Bruce Springsteen to play entire albums at N.J. shows

NEW YORK (Billboard) – Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band will perform an entire album from their back catalog each night of the five night run at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, in October, the group announced late Monday night.
"Born to Run" and "Born in the USA" will each be performed twice, and "Darkness on the Edge of Town" will be played at the other gig.
Springsteen tested full album performances earlier in the tour: in Chicago on September 20 he did "Born to Run" from start to finish as the centerpiece of one of the group's typical marathon sets.
"Chicago convinced us that this was actually worth doing," Springsteen's manager Jon Landau said in a statement. "The audience was so supportive of the concept that it convinced us to go ahead with this at Giants Stadium."
Springsteen and company are in the midst of a fall tour that wraps November 22 in Buffalo, New York. In addition to five gigs at Giants Stadium, a "Born to Run" gig is set for November 18 in Nashville. The band will also appear at New York's Madison Square Garden as part of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th anniversary concert on October 29.
After the tour, the band expects to take an extended break. "We are gonna take, I don't know how long -- a year, year and a half, two years," guitarist Steven Van Zandt said last week.
The album performance schedule for Giants Stadium:
September 30: "Born to Run"
October 2: "Darkness on the Edge of Town"
October 3: "Born in the USA"
October 8: "Born to Run"
October 9: "Born in the USA"

Springsteen's 1st Mariner show sells out in 20 minutes

Bruce Springsteen fans snapped up all the tickets for The Boss' 1st Mariner Arena show in a mere 20 minutes, officials said Friday.For the record, that's about 15 minutes faster than pop star Hannah Montana, according to Frank Remesch, the arena's general manager.The approximately 14,400 tickets for Springsteen's Nov. 20 gig sold out without major hitch, Remesch said. The night before the tickets went on sale, he worried it wouldn't sell out, thereby proving Baltimore's reputation as a second tier tour stop."I was nervous and apprehensive," Remesch said. "But after the first five minutes, we were already into the upper third level. At that point, it was ear-to-ear smiles."About 150 people stood in line outside the arena's box office Friday morning, and nearly everyone in line was able to get a ticket, Remesch said."It was a actually, actually neat thing," he said. "You had a mix of citizens like you wouldn't believe, from ages to jobs. It was just phenomenal."This will be Springsteen's first performance in Baltimore proper since 1973, when he opened for Chicago at the arena, then known as the Baltimore Civic Center. Soon after Friday morning's sellout, tickets for the gig appeared on online broker StubHub for as much as $849.

Bruce Springsteen celebrates his 60th birthday and here are 60 special memories

To celebrate Bruce Springsteen's 60th birthday, my fine editors at The Star-Ledger and nj.com have asked me to come up with my 60 special Springsteen memories.
Bruce was born on Sept. 23, 1949 at Monmouth Memorial Hospital (now Monmouth Medical Center) in Long Branch. He grew up in Freehold. I've been a Springsteen fan since 1975 and saw my first show in 1976, so there's a lot of memories and it was hard to cut it down to 60.

It's quite long, so maybe read it a bit at a time.
Most of these shows/events I was at in person and if I wasn't, I relived them through listening to recordings of the shows or watched the events on TV.First of all, Happy Birthday Bruce! May we all be in as good as shape as you are at 60 and thank you for the great memories and I'm sure there's plenty more to come.

"The Boss" Bruce Springsteen rocks the United Center

You don't need a behind the music TV show to know why Bruce Springsteen, a singer songwriter with multiple Grammys, sells out huge arenas (like the United Center for this show) and is still rocking the music scene. Because good music never gets old, whether Springsteen (with the help of the E Street Band, of course) is leaning on the pop side, making it Americana or doing straight-up rock. Also pretty impressive was Springsteen's halftime performance at last season's Super Bowl (a coup for the NFL after Springsteen turned down requests to perform at previous Super Bowls), when he slid across the stage on his knees, crashing into a camera. He's almost 60. Rock on! 7:30 p.m. Sunday at United Center, 1901 W. Madison St. $65-$98; 800-745-3000, ticketmaster.com

Bruce Springsteen plays on into overtime

He's almost his own natural phenomenon, Bruce Springsteen. Thirty-six years after his first album, decades on the road, and he's still burning up the atmosphere with his candent intensity and ceaseless search for the American Dream, at the end of the street or just over the horizon.
It's not just that he can play for three hours, as he and the E Street Band did at the BankAtlantic Center on Sunday night, but that playing at such full-stream intensity looks as natural and requirement as breathing to him. He turns 60 next week, and yet he just doesn't stop.
What Springsteen's passion means by now is hard to say. The sold-out audience at the BAC was mostly middle-aged, well-fed and comfortable, a long way from the roaring, despai driven dreams of Born to Run, or the working class despair of Seeds, whose acquaintance doesn't know where he's going to sleep.
Yet, whether they're responding to sheer energy and nostalgia, or because Springsteen brings rare meaning to rock-'n'-roll release, or both, the audience roared ardently along on songs like Promised Land and when Springsteen asked ``Can you feel the consecrated fire? We're gonna build a house out of music and out of spirit and out of noise!'' On Sunday night, Springsteen carved a masterful path through longing and exuberance and rage, out to a dimly understood but powerful faith in life.

Springsteen NJ Home Is for Sale Where Boss Wrote ‘Born to Run’

Sept. 2 (Bloomberg). The house in Long Branch, New Jersey, where Bruce Springsteen lived when he wrote the album “Born to Run” in 1974-1975, is on the market for $299,000.
The two bedroom, 828 square foot cottage near the beach with a front porch is listed by Susan McLaughlin, a component for Keller Williams Realty. The listing highlights the property’s place in rock history as “the best darn piece” of rock “memorabilia that $299,000 can buy.”
“It does have a lot of possibilities as a summer cottage,” McLaughlin said in a telephone interview. “It’s excellent for someone who needs a little beach place.”
Springsteen’s “Born to Run” album pushed the New Jersey native to rock stardom and was his third album.
The listing was antecedently resulted by the Asbury Park Press of New Jersey.