By DONNA BALANCIA
Bruce Springsteen has released newly remastered live recordings from the 1978 Darkness Tour, called Winterland 12/15/78 and Winterland 12/16/78.
The two San Francisco recordings are a rare find. Winterland 12/15/78 was the final radio concert on the Darkness tour, the other is a long-lost bootleg.
Winterland 12/16/78 is the recording of the second show in San Francisco during the Darkness Tour. It’s a newly mixed record from Plangent Processed, multi-track master tapes by Jon Altschiller.
Springsteen takes a more relaxed and real performance on that night in San Francisco, he loosens up and makes some changes to the previous night’s broadcast set.
On Winterland 12/16/78, he opens with “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” gives a tour debut to “Rendezvous,” an emotional “Independence Day” and he goes on to top the second set with “(It’s Hard To Be A) Saint In The City.”
Winterland 12/15/78 was the final radio concert on the Darkness tour.
The album was bootlegged as Live In The Promised Land, and the newly remastered 1978 tour recording is available now. The recently discovered two-track, 15 IPS master reels were recorded by the Record Plant Remote Truck.
Winterland 12/15/78 includes “Prove It All Night, “She’s The One” (feat. snippets of “Mona” and “Preacher’s Daughter”), “Backstreets,” “Fire” and “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town,” plus future River tracks “Point Blank” and “The Ties That Bind,” and an epic resurrection of “The Fever.”
