Happy 35th Anniversary to Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band’s Live 1975-85, originally released November 10, 1986.
Bruce Springsteen is making an accusation. The band is silent, after being cut off during “Raise Your Hands,” and Springsteen, admittedly doing a little bit of a James Brown impression, is berating the people in the back of the auditorium who are not standing up. “Do you think this is a free ride?” he shouts. “Do you think this is a free ride? If you want to play, you got to PAY!”
What would payment involve, exactly? Bruce has the answer: “You have to raise your hands!” The band comes back in, perfectly in time. The point is clear: if you’re going to make it through this album, or any of the longform miracles that a regular Bruce Springsteen concert turns into over the course of three-and-a-half hours, you’ve got to put in the work. You’ve got to raise your hands.
There is a lot of joy on Live 1975-85, which documents ten years of live performances from the peak of Springsteen’s career. The E Street Band, after all, is one of the most fun outfits in the history of rock & roll, delighting audiences all around the world for decades. Iconic Springsteen jams like “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” and more unsung heroes (like “Paradise by the C”) make you groove just like you would if you were in one of those arenas where the E Street Band plays.
The energy on this album isn’t just a result of that natural live show vibrancy. The small deviations that the band makes from the studio versions brings these songs a new level of panache. “Spirit in the Night,” for example, is faster on the live album compared to the studio version and crashes into the outro with a big pair of triplets that make time stand still—the comparative version on Greetings from Asbury Park (1973) is much more subdued and lets the end of the song almost deteriorate. These changes, common on Live 1975-85, offers listeners a clear vision of how the band’s finesse brings up the excitement level to meet the energy of the audience and the spiritual demands of the material.
As fun as the album is, its beating heart is a stretch from sides five through seven, running from the Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) keystone “Racing in the Street” through an eleven-minute reading of “The River” that is preceded by a long, somber story about Springsteen’s friends and bandmates getting drafted and sent to a place they couldn’t find on a map. From “Racing” onwards, the tone is dark and either slow (like on most of side six, which features cuts from 1982’s Nebraska) or menacing (in the case of side seven, taken up by “Born in the USA” and a scorching reading of “Seeds”).
The most remarkable moment of that entire stretch comes at the very end of the Vietnam story, when Springsteen resolves the tension with the harmonica intro to “The River.” Suddenly, all of the darkness from the Nebraska tracks and the anger from the rest of the seventh side coalesce into one affirming chord that tells you why you’re here. You gather with an arena full of people, all damaged in some way, to listen to this music and heal.
What’s perhaps most amazing about this moment, of course, is that the many cuts that precede “The River” and that are resolved by the harmonica weren’t actually played on the same night. Live 1975-85 is basically a live greatest hits album, cobbled together from a decade’s worth of tapes. But this is a testament to how Springsteen has run his shows throughout his entire career, up until the present day. There is always one of these moments. They speak to each other across the years.
This sense of togetherness works because the album so fully replicates the feeling of being in the arena. While we can obviously feel this as the audience claps during the breakdown in “Badlands” and sings the first verse of “Hungry Heart,” it actually comes out most in one of the record’s most spontaneous moments: Springsteen tells a long, rambling story during “Growin’ Up” about how he felt like an outcast growing up. His father wanted him to be a lawyer, and his mother wanted him to be an author. But Springsteen wanted neither—he wanted rock & roll. Upon those words, the crowd screams in a surprised expression of joy. The band hits one big chord, acknowledging the power of everyone being together in that moment. Listening to the album alone in my apartment, I feel part of the story.
But it’s not a free ride. Springsteen is an interesting performer because he requires a certain amount of belief for any of it to work. Without this belief, it’s just going to be another harmonica note, or another loud chord. This is what Live 1975-85 does: even when you’re not in the arena, you can still feel that way if you really put the effort in. Even if you’re listening at home, you’ve got to raise your hands.
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