GROWIN' UP

Live 09 Aug 1978 version

[Spoken Intro:] I wrote this song in 1971, I think. Roy! It was, it was, I remember I was 12 years old. One... And I was going to this Catholic school and I got sent home for pissing in my desk. Obviously, a popular pastime, right? (chuckles) And the sisters told my mother that I needed psychiatric attention. (chuckles) And so my mother, the only people that were more scared of nuns than the kids was the parents. And you know, like I remember my old man and my old lady, they were terrified of them sisters. So downtown they take me to this doc. And uh, I'm sitting down there on the couch and he says, "Son, how did you get this way?" And I thought about it and I said, "Doc, I'm glad you asked, because up to now, I've kept it a secret, but the fact was I was a teenage werewolf." I said, "Doc, I was standing out on the street. I remember it was midnight. I looked up, it was a full moon. Felt this hair growing all over my face, felt my fingers get longer and my nails pop out, and a guitar pop out of my left side. My pants got tighter, my hair got longer, and a man with a cigar come up and stung me on the ass. And, (chuckles) and all of a sudden, in one moment I looked up and there was this light, and for just one second...

I stood stone-like at midnight suspended in my masquerade
I combed my hair till it was just right and commanded the night brigade, hey!
I was open to pain and crossed by the rain, I walked on a crooked crutch
Well I strode all alone into a fallout zone, came out with my soul untouched
Hid in the clouded wrath of the crowd, when they said "sit down" I stood up
Ooh, ooh, growin' up

Well the flag of piracy flew from my mast, my sails were set wing to wing
Well I had a jukebox graduate for first mate, she couldn't sail but she sure could sing
Well I pushed B-52, bombed 'em with the blues with my gear set stubborn on standing
I broke all the rules, strafed my old high school, never once gave thought to landing
Hid in the clouded wrath of the crowd, when they said "come down" I threw up
Ooh, ooh, growin' up

Big Man! Assist me please!

[Spoken:] And I remember, it was years later. I grew up, I came home from high school one day. The old man's sitting at the kitchen table with the old lady, and they're looking pretty serious. [Clarence: They said, "Son, sit down, please."] So I knew I was in trouble as they called me "son". The other stuff they used to call me I can't say over the radio. (chuckles) But uh, (chuckles) so, anyway, I sit down, and my mother, she does the talking, she's the Italian, right? She says, "It's time, we decided, me and your father, we decided you gotta stop fooling around with yourself." How'd they know what I was doing in my room at night? They said, "You gotta get serious, it's like (chuckles), it's uh, it's time that you put that guitar down, that thing's okay for a hobby but you're never gonna get anyplace with that." And my father said, "You should be a lawyer because lawyers, they own the world". And my mother, she said, "You should be an author, you should write books." So, they said, "But we decided this is too big a decision, what you gotta do, you gotta go over to the rectory, you gotta talk to Father Ray about your vocation, we set up an appointment, you gotta go over there in an hour". 'Cause that was the thing I used to have to do in those days. So I go over to the rectory... Oop, before I went over there, my father says, "Now when you go talk to the priest, you tell him you wanna be a lawyer, you tell him you, you wanna be an author, but don't you tell him nothing about that goddamn guitar." I said, "Okay, okay." I go over to the priest's house. I ring on the doorbell, "Father Ray, this is Mr. Springsteen's son, I've come to talk to you about my vocation." So he comes out and we start walking around the church and uh, they all, the priests in those days, they all had like illusions of "The Bells Of Saint Mary". They'd seen that movie too many times or something. They're all doing Patrick O'Brien, is that his name? Pat O'Brien imitations. And like, we talked for a while and he says, "Listen, I decided that this decision is too big for me to make. What you gotta do, you gotta go direct to God, you gotta talk to God about this. Now you tell him you wanna be a lawyer. You tell him you wanna be an author. [a woman from the crowd yells] But don't tell him nothing about being, what? An interior decorator? (chuckles) That's you? (chuckles) But don't you tell him nothing about that goddamn guitar." I said, "Okay, okay." So I figured I gotta go see God and all I had to go see him in was my mother's Rambler. It was all beat up, all smashed up, paint scraped off the side. So I drive over to Clarence's house. I say, "Clarence, I got the word, I gotta go see God tonight". He says, "But you can't go in that car." I said, "What do you mean I can't go in this, it's the only car I got." He says, "Naw, that thing's, thing's ugly as hell, it's like... You think he's gonna see you in that car? There's gonna be guys up there with Monte Carlos, Lincolns, Continentals, you think he's gonna notice you?" So I said, "Okay, okay." So I went down to Earl Sheib. At the time it was $39.95. I went by the other day, I seen that Earl's since upped it 10 bucks. (chuckles) But anyway, he does the car, midnight blue, I leave the windows down. He does the interior for free. Ah, if I had my brother in the back seat, he had done him free of charge too, that's right. (chuckles) Anyway, me and Clarence we drive out to see God. Clarence says he knows where he is. So we get out there and I don't see nothing but this dark hill next to this cemetery. I say, "Clarence, uh, are you sure he's up there? You sure it ain't, (chuckles) you sure it ain't, you sure it ain't the other God? This is the right place?" And while I'm up there what? Ask him about? [Clarence: My Nakamichi] The tape player that [Clarence: yeah] somebody stole out of your room". So I had these two big questions that I'd ask, about Clarence's tape player and what I'm gonna do with my life. So up the hill I go and it's dark and it's scary. All these noises coming out of the woods. And when I got to the top I realized that the place was packed. There was people all over the place. I'm walking around. I bump into Kid Leo. I go, "Kid, what are you doing?" He says, "Praying for more watts. I gotta blast this baby all the way to New Jersey." Crazy men up there. So I find myself a quiet place, I kneel down. I say, "God, my father wants me to be a lawyer, my mother wants me to be an author, but I got this guitar, you see?" And all of a sudden, heard this thunder [Max pounds the drums], seen this lightning coming out of the sky, it was real quiet for a while, and then I heard just three words: "Let it rock!"

