Nebraska, Live at the Basie
In the wee wee hours your mind gets hazy
One of the discs in the Nebraska ‘82 box set is the newly-recorded live footage of Bruce Springsteen performing the entire album at the Basie in Red Bank. There's no audience, and it’s essentially a solo performance; Charlie Giordano is there to trigger some bells and the great Larry Campbell plays a second guitar occasionally and shakes tambourine on one song.
Campbell told Rolling Stone:
“Bruce asked me to listen to the tracks and stay true to the second guitar stuff going on in there. That took a lot of paying attention to what was going on. His engineer did send me some of those guitar parts separated, because they’re not mixed where they’re really discernible.”
(Emphasis mine. Chuck Plotkin really does not get enough credit in my opinion for his role in this whole saga.)
My first thought when I sat down to watch the video is that given it was directed by Thom Zimny, I had high expectations because at this point – as I wrote in my piece about “Tonight In Jungleland” at the Born to Run 50th Anniversary Symposium – as fans we know we can trust Zimny to show us what we need and want to see.
