Description
'The Ties That Bind: The River Collection' is a comprehensive look at Bruce Springsteen's 'The River' era, one of the most pivotal periods of time in his career. The set contains 52 tracks on 4 CDs with a wealth of unreleased material, and 4 hours of never-before-seen video on 3 DVDs (or 2 Blu-rays). It is comprised of the original 'The River' double album as released in 1980; the first official release of 'The River: Single Album;' a CD of 1979/80 studio outtakes; a two-DVD film of never-released, newly edited multi-camera footage from Springsteen's famed 1980 show in Tempe, AZ, long rumored but never-before-seen; rare tour rehearsal footage; a brand new documentary "The Ties That Bind" about 'The River;' and a coffee table book of 200 rare or previously unseen photos and memorabilia with a new essay by Mikal Gilmore.

'The River,' was originally released on October 17, 1980 as a double album and reached #1 on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart. 'The River: Single Album' is the 10-track album that Springsteen recorded in 1979 as a follow up to 1978's 'Darkness On The Edge Of Town' but never released. The fourth CD on the box set is 'The River: Outtakes,' which spans the entire 'The River' sessions in 1979 and 1980. Eleven songs are rarities that have never been released before, and for the most part are completely unheard and unknown even to fans, who have long considered Springsteen's outtakes to be treasured secrets.

"The Ties That Bind," on one DVD or Blu-ray, is a brand new 60-minute documentary that features an intimate interview with Springsteen as he reflects on the tumultuous, extended period writing and recording 'The River.' The film transitions between Springsteen telling the stories behind the music and illustrating them with solo acoustic guitar performances -- interspersed with period concert footage and rare photos of Bruce and the band in and out of the studio. The final video component is "Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band: The River Tour, Tempe 1980," a new film produced from footage professionally filmed in 1980 using four cameras and recorded in multitrack audio. The film features 24 songs 2 hours, 40 minutes on 2 DVDs (or one Blu-ray) from Springsteen's November 5, 1980 concert at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ. Widely regarded as one of Springsteen's finest performances, this intense show features early live versions of over half of 'The River' songs. Also included is 20 minutes of footage from the late September, 1980 River Tour rehearsals held in Lititz, PA, showing Springsteen and The E Street Band working through live arrangements of what was then unreleased material from the upcoming album.

'The Ties That Bind: The River Collection is packaged in a 10" x 12" box with a hardcover 148-page coffee table book containing 200 studio and live photographs most of which have never been seen before plus pages from Springsteen's notebooks, single covers, images and outtakes from the original album package, and other memorabilia documenting the album. Liner notes include a new essay from journalist Mikal Gilmore, the original Rolling Stone album review from 1980, and Springsteen's updated comments about the album from the 1998 "Songs" book.

Video Content:
The Ties That Bind (Documentary) - DVD1 (or BD1)
The River Tour, Tempe 1980 Concert - DVD2 & DVD3 (or BD2)

Tracklist
[CD1 - The River: Double Album Part 1]
1. The Ties That Bind
2. Sherry Darling
3. Jackson Cage
4. Two Hearts
5. Independence Day
6. Hungry Heart
7. Out In The Street
8. Crush On You
9. You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)
10. I Wanna Marry You
11. The River

[CD2 - The River: Double Album Part 2]
1. Point Blank
2. Cadillac Ranch
3. I'm A Rocker
4. Fade Away
5. Stolen Car
6. Ramrod
7. The Price You Pay
8. Drive All Night
9. Wreck On The Highway

[CD3 - The River: Single Album]
1. The Ties That Bind
2. Cindy
3. Hungry Heart
4. Stolen Car
5. Be True
6. The River
7. You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)
8. The Price You Pay
9. I Wanna Marry You
10. Loose End

[CD4 - The River: Outtakes]
1. Meet Me In The City
2. The Man Who Got Away
3. Little White Lies
4. The Time That Never Was
5. Night Fire
6. Whitetown
7. Chain Lightning
8. Party Lights
9. Paradise By The C
10. Stray Bullet
11. Mr. Outside
12. Roulette
13. Restless Nights
14. Where The Bands Are
15. Dollhouse
16. Living On The Edge Of The World
17. Take 'em As They Come
18. Ricky Wants A Man Of Her Own
19. I Wanna Be With You
20. Mary Lou
21. Held Up Without A Gun
22. From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)

4CD/3DVD Set
US - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B016EAZ6Z8/?tag=imwan-20
CA - http://www.amazon.ca/dp/B016EAZ6Z8/?tag=imwanca-20
UK - http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B016EAZ6Z8/?tag=imwan-21

