Let The Day Begin...Let The Day Start!: Day 315 - Springsteen & The E Street Band Live 1975-85

 Live 1975-85 - Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band

CBS

Produced by Jon Landau, Chuck Plotkin, Bruce Springsteen

Released 10th November 1986

US Chart #1

UK Chart #4

Side One

A1     Thunder Road (Roxy, 10/18/75)     5:41
A2     Adam Raised A Cain (Roxy, 7/7/78)     5:25
A3     Spirit In The Night (Roxy, 7/7/78)     6:22
A4     4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) (Nassau Coliseum, 12/31/80)     6:29 

Side Two
B1     Paradise By The "C" (Roxy, 7/7/78)     3:34
B2     Fire (Winterland, 12/16/78)     3:12
B3     Growin' Up (Roxy, 7/7/78)     7:57
B4     It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City (Roxy, 7/7/78)     4:37 

Side Three
C1     Backstreets (Roxy, 7/7/78)     7:27
C2     Rosalita (Come Out Tonight) (Roxy, 7/7/78)     9:59
C3     Raise Your Hand (Roxy, 7/7/78)     5:10 

Side Four
D1     Hungry Heart (Nassau Coliseum, 12/28/80)     4:28
D2     Two Hearts (Meadowlands Arena, 7/8/81)     3:05
D3     Cadillac Ranch (Meadowlands Arena, 7/7/81)     4:50
D4     You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch) (Nassau Coliseum, 12/29/80)     3:51
D5     Independence Day (Meadowlands Arena, 7/6/81)     5:09  

Side Five
E1     Badlands (Arizona State University, 11/5/80)     5:15
E2     Because The Night (Nassau Coliseum, 12/28/80)     5:18
E3     Candy's Room (Meadowlands Arena, 7/8/81)     3:09
E4     Darkness On The Edge Of Town (Nassau Coliseum, 12/29/80)     4:28
E5     Racing In The Street (Meadowlands Arena, 7/6/81)     8:13

Side Six
F1     This Land Is Your Land (Nassau Coliseum, 12/28/80)     4:17
F2     Nebraska (Meadowlands Arena, 8/6/84)     4:16
F3     Johnny 99 (Giants Stadium, 8/19/85)     4:21
F4     Reason To Believe (Meadowlands Arena, 8/19/84)     5:15 

Side Seven
G1     Born In The U.S.A. (Los Angeles Coliseum, 9/30/85)     6:07
G2     Seeds (Los Angeles Coliseum, 9/30/85)     5:13
G3     The River (Los Angeles Coliseum, 8/30/85)     11:37

Side Eight
H1     War (Los Angeles Coliseum, 9/30/85)     4:51
H2     Darlington County (Los Angeles Coliseum, 9/30/85)     5:12
H3     Working On The Highway (Giants Stadium, 8/19/85)     3:59
H4     The Promised Land (Los Angeles Coliseum, 9/30/85)     5:32 

Side Nine
I1     Cover Me (Los Angeles Coliseum, 9/30/85)     6:58
I2     I'm On Fire (Giants Stadium, 8/19/85)     4:23
I3     Bobby Jean (Giants Stadium, 8/21/85     4:27
I4     My Hometown (Los Angeles Coliseum, 9/30/85)     5:08

Side Ten
J1     Born To Run (Giants Stadium, 8/19/85)     5:02
J2     No Surrender (Meadowlands Arena, 8/6/84)     4:42
J3     Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out (Meadowlands Arena, 8/20/84)     4:18
J4     Jersey Girl (Meadowlands Arena, 7/9/81)   6:32

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Personnel
    Bruce Springsteen – vocals, electric guitar, harmonica, acoustic guitar
    Roy Bittan – piano, synthesizer, backing vocals
    Clarence Clemons – saxophone, percussion, backing vocals
    Danny Federici – organ, accordion, glockenspiel, piano, synthesizer, backing vocals
    Nils Lofgren (beginning in 1984) – electric and acoustic guitar, backing vocals
    Patti Scialfa (beginning in 1984) – backing vocals, synthesizer
    Garry Tallent – bass guitar, backing vocals
    Steve Van Zandt (through 1981) – electric guitar, acoustic guitar, backing vocals
    Max Weinberg – drums
    Flo and Eddie – backing vocals on "Hungry Heart"
    (Howard Kaylan – backing vocals on "Hungry Heart"
    Mark Volman) – backing vocals on "Hungry Heart"
    The Miami Horns – horns on "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out"
        Stan Harrison – tenor sax
        Eddie Manion – baritone sax
        Mark Pender – trumpet
        Richie "La Bamba" Rosenberg – trombone

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Singles on Live 1975-85

    A-Side: War / Merry Christmas Baby  

B-Side: Incident on 57th Street* (Live)
    Released: November 10, 1986

 US Chart #8

UK Chart #18

 *Previously Unreleased Version - Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Uniondale NY on 29th December 1980

The video for War (see the Playlist for the album) was from the Los Angeles Coliseum 30th September 1985

  A-Side: Fire / For You (Live)*

B-Side: Born To Run / No Surrender / Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
    Released: January 1987

US Chart #46

UK Chart #54

*Previously Unreleased Version - The Roxy Theater, West Hollywood CA on 7th July 1978

All other tracks are taken from the Live 1975-85 Album

The video for Fire was filmed at The Bridge School Benefit in 1986. 

