Live 1975–85
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''Live/1975–85'' is a
live album An album is a collection of audio recordings (e.g., music) issued on a medium such as compact disc (CD), vinyl (record), audio tape (like 8-track or cassette), or digital. Albums of recorded sound were developed in the early 20th centur ...
by
Bruce Springsteen Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen (born September 23, 1949) is an American Rock music, rock singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Nicknamed "the Boss", Springsteen has released 21 studio albums spanning six decades; most of his albums feature th ...
and the E Street Band, consisting of 40 tracks recorded at various concerts between 1975 and 1985, and released as a
box set A boxed set or (its US name) box set is a set of items (for example, a compilation of books, musical recordings, films or television programs) traditionally packaged in a box, hence 'boxed', and offered for sale as a single unit. Music Artists ...
by
Columbia Records Columbia Records is an American reco ...
on November 10, 1986. It broke the record for advance orders, and, according to
RIAA The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a trade organization that represents the music recording industry in the United States. Its members consist of record labels and distributors that the RIAA says "create, manufacture, and/o ...
certification, is the second-best-selling live album in the US. ''
Rolling Stone ''Rolling Stone'' is an American monthly magazine that focuses on music, politics, and popular culture. It was founded in San Francisco, California, in 1967 by Jann Wenner and the music critic Ralph J. Gleason. The magazine was first known fo ...
'' hailed it as "an embarrassment of riches", while ''
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'' said it was "an unprecedented event in popular recording" and "monumental".


Background

Springsteen writes in the liner notes, "
Jon Landau Jon Landau (born May 14, 1947) is an American music critic, manager, and record producer. He has worked with Bruce Springsteen. He is the head of the nominating committee for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and received that institution's Ahme ...
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."


Release and performance

The album debuted at the top of the ''
Billboard A billboard (also called a hoarding in the UK and many other parts of the world) is a large outdoor advertising structure (a billing board), typically found in high-traffic areas such as alongside busy roads. Billboards present large advertis ...
'' album chart, a then-rare occurrence that hadn't happened since
Stevie Wonder Stevland Hardaway Morris (; Judkins; born May 13, 1950), known professionally as Stevie Wonder, is an American and Ghanaian singer-songwriter, musician, and record producer. He is regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the 20th c ...
's '' Songs in the Key of Life'' in 1976. ''Live 1975-85'' also became the first five-record set to reach the Top 10, and the first to sell over a million copies. It was released as a box set of five vinyl records, three cassettes or three CDs. There was also an exclusive record club release of three 8-track cartridges. Being both long-awaited and highly anticipated, the album generated advance orders of more than 1.5 million copies, making it the largest dollar-value pre-order at the time. Despite some record stores opening early, they were still confronted with lines of fans. "We're selling them as fast as we can get them out of the box," said Don Bergentry, a New York retailer, adding, "This is the biggest thing I have ever seen in records." ''Live/1975–85'' is the second-best-selling live album in US history based on
RIAA The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a trade organization that represents the music recording industry in the United States. Its members consist of record labels and distributors that the RIAA says "create, manufacture, and/o ...
certification, which puts it at 13×
platinum Platinum is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol Pt and atomic number 78. It is a density, dense, malleable, ductility, ductile, highly unreactive, precious metal, precious, silverish-white transition metal. Its name origina ...
, trailing only
Garth Brooks Troyal Garth Brooks (born February 7, 1962) is an American Country music, country singer and songwriter. His integration of pop and rock elements into the country genre has earned him his immense popularity, particularly in the United States, ...
' '' Double Live''. The box set's sales performance attracted considerable media attention at the time, immediately for setting records during the 1986 holiday shopping period, and subsequently for the sharp drop-off in sales in early 1987, leaving many retailers overstocked. Two singles were released: " War" (a cover of the 1970 Edwin Starr hit), which reached No. 8 on the U.S. pop singles chart, and "
Fire Fire is the rapid oxidation of a fuel in the exothermic chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction Product (chemistry), products. Flames, the most visible portion of the fire, are produced in the combustion re ...
" (a Springsteen song that was a top 10 hit for
The Pointer Sisters The Pointer Sisters are an American female vocal group from Oakland, California, who achieved mainstream success during the 1970s and 1980s. They have had a repertoire with many genres, they have sold around 50 million records throughout their ...
in 1979), which only reached No. 46, breaking Springsteen's string of eight consecutive Top 10 singles. Two non-album tracks — " Incident on 57th Street", recorded at Nassau Coliseum in December 1980, and " For You", taken from the July 1978 Roxy show — materialized on B-sides from the album's singles, and on a Japanese release, ''Live Collection''. The music video for "War" was taken from the concert where it was recorded, while the video for "Fire" was from a completely unrelated 1986 acoustic performance at a Bridge School Benefit concert. A third video, for " Born to Run", was also released, which showed a melange of clips from the band's 1984–85 Born in the U.S.A. Tour.


