Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
May 22, 1988
Madison Square Garden
New York, NY
KT Master via JEMS
Previously Uncirculated

Torrented on Jungleland 2018-03-23

Lineage: KT analog master cassettes (microphones and recorder unknown) > DAT > Fostex D-5 > Audacity 2.0 capture at 16/48 > iZotope RX (MBIT+ resample to 16/44.1) > .wav > Nuendo 4 (processing) > Adobe Audition 3 (patches) > Tracks Split > Trader's Little Helper (flac)

Track listing:

1.  Tunnel of Love
2.  Boom Boom
3.  Be True
4.  Adam Raised a Cain
5.  Two Faces
6.  All That Heaven Will Allow
7.  Seeds
8.  Vigilante Man
9.  Cover Me
10.  Brilliant Disguise
11.  Spare Parts
12.  War
13.  Born in the USA
14.  Tougher Than the Rest
15.  Ain't Got You --> She's the One
16.  You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)
17.  I'm a Coward
18.  I'm on Fire
19.  One Step Up
20.  Part Man Part Monkey
21.  Across the Borderline
22.  Light of Day (with Born to be Wild)
23.  Born to Run
24.  Hungry Heart
25.  Glory Days
26.  Have Love Will Travel
27.  10th Avenue Freezeout
28.  Sweet Soul Music
29.  Raise Your Hand
30.  Lonely Teardrops

Patches from secondary source (This Is Not a Dark Ride from Doberman):
Boom Boom: 3 seconds at 1:20
Two Faces: 2 seconds at 2:33, 7 seconds at 2:46, 4 seconds at 3:19
All That Heaven Will Allow:  first 3 seconds
Ain't Got You --> She's the One:  First 15 seconds
Across the Borderline: Last 41 seconds
Light of Day: first 10 seconds

Suggested disc splits:
Disc 1:  Tracks 1-10
Disc 2:  Tracks 11-20
Disc 3:  Tracks 21-30

(While Disc 1 could go through War, I prefer not split up the trio of Spare Parts/War/USA)

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These DAT tapes are among the thousands of DATs that were relocated to JEMS South following the death of the late, great J in JEMS, Jared Houser, in October 2016. In addition to the hundreds of shows he recorded on the format himself starting in the summer of 1989, Jared began getting transfers of analog masters on DAT from tapers themselves. He called these Analog Master Clones, as they were digital captures of the analog masters in a non-degraded format as DAT had no generational loss. At the time, this was the best possible copy of an analog master we could make. 

Jared made a lot of these kinds of taper trades on DAT, and this one came from Springsteen taper KT, who didn’t do a lot of trading and hence his recordings of shows aren’t in wide circulation. He recorded the final two nights of the five-show run at Madison Square Garden that wrapped the US leg of the Tunnel of Love tour. 

The tour was generally well recorded, but tapes of this and other MSG shows have always been medicore. It is a little on the thin side, a little on the distant side compared to the very best ToL Tour tapes, but still quite nice. Samples provided. While I leave it to Flynn to talk about the merits of the set overall, I find the shows of this period to be compelling and you can’t help but love the cover of Jackie Wilson’s “Lonely Teardrops” that debuted during this show. 

BK for JEMS


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What made the Garden stand at the end of the US leg of the Tunnel of Love Express tour special were the covers:  Boom Boom (debuted a couple of shows prior to the Garden stand), Vigilante Man, Across the Borderline (debuted in LA the previous month), Lonely Teardrops (debuted at this show), and Crying.  This show has four of those five and those songs are indeed the highlights of this show.  'Course, the rest of the show wasn't a slouch, either; in fact, the energy level at this show sounds higher than it was the following night (guess those two nights two gave Bruce some extra energy).

There is only one set list difference between this show and the following night and, when it comes to ranking these last two of the stand, that one change gives this one the edge:  Across the Borderline for Backstreets.  Sure, Backstreets is the all-time classic and the performance on May 23rd was outstanding, the beautiful arrangement and performance of Across the Borderline makes for a different feel at the end of the second set.

Regarding the recording, it's a bit warmer than Doberman's "This Is Not a Dark Ride" (although since that was the source for the patches, you can compare and decide for yourself) and there's some talking from knowledgeable fans around the taper.  More patches were needed for this one, especially during Two Faces, which required three short patches.

Flynn