Springsteen at Count Basie Theater

[Sweet Papa Crimbo]

Dime a Dozen is full and not allowing more users to register. Would anyone out there be interested in helpting me get a copy of this?

 

 

try Jungleland

[Analogman]

I figured there was a Bruce BT site out there somewhere.

[oceanman]

I am on a hunt for the Complete Demos collection I mentioned earlier. I will see if I can find that show also.

 

Just trying to help.

 

 

 

btjunkie has the following(some are flac and some are mp3)

 

Pocket Full of Demos(Complete Recordings) 72-73 flac

 

Lost Masers

 

Rarities Vol 1,2,3,4,5

 

Live and Rare Vol 1,2,3,4

 

The Outtakes of Darkness

 

Missing Tracks Vol 1,2

[Analogman]

Thanks, Crickgirl.

[tongue-tied lightning]

holy moses malone ! what can ya say bout that show.

 

I guess Bruce had no choice but to grieve through his music. I didn't know how Danny's death would effect him. He also lost a very close friend last year. Bruce is one of a kind. Love or hate him, he gives

his all at every show.

 

I'm DL ing this show now, and can't wait to hear it.

 

It's a great place, glad I saw Wilco there last Summer, and hope they restore it to it's original beauty.

 

thanks for posting Paul

[John Smith]

try Jungleland

 

Thanks, I'll see what I can get there

[bobfrombob]

I thought so - as he took a bunch of bootleggers to court back in the 80s (I think it was) as well as, went to the UK to fight the release of that Before The Flame cd. Of course, live show trading is not bootlegging - but I suppose he does not look at it that way.

 

Come to think of it - his shows would not be up at dime a dozen if there was a no taping allowed policy - so something must have changed.

 

Ok - I dug a bit - and did not see any Bruce live show taping policy out there. His shows are allowed on Dime a dozen and Tape City - so he must know about it.

Bruce's "policy" hasnt' really changed but I believe that his stance is way more relaxed now. He is still pretty strongly opposed to people selling live recordings but I think he has resigned himself to fans trading and sharing. He doesn't allow it but he knows it's happening. In fact, I know a pretty serious collector who has been contacted a number of times by people very close to Bruce to obtain copies of specific shows.

[Analogman]

I know of another message board where the members spend $$$ on bootlegs from some place in Japan. That is crazy. I don't think I have ever bought such things.

[LouisvilleGreg]

"Raise Your Hand" to close the show is just about perfect. It, along with the "Detroit Medley" are old school show stoppers for sure. I like how at the and of the back to back full albums, which would hav ebeen pefect, he just tossed in a rarity, two insane over the top songs from the second album and an old cover favorite. Good choice. I wonder if those four were decided on the spot or not?

[Analogman]

"Raise Your Hand" to close the show is just about perfect. It, along with the "Detroit Medley" are old school show stoppers for sure. I like how at the and of the back to back full albums, which would hav ebeen pefect, he just tossed in a rarity, two insane over the top songs from the second album and an old cover favorite. Good choice. I wonder if those four were decided on the spot or not?

 

 

I am getting those demos - the seed is moving slow though.

 

Point Blank

3/29/2008

 

Spirit In The Night (Bruce goes out into the crowd)

4/4/2008

[LouisvilleGreg]

I am getting those demos - the seed is moving slow though.

 

Point Blank

3/29/2008

 

Spirit In The Night (Bruce goes out into the crowd)

4/4/2008

sounds good, keep me posted. thanks again, greg

[Analogman]

I got it now - the sound is pretty good. PM your address.

[LouisvilleGreg]

Here's a great analysis on "Darkness," 30 years later. It's my favorite Springsteen album about 75% of the time.

 

 

DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN - 30 YEAR ANNIVERSARY

A Map of the Future: "Darkness on the Edge of Town" at 30

By Joyce Millman

Darkness On The Edge Of Town, 1978

 

"Here be dragons." According to legend, medieval map-makers used that phrase to signal the dangers of unexplored realms. In 1978, Bruce Springsteen drew a map and wrote "here be dragons" on it - except his warning read, "Darkness on the Edge of Town." The "darkness" haunts this album like a living, often fire-breathing, presence. On the title track, "dreams are found and lost" within its shadows. On "Streets of Fire," when Springsteen yowls, "In the darkness, I hear somebody call my name," it's as if his anguished character has imagined the voice of darkness itself. On "Adam Raised a Cain," the narrator is swallowed up by an abyss of adolescent pain: "In the darkness of your room, your mother calls you by your true name/ You remember the faces, the places, the names/ You know it's never over/ It's relentless as the rain." "Darkness" has many meanings on the album. It's temptation and salvation. It's what we desire and what we fear. It's a crucible through which our true selves are revealed. It's the sin we hide deep in our souls.

