Springsteen’s Own Archivist Says His Newest Vault Concert Fades in the Encore

Bruce Springsteen’s newest Live Archive release is a full New Jersey homecoming by the band many fans still treat as a footnote: the touring group he put together for Human Touch and Lucky Town after sending the E Street Band home. The show, recorded at Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford, comes with an unusual dose of candor attached. Erik Flannigan, the archivist who writes the essay for each release in the series, says the closing run of classics “doesn’t meet the moment.”

That matters because this era rarely gets a fair hearing. Flannigan writes that it “has been marked with an asterisk, often viewed as a deviation from the norm given the new, not E Street band,” and that the series had not returned to it in four years. Roy Bittan on piano and keyboards was the only E Street member on stage. Around him stood guitarist Shane Fontayne, bassist Tommy Sims, drummer Zack Alford, multi-instrumentalist Crystal Taliefero and five backing singers who pushed the songs toward gospel.

The 30-song set runs just over three hours and was the sixth of 11 nights that opened the American leg of the tour on home soil. It holds the tour premieres of “Atlantic City,” “I’m on Fire” and a stripped-back “Spirit in the Night” that starts on acoustic guitar before the full choir joins. “Pony Boy” and “Cross My Heart” are rarer still, each played only twice on the entire tour. Patti Scialfa sings on “Brilliant Disguise,” and Tom Waits’ “Jersey Girl” closes the night.

Flannigan calls “Living Proof” “the masterpiece of this period” and says the version here hits “with emotional depth from start to finish.” He praises the reworked “Spirit in the Night” as a bold choice for an arena, adding simply: “And it works.” The acoustic “Thunder Road,” with light backing from Bittan, he describes as “marvelous.”

The weak spots are named just as plainly. A band assembled in a few months of rehearsals could not match two decades of E Street muscle memory, Flannigan argues, so the newcomers often could not anticipate where Springsteen was taking a song. More than ten minutes of “Light of Day” feels “both rushed and drawn out,” “Glory Days” is “unsure where to go or how to end,” and “Prove It All Night” loses its lift without Clarence Clemons’ saxophone solo. Bittan’s modern synthesizers, he adds, froze some arrangements in their moment. A release that ships with its own critique is honest, but it also tells casual listeners this is a document for completists first.

There is a case for hearing it anyway. The gospel-style backing vocals that once marked this lineup as an outlier have since become a fixture of Springsteen’s recent tours, and most of the Human Touch and Lucky Town songs have largely dropped out of his sets since the E Street reunion. Here they sound like the center of the show rather than a detour from it.

The concert was recorded on July 31, 1992, by Toby Scott and has been mixed and mastered by Jon Altschiller from the multitrack digital master tapes. It went on sale on November 12 through nugs.net, the archive series’ official outlet, on CD and as downloads up to 24-bit hi-res, and it streams for nugs subscribers. It has not been released to the general streaming services so far.

Tags: rock, Bruce Springsteen, live album, Patti Scialfa, Roy Bittan