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Bruce Springsteen in Connecticut
Looking back at almost 50 years of rocking throughout the state
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Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band return to Connecticut on March 12 for a show at Mohegan Sun Arena. It’s the band’s first visit to the state in seven years, since a February 2016 show at the XL Center in Hartford.
This is not the first time Springsteen has played Mohegan Sun, the band was there for back-to-back shows in May of 2014. But in nearly half a century of playing in Connecticut, Hartford has hosted the band more than any other city.
Springsteen has played Hartford over a dozen times, eight of them in the past 20 years. There was one show at the Comcast Theatre (formerly the Meadows, now the Xfinity) in 2009, but all the other Hartford shows were at the XL Center or under the venue’s previous name, the Hartford Civic Center.
It was at the Civic Center that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played the first stop of their worldwide, year-long Magic Tour on Oct. 2, 2007. The Civic Center show on Sept. 8, 1984, featured the live concert debut of the song “State Trooper,” a somewhat controversial tune in the Springsteen canon due to its moody repetition and eerie wails (reportedly inspired by the New York no-wave band Suicide). “State Trooper” was later used in the closing credits of the first episode of “The Sopranos,” a series that co-starred E Street Band guitarist “Little Steven” Van Zandt.
It was the Civic Center that, in 1980, took Springsteen away from New Haven Coliseum, where he’d had his first headlining stadium show in the state in 1977 and 1978. There is a famous photo of Springsteen meeting Bob Dylan backstage at the Coliseum when Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour played there in 1975. One of the final shows of the victorious “Born to Run” tour, which cemented Springsteen’s superstardom, was at New Haven Coliseum on March 18, 1977.
Considering the level of clubs the band played in when they were starting out, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s Connecticut appearances began at major concert venues and mainly stayed there.
The first documented Springsteen performance in Connecticut was at The Bushnell, Hartford’s 2,500-seat concert hall, on April 23, 1973, as the opening act for Richie Havens.
The next was less than six weeks later, on June 3, 1973, at New Haven Coliseum opening for Chicago, one of the top-selling bands of that year.
The record could have been different. Springsteen was twice booked to play the Shaboo Inn in Willimantic in 1973, but both shows were canceled by the band due to other obligations.
Shortly after those 1973 Connecticut shows, Springsteen famously decided to stop opening for other acts, feeling inhibited by the half-hour set times imposed on opening acts and the E Street Band’s incompatibility, style-wise, with some of the acts they were asked to open for.
It wasn’t long before he would be back in large venues as the headliner, including a triumphant return to New Haven Coliseum in 1977 and 1978, but there was a brief period of touring colleges and clubs to get through first. On Dec. 1, 1973, Springsteen could be found at Quinnipiac College (now Quinnipiac University) in Hamden. Less than two weeks later, he was at the Pinecrest Country Club in Shelton, and the following April he was at the University of Hartford, the University of Connecticut and Choate Rosemary Hall prep school in Wallingford. For at least one of those shows, Springsteen and the E Street Band were still serving as an opening act but had largely phased out of that role. In the audience at the Choate show was one of Springsteen’s greatest supporters, legendary talent scout John Hammond, who had signed him to Columbia Records in 1972.
By 1976, Springsteen was confidently selling out larger venues, playing the Palace Theater in Waterbury on Aug. 21 of that year, with an added horn section.
Nearly all of Springsteen’s Connecticut appearances have been, like the one on March 12 at Mohegan Sun, alongside the E Street Band. Exceptions include the solo shows he did in 2005 at Arena at Harbor Yard and in 1996 at the Oakdale Theater in Wallingford.
Despite playing in stadiums and arenas, the E Street Band maintained a rock-and-roll roadhouse sensibility, and members of the band have turned up at smaller stages in Connecticut during the past several decades. Toad’s Place in New Haven has hosted separate tours by several members of the E Street Band, including Nils Lofgren, Van Zandt (who also brought the live show based on his “Little Steven’s Underground Garage” radio program there) and the late saxophonist Clarence Clemons. After the band’s 1978 New Haven Coliseum appearance, they all popped into Toad’s afterward, and Springsteen and Clemons jumped onstage to play with John Cafferty & Beaver Brown.
In Connecticut, Springsteen and the E Street Band have lived up to their reputation as an unpredictable live act. Set lists regularly changed from what the band had done on previous nights in other cities. When they played back-to-back shows on Sept. 7 and 8, 1984 at Hartford Civic Center, only 20 of the 30 or more songs played each night were the same, and many of those were played in a different order each night.
Courant rock critic Eric Danton wrote of a pair of Rentschler Field shows in East Hartford on Sept. 16 and 18, 2003 that Springsteen “played many of the same songs as on Tuesday, yet they felt very different. Where ‘The Rising’ felt mournful earlier in the week, Springsteen injected the song with a sense of the grim heroism its protagonists displayed on Sept. 11, 2001. ‘Lonesome Day’ tore like a shot out of the ending of the song ‘The Rising,’ and Springsteen stomped his feet and swung his guitar around, lost in the power of his music.”
The E Street Band’s ranks have swelled over the years. For the current tour, it has 10 members including Springsteen. He and bassist Garry Tallent are the two remaining founding members. Van Zandt, keyboardist Roy Bittan and drummer Max Weinberg all started playing with Springsteen in the mid-1970s. Backing vocalist Patti Scialfa (who married Springsteen in 1991) and guitarist Nils Lofgren both joined in 1984. Keyboardist/accordionist Charles Giordano came on board in 2008, after the death of Danny Federici. Violinist Soozie Tyrell started recording with Springsteen in 1992 and touring with him in 2002. Saxophonist Jake Clemons has been in the band since 2012, following in the steps of his uncle Clarence, who died in 2011.
The E Street Band is enhanced on this tour by four other backing vocalists, a four-piece horn section and percussionist Anthony Almonte.
