Live July 2018 version
So, so I'm 20 years old and I'm living and playing on the Jersey Shore and I'm waiting to be discovered. Now, I have some confidence. I've been around a bit. And without a doubt, I am definitely the best thing that I've ever seen. I've already played in front of every conceivable audience. I have played firemen's fairs, midnight madness, supermarket openings, drive-in movies, uh in front of the concession stand in between films. I've played beach parties, officers' clubs, pizza parlors, coffee shops, bowling alleys, trailer parks, roller rinks, VFW halls, CYO canteens, the Elks Lodge, YMCA gymnasiums, hockey rinks, county fairs, carnivals, high school dances, weddings, fraternity parties, bar mitzvahs, uh soul revues, battle of the bands, Sing Sing Prison, and Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital. Send me your murderers and your maniacs and let me entertain them, all right? That's what I do. That's all true. That's all before I was 23 years old. I'm frustrated. I listen to the radio and I think I'm as good as that guy. I'm better than that guy. So why not me? Answer: because I live in the fucking boondocks, all right? Let me explain this to you. I live in the boondocks. There's nobody here, and no one comes down here. It's a grave. There was no Jersey, Jersey, Jersey Shore, Jersey Almighty shit. I invented that. Before me, Jersey was Jeserkhistan. Jeserkhistan! One of the little -stan things that nobody knows a fucking thing about. You know? And New York was a million miles away from the Jersey Shore. In my little town as a child, we knew no one who had ever been to New York City. Jesus Christ, it was, it was only an hour away! But no, you might as well have said you're going to the fucking Moon. "Hey, we're going to the Moon, you wanna go?" "No, no, no. No New York." Nobody knows, you know. We were provincial. Everybody was afraid, you know, everybody was afraid of the big city. And there was no Internet, there was no ET, or MTV, or cable TV, or satellite, or... This is before anyone and everyone's ass crack from Anyplace, USA, could be seen all over the world, uh, should they choose, in the push of a key, in the next instant. So who was gonna come to the Jersey Shore to discover the next big thing in 1971? You're correct. No-fucking-body. All we heard down there was the sound of one hand clapping. Wasn't gonna happen.
I had one shot. My girlfriend at the time did me a great favor. Brought a guy who had a successful recording band down to the Student Prince, our club in Asbury Park, to discover us. We got up on a little stage in a club that fit 150 people. It was about half full. And we played for this guy like we were at Madison Square Garden. Everything we had, all night long. We played five sets, from 9:00 p.m. till 3:00 a.m. At the end of the night, I was soaked to my bones. I got off the bandstand, this guy walked up to me. He looked me in the eye, shook my hand and said, "You guys are the best unsigned band I've ever seen." Then he slept with my girlfriend and left town. That's the end of that story. It's a sad ending, you know. But that was enough for me. I gathered together the men, and I said, "Gentlemen, we are going to have to leave the confines of the Jersey Shore and venture into parts unknown... if we want to be seen, heard by anybody or discovered." Now I found a manager, a surfboard manufacturer from the West Coast ─ he'd moved East ─ by the name of Carl Virgil "Tinker" West. Now together, he, Mad Dog Lopez, and myself we lived in the surfboard factory. In the industrial wastelands of Wanamassa, New Jersey. Tinker said he had some remaining rock and roll contacts in San Francisco. So we all got excited, and he said if we could get there, something might happen. So we saved up all our money until we had one hundred dollars, all right? And then me, Danny Federici, Mad Dog Lopez, Little Vinnie Roslin, our bass player, rigged out Danny's station wagon for the drive. Put a mattress in the back for the drivers to spell each other and to sleep in on the way out there. We rigged Tinker's old '40s flatbed to carry our equipment and we had three days to make it across the country for a New Year's Eve gig in Big Sur, California. Now, three days means those are gonna be thousand-mile days. You can make it, but you can't stop. You stop for gas and for nothing else. You drive, drive, drive, drive, 72 hours straight. Somebody's driving all the time around the clock. Now of course, we lost Danny and the entire station wagon full of drivers in Nashville, Tennessee. Now there's no cellular phones. Young people, take a moment. Let's try it. Imagine a world without the cellular phone. When you lose someone in that world without the cellular phone, oh they're fucking lost. There's no device. You can't get in touch with them. They're gone! Out of your life! Into the ether.
