Watch Bruce Springsteen’s All-Time Greatest Performance from 40 Years Ago Today
Photo by Joe Sia/Wolfgang's
Bruce Springsteen took the stage at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey 40 years ago as a man on a mission to prove that he wasn’t a flash in the pan who was washed up at just 28. He delivered to the 3,200 fans in attendance not merely a great show but the concert that many consider the single-best performance of his career, one captured for posterity on a WNEW-FM simulcast broadcast throughout the East Coast and recorded with then state-of-the-art video technology at the venue itself.
“I’d just recently vanished for three years,” Springsteen wrote in his autobiography, Born to Run. A dispute with his manager had delayed the release of his follow up to the Born to Run album for nearly three years, an impossibly long time in the industry at the time. “[I] had barely felt visible most of my life, and if I could help it, I wasn’t going back.”
Richard Neer was simulcasting the show that night and realized from the start that something was different. “Usually Bruce would say something before the show for the simulcast in a joking way like he was a boxer ready to take the ring.” But there was no mock Muhammad Ali on this night.
“Bruce didn’t say anything that night,” remembers Neer, now a novelist with his latest book being the soon-to-be released, The American Storm. He was so amped up, “He just couldn’t wait to get out there. Bruce has done so many shows and many argue which one was the best one. But this one had a lot of energy. It meant a lot for him to be in New Jersey. It seems ridiculous now, but then he really had to prove he wasn’t a one-album guy.”
While many shows on this tour opened with a cover, Springsteen decided to begin this night with a version of “Badlands” delivered with such fiery passion that it’s hard to believe there was anywhere left to go for the remaining three-plus hours.
Springsteen shows are communal events. And the birth of that really began on this tour. His fans by then had absorbed his recordings to the point where they could participate in the show in some odd dichotomy of both choreography and spontaneity. The audience never really knew how far and exactly when Springsteen would let them venture into the show—or how far he literally would venture into the crowd. On this night, it was farther than ever before, according to Neer on the simulcast that night. And this was after Clarence Clemens took the saxophone solo into the crowd as well in “Spirt In The Night.”
Springsteen’s story telling, now honed to the point where he can carry a Broadway show not merely with his music but his words, is in fine form in “Thunder Road,” as well as his politics and his humanity. The power of the introduction moves the crowd to a spiritual connection rarely seen in rock and roll. Suddenly, he has more than 3,000 backup singers. There’s one big stage at a Springsteen concert, especially in that period, and the audience was on it. And that would become a defining characteristic of the Springsteen concert experience.
This tour featured for the first time the two-set Bruce concert experience. The show was broken up this way, Springsteen says, so he could give the audience the new material from the Darkness On The Edge Of Town album that he felt they needed to hear, along with the then more established music that they wanted to hear.