The first leg of the tour took place in arenas in the United States, comprising 46 shows beginning on October 3, 1980, in Crisler Arena in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and lasting through the end of the year. After a three-week holiday break, a second leg continued with 26 shows through early March in Canada and the U.S.
The third leg of the tour, during April through June 1981 (and pushed back three weeks from the original schedule, due to Springsteen's exhaustion from the first two legs), represented Springsteen's first real foray into Western Europe, and his first appearances at all there since his very short venture there following the release of Born to Run in 1975. In total 34 shows were played, including six nights at London's Wembley Arena. Ten countries were visited: West Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the United Kingdom.
The final leg was billed as a "homecoming tour", visiting U.S. cities that had been special in Springsteen's career for multiple-night stands, beginning with six nights that opened his native New Jersey's Meadowlands Arena. After 34 shows in just 10 cities, this leg concluded on September 13 and 14 at Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum.
The show
For the only time in his career, Springsteen opened some concerts with his signature song, "Born to Run". At the very first Ann Arbor show, he (in)famously was struck dumb and forgot the words to it; the audience's singing them helped him regain his bearings. In that show's encore, local hero Bob Seger appeared to duet with Springsteen on "Thunder Road".
Springsteen's performances on this tour were similar in nature to tours before, but extended in length. Thirty-song sets were often seen and shows ran up to four hours; it was during this tour that Springsteen's reputation for marathon performances really took hold.
The emotional temper of the concerts was assessed differently depending upon the goer, with some having a party and others reporting that after a string of depressing songs they felt like slitting their wrists. Certainly The River had material to illustrate both viewpoints—on it Springsteen had acknowledged that "life had paradoxes, a lot of them, and you've got to live with them"—and the tour followed in kind. A key difference now was that where before Springsteen had relied upon old 1960s R&B and pop numbers for his concerts' uptempo, lighter moments, he now had written them himself: "Out in the Street" "I'm a Rocker," "Ramrod," "Cadillac Ranch," "Crush on You" and "You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)" would serve this role in this tour and in tours for years to come.
A couple of Springsteen concert traditions began during the tour. Near the end of the frat-rocker "Sherry Darling", Springsteen pulled a young female out of the front rows and danced with her on stage; this practice would become famous when he did it in the subsequent Born in the U.S.A. Tour during "Dancing in the Dark". And when playing his new (and first) Top 10 hit "Hungry Heart", Springsteen let the audience sing the first verse and chorus, a ritual that would be solidified on subsequent tours as well.
Two shows were noted at the time for their confluence with historical events. A November 5, 1980, show at Arizona State University followed the day after Ronald Reagan's electoral college landslide in the United States Presidential election. In a rare move for the time, Springsteen pronounced, "I don't know what you guys think about what happened last night, but I think it's pretty frightening", after which he and the band launched into a particularly fiery rendition of "Badlands". The performance of the song, but not the preceding remark, was included in the Live/1975-85 box set, and the performance was later included in full on a video release of the show in 2015. About a month later, on December 9, Springsteen went ahead with a scheduled concert at The Spectrum in Philadelphia the day after John Lennonwas murdered, despite initial objections from sideman Steven Van Zandt. "It's a hard world that asks you to live with a lot of things that are unlivable", Springsteen announced before starting the show, "And it's hard to come out here and play tonight, but there's nothing else to do." He opened with an especially frenzied "Born to Run" and closed with a rendition of the Beatles' version of "Twist and Shout".
Springsteen in concert on The River Tour. Drammenshallen, Drammen, Norway. 5 May 1981.
The first European show in Hamburg, West Germany, started out stiffly, but in time language and cultural barriers were broken and the European leg of the tour was considered a great success in building a Springsteen following there. It concluded with two epic shows at Birmingham, England's NEC Arena, one of which featured the Who's Pete Townshend joining the encores.
Moreover, his time in these foreign countries exposed Springsteen to the world outside America, including talking to people who considered America a beacon of self-interest and greed, and gave him alternative views of societies and issues. He began to read books on American history, deepening his heretofore admittedly shallow political consciousness.
By the time the final leg of the tour took place back in the U.S., he was doing a benefit show for Vietnam Veterans of America in Los Angeles (which raised $100,000) and often singing a heartfelt acoustic version of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land", presaging his much greater political involvement later in the 1980s. His on-stage stories and raps became longer and emotional, and he began asking for quiet before some of his more serious songs. He added the dour death-of-Elvis "Bye Bye Johnny" (later retitled "Johnny Bye Bye") and obscure Jimmy Cliff descent "Trapped" to his repertoire.
