Columbia 40558
Producers: Bruce Springsteen, Jon Landau, and Chuck Plotkin
Track listing: Thunder Road / Adam Raised a Cain / Spirit in the Night / 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) / Paradise by the “C” / Fire / Growin’ Up/ It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City / Backstreets / Rosalita (Come Out Tonight) / Raise Your Hand / Hungry Heart / Two Hearts / Cadillac Ranch / You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch) / Independence Day / Badlands / Because the Night / Candy’s Room / Darkness on the Edge of Town / Racing in the Street / This Land Is Your Land / Nebraska / Johnny 99 / Reason to Believe / Born in the U.S.A. / Seeds / The River / War / Darlington County / Working on the Highway / The Promised Land / Cover Me / I’m on Fire / Bobby Jean / My Hometown / Born to Run / No Surrender / Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out / Jersey Girl
November 29, 1986
7 weeks
From the onset of his career, Bruce Springsteen was known for his marathon live performances. As his career progressed, the concerts would often stretch to four or five hours long. With Springsteen’s popularity reaching new heights following the massive success of Born in the U.S.A., a live album seemed like a natural. Yet for Springsteen and the E Street Band, a single- or double-disc set simply wouldn’t do. To truly capture the essence of a Springsteen concert and provide an adequate sampling of his impressive body of work, it was decided that Springsteen’s live album would be a sprawling five-LP set.
The album began to take shape in November 1985, when Springsteen received a four-song cassette along with a note from his manager/co-producer Jon Landau. The tape contained live versions of the Springsteen originals “Born in the U.S.A.,” “Seeds,” and “The River,” and his interpretation of the Edwin Starr hit “War.” Landau’s note suggested the possibility of a live album.
After months of listening to tapes, 40 songs were chosen from concerts ranging from intimate club dates, such as 1975 and 1978 engagements at the Roxy in Hollywood, to stands at mammoth outdoor stadiums like Giants Stadium and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in 1985.
Aside from such obvious choices and early favorites as “Born to Run,” “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight),” and “Backstreets,” Live/1975-85 marked the first time that such Springsteen- penned hits as “Fire” (a number two hit or the Pointer Sisters in 1979) and “Because the Night” (a top 20 hit for co-writer Patti Smith in 1978) had appeared on a Springsteen album.
Springsteen also tipped his hat to some other artists, covering Eddie Floyd’s “Raise Your Hand,” Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” Tom Waits’s “Jersey Girl,” and “War.” E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg recalls performing the latter track on September 30, 1985, at the L.A. Coliseum: “Right before the show Bruce called us into his dressing room and he said he wanted to do ‘War.’ We all knew the tune, so we went out and rehearsed it very briefly because we had never played it before in concert.” Unbeknownst to the band, Springsteen had prepared a spoken prologue to the song. “He came back to me and said, ‘Just watch my hand.’ He went through this long, incredibly beautiful and touching monologue and he started to raise his hand. When he brought his hand down, everybody in the E Street Band hit that downbeat perfectly. It was awesome.”
The version of “Born to Run” on Live/1975-85 was taken from a 1985 show at Giants Stadium, rather than a ’70s club date, a decision that was fine with Weinberg. “Most everything we played with equal passion, but much more precision,” he says. “In the early days, we had a lot of energy and passion, but some of us didn’t have as much precision as we would have liked.”
Upon its release, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Live/1975-85 became Springsteen’s first album to debut at the top, as well as the first album to do so since Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life in 1976. It also became the first five-record set ever to hit Number One — the previous multi-disc album to hit the summit had been Springsteen’s The River.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of November 29, 1986
1. Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Live/1975-85, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band
2. Third Stage, Boston
3. Slippery When Wet, Bon Jovi
4. Fore!, Huey Lewis and the News
5. Dancing on the Ceiling, Lionel Richie