"The Case of Bruce Springsteen," Bruce + Patti Smith at the Bottom Line, NYC, November 26, 1976

Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith have performed onstage together a total of six times*, with the most recent of course being last week’s tribute show at Carnegie Hall, which I wrote about for both Variety and over at jukeboxgraduate.com. In the latter I mentioned a particular outing from 1976 at the Bottom Line, and in tribute to their friendship I thought I’d do a deeper dive into that particular evening.

Patti Smith released her second album, Radio Ethiopia, in September of 1976, and she toured with the Patti Smith Group relentlessly during that year. She’d returned from dates in Europe and the UK at the end of October, not long before she briefly joined Bruce and E Street onstage at the Palladium at the October 30th show. “Joined” is doing a lot of work there, because it wasn’t planned; she was in the audience, almost certainly an invited guest, and she made her way to the front of the stage and got invited up. Bruce vaguely remembers the event, Patti’s never spoken of it, but there is tape! 

At the Palladium, there’s a moment in “Rosalita,” which, in 1976, was foundational to the E Street canon but not yet sacred – if you listen to the recording, it seems like the entirety of the Palladium is yelling their own unique, specific and somehow yet unplayed request, and Bruce tells everyone to shut up – and so it’s chugging along and fulfilling its role as The Song During Which We Introduce The Band, with all of that entails. There’s a surprise bonus when he brings on the E Street Horns and they execute a small and delightful melodic flourish derived from “10th Avenue Freeze-Out.”

“I want to say that I’m proud… I’m privileged…to bring up here before your faces…the magnificent, the stupendous, from the Las Vegas of the East Coast, Asbury Park, the Miami Horns!” There’s a little bit of decoration on the individual intros but not a ton, it’s mostly moving along – “On the organ, clap real hard, his mother’s here tonight: Dan Federici!” – and then, at approximately 1:37:41, Bruce announces, “Patti Smith!”

The audience murmurs favorably when Patti’s name is mentioned, and she freestyles for about a minute, before Bruce acknowledges her again, and then goes into a “Land of 1,000 Dances” riff. This interlude is often noted as “Land” on Patti Smith sources, because Horses has an interlude known as “Land” that incorporates the Chris Kenner original, but I don’t hear any of the phrases from Patti’s “Land” in her brief interlude. 

But there has to be a reason Bruce goes into “Land of 1,000 Dances.” According to reports, she was in the audience and simply made her way to the front of the stage, where she was pulled up to join E Street. Bruce confirmed this when I spoke with him for Why Patti Smith Matters but he also did not remember anything else about this particular event. 

About a month later, after Bruce and E Street had finished the so-called “Lawsuit Tour,” Patti was playing a seven-night stand at the Bottom Line, and Bruce showed up for both the early and late shows on November 27th. According to Bruce, this appearance was not planned, nor was it rehearsed, and he alternates between piano and guitar.  

But the other element that’s the dead giveaway is where in the show that it happens. Patti would often begin her performances in the early days with a combination of poetry reading and just generally conversing with the audience, a thing that works well in small venues but starts to spiral out of control once you’re moving into larger spaces. Additionally, not every individual who recorded live concerts would necessarily tape the spoken word segment for Patti shows – or, even worse, they’d record over it to save tape – but that doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. It just means there isn’t documentation. 

But whoever was taping this night at the Bottom Line kept the tape rolling and I am reasonably certain that Bruce’s presence contributed to everything being captured instead of the taper waiting for the rest of the band to come onstage. So you get to enjoy the entire 20 minutes of Patti rapping to the audience, thanking people for a gift handed up but mentioning that in Europe they gave her jewels; how awkward it is to overhear couples talking about how great she is a couple of rows away. 

"This is a nice thing that happened: for like, a long time, you know, if you read CREEM and stuff like that, I wasn't really into Bruce Springsteen, y'know. I hadn't heard his records. Mostly what I wasn't into was the area of Jersey he was from, because Jersey is a very competitive state. And South Jersey doesn't like Asbury Park Jersey. I mean, it's just like – South Jersey's the worst, the most nationalistic part, that's why there's gambling going down there and the mafia everything's happening in South Jersey. Least it was till my family moved out."

There’s some very excited applause and then someone hits some keys on the piano. 

Me and my brother are expatriates anyway, so, like,  I wasn't, like, really into him until I saw his car. He's got this great car.

