Pop Culture Happy Hour: Our Favorite Concert Films

The Live in New York City film released in 2001 is drawn primarily from this tour-ending July 2000 Madison Square Garden concert, later released (in audio only) in its entirety through Springsteen’s live archive in 2017.

On Feb. 29, 2020, nine days after I had knee surgery, I bolted my despised immobilizer to my left leg and crutched down the 9:30 Club to see the Drive-By Truckers . I’d seen this beloved band play this beloved venue on many, many prior occasions, including on New Year’s Eve at the end of 2011, but never before with only three working limbs at my disposal. The club reserved a couple of barstools for me so I could keep my leg elevated and I had a fine time, not knowing that a global pandemic would extend what I’d expected would be four to six weeks of post-op confinement to 13 months and counting.

We haven’t been able to go to concerts in a year now. So I was glad when the Pop Culture Happy Hour crew invited me to join my longtime pal Stephen Thompson and my new-time pals Cyrena Touros and LaTesha Harris to talk about some of our favorite concert films. (Music documentaries were excluded from consideration.) While there are a dozen or so such films to which I have returned time and again, the indefensible police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd last year and the subsequent Black Lives Matter demonstrations those tragedies gave rise to made the 20-year-old film documenting the tour where Bruce Springsteen pissed off the NYPD with his then-brand-new song “American Skin (41 Shots)” — inspired by the NYPD killing of unarmed delivery man Amadou Diallo in 1999 — once again sadly timely. So I decided to talk about Live in New York City, the film shot during the final two concerts of Bruuuuuuuuuuce’s 1999-2000 reunion tour with The E Street Band — their first time out on the road together in 11 years — which concludes with that haunting, magnificent song.

The reconstituted E Street Band has now been playing together longer than its original incarnation did (circa 1974-88) but in 1999 it was not at all clear that this reunion would be permanent. Bruce had dismissed the E Street Band several years before I was old enough to be going to rock shows. The reunion was a big deal. I saw five shows on that tour. One of them, for which I begged a ride to Philly from a colleague I barely knew and then paid a scalper $240 for a nosebleed ticket, was finally released in sublime quality through the Springsteen’s live archive last summer. It only took 21 years.

I looked up the proper unit of measurement to describe how much Bruuuuuuuuuuce sweats during the performance captured in Live in New York City. Turns out it’s Wilburys. He loses five Wilburys of fluid during the show.

Thanks as always to ace producers Jessica Reedy and Candce Lim for having me on.

B-Boys & B-Sides: Presenting (the first quarter of) my Lucky 13th Yulemix, "Blue Wave Christmas"

I’ve only gotten better at this.

Have mercy! This is just getting ridiculous now. For the lucky thirteenth iteration of my Yuletunes Eclectic and Inexplicable series, I thought that instead of releasing it in two indefensibly long parts, as had been my habit since I stopped burning and printing physical CDs of this thing—a nice bauble to thrust into some unsuspecting person's hand, but expensive—I thought I would do a sort of podcast limited series of four episodes, released weekly, counting down to the Feast of Christmas. Because four is more than two—one hundred percent more, from a numerical perspective. And I believe in always giving one hundred percent, Christmaswise. 

So this is merely the first twenty-five percent, right here. And I daresay this is the most eclectic Yuletunes Eclectic entry yet. Do they know it’s Christmastime at all? Do you? Is Santa a B-Boy or a B-Man? Sure, you’ve heard Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”; that’s entry level. But have you heard the flip? These are cuts so deep they’ll give the bends, and yet so Prime that Jeff Bezos would be delivering them to you with free two-day shipping if I hadn’t already dropped ’em on ya instantaneous.

Strap in. Turn on. Light up. Get down. Because to paraphrase Ben Grimm, it’s hall-deckin’ time. Again!