Bruce Springsteen live box set debuted at #1

Live 1975/1985 Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band

Released: November 10, 1986 Recorded: October 18, 1975 to September 30, 1985 Peak: 17 US, 4 UK, 17 CN, 3 AU Sales (in millions): 4.0 US, 0.1 UK, 12.3 world (includes US and UK) Genre: classic heartland rock

Tracks, Disc 1: Click on a song titled for more details. Thunder Road (recorded 10/18/75) 3 Adam Raised a Cain (recorded 7/7/78) 4 Spirit in the Night (recorded 7/7/78) 1 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) (recorded 12/31/80) 2 Paradise by the “C” (recorded 7/7/78) Fire (recorded 12/16/78) Growin’ Up (recorded 7/7/78) 1 It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City (recorded 7/7/78) 1 Backstreets (recorded 7/7/78) 3 Rosalita (Come Out Tonight) (recorded 7/7/78) 2 Raise Your Hand (recorded 7/7/78) Hungry Heart (recorded 12/28/80) 5 Two Hearts (recorded 7/8/81) 5 Tracks, Disc 2: Cadillac Ranch (recorded 7/6/81) 5 You Can Look But You Better Not Touch (recorded 12/29/80) 5 Independence Day (recorded 7/6/81) 5 Badlands (recorded 11/5/80) 4 Because the Night (recorded 12/28/80) Candy’s Room (recorded 7/8/81) 4 Darkness on the Edge of Town (recorded 12/29/80) 4 Racing in the Street (recorded 7/6/81) 4 This Land Is Your Land (recorded 12/28/80) Nebraska (recorded 8/6/84) 6 Johnny 99 (recorded 8/19/85) 6 Reason to Believe (recorded 8/19/84) 6 Born in the U.S.A. (recorded 9/30/85, released 6/23/84) 7 Seeds (recorded 9/30/85) Tracks, Disc 3: The River (recorded 9/30/85, released 6/13/81) 5 War (recorded 9/30/85) Darlington County (recorded 9/30/85) 7 Working on the Highway (recorded 8/19/85) 7 The Promised Land (recorded 9/30/85, released 10/78) 4 Cover Me (recorded 9/30/85, released 6/23/84) 7 I’m on Fire (recorded 8/19/85, released 2/16/85) 7 Bobby Jean (recorded 8/21/85, charted 6/23/84) 7 My Hometown (recorded 9/30/85) 7 Born to Run (recorded 8/19/85) 3 No Surrender (recorded 8/6/84) 7 Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out (recorded 8/20/84) 3 Jersey Girl (recorded 7/9/81) Footnotes above indicate the original studio album on which the song was released (if relevant). 1 Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ (1973) 2 The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle (1973) 3 Born to Run (1975) 4 Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) 5 The River (1980) 6 Nebraska (1982) 7 Born in the U.S.A. (1984) Total Running Time: 216:13 The Players: Bruce Springsteen (vocals, guitar, harmonica) Roy Bittan (piano, synthesizer, backing vocals) Clarence Clemons (saxophone, percussion, backing vocals) Danny Federici (organ, accordian, glockenspiel, piano, synthesizer, backing vocals) Nils Lofgren (guitar, backing vocals) Patti Scialfa (backing vocals, synthesizer) Garry Tallent (bass, backing vocals) Steve Van Zandt (guitar, backing vocals) Max Weinberg (drums)

Rating: 4.084 out of 5.00 (average of 17 ratings) Awards: (Click on award to learn more).

