Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
Civic Center
Springfield, MA
August 22, 1976
ER Archives Vol. 12 via JEMS

JEMS 2015 Transfer: low generation reel > Otari 5050 mkII azimuth-adjusted transfer > Sound Devices USBPre 2 > Audacity 2.0 (24/96) capture > iZotope RX4 > iZotope RX MBIT+ resample 16/44.1 > Peak Pro XT (Edit / Index) > xACT 2.21 > FLAC 

01 Night
02 Rendezvous
03 Spirit in the Night
04 It's My Life
05 Thunder Road
06 She's the One
07 Born to Run
08 Something in the Night
09 Backstreets
10 Tenth Avenue Freeze-out (w/ Miami Horns)
11 Jungleland
12 Rosalita
13 Sandy
14 Raise Your Hand (w/ Miami Horns)
15 You Can't Sit Down (w/ Miami Horns)

Known Faults:
-Cuts between each song
-Something In The Night: first 2 minutes cut due to severe tape drag
-Raise Your Hand: splice

Welcome back to the twelfth in a series of releases (preceded by ten Bruce titles and one Hall and Oates released on DIME) from the ER Archives, the collection of an active '70s taper and trader who stepped away from collecting, leaving his tapes dormant until now. ER's collection contains previously uncirculated shows as well as upgrades to circulating tapes, both audience and soundboard. He used high-end tape decks and good tape, so his copies of even well-known shows have proven to be improvements.

Installment 12 is easily the weakest recording we've released from ER's terrific tape collection, but it has the unique distinction of solving a mystery. 

As well documented in the entry for this show on the indispensable brucebase.wikispaces.com, there is an oft-booted soundboard tape from the '76 tour that has been in circulation since the vinyl days. Over the years, it has been misattributed to Philadelphia and Waterbury, but it doesn't match the audience tapes of those shows.
It was eventually speculated that the board tape was from Springfield, MA, and Brucebase has provisionally assigned the recording to that show and date for many years now, while never having hard evidence to definitively settle the matter.

When ER recently shipped the final batch of tapes to JEMS from his archive, one of the reels was marked Springfield 8/22/76. I presumed it would be the familiar board tape, but to my surprise, it turned out to be a previously uncirculated audience recording. And, low and behold, it matches the performance on the soundboard recording, thereby confirming that indeed, Brucebase was correct, and the board tape was actually Springfield all along. In addition to finally having confirmation regarding the SB tape, for the first time we get the last 3 songs of the show missing from the SB recording.

As an audience tape, the quality of this recording is only fair to middling. It has cuts between many tracks (almost always the telltale sign of a novice taper trying to save tape/preserve recording time), but what audience you do hear suggests an extremely enthusiastic crowd. Samples provided.

Once again carrying this tape over the finish line is JEMS' production supervisor MJK5510. Thanks to him for final polish and prepping. Pete at Brucebase also leaned in to confirm the mystery was solved.

And of course, big thanks once again to the ER Archive for opening up the vault doors and sharing this recording with the fans. Feel free to let him know how you feel in the comments.

BK for JEMS