A Darkness Boxset as well as a dvd from the Working on a Dream Tour is on its way. Sounds like the WOAD dvd will come first. Come on Bruce, how about a Darkness deluxe edition with a remastered 3 cd set of Passaic Night.

From rollingstone.com:

This Sunday, Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band will wrap up their two-year tour by performing their 1973 debut album Greetings From Asbury Park in its entirety (stick with Rolling Stone for a full report). After that, Springsteen’s next moves are unclear. His manager, Jon Landau, says the only plans for 2010 are the release of the long-delayed Darkness on the Edge of Town box set and a DVD of the Working on a Dream tour. “The Darkness box set is 93 percent done,” he tells RS. “It’s absolutely fantastic and there are just some finishing touches that we need to turn our attention to and finalize and we’ll get it out there.” As for the Dream DVD, Landau says, “We’re working on some different approaches to a DVD for this tour. We’ll release it sometime fairly soon, post-Christmas.” Grab the next issue of RS, out November 25th, to read E Street’s reflections on their magical two years on the road.

The Darkness box will likely contain a remastered edition of the disc, a new documentary about the making of the LP, as well as live footage from the 1978 tour. A handful of pro-shot shows circulate through the fan community, but there’s no word on which concert will be brought out of the vaults for the set. In 2005, fans were stunned when a previously unknown complete performance from London in 1975 appeared on the Born to Run box set. The Darkness on the Edge of Town tour is widely regarded as the high water mark of Springsteen’s live career.

There are no plans for another E Street Band album or tour next year. “We just had back-to-back tours and back-to-back records,” Landau says. “That’s never happened before, so we’re going to have substantial downtime at this point. The E Street Band does have an illustrious future, but I don’t have anything more specific to tell you about next year except those two media projects that are on the horizon.”

The E Street Band have mixed feelings about the tour coming to an end. “I really don’t want the work to end, but I need to go home,” says guitarist Nils Lofgren. “It’s kind of an inherent level of homesickness that wears on you. I’m really looking forward to being home and actually unpacking my suitcase. It sat there with my dogs giving me dirty looks for two years.”

Steven Van Zandt has similar feelings. “It feels very much like The Sopranos,” he says. “Everybody was like, ‘Well, we’re extremely successful and still very high on the ratings,’ but David Chase knew it was time to stop. In the end I agreed and I feel like it’s the same thing here.” He says he hasn’t had any discussions with Springsteen about future work. “I’m always afraid to stop,” he says. “You think, ‘If we stop, can we get this thing going again?’ After a year or two off, you find yourself at the bottom of Mt. Everest looking up and thinking, ‘How are we gonna get there?’ I will be surprised if we don’t continue and if you ask me if I think we’ll continue I’ll certainly say yes. It’s just a matter of what happens to everybody physically, beginning with Clarence [Clemons] I suppose. He may fantasize about retiring, but with all his ex-wives I doubt it.”

I've had friends grabbing boots of the various tour nights with different complete albums played. There certainly seems to be a lot of joy in playing the albums in their entirety. How nice it would be to get an official bootleg series with at least one version of each different album!

Live CD's interest me. Live DVD's, not so much. I know I'm in the minority, however.

Darknees is one of my favorite Bruce albums, so this would be cool. Hmm, thanks for the info on those bootlegs, Walter. I wonder which ones my brother has?

How about a legit Winterland '78 release? I can't believe they aren't releasing Springsteen archives like they are Dylan archives. So far only the London '75 and Tracks....and a bit of 'Essential'....

Winterland '78 would be awesome!

Both releases will be great. Darkness and The River are my 2 favorite albums and tours. A "post Christmas" comment can hopefully mean an early 2010 release. It was a truly great tour and I think I'm in the monority when I say probably the last big tour by Bruce and the E Street Band. That was one band that was really on fire each and very night. I saw them Night # 3 at Giants Stadium...truly a great night.

Mark

He apparently mentioned a few times that night that it wasn't the end...only going to take off for "a little while" - however long that means. I saw the two MSG shows....which was great because E-Street Shuffle and The River are my two favorites.


Surpirsed too.....he definitely is fine with broadcast access to his vaults. The satellie Springsteen channel plays 2 complete concerts every day.

I know that Wolfgang's Vault has a few shows as well...one of them is Winterland 1978.

For an artist who is such a perfectionist I find it odd that he allows XM/Sirius to broadcast fair to middling bootlegs but has only released one full ESB show on CD. I hope that changes over the coming years. There are far too many fantastic shows sitting in the vaults in both audio (Main Point 75, Winterland 78, Agora 78, Nassau Night 80) and video (Largo 78, LA Coliseum 85) form. I can't imagine it would take that much effort to get this material out there in top quality form. I can only assume he just isn't interested.

I understand Buffalo was a tremendous show last night. 34 songs including all of Greetings...