How to Follow a Blockbuster Following up a blockbuster album can be a tricky proposition. Fans want a sequel to the album they loved; critics demand new material that reflects an artist’s growth. The ‘80s are littered with classic albums with follow-ups that weren’t as well-received. Michael Jackson’s Thriller set him up for a lifetime of releases that were big sellers that were often well received, but they were simultaneously viewed as something less. Prince chose to soldier on as if Purple Rain hadn’t sold 25 million copies worldwide, releasing Around the World in a Day less than a year later. U2 didn’t seem to know what to do after The Joshua Tree, releasing the half-live, half-studio Rattle and Hum a year later. The Police flat out gave up after Synchronicity and never released another album. The Boss chose a different tactic. Why compete with your previous work? Instead, he chose to celebrate it – and capitalize on the very quality that made him a legendary performer. “Long before he sold substantial numbers of records, Bruce Springsteen began to earn a reputation as the best live act in rock & roll. Fans had been clamoring for a live album for a long time, and with Live/1975-85 they got what they wanted, at least in terms of bulk. His concerts were marathons, and this box set, including 40 tracks and running over three and a half hours, was about the average length of a show.” AM Another studio album would inevitably have suffered by comparison to Born in the U.S.A. Still, a triple-disc live box set (five records) seemed a risky career move that would test just how deep fans’ pockets were. The move paid off brilliantly. Well Received Anticipation was so high, the album generated over 1.5 million advance orders, the largest dollar-volume pre-order in record business history at that time. WK The album debuted at #1, a feat last seen a decade earlier with Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life. It was the first five-record set to reach the top 10 and the first to sell more than a million copies. WK The album was certified for sales of 12 million; U.S. sales were actually 4 million, but the RIAA multiplies that figure by the number of discs in the collection. The only live album certified for more was Garth Brooks’ Double Live at 13 times platinum. WK “In his brief liner notes, Springsteen spoke of the emergence of the album’s ‘story’ as he reviewed live tapes, and that story seems nothing less than a history of his life, his concerns, and his career. The first cuts present the Springsteen of the early to mid-‘70s; these performances, most of them drawn from a July 1978 show at the Roxy in Los Angeles, present the romantic, hopeful, earnest Springsteen.” AM What We Get “The second section begins with his first Top Ten hit, Hungry Heart – this is the Springsteen of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, an arena rock star with working-class concerns. After an acoustic mini set given largely to material from Nebraska – songs of economic desperation and crime – comes a reshuffling of Born in the U.S.A., songs in which the artist and his characters start to fight back and rock out.” AM Surprisingly, “Dancing in the Dark,” his #2 hit from that album and highest-charting song of his career, doesn’t make the cut. He does, of course, include his most iconic song, Born to Run, the “unofficial state anthem” AM of New Jersey. Reviews were “overwhelmingly positive,” WK but some critics cited the omission of concert highlights such as “Prove It All Night,” “The Fever,” and his cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain.” WK “Fans could rejoice in the seven previously unreleased songs,” AM which included a cover of Edwin Starr’s War and Fire, a song written by Springsteen and a top-ten hit for the Pointer Sisters in 1979. The Songs Here’s a breakdown of songs from the live box set that aren’t highlighted on another page.

Raise Your Hand Bruce Springsteen

Writer(s): Steve Cropper, Eddie Floyd Alvertis Isbell Recorded: 7/7/1978 at Roxy Theatre in West Hollywood, CA Released: Live 1975/1985 Charted: 12/10/1986 Peak: 44 AR, 30 DF Click for codes to charts. Cover of: Eddie Floyd (1967, #79 BB, 16 RB 42 UK, 74 CN) About the Song: Eddie Floyd first recorded this song in 1967 for his debut album, Knock on Wood. While it was a top-20 R&B hit, it otherwise went pretty much unnoticed. It became a live favorite for a variety of rock acts, though, including Janis Joplin, the J. Geils Band, Ike & Tina Turner, and, of course, Bruce Springsteen, who performed it for the first time back in 1976. ESS He often used the song as an encore or show closer. ESS “Even Bruce’s casual fans recognize Floyd’s importance as a musical influence–we’ve seen it evidenced in Bruce’s set lists over the years, from Floyd-penned staples like ‘634-5789’ on the Wrecking Ball Tour to memorable cameos like ‘Ninety-Nine and Half (Won’t Do)’ and ‘Knock on Wood’.” ESS A decent chunk of Live 1975/1985 was recorded at the Roxy Theatre in West Hollywood on July 7, 1978. In addition to “Raise Your Hand,” the box set includes live recordings from this date and venue for “Adam Raised a Cain,” “Spirit in the Night,” “Paradise by the ‘C’,” “Growin’ Up,” “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City,” “Backstreets,” and “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight).”

