bruce springsteen tunnel of love tour live

Tunnel Of Love Express Tour

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Coming on the heels of the massively successful  Born in the U.S.A. Tour , the Tunnel of Love Express was designed to disorient Springsteen's audiences. A theatrical entrance began the show, a full horn section appeared, band members were rearranged from their customary positions, and on-stage spontaneity was kept to a minimum. Set lists were unusually static, and many of Springsteen's most popular concert numbers were omitted altogether. Instead, the shows featured Springsteen B-sides and outtakes as well as renditions of obscure genre songs by others. Critical reaction to the concerts was generally favorable, with some mixed reviews, while audiences were sometimes baffled.

The show featured backup singer Patti Scialfa brought center stage and the object of sexually themed presentations unusual for Springsteen. That, combined with the dour nature of many  Tunnel of Love  songs, led to speculation that Springsteen's marriage to Julianne Phillips was troubled. Further visual evidence of Springsteen and Scialfa becoming a couple emerged as the tour progressed, his separation from Phillips was officially confirmed, and for the first time Springsteen became the subject of a tabloid fervor. Springsteen and Scialfa eventually married, and the Tunnel of Love Express shows were the last full-length ones Springsteen would play with the E Street Band for eleven years

• 1 Broadcasts and recordings
• 3.1 The E Street Band
• 3.2 The Horns of Love

Broadcasts and recordings [ ]

MTV filmed the March 28 show in Detroit's Joe Louis Arena. Portions of several songs were aired as part of their special  Bruce Springsteen – Inside the Tunnel of Love  on April 30.

Much of the July 19 East Berlin concert was broadcast live on GDR state television and radio.

The first set of the July 3 show in Stockholms Olympiastadion was broadcast live on radio to an international audience. Distributed through DIR Broadcasting and available free to any station that wanted it, it was Springsteen's first live broadcast since 1978, and the first available nationwide. Some 300 stations broadcast it in the U.S., and it was also heard across Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan. Proceeds from commercials that aired before and after the concert segment were to be divided between DIR and Springsteen, and after subtraction for costs, sent to charity. The set itself followed tour practice except for the addition of Bob Dylan's "Chimes of Freedom" at the close, as Springsteen announced his upcoming participation in Amnesty International's Human Rights Now! Tour later that year.The concert was subsequently issued through the Bruce Springsteen Archives in November 2017.

The  Chimes of Freedom  EP, released in August 1988, included that rendition, as well as documenting three other song performances from scattered dates on the Express, including the radical simplification of "Born to Run".

In July 2015, Springsteen released  LA Sports Arena, California 1988 , the first official full show live release from this tour. It captured the April 23 show performed at the L.A. Sports Arena and was available through his website. This would be followed by the release of the July 3 show at Stockholms Stadion in November 2017, the release of the May 23 U.S. leg finale at Madison Square Garden in January 2019, the above-mentioned March 28 show from Detroit in March 2020, the fifth and final show at the Los Angeles Sports Arena in April 2021 & the first night at Madison Square Garden in May 2022.

Personel [ ]

The e street band [ ].

• Bruce Springsteen – lead vocals, guitars, harmonica
• Roy Bittan – piano, synthesizer
• Clarence Clemons – saxophone, congas, percussion, background vocals
• Danny Federici – organ
• Nils Lofgren – guitars, background vocals
• Patti Scialfa – background vocals, some featured duet vocals, acoustic guitar, percussion
• Garry Tallent – bass guitar
• Max Weinberg – drums

The Horns of Love [ ]

• Mario Cruz – saxophone
• Eddie Manion – saxophone
• Mark Pender – trumpet
• Richie "La Bamba" Rosenberg – trombone
• Mike Spengler – trumpet
• 1 The River Tour
• 2 Born In The U.S.A. Tour
• 3 Tom Morello

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Tunnel of Love

By Steve Pond

So Bruce Springsteen met a girl, fell in love, got married and made an album of songs about meeting a girl, falling in love and getting married. And if you think it’s that cut and dried, you don’t know Springsteen. Far from being a series of hymns to cozy domesticity, Tunnel of Love is an unsettled and unsettling collection of hard looks at the perils of commitment. A decade or so ago, Springsteen acquired a reputation for romanticizing his subject matter; on this album he doesn’t even romanticize romance.

Tunnel of Love is precisely the right move for an artist whose enormous success gloriously affirmed the potential of arena rock & roll but exacted a toll on the singer. Born in the U.S.A. sold 12 million copies mostly because it was the best kind of thoughtful, tough, mainstream rock & roll record — but also because it was misinterpreted and oversimplified by listeners looking for slogans rather than ideas. When Springsteen hit the road to support that album, his sound got bigger, his gestures larger, his audience huger. The five-record live set that followed that tour was a suitably oversize way to sum up Bruce Springsteen, the Boss, American Rock Icon.

But where do you go from there? Trying to top Born in the U.S.A. with another collection of rock anthems would have been foolhardy artistically; on the other hand, to react the way Springsteen did after the breakthrough 1980 success of The River — with a homemade record as stark and forbidding as Nebraska — would have turned an inspired gesture into a formula. So Tunnel of Love walks a middle ground. The most intelligently arranged album Springsteen has made, it consists mostly of his own tracks, sparingly overdubbed; he uses the members of the E Street Band when they fit. It’s not, as was rumored, a country album, though Springsteen sings it in the colloquial, folkish voice he used on Nebraska , and it’s not a rock & roll album, though “Spare Parts” and “Brilliant Disguise” come close to the full-bodied E Street Band sound.

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Instead, this is a varied, modestly scaled, modern-sounding pop album; it is a less ambitious work than Born in the U.S.A. , but its simpler sound is perfectly suited to the more intimate stories Springsteen is telling. Although you could often hear the sweat on his previous records, this LP came surprisingly quickly and feels effortless and elegant rather than belabored. Crucially, it demystifies Springsteen’s often arduous album-making process.

