Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, MI, September 23, 1975

SETLIST: THUNDER ROAD / TENTH AVENUE FREEZE-OUT / SPIRIT IN THE NIGHT / PRETTY FLAMINGO / GROWIN' UP / IT'S HARD TO BE A SAINT IN THE CITY / THE E STREET SHUFFLE / SHA-LA-LA / SHE'S THE ONE / BORN TO RUN / BACKSTREETS / KITTY'S BACK / JUNGLELAND / ROSALITA (COME OUT TONIGHT) / DETROIT MEDLEY / 4TH OF JULY, ASBURY PARK (SANDY) / QUARTER TO THREE / CAROL / TWIST AND SHOUT

Capacity: 3,500

The recording opens with an initial wave of applause for the opening lines of “Thunder Road.” It’s less than a month out since the album’s release; the single was the title track, it’s a stunning solo-piano TR (the Professor on the ivories) and the audience is stunningly silent, listening; they applaud warmly and with enthusiasm. They weren’t quiet because they didn’t know the song, they were quiet because the performance demanded it. 

Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor is a deceptively named venue. I bought tickets to see Dylan there not long after moving to Detroit in 2019 and thought it was going to be some gymnasium-shaped, boxy and unremarkable venue. It is the complete opposite of that; it was built in 1913, designed by Albert Kahn, it’s a gorgeous 3,500 seat theatre, ancient wood and beautiful resonance -- the acoustics are stunning, even all the way up in the upper reaches of the balcony. 

The tape tonight, as you can hear in “Tenth Avenue,” is a little echoey, which makes me think it wasn’t a sold-out show, even though this show got moved from a smaller venue to Hill Auditorium in anticipation of demand and as you can see from the caption on the photo that was on the front page of the Michigan Daily, it was a "packed house." It’s unfortunate we don't have a recording of greater fidelity because this is a birthday show on the actual date of birth and a clearly exemplary performance, which you might have suspected with that version of “Thunder Road” but is confirmed with the vocal performance on “Spirit in the Night.” 

“The night was clear and the moon was yellow, and the leaves came tumbling down,” Bruce quotes from “Stagger Lee” in the intro, spoken-word style. Some day I really need to dig into the places he kept trying to use this song as some kind of replacement for the longer-form aural world-building the band used to do at the start of “Spirit” (or that might just be the extent of it). He’s clearly crawling around on the floor or out in the audience based on the applause and laughter right around the Crazy Janey line; our friends at JEMS explain in the readme that it seems that Bob Seger himself was in the front row and Bruce ended up in his lap during that sortie out into the crowd. 

Listen to him move from conversational to whispers at the end of the final verse and how the audience quiets right down before E Street moves right in like a SWAT team to finish the number. It’s as good a version of “Spirit” as you’ll ever get in this era.

“Pretty Flamingo” got introduced to the set as a full number about two weeks earlier in Houston. He tells the story about living on South Street: “Steve, my guitar player, used to come by” – for some reason he feels the need to be specific as to which Steve he’s referencing; Mad Dog also gets name-checked. The echo is not our friend for the story initially, but we’ve all heard it so you can keep going until the fidelity improves. The punchline is, of course, that they never had the courage to approach her and eventually Bruce left town. 

It’s about four minutes of story and four minutes of song, which is a reasonable ratio for this moment on this tour in these increasingly larger venues, playing in front of people who – like our friend, the late Jared Houser, for whom this was his first Springsteen show (not his first recording – he explains his eight-track got confiscated on the way in) – had never seen him before and don’t know what the show is like. The combination of impassioned vocal delivery and tasteful guitar licks makes this an especially outstanding version of “Flamingo,” especially towards the end when Bruce seems to have figured out the hall’s acoustics and how to use them to his advantage. 

People in the audience recognize the initial piano motif for “Growin’ Up” and respond with enthusiasm; this is a fairly nitro-charged version, just the song, no deviation off into storytime. And that energy slides right into “It’s Hard to be a Saint in the City.” It’s about here you’ll be wishing there was a soundboard of this show. Danny Federici in particular is having a great night and that level of color and vibe only enhances this particular song. Clarence is holding the band down to the ground and Bruce is in full command of all of his powers, which will be of particular interest when they get to the bridge and it’s time for the guitars. 

But when they do, he deviates from the usual protocol, and gets the band and the audience to sing a background riff for them to decorate, but then he holds back, maybe he changes his mind.  Roy contributes a little here too, gets off a couple of sparkling riffs and it’s him and Max that then lay down the bottom and that’s when we finally get the face off between Bruce and Steve, less a duel than an exhortation. The band builds behind them, louder, more insistent, and it all turns into one enormous and joyful noise before Bruce cues the band to shut it down, flawlessly. They stop on a dime.

You hear Max’s drumstick on the snare rim and the audience decides they want to clap along. Roy comes in with an expanded, almost harmonic take on the intro to “E Street Shuffle” before Danny slides in alongside him and turns it into something you could recognize if you’d ever heard it before. Most of this audience has not and they thankfully abandon any attempt at keeping time. If you thought that maybe Bruce was ready to abandon some of the epics, the 22 minutes and change of “Shuffle” will reassure you. 

“BAND!” he invokes twice in the intro, probably just because he could, because he knew the power of the six men behind him. He’s telling the story we all already know, of how he used to have this band, “Mad Dog and Garry and Davey” -- Sancious gets his own applause! -- and how they were looking for work, but they couldn’t find any, “this big influx of bands, like, from Long Island, you see” (uttered with the specific kind of disdain only someone from New Jersey could offer when talking about that part of New York), how if you didn’t have some kind of “big Vanilla Fudge type-influence…if you didn’t have that type of stuff happening, you wasn’t happening!” They had everything, Bruce insists, even a bass player with long hair (laughter and applause). “We were missin’ X, like algebra” – gets big applause from the room full of University of Michigan students. They’re walking home, down the boardwalk, and Steve has his guitar, he practiced in the shower, “he practiced when he was kissin’ his girl…”