Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band

April 09th, 2003 

Arco Arena

Sacramento, California

Conversion: Gen1 CD-R > EAC (Secure) > FLAC
Quality: Excellent audience.

Disc One (53:34:45)

01> Born In the USA (Acoustic)
02> Who'll Stop The Rain
03> No Surrender
04> The Rising
05> Lonesome Day
06> The Fuse
07> Empty Sky
08> You're Missing
09> Waitin' On A Sunny Day
10> The Promised Land
 
Disc Two (66:49:34)

01> World's Apart
02> Badlands
03> She's The One
04> Mary's Place
05> Countin' On A Miracle
06> Jungleland
07> Into The Fire
08> Thunder Road

Disc Three (54:19:18)

01> Ramrod
02> Born To Run
03> My City of Ruins
04> Land of Hope and Dreams
05> Dancing In The Dark
06> Darlington County
07> Bobby Jean *

Notes:

I found this show interesting & worth remastering for a couple of reasons. There were a lot of "firsts"...the first show in Sacramento with the E Street Band since 1975, the first show in the USA after the New Zealand tour, the first show where the soundcheck was known to include "Devils and Dust," and also the first US show since the conflict in Iraq began, occurring on the day that US Forces took Baghdad. One would expect some sort of reaction to be apparent setlist-wise and there certainly was - it just wasn't exactly what anyone expected. Carrying over from New Zealand, Bruce performed the song trio "Born In The USA," "Who'll Stop The Rain," and "No Surrender" before "The Rising" for the first and only time in the US arena tour. The surprises continued throughout the evening with Bruce playing "Jungleland" for the first time in The Rising tour. Additionally he closed the show with "Darlington County" (one of only three times this song ended the show in the whole tour).

Setting the setlist and time frame aside, there's the quality of the audio. The raw tape was nothing incredible by any stretch of the imagination. There were radical volume changes in the first four songs, so radical in fact that listening to it was annoying. Along with that there were some strange pops in a few songs, the track markers were set in curious positions that did not always make sense, and there were some gaps at the ends of some files - just long enough to be annoying. However, after a bit of EQ and a sprinkle of pixie dust here & there, I was extremely impressed by the warmth and presence of the recording. Setting apart some minor volume fluctuations still present in the first few tracks, I think this is one of the best of the arena tour recordings and that it stands on its own quite well. 

Now we get to the fun stuff: known flaws. The first and most obvious flaw that you may notice are the volume fluctuations which are most obvious right at the beginning of D1T03 (No Surrender). For whatever reason the taper turned to the right and left extremely swiftly causing the volume in the left and right channels to fluctuate accordingly. At the same time the gain was turned up, so there is some clipping damage to the track which cannot be overcome. The next flaw: occasionally uneven volume between the left and right channels. From time to time you may notice a brief drop in volume on one channel or the other. This is because the L-R volume in the source differed by varying amounts ranging from -4db to -0.8db. I substituted gain where appropriate to correct for this but you may notice it a bit nonetheless especially during track transitions. Last but not least, gaps. Some of the SHN files had small gaps at the end of them. Mostly this wasn't a big deal to fix, except when the track marker was set at the bridge point between songs like "The Rising" and "Lonesome Day" -or- when the old track marker was put after the beginning of the next song.  In most cases I was able to correct this transparently. In cases where I wasn't able to correct it transparently I moved the track marker so the resulting distortion sounds, at worst, like crowd noise. Additionally I edited out the long periods of crowd noise between the encores.

The bonus track is Bobby Jean from 04-25-2003 in Brisbane. There were others but all were almost unlistenable thanks to the cavernous reverberation in the source tape. 

I created this remaster for my own listening pleasure, but am releasing it to the community in consideration of the amount of work involved. Thanks go out to various members of rec.music.artists.springsteen for their contributions information wise (you know who you are).