4CD/2BD Set
US - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B016EAZ6GC/?tag=imwan-20
CA - http://www.amazon.ca/dp/B016EAZ6GC/?tag=imwanca-20
UK - http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B016EAZ6GC/?tag=imwan-21

This is the ONE I have been awaiting for! The long rumored box is made for everyone's Christmas list.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/ ... t-20151015

Four-CD/three-DVD 'The Ties That Bind: The River Collection' set will feature unheard outtakes, new documentary, book and 1980 concert film selections

After years of rumor and anticipation, Bruce Springsteen has unveiled the details of a new box set spotlighting his 1980 double LP The River. Entitled The Ties That Bind: The River Collection, the four-CD/three-DVD package will land in stores on December 4th. It features the original single disc album of The River (then called The Ties That Bind) Springsteen planned on releasing in 1979, 11 previously unreleased outtakes from The River sessions, a new documentary, a concert filmed on the The River tour and another 10 songs from the era that were released on previous archival packages.

The new hour-long documentary The Ties That Band was directed and produced by longtime Springsteen collaborator Thom Zimny. It shows Springsteen playing acoustic renditions of songs from The River, along with photographs and concert footage from the era. Among many other songs, he plays "Independence Day," "Point Blank" and "Wreck On The Highway" outdoors near a garage (on what appears to be the grounds of his New Jersey home) as he explains their backstories in great detail.

You're brought into a very late night intimate convention between two people," he says of "Independence Day." "It's part of a series of songs that I wrote about my dad that weren't completely autobiographical, but were emotionally autobiographical."

Also in the box set is a a two-DVD Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band concert shot in Tempe, Arizona on November 5th, 1980. The 160-minute set was shot on four cameras and recorded in multitrack audio. It's a high-energy (though sadly incomplete) show of Springsteen, wearing a grey sport coat, tearing through songs like "Born To Run," "Badlands" and "Cadillac Ranch" the day after Ronald Reagan was elected president. (The definitive fan site Brucebase refers to the concert as "one of the finest, most intense shows of the River tour.") There's also 20 minutes of band rehearsal footage filmed in September of that same year weeks before the release of the album.

The River was Springsteen's fifth studio record, and his first one to hit #1 on the Billboard 200. The double album contained "Hungry Heart," his first Top Ten single, and veers back and forth between wild rockers ("Ramrod," "I'm a Rocker," "Cadillac Ranch") and somber, reflective tunes ("Independence Day," "Stolen Car," "Wreck On The Highway"). The title track was inspired by his sister Ginny, who married her husband Mickey after getting pregnant as a teenager.

"It was a record where I first started to tackle men and women and families and marriage," he said in 2009 before playing the complete record at Madison Square Garden. "There were certain songs on it that led to complete records later on. 'The River' sort of led to the writing on Nebraska. 'Stolen Car' led to the writing on Tunnel of Love. I handed it in with just one record and I took it back because I didn't feel it was big enough and I wanted to capture the themes that I'd been writing about Darkness. I wanted to keep those characters with me and at the same time added the music that made our live shows so much fun and enjoyable for our audience."

The River album sessions stretched for over a year between 1979 and 1980, producing more songs than could fit on even two records. Many great tunes, like "Restless Nights," "Where The Bands Are" and "Ricky Wants A Man of Her Own," didn't surface until the 1998 box set Tracks. Many others fell into the hands of bootleggers.

The first disc of The Ties That Band: The River Sessions has 11 songs that have remained in the vaults over the past 35 years. They include "Meet Me In The City," the tale of a lovesick felon "charged with doin' things I can't explain" and "Party Lights," which shares lyrics with "Point Blank" and "Atlantic City" and has the "take that little brat of yours" line he added to his live cover of Tom Waits' "Jersey Girl."

"It was a nice place in our development," Springsteen says of The River in The Ties That Bind. "At the time, I was pouring through a variety of history books just to contextualize myself, understand where I came from and what that meant. I wanted to write songs of breadth that had some depth to them. And I knew I wanted to write about the place I lived and I wanted to write about social forces that I felt played through that history. I devoured quite a few history books at the time trying to get a sense of where everything came from."

Like previous Springsteen box sets centered around Born To Run and Darkness On The Edge of Town, the package will come with a book. The companion piece will contain 200 rarely-seen photos and a new essay by longtime Rolling Stone Contributing Editor Mikal Gilmore along with the original Rolling Stone review by Paul Nelson.

Rick A.

A quick bump to add the image and pre-order links.

Great, pre-ordered!

Rick A.

Zowie! Thanks for the info. But why release songs on this that have already been on other archive compilations?