So now it's just Tinker and me, Tinker's dog, thousands of miles to go. And we got several problems. One is I have no license. Second problem is I don't have a clue as to how to drive. And by that, I mean the man who would very, very shortly write "Racing In The Street"... That's how good I am. Because at 21 I had never driven a fucking block. Around 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., Tinker's eyes glass over and he says, "I'm fried. I need to get some sleep. It's your turn to drive." I go, "Tink, I can't drive." He says, "Springsteen, there's nothing to it. Idiots all over the world are doing it, all right?" He pulls me into a parking lot. He puts me behind the wheel. I start grinding gears, pumping the clutch, jerking the truck all over the lot─ It's a 1940s manual transmission. I can't get past first gear! After a moment Tinker says, "This isn't gonna to work, but I got another idea." He gets in the driver's seat. He slips in the clutch. He smoothly shifts it into first. He eases out on the clutch. He gets that truck going on a sweet little roll, looks at me and says, "Now let's switch seats." And that's what we did. I was fine in second, third, and fourth and I could keep it in between the lines as long as I didn't have to stop or go near first gear. If I've gotta do either of those things, I have to wake up Mr. West. All right? Now, it doesn't matter because he's awake anyway, because the guy who can't drive is driving! You're not gonna sleep through that! So, you'd be surprised how far you can go across this big country without having to stop. You know, it's, it's a long ways between things out there. And, man, I drove my share of 2,000 miles in second, third, and fourth gear. Without killing anybody. Uh, and we made it on time, you know. But uh, that trip was, was where I saw the United States at its fullest. And as a young man, I was overwhelmed by its size and its beauty, and this is a short piece from the book about riding across the country for the very first time.
The country was beautiful. I felt a great elation at the wheel as we crossed the western desert at dawn. The deep blue, purple shadowed canyons. Pale yellow morning sky with all of its color drawn out, leaving just the black silhouetted mountains in your rearview mirror. Then with the eastern sun rising at our backs, the deep reds and the browns of the plains and the hills came to life slowly in front of us. Your palms turn salty white on the wheel from the aridity. Morning woke the Earth into this muted color. And then came the flat light of the midday sun and everything stood revealed as pure horizon. Just sky, sky, sky, and more sky. Lowering onto two lanes of blacktop and disappearing into nothing. My favorite thing. Then the evening with the sun burning red into your eyes and dropping gold into the western hills in front of you. All felt like home to me. And I fell into a lasting love affair with the desert.
On a rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert
I pick up my money, head back into town
Driving across the Waynesboro county line
I got the radio on and I'm just killing time
Working all day in my daddy's garage
Yeah driving all night chasing some mirage
Pretty soon little darling I'm gonna take charge
Well the dogs on Main Street howl 'cause they understand
If I could take this moment into my hands
Mister I ain't a boy, no I'm a man
I believe there's a promised land
I done my best now to live the right way
I get up every morning, go to work each day
But your eyes go blind, your blood runs cold
Sometimes I feel so weak, so weak I wanna explode
Explode and tear this whole town apart
Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart
Trying to find somebody itching for something to start
Well the dogs on Main Street howl 'cause they understand
If I could take this moment into my hands
Mister I ain't a boy, no I'm a man
I believe there's a promised land
There's a dark cloud rising from the desert floor
I packed my bags and I'm heading straight into the storm
Gonna be a twister to blow everything down
That ain't got the faith to stand its ground
Blow away the dreams that tear you apart
Blow away the dreams that break your heart
Blow away the lies that leave you nothing, nothing but lost and brokenhearted
Well the dogs on Main Street howl 'cause they understand
If I could take this moment into my hands
Mister I ain't a boy, no I'm a man
I believe there's a promised land
I believe there's a promised land
I believe there's a promised land
The above lyrics are for the live July 2018 performance of THE PROMISED LAND at Walter Kerr Theatre in New York City, NY, during Springsteen On Broadway. The song was played solo on acoustic guitar and harmonica.
This performance of THE PROMISED LAND was recorded on 17 or 18 July 2018 during the taping of the Springsteen On Broadway Netflix special. It was released on the Springsteen On Broadway album in 2018.
Springsteen On Broadway was a Bruce Springsteen concert residency held at Walter Kerr Theatre (in 2017-2018) and St. James Theatre (in 2021) in New York City, NY. The show consisted of Springsteen performing five shows a week, Tuesday through Saturday, at the Broadway theatres. The sold-out series of performances began with seven previews starting on 03 Oct 2017 and officially opened on 12 Oct 2017. It was extended three times after its initial eight-week run, running through 15 Dec 2018 and bringing the total number of performances at Walter Kerr Theatre to 238. On 10 Jun 2018, Springsteen received a special Tony Award for his Broadway show. In 2021, an additional limited run was announced, this time held at St. James Theatre instead of Walter Kerr Theatre. This new series of performances opened on 26 Jun 2021 and ran through 04 Sep 2021, bringing the total number of performances at both theatres to 268.
The show featured Springsteen, solo, playing guitar, piano, and harmonica, performing his music, restating incidents from his 2016 autobiography Born To Run, and performing other spoken reminiscences written for the show. His wife, Patti Scialfa, has also appeared at most shows, singing backing vocals on a total of three different songs.
Springsteen On Broadway, a Netflix special directed by Grammy- and Emmy-winning filmmaker Thom Zimny, was filmed during two special invitation-only shows on 17 and 18 Jul 2018. The film launched globally on Netflix on 16 Dec 2018 at 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time, just hours after the final Broadway performance at Walter Kerr Theatre closed. Two days prior, on 14 Dec 2018, Columbia Records released Springsteen On Broadway, an audio album encompassing the full film soundtrack. The audio was mixed by Bob Clearmountain and mastered by Bob Ludwig. The album is available physically as a 2-disc CD set or a 4-disc LP set, as well as digitally.
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List of available versions of THE PROMISED LAND on this website:
THE PROMISED LAND [Album version]