Bruce Springsteen on stage at a No Nukes benefit concert in 1979. Photo / Getty Images
It remains one of the world's best ever rock performances, but footage of the gig lay undiscovered - until now.
Six months after America's worst civil nuclear accident, in 1979 Bruce Springsteen stepped on to a New York stage to play a benefit show organised by "No Nukes" campaigners. On two consecutive September nights at Madison Square Garden he played 90-minute sets with his trademark knee slides, jumps on to amps, guitar juggling and hamming it up with the rest of the E Street Band. And thus a meltdown at the infamous Three Mile Island power plant started a chain reaction that led to one of the greatest rock performances.
A camera crew was there to capture the occasion, but Springsteen, beset by what he now confesses were hang-ups, refused to let the film be shown with the exception of three songs glimpsed in a No Nukes cinema documentary in 1980. "I was superstitious and believed a magician should not look too closely at his magic trick," he said later. "I didn't want to see the band [on film]. . . I thought it can only screw everything up."
More than 40 years on — three times as long as it took for the damaged reactor to be made safe — the film has been tracked down, cleaned up and given its rightful place in rock'n'roll history.
It was worth the wait: the film is a joyful blast from the past and a treasure trove of Springsteen anthems (Born to Run, Thunder Road, Rosalita), songs he was testing at the time (Sherry Darling and The River) and high-intensity performances of oldies such as Detroit Medley and Buddy Holly's Rave On.
If it were a classic car, this would be a "barn find", the rare occasion when, say, a perfectly preserved Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, worth a mint, turns up, having lain undiscovered under layers of dust.
Springsteen was a last-minute addition to the line-up of Jackson Browne, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Bonnie Raitt, the Doobie Brothers and Carly Simon, who had forged an alliance called Muse (Musicians United for Safe Energy). Recruited to boost lacklustre ticket sales, Springsteen stopped short of wholeheartedly endorsing the show's "stop nuclear power" message, but seized the chance to play before a live audience.
He had been cooped up in a studio for six months, frustrated with the progress on an unfinished album, The River. As a result he was fizzing with pent-up energy — it was as if, one concert-goer observed, the Three Mile Island reactor had been switched back on. Dave Marsh, Springsteen's official biographer, declared that No Nukes propelled Springsteen firmly and permanently into the pantheon of American superstars. "When it was over, the house came down," he said.
What remains a mystery is how the footage stayed undiscovered for so long. According to Thom Zimny, the film-maker and Springsteen collaborator who stitched it together, it sat for some of the time in unopened film cans in the vaults of Warner Bros. "I stumbled across it and realised this is something I can't stop looking at," he said.
The shows were shot on cinema-quality 16mm celluloid as opposed to cheaper video. "It's raw, documentary-style footage that puts you in front of the stage in 1979 with the original members of the E Street Band, who were at their height," Zimny said. "To keep up with the pace of the live show the crew and cameramen are swinging and panning and running alongside the stage. You have shots of Clarence [Clemons, the saxophonist] in wide angle towering over you and you feel like you're right there."
As well as being one of Springsteen's most electrifying performances, it was also one of his most moving. Crashing into the opening chords of Prove It All Night, youthful in jeans and sideburns, the 29-year-old had a grittiness that reflected the rigours of blue-collar life in troubled times. The US was in the throes of a worsening recession that led to thousands being laid off from the car, steel and construction industries.
"I've been working real hard to get my hands clean," he sings, describing a man's attempts to straighten himself out before proposing to his girlfriend. His lyrics of toil and disappointment, lives cut short, love postponed, anger and hope, captured the mood of post-Vietnam, hard-times America.
It helped that the other disaster that year was the music charts. Radio stations were playing Ring My Bell by Anita Ward and In the Navy by Village People. Hollywood was selling escapism, but for thousands there was no escape from unemployment. Farrah Fawcett, the Charlie's Angels actress and favourite pin-up, smiled down from billboards in a red swimsuit even as queues for soup kitchens and food banks formed in the streets below.
