Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 14: Bruce Springsteen, “The Promised Land”

On December 15, 1978, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played the Winterland in San Francisco. The entire show was broadcast live over KSAN and several other FM stations in California. People listening at home had their cassette decks at the ready, and Springsteen knew it: he give a shout-out to “all you bootleggers” at one point in the three-hour show. Pressed on vinyl, the recording circulated (and made it into Tod Gold’s record collection in my hometown), and the concert came to be known as the greatest show from the person who was, and is, rock-and-roll’s greatest living showman.

I shudder to think that it happened on this day thirty-five years ago.

This recording of “The Promised Land” comes from that show, and the song is where the biblical story and Springsteen’s own story meet most pointedly. He originally meant to call Darkness on the Edge of Town “The Promise,” and all his music (as many have pointed out) is about promises: the promise of American freedom and prosperity, the ecstasy and sustenance promised in romantic love, the implied promises in the contracts between workers and employers, and the mutual promises made night after night, record after record, decade after decade, between an artist and his audience.

I am not a Springsteen devotee. His centrality and ubiquity run against the terms of devotion as I understand them. He belongs to everybody (I feel the same way about U2), and something is lost when that feeling is funneled down into individual devotion.

But I am a devotee of this live recording. Like the Band’s “Last Waltz” concert, it can be heard in full on wolfgangsvault.com; and just as I play the Band show – recorded at the Winterland on Thanksgiving 1976 – around Thanksgiving every year, so I play this Winterland show in the run-up to Christmas. ”This is powerful rock ‘n’ roll revivalism,” the site’s descriptive text has it, “and Springsteen makes the heat rain down upon the assembled Winterland parishioners.” It’s the concert the inescapable Springsteen version of “Santa Claus’ Is Comin’ to Town” comes from, and once you know that, the Christmas song bleeds into the whole concert, making the show festive and celebratory, or bringing out the festive and celebratory qualities of Springsteen’s concerts overall and joining them to the season. Even the name of the venue suggests the seasonal.

Winterland begins here, with a full-on expression — in one night of one band’s music — of promises made and fulfilled.

• 15 December 2013