Well I took month-long vacations in the stratosphere, you know it's really hard to hold your breath
I swear I lost everything I ever loved or feared, I was the cosmic kid
My feet they finally took root in the earth, got me a nice little place in the stars
I swear I found the key to the universe in the engine of an old parked car
Well I hid in the clouded wrath of the crowd, when they said "sit down" I said...
Ooh, ooh, growin' up
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Growin' up
Say!

Cleveland Boys!
One, two!

Info

The above lyrics are for the live 09 Aug 1978 performance of GROWIN' UP at The Agora in Cleveland, OH, during the Darkness On The Edge Of Town Tour. The song was played in a full-band, album-style arrangement, and featured a story in the break.

Clarence Clemons says "My Nakamichi" in the spoken rap. Nakamichi is a historic Japanese high end audio company most famous for its innovative and very high quality cassette decks.

The 09 Aug 1978 Show

The famed 09 Aug 1978 concert at The Agora was hosted by local radio station WMMS-FM in celebration of the tenth anniversary for the station's "WMMS" callsign, which was changed from WHK-FM on 28 Sep 1968. The concert was not on the initial list of planned Darkness On The Edge Of Town Tour shows and more than 1,200 fans were awarded free tickets in a postcard giveaway. WMMS was one of the early supporters of Bruce Springsteen, even before his Born To Run album came out, and DJ Kid Leo is credited to have played a major role in aiding Springsteen's career.

Promotional poster for the 09 Aug 1978 show at The Agora, Cleveland, OH
(Taken from Brucebase)

Ticket stub for the 09 Aug 1978 show at The Agora, Cleveland, OH
(Taken from Brucebase)

The concert was broadcast nationwide live on WMMS and many other FM radio stations, including WABX in Detroit, MI, WDVE in Pittsburgh, PA, WEBN in Cincinnati, OH, WXRT in Chicago, IL, KSHE in St. Louis, MO, and KQRS in Minneapolis, MN. A total audience for the broadcast is estimated at three million. Denny Sanders was the on-air DJ while Kid Leo introduced Springsteen on stage. This show was later mastered by Springsteen's management and given to KSAN-FM in San Francisco who broadcast it as a replacement for a scheduled Winterland rebroadcast sometime in 1979. It was also given to WNEW-FM in New York City for a broadcast on Easter Sunday of 1979 and WWDC 101 in Washington D.C. on 05 Nov 1979. WMMS also rebroadcast the entire concert on 05 Nov 1979.

As The Agora owner Hank LoConti told Cleveland's The Plain Dealer in May 2012, one audio feed from the show was produced by Jimmy Iovine and went to a production truck outside The Agora for radio broadcast — the truck was actually an old school bus converted into a recording studio by Sam Kopper, a former announcer at Boston's WBCN. Another audio feed went directly upstairs to Agency Recording Studios and was captured on 24-track tape for a possible live album release. That 24-track pristine master recording remained in the vault, but LoConti revealed to The Plain Dealer that he recently made the recording into a very limited (10 copies only) edition four-disc box set that also included an hour-long 16-track recording of Springsteen's 03 Jun 1974 show at The Agora. He sent copies to Springsteen, Steven Van Zandt, and Springsteen's management, asking permission to issue the set for sale, with all proceeds going to the Western Reserve Historical Society. "Unfortunately," LoConti said, "the manager said no."

