According to NME, Connecticut names today ‘Bruce Springsteen Day’.

And I could not be more proud to be a resident of the nutmeg state today! Have you purchased your copy of Magic yet?

Springsteen’s Magic is available everywhere today. A joint Pete/Michael song by song review is coming up in a few days. Oh, the anticipation!

Links to Amazon and iTunes are here:

Amazon:

iTunes:

What are you doing at 6:00pm Eastern? Why not turn on Sirius 10 to hear the launch of E Street Radio? They’re kicking off the channel with a “rare” 1978 show at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, NJ.

Don’t have Sirius? Sign up for a free three day trial. Once you’re in, you’ll never want out:

www.SiriusSatelliteRadio.com

I’m off to a local record store today to pick up Magic on vinyl. The CD will be released one week from today.

For a very well written (and spot on) review of Bruce’s new album, check out Ben’s review at A Deeper Shade of Soul.

Buy Magic on Amazon.

UPDATE: Bruce and the band kicked off their Asbury Park rehearsal shows last night (Monday night). Here’s the set list:

Asbury Park Convention Hall
September 24th, 2007

Setlist:

Radio Nowhere
No Surrender
Gypsy Biker
Empty Sky
Something in the Night
Girls in Their Summer Clothes
Night
The Promised Land
Livin’ in the Future
Devil’s Arcade
Candy’s Room
She’s the One
Lonesome Day
My Hometown
The Rising
Last to Die
Long Walk Home

Encore:
Thundercrack
Born to Run
Darlington County
American Land

See Backstreets for a review.

ANOTHER UPDATE (or, Life as a Music Geek):

Tuesday night, home with the vinyl!

Rolling Stone is reporting that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band will play two benefit rehearsal shows at Asbury Park’s Convention Hall next Monday and Tuesday. Tickets for the event are $100, and will support an as-of-yet unannounced beneficiary. For those of you not familiar, the Convention Hall is across the street from the legendary Stone Pony (heads up for some amazing aftershows!)

The site is showing the shows as “Sold Out” but I’m sure that there will be some tickets out in the wild for astronomical prices. Good luck!

And a note from Pete: E Street Radio makes its return to Sirius Satellite on September 27th on Channel 10! Click the pic…

We got tour dates! And it looks like I’ll will be heading out to L.A. to catch the October 28th show. It looks like there’s still room in there to schedule a Phoenix date, but who knows? So L.A., here I come….

TOUR DATES:

October 2 Hartford, CT
October 5 Philadelphia, PA
October 9-10 East Rutherford, NJ
October 14 Ottawa, ONT
October 15 Toronto, ONT
October 17-18 New York, NY
October 21 Chicago, IL
October 26 Oakland, CA
October 28 Los Angeles, CA
November 2 St Paul, MN
November 4 Cleveland, OH
November 5 Auburn Hills, MI
November 11 Washington, D.C.
November 14 Pittsburgh, PA
November 15 Albany, NY
November 18 Boston, MA

November 25 Madrid, SPAIN
November 26 Bilbao, SPAIN
November 28 Milan, ITALY
November 30 Arnhem, NETHERLANDS
December 2 Mannheim, GERMANY
December 4 Oslo, NORWAY
December 8 Copenhagen, DENMARK
December 10 Stockholm, SWEDEN
December 12 Antwerp, BELGIUM
December 13 Cologne, GERMANY
December 15 Belfast, IRELAND
December 17 Paris, FRANCE
December 19 London, UK

FREE ON iTUNES and THE GUARDIAN: Be sure to head over to iTunes to get your free download of “Radio Nowhere” (in m4a) , and to pre-order the album for only $8.99. And thanks G. for letting me know that the UK paper The Guardian is offering a DRM-free MP3 on their site.

BACKSTREETS INTERVIEW: Backstreets had a chance to chat it up with the Boss in a phone interview. Check it out.

photo by Bob Minkin

Bruce’s new tune, “Radio Nowhere” leaked yesterday. It’s a straight-ahead rocker. One of my Boss Forum posters said it’s reminiscent of “867-5309” as performed by Pearl Jam [Edit: Tommy Tutone’s song as Pearl Jam would perform it – that wasn’t clear the first time around]. It’s true, you can definitely hear a tinge of it in the tune. Good stuff! You can check it out over at the Hype Machine.

So on to part two of this classic show. If you have the Live 1975-1985 box set, then you’ve heard quite a bit of part two. Six of these songs appear on the box set in edited form (Adam, Paradise, Growin’ Up, Saint, Backstreets, and Rosalita), which goes to show what an amazing show this truly is. The box set doesn’t include Bruce’s comments before “Paradise by the C”. Here, you’ll hear Bruce kick off the song with: “All you bootleggers out there in radio land, roll your tapes!”…

The very next night, Bruce and the band headed over to my neck of the woods to play Veteran’s Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix. The video footage of “Rosalita” that made its way on to the Video Anthology DVD was taken from that night.

So here’s part deux my friends. Enjoy!

Part Two

Paradise By The ‘C’
Fire
Adam Raised A Cain
Mona
She’s The One
Growin’ Up
It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City
Backstreets
Heartbreak Hotel
Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)

• Part One is here.
• Part 3 will be comin’ at you this weekend.

It looks like I’ll be putting my new turntable to good use on September 25th!

From this article on Billboard:

In an unusual move, Bruce Springsteen’s new album, “Magic,” is expected to be released on vinyl a week before its CD version hits stores. The vinyl is due Sept. 25 via Columbia, while the CD will arrive Oct. 2. A handful of major releases have appeared on vinyl prior to CD; Pearl Jam released its 1994 album, “Vitalogy,” on vinyl two weeks early, prompting a premature No. 55 debut on The Billboard 200.

My wife made me watch David Hasselhoff sing on America’s Got Talent, and now I feel sick to my stomach. I thought she loved me.

This must be rectified now. We need live Boss, and we need it now. I am getting seriously geeked about the new boss album and E Street tour coming up in a matter of weeks. This show here, this has to be my favorite Boss show of all time. You’ll feel the energy from the second Bruce takes the mic to apologize to those who got shut out after waiting in line all day: “I wasn’t trying to turn this into no private party, ’cause I don’t play no parties no more…except my own. [crowd cheers wildly] So give me a little slap back on this microphone… One…we gonna do some rock n’ roll for you...” ZOWWW! They don’t call him Boss for nothing, as you’ll hear with this show.

The show goes on for well over three hours, so this is going to be a three parter. I’ll have 2 and 3 up soon. But let’s get started with this. You Bruce fanatics, you probably have this show. But if you don’t, God are you in for a treat. I recommend downloading it all, queuing it up on your iPod or iTunes, and listening to it straight through. Certainly string the intro and “Rave On” together to see how this show kicks off. It’s amazing.

Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band
The Roxy, Hollywood, California
July 7th, 1978

Part One

Intro
Rave On
Badlands
Spirit in the Night
Darkness on the Edge of Town
Candy’s Room
For You
Point Blank
The Promised Land
Prove It All Night
Racing Intro
Racing in the Street
Thunder Road
Outro

Come back soon for parts 2 and 3.

Here’s an unconfirmed, but possible cover to Bruce’s new album, due out October 2nd.

Bruce and non-Bruce fans: thoughts? Cool cover? Badass Bruce? Grumpy Bruce?

I vote gritty, badass Boss. Sort of the 21st century version of Darkness-era Bruce. It could be the real deal, or it could be that someone combined a new Boss pic and some Photoshop skills. We’ll see…

Update: Amazon has it up on their site. It’s looking like the real deal: Magic