A “new” live album for Bruce Springsteen

It is now a small tradition for Springsteen fans, which has been going on for over 10 years: a new “official bootleg” is released around Christmas, the recording of a historic and unreleased concert. This year was no exception, if not in part: on December 24th a concert recorded on December 31st 1975 in Upper Darby, a suburb of Philadelphia, was published on Nugs.net – the streaming platform dedicated to live music used by several rock artists. This is not an unreleased show, in reality: it had already been published at the beginning of the “bootleg series” – but the audio has been completely remixed and remastered.

This is a concert held during the “Born to run” tour, released a few months earlier – therefore recorded 50 years ago. And it contains much more than one thing of interest: covers (“It’s my life” by Eric Burdon’s Animals, “Pretty Flamingo” by Manfred Mann, “Mountain of love” by Harold Dorman) and different and slowed down versions of the newly released songs: “Thunder road” and “Tenth avenue freeze out”, which you can listen to below.

In November 2014, Bruce Springsteen opened his live archives, formalizing the practice of collecting concert “nootlegs” following the example of artists like Pearl Jam. Over 100 classic shows have been released in 10 years, “Expanding the canon of Springsteen live recordings into territory that was once exclusive to the Grateful Dead,” archivist Erik Flanagan writes in the notes. “Frustratingly for everyone, some gaps still remain, due to technical limitations (#freetherisingtour) and the availability of tapes. But the Archive series is open: new sources and advances in reproduction technologies are always possible”, he continues – with reference to the concerts of the “The rising” tour, recorded in a particular format that cannot be transformed into “normal” audio. Here, 5 years ago, we made a selection of the best.