Live Archive: Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Seneca Field House, Toronto, ON, December 21, 1975
“Here’s something to you all, to Toronto from Asbury Park, with love.”
SETLIST: THUNDER ROAD / TENTH AVENUE FREEZE-OUT / SPIRIT IN THE NIGHT / LOST IN THE FLOOD / SHE'S THE ONE / BORN TO RUN / PRETTY FLAMINGO / IT'S HARD TO BE A SAINT IN THE CITY / BACKSTREETS / KITTY'S BACK / JUNGLELAND / ROSALITA (COME OUT TONIGHT) / 4TH OF JULY, ASBURY PARK (SANDY) / SANTA CLAUS IS COMIN' TO TOWN / DETROIT MEDLEY / FOR YOU / QUARTER TO THREE
The E Street Band at this moment is Roy Bittan, Clarence Clemons, Danny Federici, Steve Van Zandt, Garry Tallent, and Max Weinberg
Venue capacity: approximately 3,000
An official archive release [affiliate link]
Bruce Springsteen’s first appearance in Toronto (not Canada - Montreal a few nights earlier received that honour, and not his first appearance in Ontario, because Ottawa got that the night before) was originally scheduled for a 1,000-seat venue and then a 2,000 seat venue and finally, where we are tonight, the 3,000 seat Field House at Seneca College’s Newnham Campus. (The building no longer exists.)
It’s a beautiful “Thunder Road” to open, slightly extended intro from Roy, and then a pitch-perfect vocal delivery from Bruce. The audience is deeply, deliberately silent. It feels as intimate as if there were only 300 people present and not 3,000. It’s remarkable.
This show is an official archive release so it’s a soundboard, but it is a particularly sparkling piece of work. You will hear the E Street Band in the kind of detail and fidelity you are not accustomed to, especially from this era. The mix is spectacular. There is no moment in which you will be quietly grousing that you can’t hear a part or a band member. They dropped this in early December and I don’t know if it was the holidays or everything else but a lot of folks missed it. I didn’t even listen to it myself until January and I got 75% through “Thunder Road” and started texting pals to make sure they listened to it. Every one came back with some form of “wow you were right.” So go get it now if this describes any of you. The show was recorded by Bruce Inc. back in the day because there were plans to release a live album. And now, they have.
I love so much how “Spirit In The Night” morphed from being a wood sprite into no less than Titania as the tour has gone on, and also listening to this knowing how it will transform even more in the future, when it expands its power even further. Here, Bruce is ebullient, Max is wailing on the crash cymbals, Clarence dominates. You can hear Bruce trying to get the crowd onboard when he gets to the bridge, and you can literally feel that they want to, they just don’t know what to do yet! Listen to Roy’s ebullience in the last chorus. Even Bruce feels particularly loose. He’s connecting, you just can’t hear it back. If you look at photos of the show on Brucebase, the audience was right at the stage. They’re just quiet!
“Lost In The Flood” is powerful and the applause afterwards just goes on and on. “She’s The One” is a full-on road house rave with wild campfire harmonica and beautifully shimmering guitar licks crackling at the edges. Clarence picks up the tambourine; Danny comes in, then Roy, and then they all merge into one being. The first line gets a smattering of applause. Hey! We know this one! It feels like a particularly sharp STO even for this era.
And then, there they are: the original E Street Choir.
LET’S GO.
We’ve gone from the one-guitar-front of the Main Point to this guitar-driven ecstasy.
She’s the one
SHE’S THE ONNNEEEEEEEE
Roy’s work on the bridge of “She’s the One” is one of my favorite pieces. It exists and then it disappears, a glissando brings us to attention while everyone else is spinning out of control. It’s frenetic and it’s ecstatic and the guitar solo is fighting for space with the keyboards in the most fantastic way, until we get to the end.
“Born to Run” gets the applause of recognition. Danny’s up in the mix in a way you would never have heard at the show because it’s just too loud. Listen to him at the start of the second verse, you will shake your head in wonder. There’s some fun guitar work on the bridge that’s worth keeping an eye out for.
We can't un-know what we already know, but I always love the opportunities to to appreciate "Born to Run" just as The New Hit as opposed to that moment in an E Street Band show where people get to hear “Born to Run” and they lose their marbles. I never hate that about it but it’s nice to spend time with it just being a song, the title track for sure, but not a career-defining moment just yet.
