart,” “Dancing in the Dark” and “Cadillac Ranch” coming out of intermission, Bruce taps the Miami Horns for the first time since 1977 on “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” in a preview of their appearance on closing night 24 hours hence. The horns add much joy and vigor to the song, and while he was already having a good night, Clarence Clemons seems to take it up a notch, too.
A tender, solo “No Surrender” is next, then the aforementioned “Prove It All Night” and a stellar, crowd-pleasing version of “Fire.” The crowd certainly knows this one, singing along in full voice, and as good as the Big Man’s saxophone playing is, boy does his baritone voice sound sweet. He and Bruce milk “Fire” for all its worth. “Growin’ Up” keeps the sweetness and local landmarks flowing, complete with Jim the Dancing Bear (who wasn’t done for the night) and massive cheers for “Route 9” and “Toms River” in a tall tale about the early days of Bruce and Clarence on the shore.
Riding in on the emotional nostalgia of “Growin’ Up,”, “Bobby Jean” has heart to burn — and it resonates in a way it hasn’t consistently in recent times, as a standalone song in the encore. Bruce sings it as if Little Stevie were listening (maybe he was in the crowd that night, ahead of his appearance the next evening) and the Big Man lands the solo masterfully.
The set turns back to Darkness again for a pacey “Racing in the Street,” the coda for which is always a showcase for Bittan and Federici, with Bruce adding subtle guitar texture to their interplay. A long, loose “Rosalita” closes the set with extended and particularly funny band intros (e.g. “You may have read [Bittan’s] study of the lost tribes of Hoboken”), and this new model E Street Band is soaring — and most importantly, having fun doing it.
The encore moves from “Jungleland” (with Lofgren stepping up to fill one of Van Zandt’s best-known solos) to “Born to Run” (Federici’s glockenspiel rings out thrillingly) before the Miami Horns return to punctuate “Detroit Medley” and “Twist and Shout – Do You Love Me?” to cap the evening.
Nine nights into a homecoming stand for the ages, 8/19/84 captures Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band sounding different than ever before but every bit as good, their confidence rightly rising on the strength of outstanding performances by the individual players coalescing at the start of a new era.
Note: These concerts are only available to U.S. and Canada subscribers, and can be streamed now with a free trial to nugs.net.
by Erik Flannigan, Bruce Springsteen Archivist
Live Springsteen streaming on nugs.net expands with Asbury Park, the second of five monthly drops bringing Bruce’s Live Archive catalog to the platform.
Asbury Park offers an additional 33 shows circa 1978 to 2014, including nine from the legendary Darkness On the Edge of Town tour in 1978. These include new multitrack mixes of the tour’s five beloved radio broadcasts from which spawned several of the most famous Springsteen bootleg of all time: July 7 at The Roxy in West Hollywood; August 9 at The Agora in Cleveland; September 19 at The Capitol Theatre in Passaic; September 30 at The Fox Theatre in Atlanta; and December 15 at Bill Graham’s Winterland in San Francisco.
The Asbury Park drop also features Springsteen’s emotional appearance with the Seeger Sessions Band at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival on April 30, 2006 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, plus their inspired set at London’s Wembley Arena on November 11 of the same year. All five shows released to date from the Magic tour are here, notably the late Danny Federici’s last proper show (Boston, November 19, 2007) and appearance (Indianapolis, March 20, 2008) with the E Street Band, plus the rarities-laden penultimate performance from St. Louis, August 23, 2008. Asbury Park wraps with 16 shows from the US leg of 2014’s High Hopes tour, a stretch of concerts that saw fans making and the band delivering on dozens of inspired cover- and rare-song requests.
Note: These concerts are only available to U.S. and Canada subscribers, and can be streamed now with a free trial to nugs.net.
Erik Flannigan is a music archivist, producer, author and manager. He has been writing about Bruce Springsteen’s live performances and recordings for more than 30 years.
For audiophiles, we also offer a HiFi tier that allows you to enjoy 24-bit MQA streaming, as well as select Springsteen recordings in immersive 360 Reality Audio. Start your free trial and delve in.