Against this background, Springsteen's next two numbers, Badlands and The Promised Land, both from his album Darkness on the Edge of Town, drew rousing applause from the audience. When he paused to respond to cries of "Brooooce", there was a moment of unscripted comedy. As he came to the front of the stage to enquire "How you doin' tonight?" someone handed him a birthday cake. It had just passed midnight on September 22 (the band was late on stage after other performers overran), and Springsteen had turned 30. "Don't remind me," he yells. "I'm officially over the f***ing hill." Good-naturedly he hurled the cake into the crowd, declaring: "Send me the laundry bill."
Ditching his guitar for a harmonica, he announced a new song — the unreleased title track from The River. The first-person ballad described the life of his younger sister Ginny after her accidental pregnancy at 17 and early marriage to Mickey Shave, a one-time rodeo rider.
Delivered with a New Jersey twang that has since softened, it was the evening's emotional highlight, played to a silent crowd hearing it for the first time. Joyce Millman, a rock reviewer for a Boston paper, was in the audience. "He sang this new ballad with no guitar in hand, no barrier between himself and the audience," she recalls. "It was hypnotic and heart-breaking — the story of young lovers beset by accidental pregnancy and harsh economic realities."
Springsteen described in his 2016 autobiography Born to Run how he wrote it after a long night driving home to New Jersey. "It was just a guy in a bar talking to a stranger on the next stool. I based the song on the crash of the construction industry, the recession and hard times that fell on my sister Virginia and her family. I watched my brother-in-law lose his job and work hard to survive without complaint."
Ginny was in the audience and came backstage after the show. Springsteen recalled: "She said, 'That's my life.' That's still the best review I ever got. My beautiful sister, tough and unbowed, K-Mart employee, wife, and mother of three, holding fast and living the life I ran away from."
The other song Springsteen debuted at No Nukes was the joyous Sherry Darling, one of my favourites for its understated lyrics about a man driving to the unemployment agency with his girlfriend while her mother is "yappin' in the back seat", and the sparky chorus: "Well I got some beer and the highway's free. And I got you and, baby, you've got me. Hey, hey, hey, what you say, Sherry darlin'."
One thing viewers won't see is the infamous moment when Springsteen expelled his former girlfriend from the gig. Lynn Goldsmith was the show's rock photographer, but had apparently agreed not to take close-ups during his set. He pulled her on to the stage, announcing: "Ladies and gentlemen, this is my ex-girlfriend," before escorting her to the side of the stage and demanding she be removed from the house.
According to Peter Carlin, the author of the biography Bruce, "The Goldsmith incident had been edited out long before Bruce saw a frame. Goldsmith was later quoted in the New York Post saying that she was considering suing Springsteen for $3 million for public humiliation and being "manhandled" backstage. Nevertheless, the biographer Dave Marsh adds, "A good part of the crowd thought she was being honoured [and] it was clear in the film of the show that Springsteen had handled her pretty gently and that Goldsmith was laughing in his face. In any case, no lawsuit was ever filed."
Regardless, it didn't interrupt the show and the closing number, Quarter to Three, borrowed from the song catalogue of Gary US Bonds, was pure let-loose, no-holds-barred Springsteen. Pausing to deliver a supposedly urgent message — "I've been asked by management to make an emergency announcement. If anybody has a weak heart or a weak stomach, please leave the hall because this [next number] might be dangerous to your health" — he winds up the evening with a nine-minute raucous rock'n'roll party with Clemons playing his best boozy saxophone and Max Weinberg a whirling dervish on drums.
"I can't stand no more," Springsteen yells towards the end, collapsing James Brown-style from exhaustion. A towel-waving Steve Van Zandt — the guitarist later to find renewed fame in The Sopranos — revives him while Clemons helps him to his feet so he can take strength from the "power of the music" and bring the night to a close.
Did the concerts change America's attitude to nuclear energy or close down any power stations? Probably not. Three Mile Island carried on generating electricity up until two years ago, when it shut at the end of its operational life. But thank God for Musicians United for Safe Energy, without whom 1979 would have been a far less memorable year.
The No Nukes Concerts film is available in HD digital download on November 16 and digital rental on November 23. On November 19 it will be released on two CD with DVD, two CD with Blu-Ray and two LP formats.
Written by: Nick Rufford
© The Times of London
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