As Erik Flannigan points out in his piece on nugs.net, the audience tonight is quiet because they’d never seen Bruce before so people didn’t know what the show was like. It’s 1975, and while there were certainly circulating bootlegs, you had to really know where to look. There was a very limited tape trading network. There were certainly very well connected music fans in the Toronto area in the mid-70s but most folks, no matter how enthused, didn’t have access to bootlegs back in the day, so unless you’d been to a show, you didn’t know what was going to happen.
As the advertisement below indicates, the venue moved three times. This was probably connected to the release and subsequent success of Born to Run, which hadn’t been out that long. The first placement of the ad for the original venue, Convocation Hall, was in the paper on November 29. That’s how fast this show sold.
“Pretty Flamingo” is that bridge from the early years of E Street into what’s coming later, but we don’t know that yet, we can just see it now with the magic crystal ball of hindsight. “Flamingo” is still a new innovation, no one knows what this is, at all, and it has that otherworldly, Wall of Sound-esque intro before the band drops down to the bare minimum and Bruce tells us all a story.
“I used to live in this house, it was on the main street of town, a town of about 10k people, it was sort of a small town. It was real close to, like, to the office buildings and stuff downtown, and everyday around 5:30 everybody walked down my street, coming back from work. And there was this one girl, walked by everyday, you know, and I'd sit on my porch and watch her go by.
“And she looked like she was about, you know, a few years older than me, she was always dressed in high heels and, like, a suit and stuff, she worked downtown someplace. And me and Steve, we’d sit out there every day and watch her go by. And I’d say, ‘Steve, all you gotta do, is go cross the street, walk up to her -- wear your hat, wear your hat -- walk up to her, say ‘What’s your name?’ and find out.’ But he wouldn't go, he’d never go. Like, I wouldn't go either.
“So this goes on for a few days and my father, my father was home a lot, he was the kind of guy, he’d get up in the morning -- well, he’d wake up, and then he’d decide if he was gonna get up (the crowd laughs softly at that), and if he felt like going to work, he’d go, and if not, he’d stay around home, lay around. And so he was around all the time, he was always watching what I was doing. Always keeping his eye on me, thought I was always getting into all kinds of trouble and stuff. Like, he figured that was more his job, to stay home and make sure I was cool.
“So he’d be sitting out there on the porch –
(This is the point at which I decide that the house in question has to be the South Street house, the one next to the gas station. If you did not run through this sorting process in your own mind, I envy you. I did the same thing when I saw Springsteen on Broadway for the first time.)
“And I’d say, ‘Pop, all you gotta do is you go across the street and find out her address.’ No, he wouldn’t do it, he was afraid to do it. So it was the three of us, we sit out there, right, and me and Steve was trying to figure out ways to impress this girl so that she would notice that we was there.
“So we went down the store, there was this one store in town that sold car parts and guitars, right? (the crowd laughs) It did, it did, it sold like auto parts, and it sold some, like, $20 guitars bsides that. So I bought a guitar, learned some chords.
“I go, ‘Steve! Here she comes! Here she comes.’ We start whacking away on them chords, trying to impress her when she walks by, we start singing and stuff. She didn’t even look over.
“We knew she was tough because Clarence -- we didn’t know Clarence then, but he was always, like, around the neighborhood, we didn’t know him -- he always came riding by on his bicycle, with no hands, playing the saxophone. So, like we’d say, ‘Steve! There goes that guy again! He’s gonna ride right by her, let’s see if she notices.
“So Clarence rides by, playing the sax. Didn’t even look at him. Not once. So we knew she was tough.
“This went on and on and we had 10-15 guys on the porch all day, you know, and my sisters were out there, and we’d make all this noise every time she came by. I figured by that time that she knew we were there but she was too scared to look over. You know how when you know somebody is there, but you don’t wanna look? Like that happened to me sometimes in the city, you know somebody is there, but you don’t wanna see ‘im.
“This went on for about two years (laughter) and I moved away, finally. But we never found out what her name was or nothin’. It’s all right. We had this name we used to call her all the time, remember that?”
A couple of things about this “Flamingo” story. One is that you can almost hear Bruce realizing that none of these people have heard these stories before and he can’t even assume that any of them know where he’s from, so he’s backpedaling to fill in details. Second is, are there any other “Flamingo” stories where Doug Springsteen makes an appearance? I worked my way through most of the ones that are circulating and I couldn’t find any. So I kind of wonder what about this particular night made Bruce want to suddenly bring his dad into the fold of people hanging out on the porch.
