The Fat Angel Sings

Fresh mix from multi-track of New Year’s Eve show at Tower Theater
For Bruce Springsteen, 1975 was a year that changed everything, 12 months of milestones which included recording the majority of and releasing the seminal “Born to Run” to critical acclaim; his first true national and international tour in support of the album; and appearing simultaneously on the covers of the National magazines Time and Newsweek. 

The year and the Born to Run tour came to a close with a four-night stand on friendly turf at the Tower Theater in Upper Darby, PA, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, with the final show ringing in 1976. The band marked the occasion by wearing tuxedos, in response to which Bruce said, “If I’d known you guys would dress like this, I wouldn’t have come.” That memorable performance arrives today at live.brucespringsteen.net as the third archival release in Springsteen’s live Archive Series .

December 31, 1975 is newly mixed from 16-track master reels by Toby Scott and mastered by Adam Ayan at Bob Ludwig’s Gateway Mastering. It’s being released in standard and ultra-high-resolution 24-bit/192Khz digital files, as well as being available for CD pre-orders which will ship in another month, says Brad Serling, founder and CEO of Nugs.net which powers the Springsteen download store.

“In looking for the next release,” Serling tells Backstreets, “we wanted to go for the highest quality sources we could find. With Agora, we found the highest-quality two-track, but we didn’t want to go down that road with the next release. Toby was going through the list of what Sony had in their archive, and up came a complete set of multi-track reels from the last night of the Born to Run tour. So that was pretty compelling.”

Things moved impressively fast from there, as Scott got the tapes from Sony and shipped them to Sonicraft, which specializes in multi-track analog-to-digital transfers and just happens to be based in Bruce’s hometown of Freehold, NJ.

“It didn’t require the level of work of a Plangent transfer,” Serling explains. “The tapes just needed to be baked and sampled.” The 24/192 transfer made its way back to Thrill Hill, where Toby Scott began to mix “as purely as possible, with no gadgetry” through his SSL console. “He built the mix in a way he knew Bruce would like a live show to sound, particularly from that era,” Serling adds. Scott sent the results to Jon Landau and to Bruce for them to listen and approve, and then on to Gateway for mastering. The process wrapped up the first week in February.

The show was recorded by a young Jimmy Iovine in the Record Plant’s remote truck, one of a few select dates (including CW Post College on Long Island and Seneca College in Toronto) captured at the request of Mike Appel for a possible live album. Rough mixes of the show were made back in early 1976 for consideration, but the live album plan was scrapped.

Nine tracks from those ’76 mixes surfaced to collectors a few years ago, and a rough two-track board tape has been around for decades from the collection of the Philadelphia DJ Ed Sciaky. But this all-new Toby Scott mix marks the first time the complete performance has been heard, and the quality is undoubtedly unprecedented.

In terms of setlist, Philadelphia 12/31/75 varies materially from the other high-quality document we have of the Born to Run tour, Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75, recorded just six weeks earlier on November 18. The set includes the show jump-starter “Night,” “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?,” the stunning and short-lived slow piano arrangement of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-out,” plus extraordinary covers of The Animals’ “It’s My Life,” Manfred Mann’s “Pretty Flamingo” and Harold Dorman’s “Mountain of Love” (also made famous by Johnny Rivers) before closing out the night with “Twist and Shout.”

“It is amazing how young Bruce sounds,” notes Serling. “It’s the end of this monumental tour, at a pivotal point in his career, and it is thrilling to listen to.”  Thanks to Erik Flannagan