Shouldn't buy this...bought the remastered albums box, so have 2 discs already ... bought the VU Matrix box and some other stuff that will appear under my wife's disapproving nose in November ... have developed an unfortunate immunity to interest in Springsteen out-takes due to overexposure ... don't have the time to appreciate it ... don't care one bit about the documentary,
...The River was my first Springsteen album, bought a few years after it's release and a million radio hearings of "Hungry Heart"... This is the Springsteen Box I have been looking forward to... 11/5/80 is a intense and immense show as a hissy CD bootleg, it must be super awesome as a professionally prepared Audio-Video release...Just got a Blu-Ray player and the BR version of this box is only $10 more...
What to do, what to do...
Hey, what do you think are the chances the BR of 11/5/80 will have lossless audio? That would really increase my likelihood of spending the money...

Sounds like only one of the four CD's has "new" material? I hope it gets sold separately.

Anybody else wondering if the studio version of "Held Up Without A Gun" is on here?

As for including the previously released outtakes--people will complain if they're included, people will complain if they are not. The problems is, the blurb above says that there will be ten of these in the box, but I'm counting 15 officially released River outtakes on this page https://brucebase.wikispaces.com/The+Ri ... o+Sessions

It is. Check out the full tracklist that I've just added to the first post.

Hmm, the Born To Run box spawned the CD release of the London '75 concert that was presented on DVD in that box, but the Darkness box brought us the spin-off release of the box's 2 out-takes CDs as a 2 Cd set.
Based on that, this box is likely to have an accompanying 2 CD release. But will it be CDs 3 and 4 from the box, or a 3CD presentation of the concert from the box's video discs? Or nothing?
CDs 2 and 3 don't seem like a reasonable "set" to me. The Darkness spin-off was 2 congruent discs of material from the Darkness sessions, some completed with overdubs recorded in 2009. Disc 3 of the River box is an 11 track version of the album that includes 3 (?) unreleased songs, but Disc 4 is 22 session recordings from the '79/'80 sessions that birthed the album. Would coupling those two differently themed adjunctual collections without the actual album make sense?
As for releasing audio from the 11/5/80 show as a stand-alone release, there is the potential problem of the recent 12/31/80 CD release.
Don't know if I have seen mention of this series on this board :
http://live.brucespringsteen.net/
What started as sales of his current tours via NugsNet on CDRs or as downloads has evolved into a series similar to the Grateful Dead Dick's/Dave's Picks serieses.
In the last year or so, one show each from '75, '78, '80, '84, '88 have been released, with a '95 releasing next month. The 1980 show, 12/31/80 might make the 11/5/80 CD release idea commercially redundant... unless the two releases are perceived as targetting different markets...

Actually it looks like Disc 3 only contains 1 unreleased song, "Cindy". Some of the songs may be different version than those found on The River or Tracks, however.

"Held Up Without A Gun"!!! Finally!!!

I'm fully in on this one...

Psyched, but disappointed that only about 2/3 of the Tempe concert is being released here......

A preview:

A couple of decades ago (jeez I'm old) I had the bootleg CD which purported to contain the rejected 1979 album. It was a great disc, although unfortunately I no longer have it, as I'm curious as to how it might compare to the upcoming official version. I remember that the artwork was the studio paperwork that apparently went with the original tapes.

I guess I'm hoping for a solo release of discs 3 & 4, but I don't know...Springsteen isn't a go-to artist for me anymore. I'm not sure why. About a year ago, I spent a week or two going through his catalog from start to finish, but it just doesn't speak to me much anymore. Either I've aged or he has.

I'm not familiar with the Tempe show and I agree that only 24 of the 35 songs are included. I know the Nassau Coliseum show from 12/31/80 and love that. I have a boot of it as well as the Nugs version. I like that Springsteen is releasing these live shows legitimately, but it's too bad that the packaging and annotation are so crappy. The boots are better in that regard.

Springsteen's peak to me was "Greetings" through "The River". He's never done anything better IMHO than what he did during those years. This track has the sound from that period which is why it appeals to me. The "Tracks" material from this time frame was great too...along with the material on "The Promise". I would love it if he'd go back and explore expanded reissues of "Greetings" and "The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle", but I'm not holding my breath.

I doubt that there is much leftover studio stuff left that wasn't on "Tracks", but there is a surprising amount of pre- Columbia material that has circulated on bootleg. It would make for an interesting release if at least some of it was officially curated.

Geez, it's really hard for me not to put those on a wish list. I can just about sing every song. I think I had the Tempe show on tape years ago. My brother probably has it.

the trailer

About damn time....Merry Christmas to us all!