A lot more applause and excitement. Patti’s talking to the crowd, answering someone who’s made a song request. She doesn’t recognize it and asks them to sing it, but then something clicks and she understands what they’re asking for – they’re asking for “I Want You,” which, if you were a club-level concert-going person who was excited about both Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen, you were probably very aware was a song that Bruce used to cover. And given Patti’s affinity towards Bob, that was actually an incredibly smart ask! 

But she’s not into the song at all, based on her immediate reaction, which was a classic Dylan imitation, drawling  “I Want Youuuu.” But then she just starts improvising, and she’s either following Bruce or he’s following her (or probably, a combination of both). The best bootleg of this show goes under the highly original name “A Real Good Time Together” and I have to question where the taper indexed the break between improvs -- which I realize is not an exact science but there’s definitely some overlap -- but the first number is titled “My Car Was Invisible” is funny because it’s the punch line of a joke about how she had to wait such a long time after the previous night’s show, waiting for her car, because her car was invisible. 

But the next number is probably more interesting. Unofficially titled “The Case of Bruce Springsteen,” Patti raps for quite a while, accompanied by Bruce on piano again, and it’s tough to make out much of it until the end, when it’s suddenly very clear she is very much up to speed with why Bruce hasn’t released a follow-up to Born to Run and why he’s hanging out with a poet from South Jersey on a Saturday night: 

“We should all write letters
to the musicians union
Do anything you can
and help plead the case of Bruce Springsteen!”

A glissando brings the composition to a close.

Patti's not done, though: "And at the bottom say, ‘P.S., Mr. Appel, call up Wartoke [Patti’s manager] and they’ll tell you how it’s really done.” 

Bruce plays a bit of the “Theme from Dragnet”. 

“Oh no, Alan Pepper [co-founder of the Bottom Line] just came in with Mike Appel.” 

DUM-DUM-DUM-DAH-DUM

“See, I know that Bruce will laugh at all my jokes, because no matter what part of Jersey, all Jersey people can’t resist a stupid joke.”

He’s on and offstage for the rest of the show, some of which is easy to hear and other times it’s not. Various sites claim to know which songs he plays on and which he doesn’t but none of them explain how they reached this conclusion. I believe I can definitely hear him on the improv before “Ain’t It Strange,” and you can hear people in the audience asking for him before “My Generation” at the end of the set. But without a better tape and outside confirmation, we'll never know definitively.

The Bottom Line usually had two shows per night, an early and a late show, and Bruce stuck around for the second one on the 26th, which is where the header graphic for this essay came from. (I don't like using other people's photos unless I have the explicit permission of the photographer and/or have paid them for usage, but given the credits listed, I felt okay with this particular borrow.)

John Cale showed up towards the end of the first set and hung around for the next one, and, you know, John Cale produced Horses and was in the Velvet Underground, so in this particular milieu, he out-ranks Bruce Springsteen and gets more stage time. Cale was also more familiar with Patti's music, and while Bruce can fake it with the best of them – I definitely clocked him walking onstage at Carnegie Hall for the encore and his first stop was Tony Shanahan (who was on the other side of the stage before relocating as more folks made their way onstage) so he could get the key for "People Have The Power" – Mr. Springsteen's contribution to the second set's songs back in 1976 was a delightful bonus but not foundational.

I think these documented moments are absolutely fascinating. Here we have publicly available artifacts that demonstrate that Bruce was interested in what other musicians who were peers were doing at the time. Patti's memory is razor sharp and I hope some day to have the opportunity to speak with her about her memories of any of these outings because I'd love to just have more detail about how they came together. As demonstrated by the audience's vocal response, there were an awful lot of folks who didn't see a huge disconnect between these two artists in particular, and it was likely the industry's insistence on demonizing "punk rock" that created the appearance of a divide where there really wasn't much of one between the people who made the music and the people who listened to the music.

*Regarding the "that we are able to document" statement: I have some fundamental disagreements with the way Brucebase lists some entries, because they list things like Bruce and Patti being at a Rolling Thunder party together or a show in 1975 where "apparently" Bruce sang backing vocals with Lester Bangs and others on "Gloria" as legitimate joint performances (btw: this is a very cool thing but there is zero documentation of it!) I wouldn't have counted Carnegie Hall until Bruce walked onstage for the encore and he was, you know, actively participating in the performance by both playing guitar and singing. So Brucebase states that Bruce and Patti have performed together 10 times when it is more like six actual performances by what I feel is a reasonably objective definition of the term "performed live with Bruce Springsteen." But I know how much work it is to maintain something like Brucebase and I couldn't function without them.