Hank LoConti, owner of the Agora music hall, holds a four-disc set of Springsteen's 1974 and 1978 performances at The Agora (taken from Cleveland.com)

In December 2014 the complete 09 Aug 1978 concert was officially released on Live.BruceSpringsteen.net (see the "Official Live Downloads" section below for more details). The audio is sourced from seven 1/4 inch, 15 ips, half-track, mixdown reel-to-reel tapes that were located by Toby Scott, Springsteen's longtime recording engineer and archivist. The reels were transferred via the Plangent Process, the same analogue tape restoration technique used to good effect for the November 2014 box-set release of Springsteen's first seven albums, and mastered at Bob Ludwig's Gateway Mastering Studios in Portland, ME. The audio quality of this transfer surpasses all previously available bootlegs of the show.

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band -- The Agora, Cleveland 1978

"Initially, what Toby found in the Thrill Hill archives was not a great-sounding transfer of the reels that they'd had," Brad Serling, founder and CEO of Nugs.net which handles the live series, told Backstreets. "So they asked Sirius, and Sirius pulled out their copy ─ which apparently sounded better than what Toby had from the initial transfer. That's what was originally slated for release, and even sent off to Gateway to be mastered. Meanwhile, Toby still wanted to find the original reels and see if he could make a better transfer. I happened to call him while he was working on this ─ I voiced concern about putting out a bootleg that people had already heard if it wasn't the best existing sound. He said, 'Well, it does sound better than the last transfer, but I think we can do better.'"

"Serendipitously, Toby found a box of seven reels that been on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame," continues Serling, "and that was it. The reels ─ the pre-FM, stereo mix of this show ─ had gone missing, and it turns out they were in this box that was on loan to the Rock Hall. And Toby had managed to find it just in time."

Release notes from Toby Scott:

I found the seven Agora tape reels in a box that had been returned from the Rock'n Roll Hall Of Fame. The tapes were part of an exclusive Springsteen exhibit "Asbury Park to the Promised Land". It wasn't until the request to release this show came up that the tapes needed to be found. Not at Sony, not at Thrill Hill Archives, not at the archiving company. Last known location was the Rock'n Roll Hall of Fame. They informed me what box to look in and there they were, marked with the original indication of speed, tracks and show date.

I had the tapes delivered to Plangent Processes for evaluation and transfer, if they seemed to be of adequate quality. After comparison to other copies of this show, this was the best version and potentially the original master tapes. Plangent transferred all seven reels using their unique process, which corrects any speed variations for accurate playback. This eliminates the wow and flutter usually found in the playback of any analog tape. This new transfer to the digital domain was done at 192 (samples per second) with 24 bit resolution. The resulting digital files were sent to Gateway Mastering for evaluation and mastering, as was done to the Box Set Volume 1, recently released to critical acclaim. The resulting new master will give a renewed vigor to the already exciting show.

The provenance of the reels is still not entirely clear to Scott or to Serling, but Backstreets suspects that they are the mixed-down and mastered reels from which copies of the show were made by Columbia to service other select radio stations when demand for live Springsteen was raging in the late '78 and early '79. Some have speculated that the show was considered for a possible official live album release in 1979, and though there isn't enough evidence to conclusively state that, Serling does note, "That's what's interesting ─ that could be what this stereo mix is! The boxes say 'Springsteen Live,' as if it were a live album."

The seven reel-to-reel tapes from which the official release was transferred (taken from Backstreets.com)

The 09 Aug 1978 broadcast from The Agora was commercially released in Europe. Since 2005 some enterprising record labels in Europe (mostly in the UK) have been releasing Bruce Springsteen radio and TV broadcasts (and some soundboard recordings) from the seventies, eighties, and nineties. Though these releases are not authorized by Bruce Springsteen or his record company, they are lawful due to a legal loophole in Europe.

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band -- Agora Ballroom 1978

3xCD - Leftfield Media (LFM3CD529) - UK, 2014

This release contains the 09 Aug 1978 broadcast from The Agora.

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band -- Agora Ballroom 1978 Volume One

2xLP - Let Them Eat Vinyl (LETV250LP) - UK, 2015

This release contains part 1 of three of the 09 Aug 1978 broadcast from The Agora.

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band -- Agora Ballroom 1978 Volume Two

2xLP - Let Them Eat Vinyl (LETV252LP) - UK, 2015

This release contains part 2 of three of the 09 Aug 1978 broadcast from The Agora.