    A-Side: Born to Run

B-Side: Seeds / Johnny 99
    Released: 1987

UK Chart #16

All tracks are taken from the Live 1975-85 Album

The Promo Video for Born To Run was basically footage drawn from various shows on The Born in the U.S.A. Tour 

Notes

Thanks to Mark Wright and Charlie Pi for providing some help tracking the dates of the unreleased tracks on the singles as there was no information on the picture sleeves or the labels. Can always count on someone on Brucebook over on Facebook to have the answer you are looking for. Thanks again chaps.

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(US CD Cover)

David Fricke's Review For Rolling Stone 10th November 1986.

Bruce Springsteen wrote in the liner notes for the album, "In November of '85 Jon Landau sent a four-song cassette of 'Born in the U.S.A.', 'Seeds', 'The River' and 'War' down to my house with a note attached saying he 'thought we might have something here'. Over the following months we listened to 10 years of tapes, the music did the talkin', and this album and its story began to emerge. We hope you have as much fun with it as we did. I'd like to thank Jon for his friendship and perseverance and the E Street Band for 1,001 nights of comradeship and good rockin'. They're all about the best bunch of people you can have at your side when you're goin' on a long drive."

Prior to the release of Live 1975-85 I had a few Bootleg Cassettes of Springsteen shows (I used to pick them up at a reasonable price at a Market in London. I could have gone elsewhere and bought some of them on Vinyl but they were always way above what I could afford at the time!). They were not always great quality, apart from maybe some of the Radio Shows. 

Up until this point I had only seen Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band live three times, firstly on The original River Tour back in 1981 at the Wembley Arena and then twice in 1985 on the Born in the U.S.A. Tour at Wembley Stadium.

Imagine then the sense of excitement at the prospect of an Official Live Album Release and one that was to be credited not just to Bruce himself (as his Studio albums had been) but his fantastic band, yep let's name them... "the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, hard-rocking, booty-shaking, love-making, earth-quaking, Viagra-taking, justifying, death-defying, legendary E Street Band" (Bruce Springsteen introducing and inducting the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014). They finally got a namecheck on a release rather than just being buried among the list of album credits.

The album was to be released as a 5 x Vinyl Record Box, 3CD Set and a 3 x Cassette Set (more about that later). I think pretty much over time I've had versions of all of them (except the 3 x 8-Track Cartridge version) and replaced them a number of times as well!

Because I had a feeling that this album was going to be huge (after all Bruce at the time was one of the biggest Rock stars on the planet following the success of Born in the U.S.A. and the various singles that were released from it) I put my name down on the list to Pre-order the set. The thing I remember about release day was that I was working and couldn't get to my local record shop until the day after it was released. Being as impatient as I am now I went into HMV  in the city at lunchtime and bought a Cassette Version of the album in order to play it on my Walkman after I finished work and was on my way home (though I did manage to get a sneaky play of the first three sides at work in the Postroom once I got back to the office).

The album contains 40 songs and in a way it's set out like a Springsteen show (though I'm not sure he's ever done 40 songs in a set - I know the Nassau Show from New Years Eve 1980 has 38 or 39 if you include Auld Lang Syne) and over the course of the Ten Sides (on the Vinyl Edition) they spotlight material from pretty much all of his albums at the time, some tracks that he had passed on to other artists, a couple that had never been on any of his studio albums and four cover versions. Over three and a half hours worth of music of the highest quality with a rich diversity of sound from Soul to Rock and Roll.

The album had huge pre-orders in America (over 1.5 million) and that saw it debut on the Billboard Album Charts at #1. Apparently this was a pretty rare event and the last time it happened was ten years prior when Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life did it. It also became the first five record set to enter the Top Ten and the first to sell over a million copies.

Reviews for the album were generally very positive as you could well imagine but there were some who were critical of songs that were left off like Jungleland and who were complaining that it was a bit Born in the U.S.A. heavy (8 of the 12 songs from the album are represented). As a fan I was actually more than happy because I had seen him on that tour and to have some tracks from it was a real delight.

I think at times us fans can be a bit snobby about what was left off as well as we get older because many of us now have loads of Bootlegs that stem from the ten year period the album represents and we could probably talk for hours of the merits of some other cover versions like John Fogerty's Who'll Stop the Rain or The Animals' We've Got To Get Out of This Place or It's My Life or even Manfred Mann's Pretty Flamingo to have been included or Bruce's own songs like A Love So Fine and The Fever.

So this grand old Five Record Set is 30 years old today and it was the first of a number of live albums that have been released since and add to that the last couple of tours (High Hopes - 34 shows and The River 2016 - 75 Shows) that been issued and various archived shows via his website there's a real wealth of live material around to satisfy our hungry hearts. We really are spoilt for choice these days! It means that we don't need to be running about Market stalls looking for cassettes or poorly sounding vinyl bootlegs of recent shows anymore...though we are always happy when we stumble upon a show that we do not have in our collections!

  Let The Day Begin...Let The Day Start!