Authorized by Bruce Springsteen, written by his longtime biographer Dave Marsh, and packed with photos, Bruce Springsteen On Tour is a glorious, full-color, coffee-table tribute. This gorgeously designed retrospective incorporates 350 color and B&W photos, many never before published, plus tour artifacts and memorabilia. But it's not just eye candy -- Marsh's text follows Bruce's live career from his first days on stage right through the 2005 Devils & Dust tour, without merely rehashing his Born to Run and Glory Days bios.
Earlier this year, Marsh talked to Backstreets about the writing of this book:
"What in the world made me think I had something else to say? It was right about the time that Devils & Dust came out... I said to myself, 'Dave, you let the Proper Intellectuals interpret this stuff, you're going to live out your old age in a world where people think it all had more to do with Philip Roth and Raymond Carver than Peter Wolf and Sam Moore, and that is not acceptable. If you wrote something about Bruce live, you could push the songwriting aside, in order to get things in proportion, and you could bring forth that he does it with a guitar and a microphone and kneepads (we can't figure he does those slides across the front of the stage with nothing more to protect him than denim, can we?), not a bloody word processor.'... And the glory of it is, that's a great way to celebrate what Bruce has done, which is what photo books of this kind are best at, I think."
A fantastic record of the Live Experience, Bruce Springsteen On Tour also features a timeline running along the bottom of its pages, marking live highlights chronologically. Yet another must-have book for Springsteen fans this fall.
Hardback, 324 pages. From Bloomsbury Publishing (Bloomsbury also created the exclusive poster for Backstreets customers).
