New for 2024: Review for 1985 and 1988; audio for 1992; new entry for 2023
1974: A scheduled E Street Band gig in Memphis is cancelled.
1978: Bruce and the E Street Band bring the Darkness Tour to Berkeley.
1985: Night Two in Paris on the Born in the U.S.A. Tour features the last performance of “Point Blank” in its original arrangement for 23 years.
1989: Bruce makes a guest appearance with Jackson Browne at Bally’s Atlantic City casino, playing “Stay,” “Running on Empty,” and “Sweet Little Sixteen.”
1992: Elliott Murphy guest stars at Bruce’s second night in Paris for World Tour 1992, performing Bruce’s only known performance of “Rock Ballad.”
1998: VH1 airs a “Before They Were Stars” segment on Bruce. Here’s the (not very well fact-checked) segment.
2005: In today’s installment of Legends of Springsteen, Bruce plays six songs to airport staff in the middle of the night during a brief connecting layover in Iceland on the way home from his European solo acoustic tour. This is Bruce’s only “performance” in Iceland to date.
2009: Bruce and the E Street Band tour premiere “Atlantic City” and “I Fought the Law” at their Working on a Dream show in Bern, Switzerland.
2013: Bruce headlines Hard Rock Calling in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, where Bruce plays his Born in the U.S.A. album start-to-finish. Zac Brown guests on “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” and Bruce closes with an acoustic “My Lucky Day” (replacing the setlisted “Thunder Road”). The full-album portion of the show will be included with Bruce’s High Hopes album the following year.
2018: Springsteen on Broadway continues its theatrical run at the Walter Kerr Theater in New York City. Kylie Minogue and Amber Heard are in attendance tonight.
2021: Bruce releases the 24th installment of his E Street Radio show, From My Home to Yours, entitled “Night Time is the Right Time.”
That evening, Springsteen on Broadway continues its return engagement at the St. James Theater in New York City, and Jon Stewart, Patti Hansen, and Michael Kors are in attendance.
2023: Bruce and the E Street Band bring their world tour to Oslo, where Bruce gets a little too close to the microphone at the start of “Thunder Road.”
I’ve just discovered your great blog in the last few weeks, and I love the structure of these Kingdom of Days posts. I grew up in the Bay Area, apparently just a city or two south of Boss père and mère, but my ignorant 9-year-old self missed out on those San Jose and Berkeley Darkness shows.
I’m no Bruce historian, so is there any known reason why that string of ’74 Memphis gigs were cancelled? Illness in the band? Poor sales across a particular touring leg? (Were BS & E St. [prE-Street?] even touring in the typical sense at this stage, or was this more like a planned residency that got drastically shortened?)
Thank you again for such a great blog and all the time you must spend writing and assembling these posts. This is great summer reading. If there is ever a Live 1975 – 2025 box set (probably more like a crate set) I hope you get to curate it.
Thanks for the note, Michael! I appreciate the encouragement. I don’t know why those Memphis shows were cancelled, unfortunately. We’re still discovering a lot of booked-but-never-played gigs from those days.