But energy rather than elegance is what sold Born in the U.S.A. ; the scaled-down Tunnel of Love is thus a chancier commercial proposition. The songs are the kind that many of the fans at the last tour’s stadium shows talked through. Listeners who turn to Springsteen for outsize gestures and roaring radio rock may well be confused or even irritated by these more somber miniatures and may insist on reading a first-rate song collection as an aberration.

Initially, in fact, Tunnel of Love sounds not only modest but also playful, giddy and lightweight. “Ain’t Got You” is a funny, partially a cappella Bo Diddley-style rocker that jokes about Springsteen’s wealth (“I got a pound of caviar sitting home on ice/I got a fancy foreign car that rides like paradise”) but expresses yearning for the one thing money can’t buy (i.e., “you”). In the next two songs, “Tougher Than the Rest” and “All That Heaven Will Allow,” Springsteen is head over heels in love, convinced that the sun will shine as long as he’s got the right woman by his side. Those three songs are a light, romantic, lovely beginning, and then it all comes crashing down.

Bobby said he’d pull out Bobby stayed in Janey had a baby it wasn’t any sin They were set to marry on a summer day Bobby got scared and he ran away.

The song, “Spare Parts,” is a road-house rocker reminiscent of Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited”; the sound is abrasive and harsh; the story is bleak; and the moral is hard: “Spare parts/And broken hearts/Keep the world turnin’ around.”

From that point on, times are tough. In “Cautious Man,” the main character has “love” tattooed on one hand, “fear” on the other (Springsteen’s lift from the film The Night of the Hunter , in which Robert Mitchum played a preacher with “love” and “hate” tattooed on his knuckles). The relationships in “Two Faces,” “Brilliant Disguise” and “One Step Up” (“and two steps back”) are crumbling as trust gives way to betrayal and recrimination: “Another fight and I slam the door on/Another battle in our dirty little war.” In the title song, Springsteen voices a fear that underlies the entire album: “It’s easy for two people to lose each other in/This tunnel of love.”

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But these are not “Baby, you done me wrong” songs. They’re not about the outside forces that threaten relationships but about the internal demons that keep people uncertain of love, skeptical that they can ever truly touch another human being. It is an album about loneliness and solitude in the midst of what promised to be bliss. A pivotal moment comes halfway through “Brilliant Disguise,” when the singer stops questioning his lover and turns upon himself: “I wanna know if it’s you I don’t trust/’Cause I damn sure don’t trust myself.” More than any record since his first, it is an album in which you can hear Springsteen’s Catholic upbringing: again and again lovers pray for deliverance, romance is depicted as a manifestation of God’s grace, and love brings with it doubt and guilt.

Of course, the religious images and the frequent references to weddings will tempt those who want to think these songs tell us about Springsteen’s own recent marriage. But to read Tunnel of Love as a report from the marital front is far too facile and ignores the fact that Springsteen was telling similar stories as far back as Darkness on the Edge of Town , in 1978. Since then, he has written about the promises our country makes to its people and the way it reneges on those promises, about the dreams our land inspires and the things that stifle those dreams and about the glory in simply persevering. On Tunnel of Love , Springsteen is writing about the promises people make to each other and the way they renege on those promises, about the romantic dreams we’re brought up with and the internal demons that stifle those dreams. The battleground has moved from the streets to the sheets, but the battle hasn’t changed significantly.

And in “Valentine’s Day,” the last song on the record, Springsteen quietly reaffirms the glory of persevering. In the song, the singer drives a long, lonely highway and thinks about his girl, terrified of losing her and grappling with all the uncertainty that’s surfaced throughout the album. Finally, he shrugs aside the doubts and makes a final plea: “So hold me close honey say you’re forever mine/And tell me you’ll be my lonely valentine.” It’s a partial return to the touching naiveté of the album’s first three songs, but at this point it sounds like deliberate, hard-earned naiveté.

More than any other song, however, it is “Walk Like a Man” — the track that ends side one — that has the feel of outright autobiography. Yet another song about his father — sung from the vantage point of the son’s wedding day — it moves to as lovely an arrangement as Springsteen has ever crafted: a steady drumbeat with distant echoes of “Racing in the Street,” a gentle wash of synthesizer, a lulling melody. Every incident rings true, and every line seems open, genuine and artless (“So much has happened to me/That I don’t understand”). It is perhaps the most compassionate and affecting song Springsteen has written to his father, but at its center is a devastating question that reverberates through the entire album:

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I remember ma draggin’ me and my sister up the street to the church Whenever she heard those wedding bells Well would they ever look so happy again The handsome groom and his bride As they stepped into that long black limousine For their mystery ride?

There’s the heart of the album: an uncertain journey down a dangerous, dark highway. The album doesn’t make it sound like an easy trip — but then, it’s been a long time since Bruce Springsteen has written about free rides of any sort. One of the wonders of Tunnel of Love is that in the end, he convinces us that the mystery ride just might be worth the toll.

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Bruce Springsteen releases Tunnel of Love era live show

By Paul Sinclair

Bruce Springsteen yesterday released a 1988 live show via his Live Bruce Springsteen website which he  launched late last year.

This concert performance is from the 28 April 1988 and was the 28th show on the Tunnel of Love Express tour where the band were augmented by ‘The Horns of Love’. It was the second night of a five night stand at the Sports Arena in Los Angeles. The tour was obviously supporting Springsteen’s eighth studio album, 1987’s superb  Tunnel of Love,  which had been issued the previous October, and most of the tracks on that record get a live workout on this Californian evening ( Cautious Man , Walk Like A Man , When You’re Alone and Valentine’s Day are the ones not performed from the album).

Amongst the 31 songs in the set are the debut of The Sonics’  Have Love Will Travel   and the first appearance on the tour of Sweet Soul Music .