 

In the 1998 book "Songs," Springsteen wrote that he envisioned the characters of "Darkness" as "a community under siege" from the emotional and financial struggles of working-class life. Thirty years after the album's June 2, 1978 release, Springsteen is still guided by his old map, still squinting at the darkness on the edge of town. His most recent album "Magic" (2007) returns to a community under siege, but, this time, the siege is literal. On "Magic," the darkness takes the monstrous shape of governmental arrogance, and the toll of that arrogance hangs over the Springsteenian Anytown landscape like a soul-chilling fog. The gypsy biker is returning home in a flag-draped coffin. There are bodies hanging in the trees. Our own worst enemy has come to town. Through the prism of "Magic," we can now see that "Darkness on the Edge of Town" was Springsteen's great transitional and transformative album. It broached thematic territory to which he would return again and again: the struggle to live up to the promise of our better natures as individuals and as a society. And, musically, it charted a new course that he would follow for the rest of his career.

 

Springsteen's first three albums, "Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J." (1973), "The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle" (1973) and "Born to Run" (1975), were big, tumultuous blends of eclectic rock/jazz/soul orchestrations, cascading boardwalk poetry and technicolor turnpike psychodrama. These records owed a debt to '60s radio, Bob Dylan and Martin Scorsese's operatic vision of Italian-American manhood, "Mean Streets." But "Darkness" was something else entirely, a break with the past so sharp and unsentimental it looked more like an escape.

 

Take the album cover, for a start. The scraggly-bearded scamp of the previous records was gone, replaced by an unsmiling, (relatively) clean-shaven Springsteen gazing straight into the camera, sleepy-eyed and defiant. Dressed like vintage Brando or James Dean in a white T shirt and black leather jacket, Springsteen is incongruously posed against faded-pink flowered wallpaper and graying Venetian blinds in an old house. On the front and back cover shots, photographer Frank Stefanko positions Springsteen in a nook right up against the blinds, so he seems too large for that small, stifling space. The message is clear: You can't go home again. And indeed, Springsteen had left home. "Darkness" followed a messy legal emancipation from manager and producer Mike Appel; it was the first album made solely with new producer/mentor Jon Landau, the former rock critic who had proclaimed him the "rock and roll future" a few years earlier.

 

The mood of the music inside the album sleeve matches those broody, yet vulnerable, photos. On his previous records, Springsteen surrounded himself with a gang of lovable losers: Hazy Davy, Killer Joe, Spanish Johnny, Crazy Janey, the Magic Rat. But his lyrics for "Darkness" contain no such cameraderie. His characters here are anonymous, intensely alone and isolated. "I live now, only with strangers/ I talk to only strangers/ I walk with angels that have no place," Springsteen sings on "Streets of Fire." Clarence Clemons' sax solos, the sound of warmth and kinship on previous albums, only appear on three of the 10 cuts on "Darkness." Springsteen's vocals are gruff and growly, the guitar solos savage and scalding. Danny Federici's dirty-blues organ riffs on "Prove it all Night" and "Adam Raised a Cain" hark back to the rumbling working-class anthems of the early Animals. The stately ballad "Factory" and the harmonica-driven "The Promised Land" reflect Springsteen's new (and lasting) interest in Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie and other country and folk musicians. Lean where "Born to Run" was grand, "Darkness" jump-starts the straight-ahead, roots-rock sound that would hit full throttle on Springsteen's fifth album, "The River" (1980), the studio release that best captures the spontaneity of the E Street Band in concert.

 

With "Darkness," Springsteen also unveiled a stunning new songwriting style, with language that was newly spare and stripped-down, but no less vivid or poetic for its terseness. The songs were no longer exclusively set on urban turf. "Lights out tonight/ Trouble in the heartland" goes the first line of the first song, "Badlands," and from the "rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert" of "The Promised Land" to the "dusty road from Monroe to Angeline" of "Prove it all Night," "Darkness" crosses the Jersey state line to embrace prairies and plains and a wider, all-encompassing version of America. As if we couldn't guess from the literary-looking typewriter font of the album cover and lyric sheet, Springsteen had set out not to make just a great rock album, but to write his version of the great American novel. And in many ways, he did.

 

In its vinyl incarnation, "Darkness" comprises 10 songs, five on each side, perfectly mirroring one another in theme and mood. "Darkness" is a looped tale; finish one side, turn it over, and you find different characters in exactly the same emotional, if not physical, place as their brethren on the opposite side. And that's the whole point: The struggle to realize our dreams, to break out of pinched, repressive or hopeless circumstances, is a universal one, repeated from generation to generation, relentless as the rain. Springsteen sings most of the songs in the guise of a restless Everyman, but the ferocious "Adam Raised a Cain" stands apart as a close-to-home confession. Steeped in Catholic guilt and alluding to both biblical Genesis and Steinbeck's "East of Eden," "Adam" is the first song Springsteen recorded that nakedly depicts his turbulent relationship with his father.

