Cover Me: Bright Lights, Big City

By February 1972, The Bruce Springsteen Band was at the top of its bluesy game.

Thanks to the local popularity of Bruce’s previous band, Steel Mill, Bruce had developed a loyal following in Richmond, Virginia, leading to a month-long stand for his new band at The Back Door, a legendary live music venue from 1970 until its closure in late 2018. (The venue changed names a few times along the way.)

Bruce was established enough locally to not only draw crowds but bootleggers, too, leading to a collection of fine (for their age) documents of this pre-E Street stand.

The stand may have been pre-E Street, but the band wasn’t: the five-man combo consisted of Bruce, Steve Van Zandt, Garry Tallent, David Sancious, and Vini Lopez. Only Clarence and Danny had yet to join the original line-up.

At the opening show of their Back Door residency, The Bruce Springsteen Band was joined by Southside Johnny, already known for his impressive harmonica skills. Bruce gave Southside a spotlight that night on Jimmy Reed’s “Bright Lights, Big City.”

Reed’s song was a decade old by that time and already a standard for any self-respecting blues band. Notching in at #3 on the Billboard R&B chart, “Bright Lights, Big City” also charted at #58 on the Hot 100, earning it broad mainstream appeal as well.

For The Bruce Springsteen Band, “Bright Lights, Big City” was an excuse to strut their instrumental stuff. Jimmy Reed’s original wasn’t even three minutes long; Bruce’s version was fourteen.

Bookended by cool, smoky grooves, the band truly breaks loose in the middle segment where we get one jaw-dropping solo after another. Check out Southside’s harp solo at the four-minute mark, for example, and then again just before the six-minute mark.

Sancious gets his turn shortly before the seven-minute mark, and Bruce reminds us why he’d earned his hot-shot guitarist reputation at about 8:30.

This second and last known Bruce Springsteen Band performance of “Bright Lights, Big City” (the first is from the previous year and nowhere near as impressive in either audio or performance quality) was one of the highlights from that entire February stand.

Bruce would end his eponymous band by that summer; by the fall, he’d begin touring for his first album. But that first half of 1972 brought a collection of smoking, stunning pre-fame performances by a band that would soon set the world on fire.

Bonus: Bruce played “Bright Lights, Big City,” only once more after his Bruce Springsteen Band era. Just before he reached his peak of popularity in the summer of 1984, Bruce joined John Eddie & The Front Street Runners on stage at The Stone Pony.

Bruce joined John for four songs that night, one of which was a cover of the Jimmy Read classic. That performance was captured, too. It sounds a lot more like what we’d expect a Springsteen cover of “Bright Lights, Big City” to sound like, but I prefer the swinging 1972 version to the hard-rocking ’84 one.

Bright Lights, Big City
First performed: September 1, 1971 (Long Branch, NJ)
Last performed: June 1, 1984 (Asbury Park, NJ)