The show has been mixed from digital multitrack masters by Toby Scott, is available now exclusively from the Springsteen site in several download formats (including DSD and 24 bit/192 kHz HD files). More importantly, you can order a physical three-CD set too but they won’t ship until early August. You can add a set of MP3s to your CD order for $5, which is a bit much in this era of ‘autorip’, but at least you get to hear the audio now while you wait for the CDs. To be fair $23 for a three-CD set isn’t bad and most fans are going to be very happy to support this initiative.

• •  Order “LA Sports Arena, California 1988” from the Live Bruce Springsteen site

Track listing

1.TUNNEL OF LOVE 7:59 2.BE TRUE 4:52 3. ADAM RAISED A CAIN 5:51 4. TWO FACES 4:39 5. ALL THAT HEAVEN WILL ALLOW 11:21 6. SEEDS 5:47 7. ROULETTE 4:22 8. COVER ME 7:31 9. BRILLIANT DISGUISE 5:11 10. SPARE PARTS 10:09 11. WAR 2:59 12. BORN IN THE U.S.A.  8:18 SET TWO

1. TOUGHER THAN THE REST 6:02 2. AIN’T GOT YOU 2:33 3. SHE’S THE ONE 6:57 4. YOU CAN LOOK (BUT YOU BETTER NOT TOUCH) 6:00 5. I’M A COWARD 9:42 6. I’M ON FIRE 4:19 7. ONE STEP UP 5:49 8. PART MAN, PART MONKEY 4:53 9. BACKSTREETS 7:52 10. DANCING IN THE DARK 6:22 11. LIGHT OF DAY 7:36 FIRST ENCORE

1. HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ROY ORBISON 3:06 2. BORN TO RUN 5:32 3. HUNGRY HEART 5:00 4. GLORY DAYS 8:58 5. ROSALITA (COME OUT TONIGHT) 10:26 SECOND ENCORE

1. HAVE LOVE, WILL TRAVEL 5:47 2. TENTH AVENUE FREEZE-OUT 4:34 3. SWEET SOUL MUSIC 3:28 4. RAISE YOUR HAND 6:37

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• April 7, 2024 Setlist

Bruce Springsteen Setlist at Kia Forum, Inglewood, CA, USA

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Tour: Springsteen & E Street Band 2024 World Tour Tour statistics Add setlist

• Open All Night ( tour debut, first time since 2014 ) Play Video
• Lonesome Day Play Video
• Prove It All Night Play Video
• Two Hearts Play Video
• Ghosts Play Video
• Letter to You Play Video
• The Promised Land Play Video
• Death to My Hometown Play Video
• Tougher Than the Rest (with Patti Scialfa ) Play Video
• Fire (with Patti Scialfa ) Play Video
• Hungry Heart Play Video
• Sherry Darling ( sign request ) Play Video
• Spirit in the Night Play Video
• My City of Ruins ( interspersed with band introductions ) Play Video
• Nightshift ( Commodores  cover) Play Video
• Last Man Standing ( acoustic; with Barry Danielian on trumpet ) Play Video
• Backstreets Play Video
• Because the Night ( Patti Smith Group  cover) Play Video
• Wrecking Ball Play Video
• American Skin (41 Shots) (with Tom Morello ) ( tour debut, first time with the E Street Band since 2017 ) Play Video
• The Ghost of Tom Joad (with Tom Morello ) ( tour debut, first time with the E Street Band since 2016 ) Play Video
• The Rising Play Video
• Badlands Play Video
• Thunder Road Play Video
• Born to Run Play Video
• Rosalita (Come Out Tonight) Play Video
• Glory Days Play Video
• Dancing in the Dark ( followed by band introductions ) Play Video
• Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out Play Video
• Detroit Medley Play Video
• I'll See You in My Dreams ( solo acoustic ) Play Video

Note: Rescheduled from December 6, 2023. "Land of Hope and Dreams" and "Born in the U.S.A." were listed as options to open the encore but neither was played. Soundcheck included "Human Touch", "The Ghost of Tom Joad", "American Skin (41 Shots)", "Johnny 99", and "Open All Night" (Seeger-style arrangement).

Edits and Comments

84 activities (last edit by JayBird20 , 10 Apr 2024, 05:40 Etc/UTC )

Songs on Albums

• Backstreets
• Born to Run
• Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
• Thunder Road
• I'll See You in My Dreams
• Last Man Standing
• Letter to You
• Prove It All Night
• The Promised Land
• Lonesome Day
• My City of Ruins
• Hungry Heart
• Sherry Darling
• Dancing in the Dark
• Death to My Hometown
• Wrecking Ball
• Because the Night by Patti Smith Group
• Nightshift by Commodores
• Spirit in the Night
• American Skin (41 Shots)
• Detroit Medley
• Open All Night
• The Ghost of Tom Joad
• Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)
• Tougher Than the Rest

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Bruce springsteen gig timeline.

• Mar 31 2024 Chase Center San Francisco, CA, USA Start time: 7:45 PM 7:45 PM
• Apr 04 2024 Kia Forum Inglewood, CA, USA Start time: 7:50 PM 7:50 PM
• Apr 07 2024 Kia Forum This Setlist Inglewood, CA, USA Start time: 7:40 PM 7:40 PM
• Apr 12 2024 Mohegan Sun Arena Uncasville, CT, USA  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time
• Apr 15 2024 MVP Arena Albany, NY, USA  –  Find tickets Scheduled: 7:30 PM Tickets 7:30 PM

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Tunnel Of Love

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At a Clark concert 50 years ago, Bruce Springsteen heralded things to come

Before he was chrome-wheeled, fuel-injected and selling out stadiums, Bruce Springsteen was another aspiring, up-and-coming artist on the club and college circuit.

And it was 50 years ago this year — on Oct. 6, 1974, to be precise — when Clark University students became some of the first ones in Worcester to catch “The Fever.”

