Bruce Springsteen on Reviving ‘The River,’ New Solo LP
“We’ll have to see how everybody feels, how the show feels,” Bruce Springsteen said, lounging on a sofa in his dressing room backstage at the Consol Energy Center in Pittsburgh. The singer was speaking the night before he opened his 2016 North American tour with the E Street Band, on January 16th in Pittsburgh. He had just come off stage from a three-hour rehearsal in which he drilled his group, one more time, through Sides Three and Four of the centerpiece of the current shows — a complete, nightly performance of Springsteen’s 1980 double album, The River. Looking improbably relaxed after that long, intense practice, Springsteen, 66, was responding to a question about whether he would add more dates past the originally scheduled finale in Los Angeles on March 17th.
“I have an idea of what it’s going to be like,” Springsteen said of the next evening’s planned marathon — that whole record plus another “set after the set,” as he put it, of hits and deep tracks. “But I’m anxious to feel it.”
Springsteen found out soon enough, setting a repeatedly explosive standard in Pittsburgh with 34 songs over three hours and 17 minutes. Two weeks later, after a similar epic show in Chicago and a few hours before raising the roof at New York’s Madison Square Garden, Springsteen announced an extension of the tour into late April, with a May 19th festival date in Lisbon, Portugal, suggesting a run of European stadium gigs in the summer.
That evening backstage in Pittsburgh, during a wide-ranging interview for a story in the current issue of Rolling Stone, Springsteen spoke of his sudden eagerness to take The River on the road, in the wake of the recent multi-disc reissue, The Ties That Bind: The River Collection (Columbia); and of the much-younger man who made the original album, from the impulsive mass of songwriting resurrected in that box. He also confirmed his completion of a solo album nearly four years in the making — and admitted that it was unusual for him to be back on the road with the E Street Band with such a focused, retrospective show. But, Springsteen insisted, “At this point, the old blueprints don’t have to be followed. We’re presenting this record to people. And it’ll find its spot.”
Is there any material from the River era — unheard songs or performances — still waiting around to be heard, that isn’t in the box set?
The box cleared out everything that was listenable. There might have been some curiosities. When we put these boxes out, I discount those things where the only interest is “This happened” [laughs]. I don’t go for the multiple outtakes. I go for something that had a reason for living, came to life, didn’t get used but is a thriving entity of its own.