Live 1975–85

Live/1975–85
Live album by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
Released	November 10, 1986
Recorded	October 18, 1975 – September 30, 1985
Venue	The Roxy, West Hollywood Nassau Coliseum, Uniondale Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco Meadowlands Arena, East Rutherford Arizona State University, Tempe Giants Stadium, East Rutherford Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Exposition Park
Studio	(Additional recording) Right Track Recording, Manhattan The Hit Factory, New York City Record Plant, Los Angeles
Genre	Rock
Length	216:13
Label	Columbia
Producer	Jon Landau Chuck Plotkin Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band chronology
Born in the U.S.A. (1984) Live/1975–85 (1986) Tunnel of Love (1987)
Singles from Live/1975–1985
"War" Released: November 10, 1986 "Fire" Released: January 1, 1987

Live/1975–85 is a live album by Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band. It consists of 40 tracks recorded at various concerts between 1975 and 1985, released as a box set by Columbia Records on November 10, 1986.

In November of '85, Springsteen wrote in the liner notes, "Jon Landau 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."

It was released as a box set of five vinyl records, three cassettes, or three CDs. There was also a record club only release which came on three 8-track cartridges.^[1]

Release and reception[]

Springsteen's long-awaited and highly anticipated live album generated advance orders of more than 1.5 million copies, making it the largest dollar-volume pre-order in the history of the record business at the time.^[2] Record stores around the country found fans waiting in line on Monday morning before opening and one New York store reportedly sold the album right off the back of the delivery truck. The album debuted at #1 on the Billboard album chart, a then-rare occurrence that hadn't happened in ten years since Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life in 1976. It also became the first five-record set to reach the top 10 and the first to sell over a million copies.

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	link
Chicago Tribune	[3]
Rolling Stone	positive link
Tom Hull	B+ ()[4]
The Village Voice	A–[5]

Not surprising, given Springsteen's reputation as a live performer and the sheer scope of the 40-song set, most reviews were overwhelmingly positive. There were, however, a few critics that felt the album could have been better, citing the omission of several concert highlights such as Springsteen's live rendition of "Prove It All Night" and his rousing cover of John Fogerty's "Who'll Stop the Rain", among others. Another complaint was that some of his many unreleased songs such as "The Fever" were ignored in favor of recent album tracks like "Darlington County".^[6][7]

Live/1975–85 is the second-best-selling live album in U.S. history based on RIAA certification. It has been certified by the RIAA for 13x platinum, trailing only Garth Brooks' Double Live.^[8] This figure reflects the RIAA practice of counting each disc in a multi-disc set as a separate unit sold; the actual number of copies sold is instead over 4 million. Based on sets sold, Live/1975–85 also trails several others including Eric Clapton's Unplugged (10 million) and Peter Frampton's Frampton Comes Alive! (8 million). The box set's sales performance attracted considerable media attention at the time, first for setting records during the 1986 holiday shopping period, then later for fizzling out in sales in early 1987, leaving many retailers overstocked.^[9]

Two singles were released from the box set: "War" (a cover of the 1970 Edwin Starr hit), which was a #8 success on the U.S. pop singles chart, and "Fire" (a Springsteen song that was a top 10 hit for The Pointer Sisters in 1979), which only reached #46 on the Billboard charts, 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 titled 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.

Track listing[]

Vinyl[]

All tracks are written by Bruce Springsteen, except where noted.

Notes

• ^{^[a]} – Mistitled as "4th of July, Ashbury Park" on some CD box sets.
• ^{^[b]} – 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.
• ^{^[c]} – The short spoken intro is from July 7, 1978 at the Roxy Theatre, West Hollywood, California
• ^{^[d]} – This version edits out a long interpolation near the end which includes an early version of "Drive All Night"
• ^{^[e]} – Mistitled as "Caddillac Ranch" on the CD box set
• ^{^[f]} – Performed night after the election of Ronald Reagan to the United States presidency.
• ^{^[g]} – Song never released by Springsteen before, although recorded by others most notably by Patti Smith and, later, 10,000 Maniacs
• ^{^[h]} – The date in the liner notes is incorrect; the performance actually dates from the following night, December 29.
• ^{^[i]} – This performance previously released as the music video for "My Hometown" single
• ^{^[j]} – This performance was released in 1984 as the B-side of the "Cover Me" single. The song was written by Tom Waits and originally released on his Heartattack and Vine album.

CD[]

Disc 1

1. "Thunder Road" – 5:46
2. "Adam Raised a Cain" – 5:26
3. "Spirit in the Night" – 6:25
4. "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" – 6:34
5. "Paradise by the "C"" – 3:54
6. "Fire" – 2:51
7. "Growin' Up" – 7:58
8. "It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City" – 4:39
9. "Backstreets" – 7:35
10. "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" – 10:00
11. "Raise Your Hand" (Cropper/Floyd/Isbell) – 5:01
12. "Hungry Heart" – 4:30
13. "Two Hearts" – 3:06

Disc 2

1. "Cadillac Ranch" – 4:52
2. "You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)" – 3:58
3. "Independence Day" – 5:08
4. "Badlands" – 5:17
5. "Because the Night" (Springsteen/Smith) – 5:19
6. "Candy's Room" – 3:19
7. "Darkness on the Edge of Town" – 4:19
8. "Racing in the Street" – 8:12
9. "This Land Is Your Land" (Guthrie) – 4:21
10. "Nebraska" – 4:18
11. "Johnny 99" – 4:24
12. "Reason to Believe" – 5:19
13. "Born in the U.S.A." – 6:10
14. "Seeds" – 5:14

Disc 3

1. "The River" – 11:42
2. "War" (Strong/Whitfield) – 4:53
3. "Darlington County" – 5:12
4. "Working on the Highway" – 4:04
5. "The Promised Land" – 5:36
6. "Cover Me" – 6:57
7. "I'm on Fire" – 4:26
8. "Bobby Jean" – 4:30
9. "My Hometown" – 5:13
10. "Born to Run" – 5:03
11. "No Surrender" – 4:41
12. "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" – 4:21
13. "Jersey Girl" (Waits) – 6:30

Personnel[]

Charts[]

Certifications[]

See also[]

• List of best-selling albums in the United States

References[]