![]() Even the shimmering immediacy of his three-CD Live 1975–1985 set, famously sweetened with overdubs, only approximates the way his shows created new meanings from familiar numbers. He didn’t make weak records, but his live performances exceeded anything he managed to capture on tape. But the arc of Springsteen’s career carried its own quirks. ![]() Later that summer, we listened to the live FM broadcast from Los Angeles’s Roxy Club, where he opened by crushing Buddy Holly’s rendition of “Rave On.”Ī defining tension grew between Springsteen’s recordings and his live shows, in ways that the Grateful Dead had pioneered: the tour, not the album, became the act. Few other rock stars had anywhere near the same kind of integrity, fighting a court case instead of touring. (The album hit number three on Billboard’s US LPs chart, but the booming title single stalled at number 23, even after Springsteen appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek simultaneously.) That 1978 summer tour clawed back pent-up demand. ![]() The rock press had covered his legal fight with his first manager, Mike Appel, and the years it stole from his early career just as he should have been cashing in on the critical euphoria over 1975’s Born to Run. Nearly four hours later, the band fell apart laughing in the middle of covering the Bobby Fuller version of “I Fought the Law,” and everybody left feeling like a tornado had just picked them up and dropped them back down to earth.Īt age 28, Springsteen wasn’t just great-he was freakishly great. Springsteen’s charisma gave its breakout drama a blinding force, and the E Street Band players kept diving into grooves that felt too big for a single group, chasing their Big Idea Frontman, who kept racing out ahead. The sound busted open with triumph and ambition and a swaggering, indomitable confidence it also had foreboding and dread. When he took the stage with “Badlands,” Springsteen lit up the audience with energies both fierce and fearsome, only suggested by the lead track on Darkness. Suspicious of the hype, we took pleasure when Springsteen’s PA system played Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True (1977) for the early crowd-it sounded generous, like he cared about the same music that we did. ![]() When he played Red Rocks in June 1978, near Denver, I was a week out of high school, smack in the strike zone. We had listened to Darkness on the Edge of Town, his newest album, intently for a couple of weeks, and had read future biographer Dave Marsh’s rave review in Rolling Stone. WE THINK ABOUT Bruce Springsteen differently now from how we did in the 1970s when he first appeared, or the 1980s when he went mainstream, and it’s only in part because of his current tour’s Ticketmaster mess. ![]()
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