Thought it'd be best if we had an actual thread for this. So...
Nugs pulled the No Nukes shows from the Live site for some strange reason earlier this week. People are speculating that this is going to lead to an official DVD release - remember the awesome shots that were featured in Letter To You and the "Ghosts" music video?.
Yes, it'll push other projects back, but we'll get them eventually. I am HYPE for this, that footage we got a glimpse of last year looks mint!
EDIT:
Just watched this again (in full) last weekend.
I love the whole thing, there are primo live Bruce moments from start to finish. But if you were trying to show someone what is / was so amazing about Bruce just as a live PERFORMER (as opposed to any of the other boxes he ticks such as songwriter, singer, musician etc) I think you just start this sucker at Rosalita and play through to the end. Sure, trying to impress someone with Bruce by playing 4 covers seems counter-intuitive... but, on no other criteria other than answering 'why is this guy so revered as a live act?' that segment from Rosalita onwards is exhibit A (and possibly exhibit B also).
Crappy photo of the TV, but come on.... What I wouldn't have given to see these 3, young and with decades of music still ahead of them, on a stage together...
☺️
Well, I finally did it... I pulled the trigger on an Amazon order for the No Nukes Blu Ray. I've waited long enough to see this film. I'll have to wait a few weeks longer but I know it will be worth it. With our shitty exchange rate and the import fees we get nailed with here it cost me 60 freaking Dollars, but I know that will be worth it in the long run too.
Back to the clock thingy.... from a discussion on BTX, if I understand that discussion correctly (and perhaps I'm missing something), the timers are something to do with helping to synch film reels with associated audio. So they are there to assist in editing the resultant movie I guess, if this is the case?
The Sherry Darling video left me laughing uncontrollably. He was so young. I was so young.
No idea about the clock / counter thing either, there seems to be one on each side of the stage as it seems to pop up in side on footage either left or right.
Maybe it's recording Bruce's heart rate...
I thought maybe the counter had something to do with how long it would take us to destroy the world with nuclear energy ....... But i have zero idea in reality
I'm sorry but can I please point out how on fire Max is in that clip??? He throws riffs and fills in like a man possessed which I don't think he has played live for years... Sheesh.
I noticed the counter also, quite intriguing.
Unless it's the scoreboard and Bruce is winning by over 5 million.
What's the digital clock running in both videos? I've never noticed anything like that at a show. Is that a timer for the film crew? For the stage manager? Anyone know?
I confess I feel deep feelings of jealousy toward the people who got to see the man and the band back then when I see footage like this. Holy moly...
I'm going to have to contribute to the Bezos space programme because I must have that Blu Ray.
That was exhilarating.
Tomorrow:
Taken from an interview with Jackson Browne in the December 2021 MOJO magazine.
We haven’t put out the original No Nukes film on DVD. I feel like it would be a disservice to the movement to only portray it in retrospect, something that happened once upon a time in a universe far, far away. We’d have to figure out how to make a new film that would provide information about the movement and what’s happened in the last 40 years. You have to continue to tell the story. I mean, No Nukes succeeded in that there were no new nuclear plants ordered from that point on. We thought we had dealt a serious blow to the nuclear power industry. And the rest of the fight was about shutting the plants down. And it still is. It’s not over.
The film came out about six months later. It has a lot of great performances in there –a lot of treasures, like James [Taylor] and Carly [Simon] doing Mockingbird. But because it was shot on film and that cost a lot of money, they thought, “Well let’s just shoot one or two songs and that’s enough of that artist.” The only person whose entire set got filmed was Bruce. And now that’s coming out, which is great, because it’s totally worthy of being seen.
I always click the "SKIP ADS" button when watching youtube videos. Now the ad for No Nukes has begun to pop up and it's screwing up my whole skip ads vibe.
So the Archive Series release won't be completely invalidated, since it contains both full performances.
Looking forward to that Clearmountain mix, though.
Some more details from my favourite internet p*rn site.
https://superdeluxeedition.com/news/bruce-springsteen-the-e-street-band-1979-no-nukes-concerts/
This looks sensational. That trailer is insane. Why oh why do we have to wait until November.
Looking at the trailer, I think we may need to heed the words of Jedi Master Yoda and 'unlearn'. The trailer features footage snapshots of at least two moments from Q23 (the crazy guitar waving, and the removal of the shirt) that are shot from a different angle to the film clip we are all used to. Presumably The River and Thunder Road will also both be edited differently to the clips from the original film.
This looks so goddamn good.
Evolution explained.
Nowhere doing a vinyl DVD bundle?