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band -- Agora Ballroom 1978 Volume Three

2xLP - Let Them Eat Vinyl (LETV253LP) - UK, 2015

This release contains part 3 of three of the 09 Aug 1978 broadcast from The Agora.

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band -- Live At The Agora Ballroom, Cleveland, Ohio, USA 1978

3xCD - Live Wire (LW2014) - UK, 2015

This release contains the 09 Aug 1978 broadcast from The Agora.

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band -- The Complete 1978 Radio Broadcasts

15xCD - Sound Stage (SSCDBOX10) - UK, 2015

This release contains the 09 Aug 1978 broadcast from The Agora, the 07 Jul 1978 broadcast from The Roxy Theatre, the 19 Sep 1978 broadcast from Capitol Theatre, the 30 Sep 1978 broadcast from Fox Theatre, and the 15 Dec 1978 broadcast from Winterland Ballroom.

Bruce Springsteen -- Thunder Road - Live

20xCD - KP Music (SPRING01) - Europe, 2020

This release contains the 31 Jul 1973 broadcast from My Father's Place, the 03 Mar 1974 late show broadcast from Georgetown University, the 09 Mar 1974 KLOL-FM radio broadcast, the 05 Feb 1975 broadcast from The Main Point, the 15 Aug 1975 early show broadcast from Bottom Line, the 17 Oct 1975 early show broadcast from The Roxy Theatre, the 09 Aug 1978 broadcast from The Agora, the 30 Sep 1978 broadcast from Fox Theatre, the 05 Jun 1992 broadcast from Hollywood, the 20 Aug 1994 show with Joe Grushecky & The Houserockers at Marz American Style, plus some various TV performances from 1992-1995.

Official Live Downloads

Prior to the High Hopes Tour, Bruce Springsteen's management announced a new service allowing fans to download concert recordings approximately 48 hours after each show. The initial plan required fans to purchase a special USB wristband, which could then be used to download a single High Hopes Tour show of the purchaser's choice and also functions as a regular reusable USB flash drive. The wristband, which could be purchased online or at the concert venue, was priced at $40. Following some negative response from fans over the high cost for the wristband, Springsteen's management subsequently announced a separate cheaper option for purchasing shows directly, without the need for the wristband. The shows were available for purchase and download via Live Nation, Bruce Springsteen's concert promoter, priced at $9.99 for MP3 and $14.99 for FLAC. Audio recordings for 31 of the 34 High Hopes Tour dates (all except 16 Feb 2014, 06 Apr 2014, and 03 May 2014) were released as such and they were available until 30 Jun 2014.

On 17 Nov 2014, Live.BruceSpringsteen.net was launched. It's a new addition to the official website, serving as an online store offering high-quality live concert recordings as well as high-resolution digital releases of Springsteen's album catalog. The download store is powered by Nugs.net in cooperation with Columbia Records. Audio recordings for 30 of the 34 High Hopes Tour dates (all except 16 Feb 2014, 06 Apr 2014, 03 May 2014, and 18 May 2014) were re-released on the new download store in multiple formats, including MP3, lossless CD-quality FLAC or ALAC, and 24-bit HD FLAC or ALAC or MQA, as well as audio CD-R with custom artwork. Nugs.net adopted the MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) format on 24 May 2017. From then on, all Bruce Springsteen live concert recordings, including the previously released ones, became also available in MQA.

Audio recordings for all 75 The River Tour 2016 dates were also released on Live.BruceSpringsteen.net in multiple formats, including MP3, lossless CD-quality FLAC or ALAC, and 24-bit HD FLAC or ALAC or MQA, as well as audio CD-R with custom artwork. Each show was generally released within a month after it took place.

Audio recordings for all 14 Summer '17 Tour dates were also released on Live.BruceSpringsteen.net in multiple formats, including MP3, lossless CD-quality FLAC or ALAC, and 24-bit HD FLAC or ALAC or MQA, as well as audio CD-R with custom artwork. Each show was generally released within a month after it took place.

Archival releases were periodically released on the same site, as part of the Bruce Springsteen Archive Series. These shows were also made available in multiple formats, including MP3, lossless FLAC or ALAC, 24-bit FLAC or ALAC or MQA, DSD, and audio CD-R. So far 90 shows (or sets of shows) were released from the ongoing series.

Credits / References

Thanks Jake (ol'catfishinthelake at BTX and Greasy Lake) for the lyrics help. Some of the above info about the 09 Aug 1978 concert is taken from Brucebase.

Available Versions

List of available versions of GROWIN' UP on this website:

Page last updated: 07 Apr 2015