There actually wasn’t much incentive for filming shows in the pre-MTV, pre-YouTube days, said Chris Phillips, editor and publisher of Backstreets, the website for Springsteen news, With no real outlet on television or the movies, “you were just playing rock ‘n’ roll,” he said.Īs a result, footage of more than snippets of Springsteen onstage then are relatively rare, he said. Back in 1979, the “No Nukes” concert escaped the film phobia because a crew was on hand to make a documentary on the benefit for alternatives to nuclear energy. It’s different now all of Springsteen’s shows are filmed. “I don’t want to see what I’m doing, because it might change what I’m doing,” he said recently, “and what I’m doing is working for me and it’s working for the audience.” Springsteen explains that superstition led him to keep cameras away in those days, something about a musician not wanting to look too closely at his bag of tricks. “The sheer force of E Street at this point was amazing to see.”
“You see them explode onscreen,” he said. When filmmaker Thom Zimny first reviewed the footage, it was without sound, and he could still tell something special was happening. Little wonder, then, to see them burst onto the stage with a roaring version of “Prove it All Night.” That’s exactly what they intended to do. Sharing a bill with artists like Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, and Bonnie Raitt, they burned to show peers what they could do. Their typical four-hour show was condensed into 90 minutes. They’d been off the road in 1979, recording The River, and are thrilled to be before an audience again. Before a friendly crowd at New York’s Madison Square Garden, Springsteen and his gang of Jersey toughs crackle with pent-up energy.
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