On April 12, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band will be playing at Mohegan Sun Arena, Uncasville, Connecticut. This will be Springsteen’s first show in New England since he postponed the remainder of his current tour back in September as he recovered from peptic ulcer disease.

Last year, Springsteen played three shows in the Bay State — March 20 at the TD Garden in Boston, and Aug. 24 and 26 at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough. On Aug. 26, his last New England show before the scheduled April 12 show, Springsteen suffered a self-diagnosed panic attack when E Street Band guitarist Steven Van Zandt revealed he was from the Bay State and not New Jersey.

I call that a bargain

On Page 9 of the Oct. 3, 1974, edition of the Clark University’s student newspaper, The Scarlet , ran an unassuming quarter-page advertisement that had more white space than type for two different concerts.

The unassuming, easy-to-miss ad plainly read Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee and Willie Dixon were playing Oct. 4  

Further down the page and supplying the same amount of little or no urgency, the ad read Bruce Springsteen was playing just two days later on Oct. 6.

Even in smaller type, the ad sheepishly read, almost as an apology, “Tickets: $2, Oct. 4; $3, Oct. 6; $4, for both. Talk about a bargain for three blues legends, but I don’t know about the other guy.

For you see in 1974, most Clark students who heard the name Springsteen would say, “Who?” while anyone off-campus who got wind of the Bruce show at Clark probably would have shrugged, “Who cares?” or “I’ll save my money.”

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Springsteen’s Clark show was a year before “The Boss” was on the cover of Time and Newsweek in the same week on Oct. 27, 1975, and roughly 10 months before his breakthrough third album “Born to Run,” which was released on Aug. 25, 1975.

On Sept. 19, 1974, pianist Roy Bittan and drummer Max Weinberg played their first show in the E Street Band. By the time the two played at Clark, Bittan and Weinberg had only been rocking out with Springsteen for two-and-a-half weeks. Not at Clark was Steven Van Zandt, who wouldn't become a full-fledged E Street Band member until July 1975.

The night things changed

Springsteen is a legend now, but 50 years ago he was just another struggling rocker who was playing at area clubs, college halls and small concert arenas, and who was building a slow but steady reputation in the Tri-State area and beyond for his unorthodox tight band and legendary marathon concerts.

In 1974, Springsteen was nobody as far as people of Worcester were concerned. Unless you were from or had a cousin from the Garden State, chances are you never heard of the guy or any of his music. You certainly weren’t hearing Springsteen on Worcester radio. If you did, it was Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s cover of Springsteen’s “Blinded by the Light.” And he wasn’t being played on turntables in college dorms.

But that was about to change on the night of Oct. 6, 1974, at Clark’s Atwood Hall in Worcester, the same New England city where Springsteen would go on to sell out multiple nights on his “Born in the U.S.A.” tour and play his tour opener for his “Tunnel of Love” tour, all in the ‘80s at the Worcester Centrum , now the DCU Center.

To date, Springsteen has play eight sold-out shows at Worcester’s downtown arena.

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'Controlled energy'

So what did Springsteen and his E Street Band (noncredited in The Scarlet ad) deliver that night 50 years ago at Clark?

“Controlled energy,” according to college scribe Ruth Rachel Polsky, who reviewed the show and left behind one of the few documents of Springsteen’s first-ever concert in Worcester.

“Onstage, silhouetted dramatically by green light, the slight man (Springsteen) became a magician, deftly manipulating his band, his body and us, his audience,” Polsky wrote in The Scarlet published four days the show.

Despite only being a junior at the time, Polsky was astute, especially with her Springsteen-magician analogy.

Nightly during the 267-date, sold-out run of “Springsteen on Broadway” at the Walter Kerr and St. James theatres in New York City, the Boss says it all starts with a big “magic trick,” a sleight of hand that has given Springsteen "a furious fire" that’s need to come face to face with 80,000 screaming rock ‘n’ roll fans.

“I am here to provide proof of life to that ever elusive, never completely believable 'us,'" Springsteen said. “That is my magic trick. And like all good magic tricks, it begins with a setup.”

A life-changing event

When Clark seniors Dennis M. Dimitri and Sue Kurz (later Sue Kurz Eleftherakis) went to the Springsteen concert at Atwood Hall together as friends, they were unaware of the life-altering event that was about to unfold inside.

“I was not a Springsteen fan going into the show,” Dimitri said. “The reason I made a point of going is my cousin was attending Seton Hall in New Jersey at the time. And he always used to say to me that there’s this guy who plays there in the student union named Bruce Springsteen. He’s great.  If you ever get a chance to see him you should go. And that’s what prompted me to get the tickets and go. I’d never listened to one of his albums prior to that.”

Dimitri, a Worcester-native — now a retired professor and former vice chair of Family Medicine & Community Health UMass Chan Medical School — and Kurz, originally from White Plains, New York, were sitting in the front row of the balcony in Atwood Hall.

“I just had two tickets and Sue was a friend of mine,” Dimitri said.  “And I asked her to come with me, and I told her the story about having heard about him and we should probably go.“

“I was a big music fan but not a Springsteen fan,” Kurz said. “I never heard of Springsteen before. But I was a rock ‘n’ roll music lover and the show was inexpensive and on campus.”

And there were also other fellow Clarkies and Clarkie friends that they knew in the audience.

“Ironically, also in the crowd, was the woman who later became my wife. She was on the floor with her girlfriends, just a few rows back from the stage,” Dimitri said. “We got married several years after we got out of college.”

'He just took the crowd'

Touring behind his sophomore album, “The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle,” Springsteen opened with “Incident on 57th Street” accompanied only by pianist Roy Bittan.

“For the opening of the show, Springsteen came out with an acoustic (guitar) and played a slow ballad,” Dimitri said. “I didn’t know it at the time but, later, recognized that it was 'Incident on 57th Street,' which we all nicknamed 'Spanish Johnny' because of that opening line, ‘Spanish Johnny drove in from the underworld last night.’”

