"There's Magic in the Night"

By JAY COCKS

Just a few more days now. At Tower Records in New York City, Manager Kenny Altman, who has already put in "our biggest initial order for as far back as I can remember," says flat out that "it's going to be the biggest record of the year, maybe for the next five years. I want a big truck to pull up in front of the store at 9 a.m. on Nov. 10, with a cash register in the back. For the first few hours we'll just sell them right off the truck." Lory Shaw, a buyer for California's 41-store Music Plus chain, enthuses, "It's the biggest advance buy we've ever made. And it's the first time we've taken advance orders from customers for any audio product."

Before you wait on the corner for Kenny's truck or call Lory to place a phone order, there are a few things to keep in mind. The record company, busy turning out some 1.7 million copies, has kept the lid on tight, so very little has been known about Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Live/1975-85 until now. It is a 40-song live set, spanning the past decade in the performing life of America's greatest rocker and the country's hottest band: that rumor is right. It wholesales for about $19: right again.

There has also been more argument and speculation about the contents of the album than about what happened at the Reykjavik summit. Yes, classics like Born to Run are there, jumping out of a superb audio mix like a Maserati off the mark. But so are Springsteen standards like Thunder Road and No Surrender, performed with newly spare instrumentation, sounding entirely different and stronger than ever. There are tunes Springsteen wrote for other performers that he has never recorded (Fire, Because the Night), as well as songs that he has borrowed from others (This Land Is Your Land, War, Raise Your Hand, Jersey Girl) and refashioned for his own.

And there are two new tunes. Paradise by the "C", a surfside 1978 instrumental titled in tribute to Saxman Clarence Clemons, is get-down beach music in extremis and in excelsis. The breadth of Springsteen's spirit and the range of his gifts can handily be measured in the distance between Paradise and Seeds, a workingman's testament of pride, helplessness and hopelessness from the 1985 tour that is one of his best tunes, and certainly one of his angriest. With all this, there is one more thing. Just incidental, of course, considering that Springsteen is now a certifiable sociological phenomenon, a rocker who is written about by political columnists and cultural essayists who live far from the nearest jukebox. But good to know, anyway.

Live/1975-85 is a great record. It puts the life back in live albums, , vividly encapsulating a decade of change into three hours and 35 minutes of rock 'n' roll that gives no quarter but makes demands that few other musicians today will risk. Springsteen wants your heart to hear. And he wants you to bring your conscience.

Before the Flood with Bob Dylan and the Band, Van Morrison's It's Too Late to Stop Now -- if the list of other memorable live albums goes on after these, it doesn't go on for long. Live/1975-85 is structured, with occasional exceptions, in chronological order, and, in its tape and CD configurations, each of the three parts is like a self-contained concert, so it is not necessary to play the whole set straight through to pick up the momentum or feel the impact. But Springsteen is after more than just putting together a family album, a memoir of glory days. Live/1975-85 is the personal testament of a decade.

Whoever did not catch on to Springsteen until 1984's commercial breakthrough, Born in the U.S.A., which sold some 17 million copies worldwide and became Columbia's all-time hit album, can now take Live/1975-85 and play an extraordinarily exciting game of catch-up. 4th of July, Asbury Park, which dates back to the "Boss's" second album, released in 1973, has never sounded more poignant or evocative of all its epiphanies down on the Kokomo than it does here, in a performance recorded at a New Year's Eve concert in New York City six years ago. Springsteen fans of long standing, however, will be more quickly absorbed in the implicit emotional trajectory of the record.

The Boss's raps embellishing some of his songs in concert can be shaggy-dog goofs or poignant dramatic reveries. Live/1975-85 offers both. Growin' Up's monologue is addressed to his mother and father, both of whom are in the audience at a 1978 Los Angeles concert ("For six years they have been following me around California, trying to get me to come home"). The River, however, begins with much darker currents, a memory of how "me and my Dad used to go at it all the time, over almost anything." He recalls how his father waited until Springsteen was laid up in bed after a motorcycle accident, then brought in someone to cut his son's long hair. Bruce said he would never forget it. His father said he couldn't wait until the Army got him. Later, the singer remembers, he came home after failing his draft physical.

"Where you been?" his father wanted to know. Bruce told him, and his father said, "What happened?" "They didn't take me." And his father heard that and said simply, "That's good." A story like that shows where seminal Springsteen songs like Adam Raised a Cain -- heard here in a rubbed-raw 1978 performance -- may have come from. On this record, it is also a psychic peacemaking. By the time the whole set ends with Tom Waits' Jersey Girl, a song to which Springsteen has added his own long last verse, there is a sense that accounts have been settled and that pages have been turned.

That is what makes Live/1975-85 unique: it is a concert as well as a confessional. Springsteen makes everyone accomplices in the shared experience of a common emotional life. And, as the cheers fade after the last song, there is a sure sense that it is time for him to move on. This is traveling music, then, for a trip that has finished and a journey that is about to begin. Put on Live/1975-85 and start waiting again.