Commercially, the 1980s were kind to Bruce Springsteen. He’d began the decade with both a sprawling two-LP set The River, and his first big swing for a hit single. The record peaked at number and “Hungry Heart” at five one on the Billboard charts in late 1980; it was only a harbinger of things to come for Springsteen’s decade-long dominance of the charts, but also a sign he’d finally come into his own after a tumultuous 1970s.
Indeed, by 1986, Springsteen had gone from a cult figure to one of the biggest names in American music.
Two records had hit number one, another three had hit the top five. There was a string of hit singles, including the ubiquitous “Born in the USA.” And there were the live sets, sprawling, three-hour concerts. He’d gone from playing clubs and smaller venues like the Roxy in LA, Bottom Line in New York or Cleveland’s Agora to selling out basketball arenas and finally football stadiums, like the 75,000-plus seat Giants Stadium in New Jersey.
At the same time, in 1986 there wasn’t anything resembling a definitive Springsteen collection. The closest thing to a best-of was a promo LP issued around The River in 1980. And there wasn’t a live record, either, despite his steady success as a live act. Both had been discussed at various points, but ultimately passed on. That fall, he released a box set that covered both of these bases: Live 1975-85. At once it’s both an extensive sampling of highlights from a creative peak and the definitive document of his live act.
There were drawbacks, like the bootleg LP market. Even a casual glance through Springsteen bootlegs shows how many of his shows were broadcast by FM stations and subsequently bootlegged. There’s a 1973 show from Roslyn, NY, a show from Winterland in 1978 and an infamous 1975 show from The Main Point, a tiny club outside Philadelphia where he premiered many of Born to Run‘s songs. Hell, the first episode of The King Biscuit Flower Hour – a long running syndicated radio show of live music – featured parts of another 1973 show.
It’s said these shows literally helped build Springsteen’s audience.
For example, during a run of shows in 1975 at New York’s Bottom Line nightclub, he went from playing for small crowds to people lined up around the block after a single live-to-air concert. We’re not talking weeks or months after the broadcast, either, but the very next day or two.
At the same time, all these radio shows also meant there was an abundance of Springsteen bootleg records. The first of them came out sometime in 1975 and before long there were dozens of them, all of varying sound quality and interest. Some of them had jarring cuts and degraded sound quality; others were as close as you could get to hearing him over the radio. But these also reflect Springsteen’s rising popularity: if he was still just a cultish New Jersey act, why were bootleggers trying to make a buck off his music? Obviously, there was a demand.
As his profile rose and rose, demand for live material kept rising and rising. At several points throughout the 70s, he rejected the idea. Perhaps the scope of the average Springsteen concert – about three hours by the early 80s – made it unsuitable for records. There was about 20 minutes on each side of a record; often songs like “Kitty’s Back” or “The E Street Shuffle” stretched out to that length alone. You could get away with a side-long song if you were the Grateful Dead or Miles Davis, but for a guy whose studio records kept songs to about three or four minutes, it wasn’t going to work.
Maybe it’s because he was so prolific: The River had so many songs, it was expanded to a double LP and still hit the top of the charts. The demos for Nebraska were so good they became the actual album. There were dozens of songs from Darkness on the Edge of Town left off the record and they became a double album in 2009: The Promise.
And as those records rose up the charts, Springsteen played a lot of live shows, with gigs in cities like Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere being professionally recorded.
It was on one of these hits that Springsteen and his manager Jon Landau got the idea for a live record. They were considering using a live version of “War” as the b-side of a single, but felt it was good enough to be a single of it’s own. Landau put together a tape of a few recent live performances and suggested maybe something was there. Springsteen thought about it and worked with a producer and Landau for a few weeks in early 1986.
Rather than take a single complete show and present it end-to-end, Springsteen and Landau’s approach was to show the scope of his career. It wasn’t an original idea – artists like Todd Rundgren and Peter Frampton had done live albums that doubled as best-of collections – but the scope of this was almost unprecedented. The set would contain 40 songs, going all the way back to a 1975 show in Los Angeles. It wasn’t a single LP, but a boxed set of five records (or three CDs/cassettes). It was audacious and the kind of album that typically sold to hardcore fans or collectors.
