22.02.77 Milwaukee, WI, intro to “It’s My Life”
“So what’s been happening, how’s everybody been since the last time we was here? (crowd cheers)(?)…(chuckles)…(intro music)…I grew up in this small town, it was about…twenty miles inland from the beach…lived there…lived in this two-family house…and my mom, she worked, she was a secretary, she worked downtown and my pop, he worked, when I was real small, in this, this rug mill till they closed it down, put a lot of people out of work, and he was, worked for Pinkerton guards for a while, worked in a plastics factory for a while, I remember I’d only see him…I used to only see him two times a day, I used to see him in the morning in the wintertime out underneath the car trying to get it to run so he could make it to work…then I’d see him at night in the kitchen… sitting there in the dark…and we used to live next-door to this, this gas-station…and in the summertime I used to…pull my mattress out on the roof, sleep out on the roof, and the station used to close up about one o’clock but, uh…all night there’d be these guys pulling in, some guys that I knew from school and some guys that I’d just seen around town, when the patrol car wasn’t sitting there trying to catch the cats speeding down, speeding down the highway, these guys’d pull in there…meet each other there and head off down the highway towards the beach…this would go on all night long, I used to sit there awake on the roof just watch them pulling in and watch them pulling out…as soon as I hit sixteen…I used to take off into down, down along the coast to…up to New York City…and I worked some jobs down in Village for a while till the cops, till we either ran out of money, me and this cat Skibotts*, or till the cops just, uh… proofed us in Port Authority sitting around and send us back home…and my pop every night, riding back home in the bus I could see him sitting there, I knew when I’d get home, he’d be waiting for me sitting there in the kitchen, he shut off all the lights in the house, my mother’d sit in the front room and watch TV with just the TV on till she’d fall asleep, woke up the next morning to go to work…my pop, he’d just sit in the kitchen smoking cigarettes, drinking a little beer, waiting for the kids to come home…and he used to lock up, used to lock up the front door so that me and my sister used to have to come in ‘round the back…and if we came home early, after he hadn’t been sitting there too long, it wasn’t too bad, but if we came in late or if I’d been gone for a few days, I knew that no matter when I came back…that he’d be there waiting for me…and I’d stand there in the driveway and look through this screen door and I could see the light of his cigarette butt…and I’d slick my hair back real tight…so he couldn’t tell how long it was, I’d try to make it through the kitchen and he’d wait till I hit the bottom step, then he’d call me to come back and sit down there in the dark and talk to him… and in the wintertime he’d close all the doors to the room and just turn on the gas jets to the stove so it’d get real hot in there and we’d sit there and he’d be telling me, he’d be telling me… I could always hear his voice…I could always hear his voice but I could never see his face…he’d start off talking about nothing too much at all…how I was doing…what was happening at school… pretty soon he’d be asking me where I was getting my money from…or what I thought I was doing with myself and how my whole life was a waste …and we’d end up screaming at each other, my mother’d end up running in from the front room to try and keep us…from fighting with each other…I’d always end up running out the backdoor…out into the street, running out into the street, telling him, telling him…that it was my life and I was gonna do what I wanted to do…”
(*Vinny “Skibotts” Maniello, who replaced Bart Haynes as the drummer of the Castiles after Haynes went off to fight in Vietnam.)
22.02.77 Milwaukee, WI, intro to “Thunder Road”
“Are you loose? (crowd cheers)(chuckles)(?) this is for all the folks that was at the show last time we played here and I went home and came back and (chuckles)(crowd cheers) now we’ll go straight through the night (?)…Professor, the introduction, please…”
22.02.77 Milwaukee, WI, intro to “Action in the Streets”
“Are you loose? (crowd cheers) are you alive? (crowd cheers) are you out there? (crowd cheers) are you loose? (crowd cheers) are you alive? (crowd cheers) are you alive? (crowd cheers) are you alive? (crowd cheers) are you alive? (crowd cheers)…”
22.02.77 Milwaukee, WI, after “Action in the Streets”
“Thank you, little sister! (crowd cheers)…”
22.02.77 Milwaukee, WI, intro to “Backstreets”
“This is for that little girl who was my partner…thank you…
(…) Till the end…just me and you, baby…just me and you, girl…we could steal away…we could steal away…we could steal away…we could steal away – we had it all figured out, I remember we had this, we had this plan we were gonna make…you was gonna quit your job…and I’d been saving up some money…we were gonna slip away…we were gonna steal away…and I remember that night ‘cause these guys, they had, these guys, they had some machines down there and there was this fire down there that night down by the tracks…we were sitting…in the backseat of…of a burned-out old Cadillac…I could see…(?) fire down, down on the south-side of the tracks and they had these machines down there and there was this water spraying in the air…and you promised me, you promised you was never gonna go anyplace without me…I remember you promised that night…and the rain came tumbling down…and we were sitting there that night and you promised…you promised…and the rain came…tumbling down…and I was standing on the corner… and I was standing on the corner…I was standing on the corner…(?) …and I remember…there was a check-in cop across the street and he asked me what I was waiting for…and he asked me just what I was waiting for…I told him, I told him it was nothing…and…I was just standing there waiting and wishing that, wishing that God would send some angels to blow this whole town right into the sea…I was just wishing that God would send some angels and just blow this whole town right into the sea…I was wishing that just God would send some angels and blow this whole, blow, blow us all right into the sea…I was just wishing God would send some angels and just blow us, blow us all right into the sea…just blow it all away…I wished He’d just blow it all away because, because you promised, I wished He’d just blow it all away because you promised, I wished He’d just send some angels and blow it all away because you promised, because you promised, because you promised, because you promised and because…and because…YOU LIED!…YOU LIED!…YOU LIED!…Hiding on the backstreets…”
22.02.77 Milwaukee, WI, intro to “Rosalita”
“(People yelling “Rosalita”)…The clock is ringing…the clock is ringing…(?)…the clock is ringing…and somewhere…west of Hoboken…wherever you are, Rosie, come out of there!…
(…) Are you loose? (crowd cheers) to the far left of the stage we got the Professor himself, man with all the degrees and all the keys, Professor Roy Bittan (crowd cheers) play it, Professor (Roy plays) to his…immediate right…poet of the soul…artiste, auteur… oh, producer, the man who brought you such great hits as “I don’t wanna go home”…”Sweeter than honey”…you all know him, you all love him…the magnificent Miami Steve Van Zandt (crowd cheers) on the bass guitar…Mr. Garry W. Tallent (crowd cheers)(?) go ahead (Garry plays a bit)(?) on the drums, the Mighty Max (crowd cheers)…on the organ…now you see him, now you don’t…first you can, then you won’t…Phantom Dan Federici (crowd cheers)…(?)…in the back…coming to you…all the way from the Paradise Room…in Philadelphia (?)…coming to you via Las Vegas…where they played (?)…coming to you via the men’s room tonight where they played with themselves – no…that’s the joke, that’s the joke, these are the jokes…the Miami Horns (crowd cheers)…oh yeah!…last but not least…king of the goddamn world…the Big Man, Clarence Clemons (crowd cheers)…”
22.02.77 Milwaukee, WI, intro to “Quarter to Three”
“Yo! (chuckles)(crowd cheers)(screams) are you loose? (crowd cheers)(Clarence/Steve: “Yeah!”)…somebody threw their t-shirt up on stage (?)…now you gotta help us out, it goes “One, two, one, two,” that’s the count-off, right…here we go…(counts off the song with the crowd)…”
Compiled by Johanna Pirttijärvi
