Bruce Springsteen
Berkeley Community Theatre
Berkeley, CA
July 1, 1978
JEMS Archive

JEMS 2017 Transfer: low generation cassette > Nakamichi CR-7A azimuth-adjusted playback > Sound Devices USBPre2 > Audacity 2.0 (16/44 capture to .wav) > iZotope RX6 and Ozone 6 mastering > Peak Pro XT (post production) > xACT 2.37 > FLAC

01 Badlands
02 Night
03 Spirit In The Night
04 Darkness On The Edge Of Town
05 For You
06 The Promised Land
07 Prove It All Night
08 Racing In The Street
09 Thunder Road
10 Soundcheck Snippet: New York City Serenade > Prove It All Night

On a recent trip north, I had a chance to visit M (as in the M in JEMS), stalwart custodian of JEMS’ complete Springsteen archive. Spurred on by the efforts of our pal mjk5510 to track down upgrades to circulating tapes for which no master sources are available, I wondered if I might find some material upgrades to familiar shows lurking in our archive.

I went to visit M with one particular set of tapes in mind, a collection of some 50-60 shows we obtained in ‘80s from a collector who got into Springsteen very early on then dropped out completely. I wasn’t expecting to find anything uncirculated, but I wondered if his copies of some key shows might be superior to what’s around, due to when he obtained them, who he obtained them from (he had both band and label connections) and the fact that his collection was all preserved on clearly annotated (e.g. Dolby on or off), high-quality (TDK SA and Maxell UD-XLII) tapes.

With M’s help, I pulled and auditioned several shows and found a good number of potential upgrade candidates which I am presently working through, with this being the first to make the grade.

The live versions of “Prove It All Night” and “Paradise By The C” aired by some radio stations in 1978 are culled from this show, which was recorded on multi-tracks and later mixed down to two-track with the intent to cull live cuts, though Columbia never even pressed up “Prove It” or “Paradise” as a promo nor anything else from those tapes.

Incomplete copies of the mixed Berkeley recording have been around collector circles for decades, consisting of the full first set plus “Paradise By The C” from the second set and the four-song encore. But for whatever reason, the quality of the circulating copies is not stellar, sounding hissy and flat.

Which is what made this particular copy of Berkeley such a pleasant discovery. It is positively sparkling, rich and super clear, generations closer than previous versions. If you felt like the recent official ’77 releases suffered from being in mono, you are gonna love the wide stereo found here and the detailed instrument separation that tells you it was mixed from multis. Samples provided.

This is primetime on the Darkness tour and the performance does not disappoint. Every one of these performances is up there with the best versions ever, and I suspect this show will be reassessed now that we can hear it so clearly.

The bad news is the 60-minute cassette did not contain the four encore tracks nor “Paradise By the C.” The good news is it did contain something else that’s short, special and very sweet indeed. Tacked on the end of the tape, previously unbeknownst to us or seemingly anyone, is three and a half minutes from the soundcheck where the band plays some of “New York City Serenade” and the intro to “Prove It All Night.” Brucebase aficionados will undoubtedly have already recognized that “New York City Serenade” was not played at all on the Darkness tour. In fact, this is the only known even partial performance of the song between the Bottom Line in August 1975 and Continental Airlines Arena in August 1999. It is but a snippet but still very fun to hear for the first time.

Huge credit goes to M for maintaining JEMS’ Springsteen archive is such a well-organized and deep fashion. He truly is the keeper of the Bruce flame. Thanks as well to mjk5510 for inspiring the mission and for his on-going role as JEMS post-production supervisor. 

BK for JEMS