"It's about what's happening NOW!" - from Nugs/Live Archives, a past political show for our present

November 10, 2025

A lot has changed - some forever, and not for better - in the nearly two decades since Bruce Springsteen's 2007 album Magic and the 2007-2008 tour that followed it. But in 2025, when you're still stuck in radio nowhere and just want to hear a Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band musical performance with some strong, explicit, and sane politics behind it, while continuing your search for a world with some soul, it just doesn't get any better than Oracle Arena, Oakland, CA - October 26, 2007, the latest release in the Nugs/Live Archive monthly "First Friday" series.

After all, we're now living even more in the future-as-now that Springsteen sang of and spoke about in Oakland that evening. "This is a song called 'Livin' In The Future,'" he told his audience by way of introduction early in that show, "but it's about what's happening NOW! It's about about how along with all the things that we love about the place we live, America… along with all those things….over the past six years we´ve had to add to the American picture things like rendition and illegal wiretapping, the rolling back of our civil liberties, and no habeas corpus or right to defend yourself against charges in court. And either because of the color of your skin or your circumstances or your religion, you may think that these things don´t have a big effect on your life, but all of these things are an attack on our Constitution, which means they're an attack on our very selves and our sense of ourselves as Americans. This is a song about sleeping through things that shouldn´t have happened here... that happened here. So tonight we´re gonna do something about it! We´re gonna sing about it! We´re musicians; it´s a start. And the rest is up to us.”

The show's not "all politics all the time," either, since it also includes this great full-E-Street-Band performance of "Tunnel of Love," a song rarely performed - with or without the E Street Band - since the 1988 Tunnel of Love Express Tour:

But let's not fall into the trap of drawing up false and unnecessary distinctions, forcing great music to be defined strictly as either totally "personal" or totally "political." After all, in the 1987 Newsweek article reprinted in The Tunnel of Love Express Tour's program, Springsteen made it clear that there still is a strong thematic connection between a song like "Tunnel of Love" and other songs of his that are considered to be more overtly political, like "Born in the U.S.A." He told interviewer Bill Barol, "One of the things I wanted the [Tunnel of Love] record to be about is, we live in a society that wants us to buy illusion every day. That happens on a national scale, like Reagan telling us there are no hungry people here, just people who don't know where to go to get the food. There's that will to pretend that everything is OK. That I'm OK, and you're OK. That it's morning again in America. That happens on a personal level also. People are sold this every day: you're gonna live happily ever after. So when you do begin to feel conflict - the natural human conflict that comes with any human relationship - people have a tendency to repress it, make believe it's not there, or feel guilty and ashamed about it. I wanted the record to be against that. Against that illusion. You just can't live like that, and people shouldn't be asked to. It's a cheapening of your own real experience, things that you know inside. People deserve better. They deserve the truth. They deserve honesty. The best music, you can seek some shelter in it momentarily, but it's essentially there to provide you something to face the world with... The guy in ['Born in the U.S.A.',] he wants to destroy that myth. It's not helpful, it's not useful. It brings people down in guilt and shame if they feel they're not living up to it... And it led him, and a lot of other men and women, into hell. So he comes back from Vietnam and he wants to find something new in this country. That search, that stand, is what the guy is screaming about. He wants to find something new and useful. That goes for myths about America, and it goes for the myth about 'They lived happily ever after.' Myths don't bind us together. They keep us strangers from each other. Strangers from our communities, from our country, from our friends and our children and our wives. And ultimately from ourselves."

From multiple decades burning down the road and into whatever next future we'll be livin' in, it has been and will continue to be a very long walk home. And the rest is up to us, indeed.

Click here to order/stream Oracle Arena, Oakland, CA - October 26, 2007. And you no longer need a different link to read Columbia/Nugs archivist Erik Flannigan's essay on this recording, entitled "Certain Things Are Set In Stone." On the same page where you can order/stream Oracle Arena, Oakland, CA - October 26, 2007, just click the "SHOW MORE" button where it reads, "Show Notes."