Generally in the vinyl era, THE RIVER
tour was poorly represented by bootleg releases in terms of sound quality, at least partly due to the lack of excellent live recordings. This situation was in contrast to that for live bootlegs released in the 1970s or during and after the BORN IN THE U.S.A. tour: many of the early underground releases, as exemplified by a series of DARKNESS tour bootlegs, are sourced from radio broadcasts of live performance (thus, at least they are listenable), while audience recordings from the BORN IN THE U.S.A. tour have overall improved the sound quality compared with those from THE RIVER tour.
I can still recall several disappointing experiences of purchasing 1980-81 tour bootlegs back in the old days, which often turned out to be of terrible sound quality. To my mind, NASSAU, a pricey triple-LP box from the first (28/12/1980) of the famous three concerts in New York to conclude 1980, is easily placed on the top of the worst list. Two songs, Because The Night and Hungry Heart (with Flo and Eddie on back vocals), from this concert are among the featured 40 tracks on LIVE/1975-85 (Columbia C5X 40558). So, although it was an awful bootleg, I have kept the copy in my collection just because it shows how the released version of Because The Night is heavily edited its guitar solo on the official live album. On the other hand, oddly, the bootleg is missing Hungry Heart. Other titles I can mention (and still in my possession) include EL BOOS EN BARCELONA (serially numbered single LP), THE BOSS HITS THE BADLANDS (2LP plus a 7" disc), HUNGRY HEART (Japanese 3LP), and so on.
Despite the relatively low ratings given to those THE RIVER tour bootlegs, however, we have seen nothing but praises (like "superb all-round production") on a few particular vinyl releases back in the early 1980s. FOLLOW THAT DREAM is one such famous exception, as reported enthusiastically in the Backstreets magazine (#2 probably issued late 1981 or early 1982) and reviewed in various bootleg guides including the late Chris Hunt's bootleg file found in the Blinded By The Light book (P. Humphries & C. Hunt, 1985, Plexus, London). Although no introduction is necessary, this triple-vinyl
bootleg captures the complete performance for the first of the two-night
stand on May 7th and 8th in Stockholm during the European leg of the 1981 tour. Along with the equally impressive sister release TEARDROPS ON THE CITY that documents the following night's concert, this release comes with a deluxe full-color gate-fold sleeve and
represents one of the must-have bootlegs in
the vinyl era (although, in my opinion, it is not deniable that the sound quality of the recordings was over-rated to begin with).
One notable fact with the two Swedish bootlegs is that both in the original form are still highly sought after even
nowadays by Bruceleg
collectors. This is primarily because, reportedly, the master recordings
for the two concerts were damaged and no longer recoverable due to a fire
accident that
occurred somewhere in Sweden in the mid-1980s. Thus, the original releases of FOLLOW and TEARDROPS are considered the best possible recording sources for these Scandinavian concerts that are highly reputable among various tour locations. As pointed out when I wrote about TEARDROPS ON THE CITY on this blog 4 years ago, these vinyl titles were reissued around in 1987 fairly in a faithful replica of the original edition (see the scan of a part of the bootleg dealer's catalog above). On the following posts, I summarize the differences between the original (or exactly what I believe the original) and reissue pressings.
— To be continued.
"You don't see no music on the records unless you watch the grooves. And that ain't much. That's pretty boring,"
once said Bruce Springsteen. Despite his words, I have never felt bored when looking at these vinyl analog artifacts.
I hope you enjoy reading this blog as much I enjoy sharing information and my personal thoughts with you.
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