“Pretty Flamingo” was something I always understood in my early days of fandom as being one of the canonical E Street covers, but the first documented appearance is only September of ‘75. It’s only had half a dozen post-1978 appearances, and overall only has about 39 documented appearances. My excuse is that I must have had a bootleg with it and so in my mind, it was a regular event, me trying to build an understanding of Bruce Springsteen live and in concert, a thing I was not able to see nearly as much as I wanted to see!
But the best thing about this recording’s fidelity is how well it captures the back and forth just slightly off-mic banter between Steve and Bruce at the end of the story, when Bruce is talking about how he’s gonna hire a detective, and how Steve is a guy who’s into genealogy (although Bruce is not using that term).
“He looks up your family tree, finds out who you descended from and stuff. You might be descended from some prince, or something!
Steve, laughing: “Give it a shot!
“You know?
“Yeah.
“I’m telling you!
“You know what we should have done? We should have got my sister, man, we should have got her to go tell that girl that we was in a band and that we had a record coming out.”
It is really kind of gutsy to get up in front of people who have never seen you before and just tell your stories and do your thing, but he never loses them. There’s no people shouting nonsense because they’re bored or trying to catch Bruce’s attention. They are with him, so when the band jumps into yet another killer version of “Saint in the City” there isn’t a noticeable energetic switch. “Saint” in this era and on this recording in particular is such a delight to listen to the dueling keyboards. But it’s also just such a fabulous full band rendition, completely solid from top to bottom.
There’s a long silent gap towards the end of the song just at the moment when you’re waiting for Bruce and Steve’s guitars to start talking to each other, and just when it’s starting to feel uncomfortable, it begins, short licks that fly back and forth until everyone else joins in and Max drives it all home in a manner nothing short of breathtaking. Just when you’re about to say, “Well, pretty good version of ‘Saint’ but not extraordinary,” here they come, proving you wrong.
More applause of recognition for the intro to “Backstreets” and you kind of envy them for not knowing what’s about to hit them. But that is just an appetizer, an amuse-bouche, for the five-alarm fire that is this version of “Kitty’s Back.” It’s introduced half-way off mic, kind of an aside and not a full declaration, but it doesn’t matter because it’s what happens next on the guitar that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. There’s your fucking introduction.
Bruce’s vocalization of the lyrics tonight is particularly louche, he’s just opening his mouth and letting the words pour out whenever they will. Please please get out the good headphones so that you can listen to the detail on this between the two guitars, the keyboards, and then everyone in concert.
But the keyboard solos are a delight, beginning with Danny. You can hear Bruce just off-mic exhorting him. You’ve seen him do this recently, you know what it looks like. Garry Tallent and Max are in lock step, but it’s not just foundational, Garry is who ends up reinforcing the swing that Danny was already manifesting.
Danny finishes, and then it’s all rhythm while the crowd applauds, before handing the keys over to the Professor. He’s bringing some slight dissonance that leans on the edge between jazz and boogie-woogie and the first thing I thought of was James Booker, maybe just the slightest tinge, but it doesn’t even matter, it’s just semantics, it’s flamboyant and creative. He brings the band back into a more rigid 4/4 time and Max and Garry hold that line, giving Roy the backdrop he needs to fill in a multi-colored, expansive exploration.
Then you hear Bruce yell, “Come on!” and everyone comes together for the transition -- where the guitars are echoing Clarence, before you start looking for additional horn players -- before the guitar solos. But it’s not just a guitar solo in the way you thought of guitar solos in the 1970s, it’s a symphony where everyone is working both together and bouncing notes off of each other, it’s getting really close to prog rock in its various excursions but it’s not boring pomposity, it’s grand and it is absolutely riveting. I’m ready to declare this version definitive. If you knew how this one went, you’d be losing your mind but if you were a Torontonian hearing this for the first time, you were probably thinking, “How much money is left in my bank account and can I take any time off work, because I have to see this again, wherever they are playing.”
The intro to “Jungleland” gets some recognition, but then the audience falls back into that respectful silence. I want to make the point that there are different ways for an audience to be quiet and there’s the kind where you can feel that nothing is landing, nothing is getting through. In the Main Point, which we have just recently covered, it’s an energetic, anticipatory silence.
Caryn Rose
Bruce’s vocals in “Jungleland” tonight are just the slightest bit operatic, and when he gets to the spot in the second verse where he’d normally expect crowd response – “As we take our stand..." – – he doesn’t request the audience’s participation because he’s probably figured out by now that they’re supportive and enthusiastic but they don’t know what they’re supposed to do! So when they head into the third verse, Bruce says “C’mon” or something similar that seems to be an exhortation to urge the crowd to the feet or to the stage, but wanting to bring them in. He’ll do that another few times.