Subscribers can stream over 100 of the officially released shows from The Grateful Dead Vault, organized for the first time with Deadheads in mind — browse by show date instead of album title or release date. Each show is streaming in standard and CD-Quality lossless formats, and hi-res MQA where available. We’re thrilled to partner with Rhino Entertainment, the keeper of Warner Music Group’s legacy catalog, to stream many of the previously released iconic concert recordings including Fillmore East ’69, the entirety of Europe ’72, The Field Trip ’72, Cornell ’77, Winterland ‘77, Egypt ’78, Nassau ‘81, Alpine ‘82, MSG ‘90, and a whole lot more.
nugs.net will be updating our Grateful Dead catalog with the entire studio album collection and other live releases in the coming months — follow Grateful Dead in the app to see new additions first. Additionally, we are adding some of the Crown Jewels of classic rock including album catalogs from Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, The Doors, and Yes.
The Wrecking Ball tour was big on multiple levels, from the length of the shows (eventually reaching four hours, breaking Bruce’s all-time record), to the number of band members on stage (hitting 17 on occasion), to the scale of the venues—especially in Europe, where the 2012 tour hit stadiums across the continent… save for one special stand in Paris.
For reasons that have never been explained, when Springsteen brought the Wrecking Ball caravan to France to open the second half of the Euro leg, he downsized from stadiums back to arena-scale for just one pair of shows that fell on the fourth and fifth of July. Those back-to-back performances, which featured an impressive 44 different songs between them, have long been lauded as some of the best of the tour. In that spirit of bigness and in celebration of the ten-year anniversary of the gigs, it seemed only fitting to add both Paris 2012 shows to the Live Archive series.
The Paris concerts combined offer over seven hours of music and a bounty of special moments and performances. Here are several worth noting.
Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band at Palais Omnisports De Paris-Bercy, July 4, 2012
The charms of the expanded 2012 band bear fruit in a delightful, unhurried version of “The E Street Shuffle” performed as a sign request. The song was played more in 2012 than any other year since 1975, when it thrived in a completely different arrangement. The Wrecking Ball tour edition takes advantage of the horn section, Everett Bradley’s percussion, and the E Street Choir on background vocals for a fully realized rendition that follows the original album structure of prelude, main song, and a storming, extended coda. In Paris, the crowd keeps singing the melody after the whole thing ends, indicative of just how into the show they are, and it compels Bruce to start the “E Street Shuffle” back up again for a second coda.
Springsteen keeps the Asbury Park setting, linking “Shuffle” to “Sandy” in his transition: “And then, down from town, about five blocks in on the boardwalk… if you listen hard, you could hear…” He sings the accordion-led, Fourth of July special in a low voice at times, adding a bit of age and wisdom to the tale, which on this night includes the sometimes-omitted third verse about the “waitress who lost her desire for me.” The background singers bring lushness to the final chorus as the sun sets on the boardwalk via Paris.
When Bruce opened his Fourth of July playlist for this show, he clicked them all—which means “Darlington County.” Stevie Van Zandt veers the song towards the edge of the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” before Bruce sings his first line about that memorable drive he and Wayne took from New York City all those years ago. The Paris take is long, with an extended horn and sax section at the end.
With Patti back on stage for the first time on the Euro tour, “Easy Money” returns to the set in one of only 18 performances ever. Bruce’s untamed falsetto vocals start things out, and one has to credit the Paris crowd for their consistently high level of participation as they sing along strongly here. Patti’s vocal contributions are a key element to “Easy Money,” which is why the song wasn’t performed without her.
In the most special nod to the occasion, Bruce moves to the piano for a rare solo-piano performance of “Independence Day.” Bruce released a video of this version in 2012 on his official YouTube channel, and it is great to have the audio available through the Live Archive series. Having played the instrument every night of the Devils & Dust tour, Springsteen’s piano playing is more confident than ever. Listen to the fine solo he takes in lieu of Clarence’s memorable sax before the third verse. Like so many older songs performed in this era, the bit of age in Springsteen’s voice only adds gravitas.
No Fourth of July performance would be complete without “Born in the U.S.A.” in its still-awe-inspiring, full-band arrangement. Bruce has no trouble finding his 1984 vocal range “forty years down the road” in a crackling rendition that puts the electric guitars on a level playing field with the synthesizers. Max Weinberg is also up to the task: while the horns add heft to the outro, Max smashes his legendary fills as hard as ever.
Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band at Palais Omnisports De Paris-Bercy, July 5, 2012
If anyone needed a sign that the second show in Paris would be materially different from the first, look no further than the top of the set when Bruce and the band reel off six songs in a row not featured the previous night. Deviating from his own written setlist, the band starts what sounds for all the world like “We Take Care of Our Own” only to shift gears into a bright “The Ties That Bind,” led by Roy Bittan’s piano and rich with the voices of the background singers in the chorus and bridge. Jake Clemons takes a sharp solo, too. The stellar reading of “Ties” is followed in bang-bang succession by breathtaking runs of “No Surrender,” “Two Hearts,” “Downbound Train,” “Candy’s Room,” and lastly a scintillating “Something in the Night.” Fans in attendance said the July 5 show was truly something special, and you can hear that imprinted in Jon Altschiler’s full-bodied mix. The six-song start of the second Paris set is as good as it gets in the post-Reunion era.
“Something In The Night,” Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band Live in Paris, 7/5/2012
In all, Paris night two boasts 15 changes from the previous show, including three certified epics starting with “Incident on 57th Street.” As vocal as they have been all night, the Paris audience treats the Wild & Innocent masterpiece with fitting reverence. Bruce tells Nils to take the initial guitar lead, which rises above Charlie Giordano’s swirling organ.
“Working on the Highway” and “I’m Goin’ Down” add a dose of levity and self-deprecation to the evening. The horn section and background singers give “Working on the Highway” a big jolt of energy, while the audience does the same for “I’m Goin’ Down,” yielding reinvigorated versions of both songs.
After a solo “Independence Day” on July 4, Bruce sits at the piano bench night two and delivers “For You.” This one is triumphant, reaching the heady heights of the song’s solo outings in 1975 (such as the extraordinary take on the Live Archive release of Greenvale, NY 12/12/75). Like “Indy” the night before, Springsteen plays the piano brilliantly, and he commits to every line of the lyrics to staggering effect. He also hits the last note resoundingly when he sings “When it was my turn to be the God.” As the kids say, “Chills.”
From “For You” straight into evening’s epic denouement, “Racing in the Street”—another time-defying performance. It can be difficult to describe in the written word what it feels like when a performer is in the moment, not simply performing their music, but embodying it, living the words and melodies anew. But you can hear it. That goes for every member of the band, too—special credit to Bittan and Bradley, first among equals in this performance of “Racing.”
The sequence of “For You” to “Racing in the Street,” and the top of the July 5 show as well, all capture Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performing in the moment. For years, they did so more consistently than any other band in concert. On this fantastic recording of Paris 2012, so many years down the road, they undeniably do so again.
Erik Flannigan is a music archivist, producer, author and manager. He has been writing about Bruce Springsteen’s live performances and recordings for more than 30 years.
Note: These concerts are only available to U.S. and Canada subscribers, and can be streamed now with a free trial to nugs.net.
by Erik Flannigan, Bruce Springsteen Archivist
Live Springsteen streaming on nugs.net kicks off with Freehold, the first of five monthly drops. Freehold presents 35 shows circa 1975 to 2014, starting at the legendary Roxy in West Hollywood on the Born To Run tour. Bruce’s October 18, 1975 appearance at the club with the E Street Band featured a rare cover of Carole King’s “Goin’ Back” in the encore.
From later that same year we get the legendary December 12 gig at CW Post College on Long Island, at which Springsteen’s beloved version of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” was recorded. From 1977, a rare pair of shows in Albany and Rochester that extend the BTR tour, but showcase newly written songs like “Something in the Night,” “Rendezvous” and “The Promise.” Freehold includes all six shows released to date from the 1999-2000 Reunion tour with the E Street Band, from September 25, 1999 in Philadelphia (and the first “Incident on 57th Street” performed in 19 years) to July 1, 2000, the final show at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
The Rising tour is represented by the June 16, 2003 show in Helsinki, while 2005’s Devils & Dust tour contributes five concerts, each with a rarities-packed setlist. The start of the 2014 High Hopes tour completes the Freehold drop, offering 14 shows performed in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, a run that included unexpected cover songs like AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell,” The Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” and Lorde’s “Royals.”
Note: These concerts are only available to U.S. and Canada subscribers, and can be streamed now with a free trial to nugs.net.
Erik Flannigan is a music archivist, producer, author and manager. He has been writing about Bruce Springsteen’s live performances and recordings for more than 30 years.
For audiophiles, we also offer a HiFi tier that allows you to enjoy 24-bit MQA streaming, as well as select Springsteen recordings in immersive 360 Reality Audio. Start your free trial and delve in.