 

But, then, all of the characters on the album share a desire to escape the dead-end, dead-eyed "workin' life" of their fathers (so succinctly and chillingly articulated on "Factory"). These people long to be somewhere, and, often, someone, else. And while all the songs on "Darkness" take place after sundown, this is not the sensual, liberating summer night of "Born to Run," but, rather, a darkness ambiguous and impenetrable, in which the characters drive around and around "chasing some mirage." But for all its car and road imagery, "Darkness" is really about the illusion of movement. Few of these characters truly get anywhere, except in their dreams.

 

The ones that do make it are haunted by the cost - betrayals, severed ties, disappointment - of pursuing their desires and ambitions, for "wanting things that can only be found/ In the darkness on the edge of town." On the heartbreaking "Racing in the Street," the narrator - possibly the kid from "Thunder Road," who lured Mary off her front porch and into his front seat, crowing "it's a town full of losers / And I'm pullin' out of here to win" - has failed the girl he loves. He promised her a better life, but they've ended up back where they started, "on the porch of her Daddy's house." The girl's "pretty dreams are torn"; the guy races cars to keep from "dying little by little, piece by piece" - to keep moving, even if he knows he's just spinning his wheels. And yet, the song ends with the possibility of redemption and escape: "Tonight my baby and me, we're gonna ride to the sea/ And wash these sins off our hands."

 

Battered, tenacious faith in the promise of a better life - that's the glimmer of light at the heart of "Darkness," and it shines brightest on each side's opening tracks, "Badlands" and "The Promised Land." Indeed, these two songs are the foundation of the populist spirit that has become an integral part of Springsteen's music. Against a churning beat, the narrator of "Badlands" is "caught in a crossfire" of emotions and impulses. He wants to get out of this nowhere life, take control of his future, but he wonders if it's possible to realize his heart's desire without losing his soul. Is it preordained that to succeed in America, you have to succumb to selfishness and cynicism and adhere to the social and economic facts of life that dictate, "Poor man wanna be rich/ Rich man wanna be king/ And a king ain't satisfied/ Till he rules everything"? The narrator considers going over to the dark side, but his heart isn't in it; the pull of youthful idealism and innocence remain too strong. He keeps coming back to these two words: "I believe." In the emotional crescendo of the song, Springsteen sings, "I believe in the love that you gave me/ I believe in the faith that can save me/ I believe in the hope/ And I pray, that someday it may raise me/ Above these badlands."

 

The assertion "I believe" recurs in "The Promised Land." The scenario is similar to "Badlands" - the young narrator works in his "daddy's garage" by day and drives around aimlessly by night. He feels weak and trapped and longs for a purifying "twister to blow everything down/ That ain't got the faith to stand its ground." But, he hasn't yet given up hope in what might wait shimmering for him in the wreckage: "Mister, I ain't a boy, no, I'm a man/ And I believe in a promised land."

 

That use of "Mister" in "Promised Land," as if the story is being told to an observer just out of our view, brought a documentary dimension to Springsteen's songwriting; he would pursue the "Mister" (or "Sir") structure further in the sparse and spooky modern folk music of his 1982 solo masterpiece, "Nebraska." But, in hindsight, "The Promised Land" may well have been Springsteen's first true folk song. Like Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," "The Promised Land" is a subversive - a people's - national anthem. It suggests the breadth and natural majesty of the land (that "dark cloud rising from the desert floor" is one of the most hauntingly visual images in all of Springsteen's songwriting) and the resilience of working-class optimism. But it's shadowed with the dark side of the American Dream - the socioeconomic inequalities, the "lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted." In "The Promised Land," we can find the seeds of two bittersweet latter-day Springsteen folk songs, "Land of Hope and Dreams," a passionate invocation of an America more generous and inclusive than the one we're living in, and "American Land," a rambunctious Irish-flavored salute to - and defense of - the immigrants who have followed their dreams to our supposed land of opportunity.

 

The question is, after eight years of the Bush Administration, after Iraq, torture, wiretaps, the erosion of the Constitution, the loss of moral standing in the eyes of the world, the disappearance of the middle class and the scapegoating of immigrants, legal and illegal, is it still possible to believe in America as the promised land? Springsteen thinks so, if his April 16 endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama for President is any indication. Springsteen wrote of Obama, "He speaks to the America I've envisioned in my music for the past 35 years, a generous nation with a citizenry willing to tackle nuanced and complex problems, a country that's interested in its collective destiny and in the potential of its gathered spirit."