Andy...it was a just a great 2 years worth of touring behind Magic and Working on A Dream. I'm glad I was able to see a show to what I believe will be the last great E Street Band Tour.

Mark:
I was able to get to shows on the Magic and WOAD tours here in Boston and they were terrific shows. The WOAD show took it to another level. They were playing and sounding fantastic. Wish I could have gotten to some of the shows on the Fall Tour because it sounded like they were really humming.

I can't imagine they will do another full trek like they've done the last year or two. Hopefully they will get back out again even if its just for quick regional tours.

Andy

After tours that were this great, it will be hard to top. Especially when they played all the albums in full from Greeting thru BITUSA...hard to top IMO.

This is from a Q&A interview put out on billboard.com today. The interview took place just prior to his show in Nashville on 11/18. Makes me wonder if Jon and Bruce are on the same page given Jon Landau's statements in Rolling Stone came out on the 19th.

Any thoughts on what you might do with some of these shows, like release a DVD or album set?

We didn't have any plans. They've been filmed, but I don't know if they've been filmed to put out. It's about going in and listening to what we have. But it's something that we really just started to make the tour exciting at this point.

Some more info from FMQB.com (sounds like Bruce is doing some additional recording like the Stones and that's fine by me) :

A deluxe reissue of Bruce Springsteen's Darkness On The Edge Of Town is on the way this fall. E Street Band guitarist Steven Van Zandt recently revealed in a U.K. radio interview that they are currently doing some work on outtakes and rarities from that era. According to Rolling Stone, Van Zandt said, "We put ten or so outtakes on the [1998] Tracks box set and we [have since] found ten more. I'm not sure how many we'll put on there. We'll go back and he might finish a lyric on one or two, or finish a harmony on one or two, but we'll keep them intact pretty much."

I also read a Christmas release is when we'll see it.

I believe he did some re-recording for the Tracks boxset so its not surprising he's doing some for this re-issue. I just hope we get more than 10 tracks like Exile. Toby Scott (Springsteen's engineer) mentioned in an interview that there has been talk about Tracks 2.

From backstreets.com on June 7:

Springsteen's engineer and archivist Toby Scott [right], in conversation with curator Jim Henke, provided some fascinating insights. In addition to acting as liason between Bruce and the Rock Hall to put together the exhibit, Scott has been recording Bruce from the full-band-in-the-studio days of The River to Bruce's more recent home studio work, not to mention working to preserve and archive every note. All aspects of his work were well covered in this hour and a half — though of course, most of us could have listened twice as long.

"So what's Bruce working on now?" Henke asked, to which Scott replied after a pregnant pause: "Material." That got a laugh, but Toby didn't leave us hanging. "Both new and old," he continued. "Best I can say is, he always has new songs. Yesterday he was playing around in the studio, playing and writing down, playing and writing down.... I go, 'You got another one?' And he says, 'Oh yeah, there's always another one.' So he's got new material, and we've been working on some old stuff [referring, we have to assume, to the impending Darkness box], we'll probably see that in another six months or so. I think everybody will really like that."

Toby expanded on their revisiting of old material when asked about the possibility of a Tracks 2: "There will be a Tracks 2, as far as I know," he stated. "Yesterday we were doing a session working on our next project, which will be out in November, I'm guessing? Or maybe October — they don't tell me until I'm late," he added to laughter. "But Bruce and Steve were there, and Bruce was saying, 'Hey, when we do Tracks 2, we can do this, we can do that...' speculating as to stuff he would include on the second Tracks record. And there's a ton of it. Of the unreleased material — the studio recordings — I'm probably guessing one to two hundred songs.... So there probably will be a Tracks 2. When? You know... when we're not doing something else."

I'm more than happy with my non-official 1978 complete live show CD's. If 1975-1985 is any indication releasing them officially would be scary. Added reverb, missing chatter, re-sampling, then throw in squashing of Dynamics, etc. Too bad Bruce doesn't have a live vanity label like the Dead's old Dick's Picks. Well there's always Cryst@l C@t, Gre@t D@ne, etc, Just avoid Godf@ther stuff it's squashed thin like warm dog sh1t under a heavy wide shoe

I hate to say this, but until I see a release date for this thing, I won't believe it. It was supposed to come out a couple of years ago, and it has been delayed countless times. Nonetheless, when it does come out, it'll be grand. Especially the outtakes disc they're supposedly assembling. So many of the outs that have leaked out over the years have been torture for Boss fans because of the bad sound quality and the fact that so much of what has come out are early versions of songs that were later more fully realized in the studio. Stuff from the early Atlantic sessions before the Darkness sessions moved to the Record Plant.

I tend to agree with you. I often don't have time to watch concert dvd's, & will sometimes rip the audio to cd.

My least distracted music listening occurs in the car.