Instead, Live/1975-85 debuted at number one on the Billboard chart. There were reports of people lined up to buy the record. Allegedly, one store sold it off of a truck. Rock group NRBQ took a cheeky photo of themselves lined up to buy the set and Berke Breathed parodied the cover in his comic Bloom County.
Springsteen’s steady rise to success wasn’t a clear and easy path in the late 70s.
Even the breakthrough success of Born to Run caused problems: working with Landau caused friction with his then-manager Mike Appel and a lawsuit kept him out of the recording studio. In the three-year gap between Born and Darkness, his constant touring schedule kept money flowing in and the accompanying live-to-air concerts kept his music on the radio. But it wasn’t always songs fan were familiar with: he gave several songs away to artists as diverse as Patti Smith and the Pointer Sisters. Others weren’t released at all.
Years later, fans would estimate there were something close to four times more unreleased material than there was officially released.
And over the years, he’s repeatedly mined the archives: the four-CD box set Tracks was almost entirely unreleased and deluxe reissues of Darkness and The River had hours of unreleased music.
In 1986, however, Springsteen made his first dip into this archive with Live 1975-85. It wasn’t simply just a greatest hits live collection. Instead it had a little of everything: classic E Street Band songs, anthemic singles from Born in the USA and several songs he never got around to releasing. The most interesting aspect of this release is how strong all the songs are: there’s hardly a dud in the bunch, even among the unreleased songs.
Live 1975-85 opens with “Thunder Road,” a performance in the small Roxy nightclub in LA and closes with a cover of Tom Waits’ “Jersey Girl,” recorded live at a hockey arena in Long Island. In between you can follow him as he graduates from playing clubs to arenas to stadiums. It’s loosely structured like a show, with raging versions of “Born to Run” and “10th Avenue Freezeout” as the set’s climax, but throughout the three discs, the band’s on fire. Really, you’d think more than half of the set is the most energetic part of a set.
Indeed, the band slashes and crashes their way through Springsteen’s material.
A highlight comes halfway through Live 1975-85’s second disc, when they kick into “Badlands” like they’re on a mission. Max Weinberg’s pounding drumming pushes the music along while Springsteen shouts and the band plays at full tilt (makes you wonder if the full show from November 1980 is so powerful). It then cuts to “Because the Night,” recorded months later at a show in New, Jersey and a version of “Candy’s Room,” half a year after that. It’s a remarkable three-song segue: the guitar solos sizzle and the songs pack an emotional punch the Darkness versions only hint at.
That said, the show isn’t all full-tilt E Street Band material. There’s a short, nearly-acoustic segment – a cover of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” plus a couple Nebraska songs – which is a nice change of pace in the middle.
Still, the most interesting aspect of Live 1975-85, and something which makes Springsteen’s live shows compelling in a way most musician’s shows aren’t – are his little monologues between songs. For example, before “The River,” he tells a story about how his dad always said the Army would “make a man out of you,” but Springsteen was rejected by the draft board. He continues a look back at Vietnam on an introduction to a cover of Edwin Starr’s “War.” “In 1985,” he says, “blind faith in your leaders, or in anything, will get you killed.” It almost makes you wish there was more talking on a album already stuffed with lots and lots of playing.
In the years after this, Springsteen would often revisit and dip into his vault.
1998’s Tracks was a four-CD box of b-sides, demos and outtakes, all of which hold their own against his official releases. Albums like Greatest Hits or The Promise contained new, previously-unheard material and deluxe versions of Darkness and The River contained lots and lots of extras. There’s also been something of a live archive, with several shows available for release on his website.
Still, Live 1975-85 remains a high water mark, not just as an overview of where he’d been but of what he was capable of. Like an ideal best-of, it showed off his potential and made all his albums (or, in this context, his live shows) sound appealing, while focusing on material most people are familiar with. But by showing so much music, it also serves as a sampler of an ideal concert: all killer, no flubbed notes or lackluster performances. For a guy who’s made a reputation as a phenomenal live act, it delivers in a way only a handful of live records do.
This year, Springsteen’s on a reissue kick.
He’s touring a reissue of an old record, there’s a new compilation and a resequenced version of his Essential album. There are a handful of compilations and a thumb-drive’s worth of live albums. But this is the one you need if you want to understand not only why his live shows are spoken of so fondly by fans, but if you’re curious what the whole Springsteen thing’s about.