My God, I'm so excited for this!! The set looks amazing and that trailer… To think we'll finally have this legendary performance in Blu-ray quality is insane. I can't wait!
During the early days of the E Street Band, Bruce Springsteen resisted nearly every opportunity to capture the magic of their live show on film. “I had some voodoo thing about that,” he tells Rolling Stone a few hours before taking the stage for one of his final Broadway shows. “Film and television were relatively cool mediums, and we were a hot band. I said, ‘If you want to feel that heat, you need to be at that show.'”
He made a rare exception to that rule in September 1979, when he agreed to perform at two No Nukes benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden alongside Jackson Browne, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, the Doobie Brothers, and Carly Simon. “They were filming it,” Springsteen says. “They said, ‘You’ll have a choice of whether you’re in the movie or not.’ That meant I didn’t have to think about the cameras since I knew I could throw it away if I wanted to.”
He ultimately let the event organizers use his performances of “The River,” “Thunder Road,” and “Quarter to Three” as the climax of the 1980 concert movie No Nukes, but the vast majority of the three hours of E Street music that was filmed over two nights ended up stuffed into a vault and not seen by the public for the next four decades.
That will change on November 16th, when Springsteen’s new movie, The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concerts, is released for purchase on all digital film outlets. Three days later, it will be available as a two-CD plus DVD or two-CD plus Blu-Ray package (as well as on LP), and on the 23rd it will be up for digital rental. The film is directed by Springsteen’s longtime collaborator Thom Zimny and features the best moments from both of Springsteen’s No Nukes performances, including explosive renditions of “Born to Run,” “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight),” “Badlands,” “Prove It All Night,” and “The Detroit Medley.” Without question, it is the best representation of a Seventies Springsteen concert ever captured on film.
“The energy of the band that comes across in this film is just incredible,” says Zimny. “You can read about it or hear sonic recordings, but when you see this footage it’s as exciting as seeing the Clash in this same time. This is a band that was exploding onscreen.”
At the time of the shows, Springsteen had been off the road for nine months and was hard at work on The River, whose release was still a year away. He’d attached to his name to virtually no political causes at this point, but Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Bonnie Raitt, John Hall, and activist Harvey Wasserman came together as MUSE (Musicians United for Safe Energy) in the wake of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, and they asked Springsteen to help guarantee that Madison Square Garden would be packed for the final two shows of the five-night stand.
“That was a critical moment,” says Springsteen. “My friend Jackson Browne was very involved. He’s an activist and I was sort of a hired gun. But I was curious to see where else I could take my music, and where it would be helpful. We had enough success where I felt like I should be doing something with it, and that was where I was at that moment.”
Springsteen says he paid almost no attention to the camera operators assembled all around Madison Square Garden at both shows, but they were an ace crew led by cinematographer Haskell Wexler, best known for his work on In The Heat of the Night, The Thomas Crown Affair, and American Graffiti. “These guys were filmmakers and cinematographers at the top of their game, and they were in sync with the band,” says Zimny. “The cameramen are at the foot of the stage, and they’re literally side-by-side with audience members. This is not a language of MTV and this is not a language of multi-cam cranes and swooping angles and quick cuts. It’s pure documentary.”
On the first night, Springsteen debuted his new song “The River,” which wouldn’t see release until the following fall. It was inspired by the struggles of his sister Virginia, who’d had a baby at 17 with her husband, Mickey Shave.
“That song was a real turn in my songwriting,” says Springsteen. “I felt like I had broken through to a narrative type of songwriting that I previously hadn’t quite [figured out],” he says. “That turned into Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad, Devils and Dust, and so many other things. That one song birthed so many other incarnations and so much other music. It was a really critical song in my development and I knew it when I wrote it.”
Virginia Springsteen was in the audience of Madison Square Garden when he first played it, having no idea he’d written her story into a song. “She inspired it with my brother in-law, so it was nice to play it for them out of the box,” Springsteen says. “She came backstage and all she said was, ‘That was my life.'”
In 2012, Virginia Springsteen told biographer Peter Ames Carlin that she was initially uncomfortable with “The River.” “It was wonderful that he wrote that and all, but every bit of it was true,” she said. “And here I am [in the audience], completely exposed. I didn’t like it at first — though now it’s my favorite song.”
Near the end of both sets, Springsteen welcomed Jackson Browne and backup singer Rosemary Butler onto the stage for “Stay.” Tom Petty joined them on the second night, marking one of the few occasions in his entire career that he performed with Springsteen. “Rosemary Butler is phenomenal there,” says Springsteen manager Jon Landau. “She doesn’t get enough screen time, because I don’t think the [camera] coverage was there, but musically, she’s in there, really helping to make that great version of that song.”