“When Springsteen got on the stage, I only focused on him,” Kurz added. “And he just took the crowd. He just controlled the audience. He was just amazing. And I think I was so surprised how good he was. And I never forgot it. He was just so wonderful.”

Then everything changed when “Scooter” and the “Big Man” and the rest of the E Street Band came out and bust Atwood Hall in half.

“When he jerked his hips to the left and to the right, a double-barreled drumroll and flashes of purple and red light occurred simultaneously, radiating to us in a wave of total sensuality,” Polsky continued in her review. “When his voice dropped to a husky, caressing whisper, we held out collective breath and rose with him to the crescendo on Clarence Clemons’ ethereal sax.”

'He knew how to work a crowd'

Springsteen played “Spirit in the Night,” an extended version of “Kitty’s Back” and a “crashing, ecstatic “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight),” the latter which the crowd was dancing in the aisles, according to The Scarlet.

“The other thing I remember about that concert that I can’t recall ever experiencing before that and not much since is the ability of this band to take you up to this incredible high, and then slow it down and then bring it up even higher again,” Dimitri said. “It was just a manipulation of emotions of the audience that I don’t know if I’ve experienced that with other bands.”

“Bruce was feeding off the energy, and he really knew how to work a crowd,” Erlander said. “He really knew how to get them going. He was a real performer, which he still is.”

Clark senior Leon Erlanger wasn’t a Springsteen fan going into the show at Atwood Hall. And he wasn’t much of Springsteen fan going out.

“I’m a mild Springsteen fan. I’m not like a big Springsteen fan,” Erlanger said. “A friend of mine had seen him in Boston and told me he was fantastic and I have to see him. But not many people knew who he was.”

What Erlanger found extraordinary was how Springsteen instantaneously made the crowd go bonkers.

“Springsteen showed up, and he started singing and I would say, within two seconds, these people who didn’t know him, pretty much the whole audience, went crazy,” Erlanger said. “I’d never seen anything like it. Honestly. I was just looking around and thinking, what the hell was going on around here? And it was like the Beatles or something.”

'They went nuts over him'

Erlanger said he noticed that the women, especially, in the audience were going particularly nuts over Springsteen.

“All these women that I thought were nonchalant about men but I guess it was just they were nonchalant about me, they were all talking about how sexy Springsteen was. And I mean they were getting like really excited. I was just really blown away about the whole thing,” Erlander said. “They went nuts over him. I’ve never seen anything like it …And it was instant, just instant. Everybody went crazy and was going crazy through the whole concert.”

Appearance-wise, Dimitri and Kurz remember Springsteen being a skinny, scrawny little guy in a muscle shirt and blue jeans sporting a beard and wearing sunglasses who became larger than life onstage, feeding on the excitement of the crowd’s collective energy.

In other words, Springsteen, 25, was already a powerhouse.

“I’m not quite sure what this guy is all about,” Dimitri said. “He’s from New Jersey, and he looks a little bit like a greaser, to tell you that truth. And his songs had a lot of car references in them.”

“Springsteen looked so small to me, but, I think it was because he was so young but also, he was standing next to Clarence Clemons, who I really didn’t notice because I was focusing on Bruce,” Kurz said. “He was very scruffy-looking but the way he controlled our hearts and heads and just got us going. I couldn’t look away. It was just great.

Kurtz, who has seen Springsteen five times in her life, said “Rosalita” was her favorite song that night at Atwood Hall.

“A lot of that bands at that time were a bunch of hippies,” Erlander said. “And Springsteen didn’t look like that. He looked more like a biker, pre-hippie era.”

Sounds of change

Springsteen was a different sound from what people were used to in the early ‘70s, Erlanger added.

“At that time, a lot of bands were unscripted and they would play a song and have a jam in the middle, stuff like that, and it was very loose,” Erlanger said. “But Springsteen’s act was very scripted, building into these crescendos. And I don’t think people were used to that. I found it kind of contrived, that was my feeling about it. But everybody else seemed to be eating it up.”

Erlanger said while he kind of liked Springsteen, he didn’t go crazy over him as did so many concertgoers.

“I was thinking his lyrics were like he was trying to be like Bob Dylan but not quite succeeded, ‘Blinded by the Light’ and scared of the night, things like that,” Erlanger continued.  “He was OK but he was not great.”

In addition to The Boss, The Big Man, Mighty Max and The Professor, Polsky also gave high marks to organist Danny Federici and bassist Garry Tallent in her review.

“Through sheer professionalism combined with humor, emotion, and charisma, Bruce Springsteen gave Clark a show that won’t soon be forgotten — a synthesis of rock and jazz that communicates on the level of pure soul,” the Scarlet review said.

Dimitri agrees.

“You could see the music moving back and forth among the various players, whether it was Bruce with his guitar, Clarence with his sax, Roy with the keyboards, Max with the drums,” Dimitri said. “It just moved around so much back and forth among them and building to crescendos that just blew you away.”

A legendary sax player

Like Polsky, Dimitri had high marks for the shared chemistry between Clemons and Springsteen.

“I have not seen a lot of rock bands that had a saxophone player in them. And Clarence Clemons would come in on those saxophone solos and just blow the lid off of the place,” Dimitri said. “Clearly, Bruce and Clarence stuck out, man. Those were two imposing figures on the stage that drew you right in. It was hard to take your eyes off them. It was a stark contrast, absolutely, but they fit together like hand and glove. And they played off each other back and forth,”

At Clark, Springsteen played the yet-to-be-released tracks “She’s the One” and “Jungleland” (both off “Born to Run”) for the first time for a Worcester crowd at Clark University.

“One of the other songs that really struck me and I didn’t really know what it was at the time was 'Jungleland,’” Dimitri said, “When '“'Born to Run'”' came out the next year, I immediately recognized the song when I played it. Oh! That’s definitely one of the songs I heard him play.”