 

But even if Springsteen had not written those words, his faith in the "gathered spirit" would have been evident from the pivotal set list positions he gave "The Promised Land" and "Badlands" on the 2007-08 legs of the E Street Band's "Magic" tour. "Magic" is an autumnal record, with references to ill winds and gray skies and a pervasive sense of identities, personal and national, breaking down. The deceptively upbeat "Livin' in the Future" is a litany of all the things that have fallen apart during the Bush years: "The earth it gave away/ The sea rose toward the sun . . . My ship Liberty sailed away

[Analogman]

Yes, it is a great album - but the sound, not so great. I put that disc in the mail today.

[blue_94_trooper]

Dime a Dozen is full and not allowing more users to register. Would anyone out there be interested in helpting me get a copy of this?

 

Just keep trying. Dime deletes inactive accounts refreshes their numbers about every 15 minutes.

[remphish1]

After a bit of sleuthing, this appears to be the only known time that "The Iceman" was ever played, and at a soundcheck at that. He dug really, really deep into the vaults for the D&D tour. I'm pretty sure he did "Zero & Blind Terry" at least once on that tour. The good news about the soundcheck for the below, it that it was taped, and several sources are listed at the end. That's a song I haven't thought about in a long while. I guess I'll give it a listen sometime soon. Good luck, Greg

 

 

17-May-2005 Philadelphia,PA Tower Theatre,USA

 

Soundcheck included: Iceman (solo piano) / Open all night (electric guitar) / Ramrod

 

01 My beautiful reward (on pump organ)

02 Reason to believe

03 Devils and dust

04 Youngstown

05 Empty sky

06 Black cowboys

07 Iceman (solo piano)

08 Incident on 57th street (solo piano)

09 Part man part monkey (electric guitar)

10 Maria's bed

11 Silver Palomino

12 Reno

13 Wreck on the Highway (electric piano)

14 Real World (solo piano)

15 The rising

16 Further on (up the road)

17 Jesus was an only son (solo piano)

18 Leah

19 The Hitter

20 Matamoros banks

21 Ramrod

22 Land of hope and dreams

23 The promised land

24 Dream baby dream (on pump organ)

 

Songs from this show can be found on:

DREAM MILANO DREAM (Godfatherecords)

STOCKHOLM DUST NIGHT (Crystal Cat)

PHILADELPHIA,PA,TOWER THEATRE, 17-MAY-05

 

 

I attended this show! It was sweeeeet!

[JerseyMike]

Bruce is one of a kind. Love or hate him, he gives

his all at every show.

 

Bruce is a great guy. I played a Springsteen tribute show in Asbury Park last year on his birthday. Bruce showed up and took a bunch of us down the street for a round of beers to watch the Yankees when the show was over. Totally down to earth, if not a little buzzed!

[Analogman]

Springsteen Giants Stadium Gig A Family Affair

 

July 29, 2008 , 4:05 PM ET

Ben French, N.Y.

 

Playing the second in a three-show homestand last night (July 28) at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band delivered a three-plus hour set of almost exclusively up-tempo material, including a number of rarely heard songs.

 

Throughout the gig, the band proved it is still more than capable of stadium-filling rock'n'roll. From opener "Out in the Streets" to main set closer "Badlands," the E Streeters kept the audience on its feet and singing. Guitarist Nils Lofgren even pulled off a somersault in the middle of his solo on "Because the Night."

 

The encore in particular harkened back to the days of the massive "Born in the U.S.A." tour with songs like "Glory Days," "Twist and Shout" (featuring vocals by Jesse Malin and Marah's Dave Bielanko) and "Detroit Medley."

 

For the loyal audience, the band brought out some real surprises, including the little-known "Hungry Heart" B-side "Held Up Without A Gun." The song, performed on request by an audience member, has only been played two times previously in Springsteen's career. "Drive All Night" was another shocker, having not been played in the U.S. since the 1981 tour in support of "The River."

 

Given the locale, it's not surprising the show also included a number of cameos by extended E Street family members. Springsteen led the crowd in a "Happy Birthday" sing-a-long for his wife Patti Scialfa. Drummer Max Weinberg's son took over the kit on "Born To Run," while Springsteen danced with his daughter during "Girls in Their Summer Clothes."

 

Since the death of keyboardist Danny Federici in March, Springsteen has been playing a host of songs from early albums in tribute to him. On Monday, it was "It's Hard To Be a Saint in the City," which was botched initially but recovered thanks to blistering solos by Springsteen and Little Steven Van Zandt. The night before, it was "Spirit in the Night."

 

Springsteen's Giant Stadium run concludes Thursday. He and the E Street Band are on tour in North America through an Aug. 30 set at the Harley-Davidson 105th anniversary bash in Milwaukee.

[Party @ the Moontower]

We have Bruce tickets for Kansas City August 24th!

 

I've only seen him live once @ the Vote For Change John Kerry benefit in MN with R.E.M.,Neil Young, and Fogerty.