“Stay” goes directly into “The Detroit Medley,” a mashup of “Devil With the Blue Dress,” “Good Golly Miss Molly,” “C.C. Rider,” and “Jenny Jenny” that had been a staple of Springsteen shows since the Born to Run tour in 1975. It’s featured on the No Nukes soundtrack, but the complete footage has never been seen until now.
“At one hour and seven minutes, which is the start of ‘The Detroit Medley,’ this thing goes to an energy level that has rarely been seen,” says Landau.”Bruce transports himself to a space where the endorphins have been completely released. He’s floating on pure energy. He’s absolutely floating. It’s spectacular.”
The film ends with a nine-minute version of the 1961 Gary U.S. Bonds classic “Quarter to Three,” complete with false stops and Bruce collapsing on the stage James Brown-style and getting revived by Clarence Clemons and a towel-waving Steve Van Zandt. What’s not seen is an infamous moment during the performance where Springsteen noticed photographer Lynn Goldsmith, who happened to be his ex-girlfriend, snapping photos from the floor. He pulled her onto the stage. “Ladies and gentlemen!” he roared to the crowd. “This is my ex-girlfriend!” He then escorted her to the side of the stage and demanded she be removed from the house.
This moment was edited out of “Quarter to Three” in the original No Nukes movie, and it doesn’t appear here. “I had no interest in exploring that,” says Zimny. “It’s not a musical moment. Even if you wanted it, it’s not really even documented since it was such a chaotic moment and the cameramen didn’t know what was happening.” (Springsteen and Goldsmith made peace decades ago, and she told Carlin they laughed about the incident when they bumped into each other at the Sunset Marquis in 1980.)
The Lynn Goldsmith incident and all the other No Nukes footage were tucked away in a film vault and half-forgotten until Zimny started going through those archives while assembling the 2020 movie Bruce Springsteen’s Letter To You. “Bruce noticed this wonderful shot we used to show Danny [Federici] and Clarence,” says Zimny. “In that was a composition and a beauty and a clarity of the E Street Band in that era that we had never really seen before. It was something that immediately struck us as the next project to explore, and also Bruce was real into the idea of remixing the soundtrack of that concert and finding a way to piece together everything we had from those shows.”
The multi-track recordings of the show were given to Bob Clearmountain, a recording engineer, mixer, and producer who has been working with Springsteen since the Born in the USA days. “Bob Clearmountain is a giant,” says Landau. “We’ve worked with a variety of terrific mixers, but we always come back to Bob. He’s so creative and always takes the work to some unexpected sonic level. It’s a fact that, when it comes to mixing, Bob is a genius, pure and simple
Springsteen didn’t see the film until it was practically finished, and it hit him on a deep emotional level. “It’s very intense to see the young Clarence and Danny,” he says. “But Clarence particularly, since he was in front and so athletic and so youthful, and he just looked so damn great. It’s a wonderful moment in Clarence’s performing experience, and mine with him.”
It also made him realize once again that he erred in not allowing the band to be filmed on many other occasions back then. “I wish we had filmed all the time,” he says. “It was a mistake. It was just a young, youthful, insecure, mistake at the time. I wish we’d filmed at least every tour we’d done once. That would have been really nice. There was a pretty decent bootleg from [Houston] 1978 that ended up on our [Darkness] box set. We have 1975 from the Odeon [in London]. We have a little taste of 1973 from the Ahmanson Theatre [in Los Angeles]. What’s funny thing is the one thing I don’t know we do have is anything from Born in the USA. There was a lot of video shot, but no film.”
“I’m just glad [No Nukes] is there,” he continues. “Looking back, I had my reasons. They worked for me well psychologically at that time and kept me stable. I just didn’t have the flexibility as a young man to sort of delve into that side of my work life. Looking back, of course I wish I had.”
Looking ahead, Springsteen hopes he can return to the road next year to finally support 2020’s Letter To You with a tour. “I’m hoping,” he says. “Like a lot of people. Everyone’s hoping. We’re just trying to figure out how to do that, like everyone else. If we can, if it’s possible, we will be [touring]. If it’s just not safe or not practical, we’ll be waiting it out like everyone else. We’re waiting and doing our best to see.”
Jon Landau feels the same way. “The only thing I can say about this is that we approach things very cautiously,” he says. “The safety of everyone, the audience, the artist, the band, the crew, and the people who work at the various facilities…We need to feel that everyone is as safe as possible in order to move ahead with what we hope will eventually be a great tour.”