'What did we just see?'

At the end of Springsteen’s performance at Clark, a totally stunned and blown-away Dimitri and Kurz turned to each other and said in unison, “Oh, my God! What did we just see?”

“I say this all the time. Of all the bands that I have ever seen, I think the E Street Band is the tightest band,” Dimitri said. “I never seen anything quite like it. There’s no other way to describe it. It’s like they’re all connected all the time. Now, with the hindsight of 50 years, I realize that’s because of the workmanship of Bruce Springsteen bringing those guys together. They are just incredible.”

On Nov, 18, 1975, Springsteen played the Hammersmith Odeon in London. Kurz, who has seen the concert film made from the ’75 London show, says the Clark University show was a lot like that, just with fewer funny hats.

“Springsteen at Clark University was the best show I’ve ever seen,” Kurz said. “And I’ve seen the Rolling Stones in the third row at Shea Stadium. I’ve seen a lot of great shows. But I still have to go back to that because it has stuck with me all these years.”

'I was sort of baffled'

Clark University was the first and only time Erlander saw Springsteen. Erlander, who’s originally from New York, cites Bob Marley as the best show he ever saw. He also rates Bob Dylan high on his personal list. Erlander said he saw Dylan in Sweden when he had a cold and he sounded better than he normally sounds.

“I thought Springsteen’s band sounded good, but they didn’t sound as good as everybody else seemed to think,” Erlanger said. “I was just sort of baffled by it. I thought they were good. I liked them. I didn’t understand what the mania was about.” 

The next day, Dimitri and Kurz went to Carl Seder's Music Mart in downtown Worcester. One of them bought “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.” while the other bought “The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle.” Neither of them had enough money to buy both of them so they bought one each.

“It was probably, I don’t know, $3.99 at the time,” Dimitri said.  “I don’t remember which one of us took which one but eventually, I know for sure I went back at some point later and bought the other one that I didn’t have so I had them both and played the heck out of both of those.”

More than a moment

At the time of this writing, general admission, standing-room-only, verified resale tickets for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s twice-postponed April 12 concert at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Conn., were going for $2,380 each on Ticketmaster.

To date, Dimitri has seen Springsteen nine times, five times in the ‘70s and three times with his first wife, who died 10 years ago.

Dimitri married his second wife six months ago. His current wife has never seen Bruce Springsteen but all of that is going to change when they see Springsteen on April 15 at the MVP Arena in Albany, New York, which will also be Dimitri’s 10th time seeing The Boss.

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Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Get Loose in Los Angeles

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Three hours into Bruce Springsteen ’s epic return to Los Angeles on Thursday night with the E Street Band, he stared down the sold-out crowd at the Forum. “Do you have anything left?” he shouted, midway through “Twist and Shout,” the second-to-last song of his first L.A. show in eight years. Five decades in, the magic of a Springsteen show remains: He always seems to have a little bit left in the tank.

In 2024, Springsteen continues to set the standard for rock concerts, playing longer sets at age 74 with more energy than some of his younger contemporaries. That’s likely no shock to those who managed to catch a Springsteen and the E Street Band show last year, but it still feels worth celebrating after Springsteen had to reschedule multiple dates of last year’s tour , including his L.A. run. At the time, he was suffering from peptic ulcer disease so severe that, as he recently revealed, he was afraid he’d never be able to sing again. “Sorry we missed you last time,” Springsteen said onstage at the Forum. “I hope we didn’t put you out too badly, but, man, I had the worst motherfucking bellyache you can imagine. But it’s not aching now.”

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The 2024 version of the tour has been looser than last year’s, which stuck fairly close to a single set list, and Thursday was no exception. Springsteen kicked off with a true rarity, a cover of John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom” (most frequently played on the Tunnel of Love Express Tour back in 1988), before jumping into “Lonesome Day” (rarely played last year, but now a staple in the set) and “Prove It All Night,” then his live-favorite arena-rock reworking of Jimmy Cliff’s “Trapped.”

In the sweetest surprise of the show, Springsteen brought out his wife and longtime E Street Band member, Patti Scialfa , who has been mostly absent from this tour, to share vocals on two unexpected songs. The first, “Tougher Than the Rest,” was a welcome reminder of how gorgeously the couple’s very different voices intertwine. Then came a flirty, crowd-pleasing acoustic take on “Fire,” which turned into a true duet, with Scialfa taking over some of the lead vocals before sharing the mic for intimate harmonies.

Six dates into their return to the road, Springsteen and the E Street Band sounded like they had never been interrupted. “Are you having fun yet? Because we haven’t had fun yet,” Springsteen told the crowd just over an hour into his show. “This is our pre-fun. We’re here to wake you up, shake you up, and take you to higher ground. The E Street Band is here to bring the joyous power of rock & roll into your life. But we need your help. We plan on sending you home with your feet hurting, your hands hurting, your ass in paralysis, and your sexual organs stimulated.”

Springsteen maintains a remarkably simple setup and show presentation compared to the other blockbuster live shows currently on the road. The visuals are limited to video screens and elegant stage lights, keeping the focus on the 17 musicians onstage with him. He doesn’t really need much else.

At one point, Springsteen grabbed a sign from a fan, noticing a song request but struggling to make out what it said. “This sign is impossible to read; it seems to be some black spray paint,” he said as the crowd chuckled. Holding the sign up for the audience to help, he finally learned that the sign was requesting another rarity: the Cajun traditional song “Jole Blon,” which has occasionally popped up in concerts since Springsteen released a cover of it with Gary U.S. Bonds in 1981. “We haven’t played that song in many years,” he said, “but we’re gonna play it now.”