The July 1981 Meadowlands shows, while lauded for opening the arena (New Jersey's first), were marred by their proximity to the American Fourth of July and the firecrackers that were set off in the crowd during every show of the stand. Springsteen hated them (and had once been hit in the face with one), and angrily denounced the fans doing it.
This was also the final E Street Band tour performed in the classic all-male lineup before Patti Scialfa joined the band permanently from the Born in the U.S.A. Tour onwards.
By now tickets were very hard to get for many Springsteen concerts. As biographer Dave Marsh wrote, "Springsteen concert tickets sold out of all proportion to his popularity in the record stores or on Top Forty radio. He could sell out 20,000-seat sports arenas faster and more often than artists who sold four or five times as many records ... he was acclaimed as the greatest performer in rock." Thus, ticket scalping was a constant problem, as was fraud in mail-order lottery sales.
Critic Robert Hilburn wrote that the album and "the extensive U.S. tour that immediately followed its release made Springsteen not just a critical but also popular favorite with rock & roll fans across the country. No longer was he seen as merely an East Coast critical phenomenon." Music writer Robert Santelli wrote that, "Eager to please old fans and make disciples of new ones, Springsteen and the band pushed the limits nearly every night, with shows that went on for three—and sometimes four—hours. These marathon performances were exhausting for band and audience alike. The sheer number of songs played, the range of emotions explored, and the between-songs stories told by Springsteen ... took the shows far beyond the usual rock concert. Each night turned into a hard-driving demonstration of how and why Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band had become the best rock act on the road."
Legacy
Of all Springsteen's tours, The River Tour is perhaps the least known in retrospect to people who were not there. For many years, unlike tours before and since, there was little official audio or video documentation of it—no live radio broadcasts, no live album, no music videos made from concert footage, and no video releases. The Live/1975-85 box set had thirteen selections from the tour, but they formed little thematic pattern. Shows from the tour were of course bootlegged, but otherwise they are mostly lost to time.
The tour also suffers by comparison to the legendary 1978 Tour before it and the monumental Born in the U.S.A. Tour after it. Perhaps its biggest legacy is the successful introduction of Springsteen's music and performance abilities across Western Europe. Two decades later, much of Europe would boast a bigger and more vociferous fan base for Springsteen than anywhere in America.
In simultaneity with the box set, a new tour was announced, The River Tour 2016, which celebrated the original album's 35th anniversary and featured full front-to-back performances of The River during its initial leg. The tour kicked off in January 2016. The press release containing the announcement of the tour directly referred to the legacy of the original tour by stating that "[t]he original The River Tour began Oct. 3, 1980, two weeks before the release of Springsteen's fifth album, and continued through September 14, 1981. With sets that regularly approached the four-hour range, the 140-date international tour firmly established a reputation for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band as marathon performers."
Broadcasts and recordings
As previously mentioned, no River Tour shows were broadcast live, and for nearly three and a half decades after the tour's completion, the sole documentation of the tour came from the Live/1975-85 box set's selections.
"Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" is a 1973 song by Bruce Springsteen, from his The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle album, and is especially famed as a concert number for Springsteen and The E Street Band. The song, which clocks in at just over seven minutes, is a story of forbidden love between the singer and the titular Rosalita, whose parents disapprove of his life in a rock and roll band. It is included on the compilation albums The Essential Bruce Springsteen and Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band Greatest Hits. In 2021, Rolling Stone ranked it the 446th greatest song of all time on their updated 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list.
Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum is a multi-purpose indoor arena in Uniondale, New York, east of New York City. The Long Island venue is approximately 7 miles (11 km) east of the eastern limits of the New York City Borough of Queens, and is also next to the Meadowbrook Parkway.
The E Street Band is an American rock band, and has been musician Bruce Springsteen's primary backing band since 1972. The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014. For the bulk of Springsteen's recording and performing career, the band consisted of: guitarists Steven Van Zandt, Nils Lofgren, and Patti Scialfa, keyboardists Danny Federici and Roy Bittan, bassist Garry Tallent, drummer Max Weinberg, and saxophonist Clarence Clemons.