The sonic depths of this show are on full display here, there’s some gorgeous, ethereal burbles from Danny threaded through the instrumental bridge, again, just finding the space to fill and putting the exact right thing in place while the guitar solo clears the path ahead. The next verse, listen for similar adornment coming from the Professor, and also during Clarence’s solo. We never get to hear it so clearly live.
The epitome of all of this is in that short bridge before the last verse, when it’s just the keyboards and it is perfection, the notes are just hanging in the air before dissolving like soap bubbles. It’s stunning.
This song, however, is where I wish that Max was maybe a little less separated or a little lower in the mix. I appreciate the clarity but would have liked perhaps just a soupçon more subtlety.
The band intros are brisk and enunciated. Roy adds a little sparkle, Steve hits a riff, Max throws in some energetic drum rolls, Danny gets to rock out – “The Phantom moves!” Bruce declares. “Last but not least, the Kahuna of surf and soul, on the tenor saxophone, Clarence Clemons” is the Big Man’s intro tonight, with about three seconds of the “Theme from Shaft.”
The band romp around, and then Bruce pauses the whole thing and makes what sounds like a good-natured attempt to get some vocal audience participation going. They try, but he must realize that he’s gotten as much out of them as he can this time.
The encore break is loud and enthusiastic and then the band is back. You can hear the accordion, but you can also hear Bruce murmur “I Gave My Heart…” and I flipped back to the track listing really fast in case I had missed something. Alas.
“Here’s something to you all, to Toronto from Asbury Park, with love.”
It’s funny to listen to “Sandy” just six months past the Main Point and realize how much it has… grown up? It’s transformed from its original role or purpose into more of the piece that’s going to represent those days that were actually not that long ago. It’s already morphed into a postcard instead of a story about the people that Bruce knew on the boardwalk. It’s a particular tour de force for Mr. Bittan, listen to how the piano propels the song forward.
“Things really go fast around here,” Bruce says just off-mic, as Roy begins the cheerful intro riff of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” Newbies or not, the audience recognizes the melody with audible delight.
“Hey gang, guess what time of year it is?
“Easter!” (That sounds like Steve.)
“No, no, no, no, no, it’s not Easter, guess again.” The band venture a few more guesses before Bruce directs his inquiry to the audience: “Everybody out there been good?”
The crowd enthusiastically affirms their behavior.
“Oh, that’s good, that’s dynamite.”
It’s the last “Santa” of the year, probably because while there’s still four shows at the Tower Theater in Philly to close out 1975, those dates are all after Christmas. Back when we had rules about these things!
“Meanwhile, back in Detroit where Santa don’t go because he’s afraid of getting mugged--” He used this intro the night before in Ottawa but it hits a little closer to home because the Toronto - Detroit concert tourism pipeline was very much a thing even back then. The Medley is another one of those numbers that later became so essential to an E Street Band show that you forget that it only began its life on E Street earlier in the year, back in September at a birthday show at Hill Auditorium at the University of Michigan main campus in Ann Arbor. Here it’s still in fledgling form, finding its feet and its wings but still awesome nevertheless.
The crowd won’t stop applauding and we know they’re coming back, just in time for solo piano “For You” in the encore, which was the WIESS tour convention, the second to the last song, usually with an epic ahead of it and then a rocker to send everyone home on. This is a particularly gorgeous “For You,” Bruce feeling particularly present within the lyrics to the point where it feels like he gets lost a little bit in the last chorus, and there’s some repetition of lines and melody until he regains his composure, but it’s not a bad thing, it’s vulnerable and true and gorgeous.
I’m sorry there are no photographs of the encore because Bruce mentions that they’ve been gifted some shirts and he thanks their benefactor but adds, “Thank god they can’t see us back in New York.” It doesn’t matter, because this version of “Quarter to Three” is particularly spectacular, joyful and frenetic.
Bruce stops the band to address the crowd one more time:
“Are you loose?” The crowd responds affirmatively.
“Are you loose as this?” Once again, they agree.
“Are you looser than this?” It sounds like he demonstrates a move. Still a yes.
“Are you sure?” One more time, yes.
“Are you really positive now?”
That last line is less exaggerated, more conversational, the crowd laughs in response, everyone's in on the joke, before the band runs through the chorus one more time and brings the fantastic night to an end. First time in Toronto, sure, but they'd be back.
An official archive release [affiliate link]