Last year’s shows were suffused with themes of mortality, and that carried over on Thursday, in moments that felt even more poignant in a light of a new loss: Springsteen’s mother, Adele, died earlier this year. “I know there’s a lot of us missing somebody special,” Springsteen said during one of the night’s most powerful moments, a deeply felt, horn-drenched version of “My City of Ruins,” which has been making a welcome return to the set list in 2024 after being entirely absent last year. “I don’t know where we go when all of this is over, but I know what remains. The only thing I guarantee is that if you’re here and we’re here, then those who are missing are here with us.”

As he has every night during these shows, Springsteen recalled the death of George Theiss, from his very first band, the Castiles, telling the crowd that “death brings a certain clarity of thought. Grieving is the price we play for love.” He then went into the emotional gut punch of a two-song sequence that’s been a signature of this tour since the first show of last year: “Last Man Standing” into “Backstreets,” two songs that look at youth and loss from very different angles.

From there, the show was all joy and catharsis, with an unbroken string of hits and live favorites, beginning with Nils Lofgren’s jaw-dropping guitar virtuosity on “Because the Night,” and inevitably reaching “Thunder Road” and “Born to Run.” As he has throughout the tour, Springsteen finished the show alone with his meditation on life after death, “I’ll See You in My Dreams.”

Springsteen and the E Street Band will play another Forum show on Sunday.

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Music | Review: Bruce Springsteen ups his game for…

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Music | big rig overturns on connector to i-880, commute a mess, music | review: bruce springsteen ups his game for incredible easter sunday show, it was another sold-out concert for springsteen and e street band.

Bruce Springsteen put on a magnificent show on Thursday night at Chase Center in San Francisco . Then he went out and topped that effort by delivering an even better concert at the same venue on Easter Sunday.

“Happy Easter,” the 74-year-old New Jersey native greeted the full house of fans. “It’s a religious crowd here tonight, I can tell — spiritual crowd.”

For his part, Springsteen went about his work with the enthusiasm of a revival tent preacher, strutting about the stage with passion and purpose and delivering each batch of words like they might be the ones that will change the very lives of those listening.

And the 16,500 followers in attendance ate it up — every single word — during all 29 songs of the approximately three-hour set.

Unlike Thursday’s show, which got off to a somewhat tepid start, Springsteen and his incredible 17-piece E Street Band came racing out of the gate with a fiery “Light of Day.” That relative rarity — which was being played for the first time on this 2024 tour — was actually first recorded by Springsteen in 1983 as part of the “Born in the U.S.A.” sessions, but never ended up making it onto that or any other of his studio albums. “Light of Day” would actually first surface in a performance by Michael J. Fox and Joan Jett, playing as the fictitious band the Barbusters in the 1987 film of the same name.

There were a lot of other differences between the two sold-out Chase Center shows, both of which consisted of 29 songs. Most significantly, the setlists varied in satisfying fashion, giving fans plenty of reasons to attend both.

On Thursday, fans got “Something in the Night,” “Two Hearts,” “No Surrender,” “Atlantic City,” “Death to My Hometown,” “Racing in the Street” and “Bobby Jean.” Those songs were absent on Sunday, replaced with “Light of Day,” “Night,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “Darlington County,” “My City of Ruins,” “Glory Days” and a deliriously fun and unexpected cover of the Top Notes classic “Twist and Shout” (which most people know from the hit Isley Brothers and Beatles versions, the latter of which was introduced to an all new generation through “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”).

The concert was a juggernaut early on, as The Boss and company continued through the “Rising” anthem “Lonesome Day” (which has nicely settled into the No. 2 spot on this tour setlist) and the “Born to Run” cut “Night.” Setting a likely unintended theme, Springsteen went on to include four more night-titles in the show — with the others being “Prove It All Night,” “Spirit in the Night,” the Commodores cover “Nightshift” (featured on his 2022 covers album, “Only the Strong Survive”) and, of course, the powerful Patti Smith co-write “Because the Night.”

He’d draw from 10 studio albums — as well as the 1992 live effort “In Concert/MTV Plugged” — with the lion’s share of the setlist going to the legendary 1975 outing “Born to Run.” He pulled a half-dozen tracks from that career-maker, including two — “Born to Run” and “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” — during the eight-song encore.

No matter how many times you experience it, “Born to Run” — performed with the house lights up — is an adrenaline rush that never fails to satisfy. It remains Springsteen’s greatest rock song, with “Thunder Road” being a somewhat distant second.

Yet, what will stick with many fans is the surprise that came at the end of the first encore.

The Boss has been closing this segment with “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” on this tour — and, for good reason, since it’s a fun rocker that puts a real exclamation point on the E Street Band portion of the show. Then Springsteen remains onstage and plays a soft solo acoustic version of “I’ll See You in My Dreams” as the real finale.

But as the last notes of “Tenth Avenue” were still ringing through Chase Center, Springsteen decided to rev up one more — “by request,” he said — and led the E Streeters in a glorious old-school run through “Twist and Shout.” It was one of those special moments where Springsteen — who has been one of the biggest artists in rock ‘n’ roll now for some 40 years — channeled his Jersey bar band roots in such brilliant fashion.

A wave of pure joy washed over the 16,500 fans — some of whom were likely old enough to remember when the Beatles performed “Twist and Shout” on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964 — illustrating once again why so many people consider Springsteen and the E Street Band to be the greatest live act in rock history.

1. “Light of Day” 2. “Lonesome Day” 3. “Night” 4. “Prove It All Night” 5. “Darkness on the Edge of Town” 6. “Darlington County” 7. “Ghosts” 8. “Letter to You” 9. “The Promised Land” 10. “My City of Ruins” 11. “Spirit in the Night” 12. “Hungry Heart” 13. “Nightshift” 14. “Last Man Standing” 15. “Backstreets” 16. “Because the Night” 17. “She’s the One” 18. “Wrecking Ball” 19. “The Rising” 20. “Badlands” 21. “Thunder Road” Encore: 22. “Land of Hope and Dreams” 23. “Born to Run” 24. “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” 25. “Glory Days” 26. “Dancing in the Dark” 27. “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” 28. “Twist and Shout” Encore 2: 29. “I’ll See You in My Dreams”

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Live Shots: Bruce Springsteen rocked Chase Center with a marathon set

The Boss barreled through hits and some surprising covers on the second night of his SF appearance.