This Land Is Your Land Bruce Springsteen

Writer(s): Woody Guthrie Recorded: 12/28/1980 live at Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York Released: Live 1975/1985 About the Song: Woody Guthrie wrote “This Land Is Your Land” in 1939 as a reaction to the “saccharinely patriotic song” ESS “God Bless America.” “It irked Guthrie to hear Berlin’s blindly syrupy song coming out of every radio a full decade into the Great Depression while all around him were migrants and homeless struggling to find work and survive.” ESS Guthrie used “This Land” to point “out where America was falling short and failing its citizens.” ESS However, “the version most of us are familiar with is the sanitized one he released in 1951,” ESS “minus its more progressive lyrics.” ESS “Even though the versions in print and on record excluded Guthrie’s sharpest lyrics, the folk music tradition kept them alive.” ESS Bruce Springsteen, for one, “always insisted on performing all the verses, starting with his first performance in 1980.” ESS He “was captivated with the beauty and poetry of Guthrie’s words, along with Guthrie’s ability to simultaneously hold his country accountable.” ESS

Seeds Bruce Springsteen

Writer(s): Bruce Springsteen Recorded: 9/30/1985 live at the Los Angeles Coliseum Released: Live 1975/1985 About the Song: This is “an original Springsteen song that Bruce has played live almost two hundred times, and yet it’s never seen an official studio release.” ESS It’s been done “in so many different arrangements…[one] can’t help but wonder if the reason Bruce never released it is that he’s never found a studio arrangement he’s comfortable memorializing.” ESS He would, however, release “Rockaway the Days”on the 1998 Tracks box set in which he paired the lyrics with completely different music. This version was recorded live at the Los Angeles Coliseum on 9/30/1985 along with “Born in the U.S.A.,” “The River,” “War,” “Darlington County,” “The Promised Land,” “Cover Me,” and “My Hometown.” The song is sung from the point of view of “an unemployed worker, lured from his home up north (probably working in the steel mills or coal mines) by the promise of plentiful and secure work in Texas. He heads south with nothing to his name other than his family, only to find that by the time he gets there, the price of oil had dropped and the jobs along with it. With no work to do and no place to go, he and his family find themselves homeless in Houston.” ESS The family sleeps in their car and the kids are sick. The narrator seethes over a passing limousine, presumably carrying an oil executive apathetic to the plight of his former workers. He just wants “to be seen and acknowledged for the economic injustice that’s been done him.” ESS

War Bruce Springsteen

Writer(s): Norman Whitfield, Barrett Strong Recorded: 9/30/1985 live at the Los Angeles Coliseum Released: 11/10/1986 as a single, Live 1975/1985 (live box set, 1986) B-Side: “Merry Christmas Baby” Peak: 8 BB, 9 CB 9 GR, 12 RR, 4 AR, 18 UK, 11 CN, 38 AU, 1 DF Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, 2.5 video, 2.64 streaming About the Song: This song was originally recorded by the Temptations, but their “original 1970 recording never quite mustered the visceral power that Edwin Starr would bring to bear in his now-legendary single released just a few months later.” ESS It reached #1. As Bruce was winding down his Born in the U.S.A. tour in 1985, he “introduced a few wild cards into the tour’s last stand in Los Angeles. One of them was a cover of “War,” introduced by a prescient plea to his young fans not to blindly trust their leaders. Bruce had never shied away from anti-war sentiment, but rarely had he embraced it quite so boldly.” ESS Check out the DMDB page for more details about the original version of “War.”

Awards: (Click on award to learn more).

Jersey Girl Bruce Springsteen

Writer(s): Tom Waits Recorded: 7/9/1981 live at Meadowlands Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey Released: 7/31/1984 as the B-side of “Cover Me,” Live 1975/1985 (live box set, 1986) Cover of: Tom Waits (1980) About the Song: Tom Waits wrote this song for Kathleen Brennan, his future wife. It was released in 1980 on his Heartbreak and Vine album. Springsteen performed the song live and a recording of it was featured as the B-side of his 1984 single for “Cover Me.” The same performance was then used as the closing song for Bruce’s Live 1975/1985 box set. Because of his association with the state, people have mistakenly assumed Bruce wrote the song. ”Its lyrics absolutely reek of Bruce” ESS “because Waits’ songwriting on ‘Jersey Girl’ so closely resembles Bruce’s own style.” ESS When Bruce debuted his performance of the song, he cleaned up the lyrics a bit and added a whole new verse that “perfectly matches the tone and heart of Waits’ original.” ESS It turns out he’d originally written the words for the song “Party Lights,” which wouldn’t surface until it was released on The Ties That Bind: The River Collection box set in 2015.

Resources/References: AM AllMusic.com review by William Ruhlmann ESS EStreetShuffle.com WK Wikipedia Related DMDB Pages: First posted 2/14/2011; last updated 8/3/2025.