1981-07-03 Brendan Byrne Arena, East Rutherford, NJ

Scheduled: 20:00 | Local Start Time ??:?? / End Time ??:??

Info & Setlist | Venue

First "Summertime Blues" of the tour and the premiere of "This Little Girl", with Gary U.S. Bonds guesting. "Badlands" opens the show. "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" includes a snippet of "Sweet Soul Music". "Detroit Medley" includes "I Hear A Train", "Land Of 1000 Dances", "Shake", and "Sweet Soul Music".

Gary U.S. Bonds (Guest)

Intro to "Independence Day"
“This, uh…this is a song about fathers and sons and…this is called “Independence Day” and (crowd cheers) I need a little, I need a little bit of quiet for this song, thank you…(intro music starts)…I haven’t been back home…(?) quite a while and…it’s funny ‘cause every time…I remember when I was growing up…I was about 16 or 17 years old…I couldn’t…I could never wait to leave, I could never wait to get away…and now every time I come back, for some reason…I always wait till it’s late at night, I get in my car…and I always drive back, back down through the town that I grew up in (crowd cheers) and…I always ride…I always ride past, ride past my old house, you know, the old houses I used to live in when I was a kid…and I always look up…that’s that window that was my room, I always wonder who’s…who sleeps there now and who…what they do…and…I never thought when I was…when I was younger, I never thought that I’d, I would feel that way, feel like ever going back to that place where I grew up again…and…I remember I was so glad when I finally got out of the house, got away from my old man and my mother…but…everybody, everybody’s gotta leave home someday…but it seems…that…after, after a certain amount of years you always wanna go back…and you wanna see…just to see if it’s still there…or to think about the things that happened to you when you were there…and for a long time I used to try and sort out what it was about me and my old man, why we never got along and why…why when I needed him…he wasn’t there and why …I couldn’t understand the way that he needed me…but…this is, this is a song about…about leaving home…and…but you always gotta go back and see, just to, just to see if it’s still there or figure out…’cause your family don’t ever go away, you’re gonna have to make, make some peace with them someday (crowd cheers)…”

Intro to "Johnny Bye Bye"
“I remember when I was…I was just up in my room at night and I had this…I had this little Japanese transistor radio that used to fit underneath my pillow…and…and it was about 1965…there was a lot of great stuff on the radio…I remember I used to wish I could go downstairs sometimes and…’cause my old man used to sit in the kitchen right, right beneath me…and to say “Hey, dad, listen to this song, listen to this song by…the Drifters or…Sam Cooke”… because I was getting something from it that I knew that, that he needed…and as you get older…it’s harder to hold on to the thing, to the thing that, that, that keeps you alive when you’re, when you’re young…and you get trampled on so much that a lot of people turn away…they turn hard or they get…they end up getting drunk or stoned all the time, anyway…this is, uh…this is a song about holding on to the things that make you yourself…”

After "Two Hearts"
“It’s gonna take the two of us…”

Intro to "Jole Blon"
“(?) we’ll bring out a friend of mine who’s gonna do a couple of songs with us (crowd cheers) Gary U.S Bonds (crowd cheers)…”

Middle of "Rosalita"
“(Roy’s intro missing from the source tape)…on the guitar, the great Miami Steve Van Zandt (crowd cheers) on the bass, Mr. Garry W. Tallent (crowd cheers) on the drums, ooh-ho-hoo, the Mighty One, Mighty Max Weinberg (crowd cheers) on the organ, Phantom Dan Federici (crowd cheers) and last but not least (crowd cheers) I’m talking about the king of the world…the prince of the city…the Duke of Paducah…he’s faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a roaring locomotive, able to leap tall women, I mean tall buildings in a single bound, is it a bird? (crowd: “No”) is it a plane? (crowd: “No”) his mama calls him Clarence but we like to call him…Spotlight on the Big Man!…”

Intro to "I Don’t Wanna Go Home"
“Thanks…this is…this is for anybody from the Shore (crowd cheers) this is a song that, uh…that Steve wrote…he’s gonna sing it with me…”

Intro to "Born to Run"
“I wanna say it’s nice to be back home and (crowd cheers) nobody’s treated us better than you guys…”

Intro to "Detroit Medley"
“Let’s dance!…”

^{Compiled by : Johanna Pirttijärvi.}

Pete	This was the first of two shows I saw at this stand of concerts. The arena was brand new and bruce was the first event there. I asked some people before the show if he played "summertime blues" the night before. He played it that night and it felt like I willed it to happen. I snuck in a recordable walkman to make a rough bootleg of the show. When I went into the bathroom to take it out I heard noises above me. The bathroom had a drop ceiling and 3 or 4 guys spent 24 hours in the rafters in the ceiling to sneak into the second show. I thought it was genius.
RosalitaNYC	I remember going to the all night post office in NYC to send in my ticket orders for these concerts. At midnight the place was mobbed and they had made a special section for Springsteen tickets. I got tickets for this night and July 5th. At the concert all these guys were asking me if I was from Jersey and that night I wished I was.
Jim Murphy	My first (and sadly - only) Bruce show but an unforgettable one - It was the second night the Byrne Arena (now the Continental or whatever arena) was ever open. Gary US Bonds performed with the Boss and the show was truly magical - the intensity, the energy, the screaming, and the shear noise…. you know the story… As a rising high-school junior, I was hooked and still am - thanks to the Boss - especially for a rendering of Point Blank that till this day still raises a chill in my spine when I think about. Perhaps the last tour before the "excesses" of the mid-80s but still (perhaps) a bit too refined for those lucky enough to see him in the early S-P days.

Brucebase Wiki

Site Navigation