The Boss looked lithe and trim as he hit the Chase Center stage on March 31—launching into “Light of Day,” which he hasn’t played since 2016 with his E Street Band—also in great form on the second night of his San Francisco appearance, and the fifth night of his world tour. His marathon set of more than three dozen songs (remarkably delivered after just recovering from an illness ) included classics like “Thunder Road,” “Born to Run,” and “Glory Days,” as well as some covers like “Night Shift” by the Commodores and “Because the Night” by Patti Smith. A thrilled crowd sang along, and posed beforehand under the new “Bruce Springsteen and E Street Band” street signs, dedicated by the SFMTA.

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Bruce Springsteen Digs Deep at First Los Angeles Show in Eight Years

S ay this for Bruce Springsteen : 2024 is already a much better year than 2023. His first tour with the E Street Band since 2017 began last February in Tampa, Fl., with fans still grumbling over a dynamic ticket pricing fiasco , and was criticized because the set lists were too rigid compared to years past. Far more worrisome was the Boss having to postpone a huge swath of shows last fall while recovering from a peptic ulcer.

Thankfully, Springsteen is back on the road, fresh off a memorable cameo as a fictional version of himself on Curb Your Enthusiasm in a plot involving him getting COVID from Larry David and having to cancel his fictional farewell tour. Nobody knows when or if the Boss, 74, will hang it up for real, so just having an opportunity to be in the man’s presence for a few hours carries a bit of extra weight these days.

So it was last night (April 5) at Springsteen’s first show at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum in 22 years — certainly a more favorable venue than the demolished L.A. Sports Arena, which he lovingly referred to as “the dump that jumped.” Vowing that this stretch of shows, which began last month in Phoenix, would have a more diverse set list, Springsteen opened by covering John Lee Hooker’s blues powerhouse “Boom Boom” for the first time since 2016. It set the tone for the rest of the night, with material from more recent albums such as 2020’s Letter to You and the 2022 soul covers project Only the Strong Survive sharing space with songs not played in years, such as the crowd-requested “Jole Blon” and Jimmy Cliff’s “Trapped.”

Jumping off from the themes of his hugely successful one-man Broadway show, Springsteen seems focused on life and mortality on this tour. An emotional centerpiece of the show was “Last Man Standing,” his tribute to George Theiss, the last living bandmate in his childhood band the Castles, and the heaviness of that moment imbued different meanings to other early tracks. Among them was “Backstreets.” Once an anthem of the youthful exuberance of friendship and the fearlessness of conquering the world when you have your whole life in front of you, it’s now a fond nostalgic look back at the good times that were.

Usually, when Springsteen plays in Southern California, a special guest or two can be expected. In years past, that has meant Social Distortion’s Mike Ness or Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello. Last night, it was Springsteen’s wife, Patti Scialfa, also a longtime E Street Band member. Though her on-stage appearances have been more sporadic in recent years, she was a welcome presence, trading vocals on Tunnel of Love ‘s “Tougher Than the Rest” and an acoustic version of the Pointer Sisters’ cover of Springsteen’s “Fire.” Both songs hadn’t been performed since the Broadway run in 2017, and Springsteen quipped that it was actually her first time singing the latter.

Throughout, the show was loose and casual, but never sloppy, and battle-tested songs such as “Badlands,” “The Promised Land,” “Hungry Heart” (imagine if Bruce ended up giving that one to the Ramones like he intended to?) and “Rosalita” kept the crowd on their collective feet. “Because the Night” shone with Nils Lofgren’s shredding guitar solo, and there continues to be an unspoken chemistry with Jake Clemons, who has more than ably taken the baton from his late uncle, the beloved Clarence “Big Man” Clemons, drummer Max Weinberg, and Springsteen consigliere “Little” Steven Van Zandt, who all adapt in the blink of an eye to the spontaneity long a hallmark of Springsteen’s live performances.

Unlike previous tours, the dates on the 2024 jaunt are more spread out, and the five-day break from the previous show in San Francisco clearly served Springsteen well. Moving all over the stage, he high-fived audience members and even ventured into the crowd during the encore staple “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.”

At this point in his career, Springsteen doesn’t owe anybody anything. He’s wildly wealthy (he sold his catalog for a cool $500 million), famous and his legacy is amongst the most important in rock history. Yet here he was, hauling ass on stage, performing with a band which has been making it look easy for 50 years. The theme of glory days in the rearview mirror loomed large, but if Springsteen fears what the future holds, it wasn’t apparent on this night. Laughing, joking and rocking with the prowess of a man half his age, Springsteen clearly isn’t ready to throw in the towel quite yet.

Bruce Springsteen Kia Forum Setlist:

Boom Boom (John Lee Hooker cover) (tour debut; first time since 2016)

Lonesome Day

Prove It All Night

Trapped (Jimmy Cliff cover) (tour debut)

Letter to You

The Promised Land

Tougher Than the Rest (with Patti Scialfa) (tour debut; first time with the E Street Band since 2016)

Fire (with Patti Scialfa) (tour debut; acoustic until the end, first time with the E Street Band since 2017)

Hungry Heart

Jole Blon ([traditional] cover) (sign request; tour debut; first time with E Street Band since 2017)

Spirit in the Night

No Surrender

My City of Ruins

Nightshift (Commodores cover)

Last Man Standing (acoustic; with Barry Danielian on trumpet)

Backstreets

Because the Night

She’s the One

Wrecking Ball

Thunder Road

Encore: Land of Hope and Dreams

Born to Run

Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)

Dancing in the Dark

Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out

Twist and Shout (The Top Notes cover)

Encore 2: I’ll See You in My Dreams

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