In the meantime, No Nukes will allow concert-deprived fans to experience the E Street Band at the height of their powers. “It’s wonderful,” Springsteen says. “If you missed 1975 Hammersmith Odeon, it’ll knock your socks off. And if you weren’t around in 1979, it will show you what we were all about.”
Realised that with this new film coming out I should best review Western Stars. So expect a write-up of that before November 19th.
The trailer - it looks like such good shit!
I would like the vinyl and the DVD but that doesn't seem to come as a bundle (at least from Badlands) I can be hard to please too!
Need a vinyl edition.....hard to please!
Bruce Springsteen's and the E Street Band's iconic 1979 No Nukes concerts were recorded at the MUSE (Musicians United for Safe Energy) benefit concerts in September 1979 at Madison Square Garden, New York City. This 2-CD set contains 13 songs that were performed, remixed and mastered over two nights, as well as a DVD with the 13-song concert film, which was re-cut from original film material, restored and mixed in HD. This package includes a 24-page book of rare photos and memorabilia, an essay, a vintage ticket cover, a ticket replica, and a sticker.
I am very much looking forward to this!
However, I can’t think of these shows without think of the Lynn Goldsmith embarrassing incident.
I hope Bruce ended up regretting what he did and apologised properly.
I remember in the Blood Brothers video, Jon was dictating the press release over the phone about the greatest hits compilation. After he was done, he said we issue the press releases so we formalize that it is "actually happening even in our own minds". In this case, there seems to be a bit of liquidity as to the final shape this will take. I have read some places where its a concert "film" and in others, a "documentary".
I will gobble this release up in anyway I can asap. This is the middle of the peak of this band's highest powers. In fact, I was driving this morning, and Rosalita from 9/22 came on. I had to turn it up, and sit and listen to the power and the fury of this performance. I smiled as it ended.
Allow me to be me here, and I will say it feels like a new level of "whatever you wanna call it" is being applied here. They make an annoucement, that a press release is coming in September. Which means to me it is being decided how it will be distributed, either streaming or physical, whetehr there is a soundtrack CD. I don't pretend to know what any of this is like from Bruce or Jon's perspective. I am just a fan. I have been waiting for a Born in the USA box, Tracks 2, etc.
I look forward to it. Now let's release the next archive. It's hot fun in the summertime. Hey hey, lets effin' goooo.
Certainly sounds like a physical release from the description, happy days.
What's interesting is that the Backstreets news article states this announcement is ahead of an actual press release in September. Why wait now that the cat is out of the bag? Unless this is only part of a bigger project? Mmmmmm...
Imagine a dvd/blu ray box set with this, the final LA BITUSA show from 1985 and a 1988 TOL show all included... take my money, Bossman...
Its one thing for something to disappear from Spotify ....Its another to specifically pay for a certain product and then no longer have access to it with no warning ..... That blows
That 5 minute video makes me smile. What a performer, what a band, what a crowd.....
Rock n roll can save a soul or maybe even change the world in some way. It is the eternal now.
This must be released in any way possible. I will buy two, and send one to an enemy in the hopes it will change them as this music has changed me.
I know it's my old school thinking, but I really hope this is an actual physical product release. Not just streaming on whatever platform is JLM's current flavour of the month. If it is online only, please make it You Tube.
When I buy a show, I buy a show, not a subscription to the streaming service. They offer that as a separate product. I have to download the show in 24 hours.
I always understood the possibility of streaming the purchased shows as a bonus, and not as a substitute for not downloading them. I haven't read any of the small print, so I might be mistaken, of course.
In addition, the number of those who had bought the shows and hadn't downloaded them must be an insignificant number. And all those people are fans who know where to find the No Nukes shows now.
I have come to the conclusion that some people complain whatever he does and whenever he does it.
You can't please all of the people all of the time. I doubt he gives a fuck anymore!
What are the complaints about? The show no longer being offered for sale or the possibility of a DVD itself? Are they complaining they didn't have a chance to purchase the download, even though it's been available all this time? Is it because people who bought the show won't be able to stream it on their nugs account any longer?
I do listen to the No Nukes release quite a bit. When I don't have time for a full standard show, this set is perfect.
If the DVD comes to pass, does that make the nugs release an actual official bootleg, after the fact?
A. Why is this supposed to not be great news?
B. Isn't it obligatory for any fan to want everything and anything? All the time.
C. I don't have an argument C. 🙃
I mean, look at those shots and tell me you can wait for this!
The fact there are plenty of people reacting to this like it's a bad thing is, to put it mildly, fucking infuriating.
I think I've only ever see the famous Rosalita footage from No Nukes........... this'd be good.