"The Ghost of Tom Joad" is a folk rock song written by Bruce Springsteen. It is the title track to his eleventh studio album, released in 1995. The character Tom Joad, from John Steinbeck's classic 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, is mentioned in the title and narrative.
The Bruce Springsteen with the Seeger Sessions Band Tour, afterward sometimes referred to simply as the Sessions Band Tour, was a 2006 concert tour featuring Bruce Springsteen and the Sessions Band playing what was billed as "An all-new evening of gospel, folk, and blues", otherwise seen as a form of big band folk music. The tour was an outgrowth of the approach taken on Springsteen's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions album, which featured folk music songs written or made popular by activist folk musician Pete Seeger, but taken to an even greater extent.
The Rising Tour was a lengthy, worldwide, top-grossing concert tour featuring Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band that took place in arenas and stadiums over 2002 and 2003. It followed the release of their 2002 album The Rising.
The Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Reunion Tour was a lengthy, top-grossing concert tour featuring Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band that took place over 1999 and 2000.
The Ghost of Tom Joad Tour was a worldwide concert tour featuring Bruce Springsteen performing alone on stage in small halls and theatres, that ran off and on from late 1995 through the middle of 1997. It followed the release of his 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad.
"Hungry Heart" is a ballad written and performed by Bruce Springsteen on his fifth album, The River. It was released as the album's lead single in 1980 and became Springsteen's first big hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart peaking at number five.
The Tunnel of Love Express Tour was a concert tour by Bruce Springsteen and featuring the E Street Band with the Horns of Love that began at the end of February 1988, four and a half months after the release of Springsteen's October 1987 album, Tunnel of Love. Considerably shorter in duration than most Springsteen tours before or since, it played limited engagements in most cities which fueled the high demand. The tour finally grossed US$50 million not counting merchandise. Shows were held in arenas in the U.S. and stadiums in Europe. A historic performance in East Berlin took place on July 19th 1988.
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's Darkness Tour was a concert tour of North America that ran from May 1978 through the rest of the year, in conjunction with the release of Springsteen's album Darkness on the Edge of Town.
The Born in the U.S.A. Tour was the supporting concert tour of Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. album. It was his longest and most successful tour to date. It featured a physically transformed Springsteen; after two years of bodybuilding, the singer had bulked up considerably. The tour was the first since the 1974 portions of the Born to Run tours without guitarist Steven Van Zandt, who decided to go solo after recording the album with the group. Van Zandt, who was replaced by Nils Lofgren, would appear a few times throughout the tour and in some of the music videos to promote the album. It was also the first tour to feature Springsteen's future wife, Patti Scialfa.
"Badlands" is a song by the American singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, released as the second single from his fourth studio album Darkness on the Edge of Town in July 1978.
The Magic Tour was Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's 2007–08 concert tour of North America and Western Europe.
"Fade Away" is a 1980 song written and performed by Bruce Springsteen, accompanied by the E Street Band. It is included on his album The River, and the second single released from it in the United States, reaching the top twenty in both the United States and Canada.
The Working on a Dream Tour was a concert tour by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, which began in April 2009 and ended in November 2009. It followed the late January 2009 release of the album Working on a Dream. This was the first full E Street Band tour without founding member Danny Federici, who died during the previous tour in 2008, and the final tour for founding member Clarence Clemons, who died in 2011.
The Wrecking Ball World Tour was a concert tour by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band to promote Springsteen's seventeenth studio album, Wrecking Ball, which was released on March 5, 2012. It was the first tour for the E Street Band without founding member Clarence Clemons, who died on June 18, 2011. The worldwide tour in support of the album, which ended in September 2013, reached 26 countries, the most ever for one of Springsteen's tours. The tour resumed in January 2014 to promote Springsteen's new album, High Hopes, and went under that album's name.
The High Hopes Tour was a concert tour by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band with special guest guitarist Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine. The tour was seen as a continuation of his previous tour and was in support of eighteenth studio album, High Hopes, which was released in January 2014.
Nassau Coliseum, New York 1980 is a live album by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, released in March 2015, and was the fourth official release through the Bruce Springsteen Archives. The show was originally recorded live at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York, on December 31, 1980.
The River Tour was a concert tour by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in support of Springsteen's 2015 The Ties That Bind: The River Collection box set and in celebration of the 35th anniversary of Springsteen's 1980 album, The River. The River Tour ended in September 2016. Subsequently, the Summer '17 tour in Australia and New Zealand continued the tour using the same promotional image from the original legs.
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