{"id":490466,"date":"2019-09-24T10:26:01","date_gmt":"2019-09-24T16:26:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=889615"},"modified":"2019-09-24T10:26:01","modified_gmt":"2019-09-24T16:26:01","slug":"is-this-bruce-springsteens-single-greatest-live-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/music-news\/is-this-bruce-springsteens-single-greatest-live-moment\/","title":{"rendered":"Is This Bruce Springsteen\u2019s Single Greatest Live Moment?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Bruce Springsteen<\/a> has played somewhere in the ballpark of 2,600 concerts since signing to Columbia Records in 1972. Many of the ones before Born to Run<\/em> came out in 1975 have been lost to history, but the vast majority since have been bootlegged and traded within fan circles. Five years ago, Springsteen\u2019s team made the wise decision to eliminate the need for bootlegs of his current shows by offering fans the chance to download every one them in pristine sound quality.<\/p>\n

With all of this in mind, naming his single greatest concert is a very difficult task. And zooming in even further to pick out his best performance of a singular song is just absurd. After all, he\u2019s played \u201cBorn to Run\u201d 1,744 times, \u201cThunder Road\u201d 1,424 times, and \u201cThe Promised Land\u201d 1,375 times. Hell, he\u2019s even done the 1984 B side \u201cShut Out the Light\u201d 35 times, and \u201cJump\u201d by Van Halen\u201d twice. One time he even did Bon Jovi\u2019s \u201cBad Medicine,\u201d though nobody is going to pick that one.<\/p>\n

But in honor of the man\u2019s 70th birthday yesterday, we\u2019re going to go ahead and pick our choice for his best live performance anyway. It was \u201cProve It All Night\u201d at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey, on September 19th, 1978. The show was broadcast on the radio and released as the famous Pi\u00e8ce De R\u00e9sistance bootleg that Springsteen fans have cherished for years. Springsteen finally released it himself earlier this month as an official download. The Capitol Theatre also had a camera running and you can watch the whole thing right here.<\/p>\n

It begins with a four-minute piano and guitar duel between Springsteen and E Street Band keyboardist Roy Bittan before the vocals kick in. The version of the song that follows makes the \u201cProve It All Night\u201d on Darkness on the Edge of Town<\/em> sound like a limp, lifeless demo by comparison. The group had been touring the album for four months at this point and were in absolute peak form as a live band.<\/p>\n

To be fair, there were 115 shows on the Darkness on the Edge of Town<\/em> tour and only a tiny handful survive in crystal-clear audio like this show. Even fewer were caught on film. It\u2019s quite possible that other shows had a \u201cProve It All Night\u201d even better than 9\/19\/78. It\u2019s actually quite likely. But based on what we have access to at the moment, we stand by our choice.<\/p>\n

Springsteen kept \u201cProve It All Night\u201d in his live repertoire after 1978, but the extended version from the Darkness<\/em> tour vanished. The fans never gave up on hearing it again, though, and one even managed to ask Springsteen about it during a 2010 appearance on E Street Radio. \u201cYou\u2019re one of the \u201978 piano intro guys!\u201d Springsteen said. \u201cThere are clones of you in various places throughout the United States. \u2026 It was just a device that worked nicely at the time. If you\u2019d like to hear it again, that\u2019ll probably never occur, my friend. But it was good while it lasted.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just two years later, however, he revived it at a show in Barcelona and then did it again a handful of times throughout the tour. The fans were ecstatic, but it never quite reached the highs of 1978 or, more specifically, the high of September 19th, 1978. Feel free to disagree with us, though. And if you pick \u201cBackstreets\u201d from a 1978 show with a long \u201cSad Eyes\u201d interlude, you might have a decent case to make.<\/p>\n

via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bruce Springsteen has played somewhere in the ballpark of 2,600 concerts since signing to Columbia Records in 1972. Many of the ones before Born to Run came out in 1975 have been lost to history, but the vast majority since have been bootlegged and traded within fan circles. Five years ago, Springsteen\u2019s team made the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-490466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-music-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-21 13:54:07","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KQZR - The Reel","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490466\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}