Critical reception

Most reviews were overwhelmingly positive. ''The New York Times'' found it to be the "equivalent of an epic American novel, its story told in the ungrammatical, rough-hewn vocabulary of rock", possessing an "historical resonance that goes beyond pop culture". ''Rolling Stone'' said it was "an extraordinary demonstration of how Springsteen’s telepathic command of a concert audience has increased in direct proportion to the size of his stage." It lauded Springsteen's "raw power, lyric honesty and spiritual determination". However, the magazine was not alone in highlighting the omission of several concert highlights, including " Prove It All Night" and Springsteen's rousing cover of John Fogerty's " Who'll Stop the Rain". Nor was it the only one to note that some superior unreleased songs, such as "The Fever", were ignored in favor of recent album tracks like "Darlington County".Barton, David. "It's Not That Good" ''Sacramento Bee'' December 7, 1986: EN1


Track listing


Vinyl

Notes * – Mistitled as "4th of July, Ashbury Park" on some CD box sets. * – Song never released by Springsteen before; the version on this release omits Bruce saying "All you bootleggers out there in radioland, roll your tapes" right before the song. * – The short spoken intro is from July 7, 1978, at the Roxy Theatre, West Hollywood, California * – This version edits out a long interpolation near the end which includes an early version of "Drive All Night" * – Mistitled as "Caddillac Ranch" on the CD box set * – Performed night after the election of Ronald Reagan to the United States presidency. * – Song never released by Springsteen before, although recorded by others most notably by Patti Smith and, later, 10,000 Maniacs * – The date in the liner notes is incorrect; the performance actually dates from the following night, December 29. * – This performance previously released as the music video for "My Hometown" single * – This performance was released in 1984 as the
B-side The A-side and B-side are the two sides of phonograph record, vinyl records and Compact cassette, cassettes, and the terms have often been printed on the labels of two-sided music recordings. The A-side of a Single (music), single usually ...
of the "Cover Me" single. The song was written by
Tom Waits Thomas Alan Waits (born December 7, 1949) is an American musician, composer, songwriter, and actor. His lyrics often focus on society's underworld and are delivered in his trademark deep, gravelly voice. He began in the American folk music, fo ...
and originally released on his '' Heartattack and Vine'' album.


Personnel

*
Bruce Springsteen Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen (born September 23, 1949) is an American Rock music, rock singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Nicknamed "the Boss", Springsteen has released 21 studio albums spanning six decades; most of his albums feature th ...
– vocals, electric guitar, harmonica, acoustic guitar on "No Surrender" The E Street Band * Roy Bittan – piano,
synthesizer A synthesizer (also synthesiser or synth) is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals. Synthesizers typically create sounds by generating waveforms through methods including subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis a ...
, backing vocals * Clarence Clemons – saxophone, percussion, backing vocals * Danny Federici – organ,
accordion Accordions (from 19th-century German language, German ', from '—"musical chord, concord of sounds") are a family of box-shaped musical instruments of the bellows-driven free reed aerophone type (producing sound as air flows past a Reed (mou ...
,
glockenspiel The glockenspiel ( ; or , : bells and : play) or bells is a percussion instrument consisting of pitched aluminum or steel bars arranged in a Musical keyboard, keyboard layout. This makes the glockenspiel a type of metallophone, similar to the v ...
, piano, synthesizer on "My Hometown", backing vocals * Nils Lofgren (beginning in 1984) – electric and acoustic guitars, backing vocals * Patti Scialfa (beginning in 1984) – backing vocals, synthesizer on "Born in the U.S.A." * Garry Tallent – bass guitar, backing vocals * Steve Van Zandt (through 1981) – electric guitar, acoustic guitar, backing vocals *
Max Weinberg Max Weinberg (born April 13, 1951) is an American drummer and television personality, most widely known as the longtime drummer for Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band and as the bandleader for Conan O'Brien on ''Late Night with Conan O'Brien'' an ...
– drums Guest musicians * Flo and Eddie ( Howard Kaylan and
Mark Volman Mark Randall Volman (born April 19, 1947) is an American vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter, best known as a founding member of the 1960s rock band The Turtles, and, along with his bandmate and friend Howard Kaylan, a member of the 1970s rock ...
) – backing vocals on "Hungry Heart" * The Miami Hornshorns on "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" ** Stan Harrison – tenor saxophone ** Eddie Manion – baritone saxophone **
Mark Pender Mark "The Loveman" Pender (born August 21, 1957, in Kansas City, Missouri) is a trumpet player and vocalist who has played with Southside Johnny, Little Steven and Bruce Springsteen. Since 1993 he has performed on '' Late Night with Conan O' ...
– trumpet ** Richie "La Bamba" Rosenberg – trombone Technical * Bruce Jackson – live
sound engineer An audio engineer (also known as a sound engineer or recording engineer) helps to produce a sound recording, recording or a Concert, live performance, balancing and adjusting sound sources using equalization (audio), equalization, Dynamic range ...
* Toby Scott
engineer Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who Invention, invent, design, build, maintain and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials. They aim to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while ...
, recording engineer *
Jimmy Iovine James Iovine ( ; born March 11, 1953) is an American entrepreneur, former Music executive, record executive, and media proprietor. He is the co-founder of Interscope Records and became chairman and CEO of Interscope Geffen A&M Records, Interscop ...
- recording engineer * Bob Clearmountain - mixing


Charts


Certifications


See also

*
List of best-selling albums in the United States The following is a list of the best-selling albums in the United States based on RIAA certification and Nielsen SoundScan sales tracking. The criteria are that the album must have been published (including self-publishing by the artist), and the ...


References


External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Live 1975-85 Bruce Springsteen live albums 1986 live albums Albums produced by Jon Landau Albums produced by Chuck Plotkin 1986 compilation albums Bruce Springsteen compilation albums Columbia Records compilation albums Columbia Records live albums Albums with cover art by Jimmy Wachtel