THE RIVER

Live 05 Nov 1980 version

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I come from down in the valley where mister when you're young
They bring you up to do like your daddy done
Me and Mary we met in high school when she was just seventeen
We'd ride out of this valley down to where the fields were green

We'd go down to the river and into the river we'd dive
Oh down to the river we'd ride

Then I got Mary pregnant and man that was all she wrote
And for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat
We went down to the courthouse and the judge put it all to rest
No wedding day smiles, no walk down the aisle, no flowers no wedding dress

That night we went down to the river and into the river we'd dive
Oh down to the river we'd ride

Then I got a job working construction for the Johnstown Company
But lately there ain't been no work on account of the economy
Now all them things that seemed so important, well mister they vanished right into the air
Now I just act like I don't remember and Mary acts like she don't care

But I remember us riding in my brother's car, her body tan and wet down at the reservoir
At night on those banks I'd lie awake and pull her close just to feel each breath she'd take
Now those memories come back to haunt me, they haunt me like a curse
Is a dream a lie if it don't come true or is it something worse

That sends me down to the river, though I know the river is dry
That sends me down to the river tonight, ay yay yay
Down to the river, my baby and I
Oh down to the river we'd ride, ah yay yay
Ooh ooh ooh ooh, ooh ooh-ooh-ooh
Ooh-ooh-ooh ooh ooh ooh, ooh ooh, ooh-ooh
Ooh ooh ooh ooh, ooh ooh-ooh-ooh
Ooh-ooh-ooh ooh ooh ooh, ooh-ooh
Ooh ooh ooh ooh, ooh ooh-ooh-ooh
Ooh-ooh-ooh ooh ooh ooh, ooh-ooh

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Info

The above lyrics are for the live 05 Nov 1980 performance of THE RIVER at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ, during The River Tour. The show was held at the university's Activity Center. The song was played in its full-band arrangement.

Video of the entire live 05 Nov 1980 performance of THE RIVER from the upcoming The Ties That Bind: The River Collection box set debuted on 16 Nov 2015, streaming on NPR.org. It was simultaneously posted on Bruce Springsteen's official website and Bruce Springsteen's VEVO YouTube channel.

The 05 Nov 1980 Show

During The River Tour, Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band performed a concert at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ on 05 Nov 1980. The concert was held at the university's Activity Center. It was professionally shot on three-quarter-inch U-matic videotape for promotional use. 24 songs were released on The Ties That Bind: The River Collection box set in 2015. The footage was originally produced and directed by Barry Rebo and the 2015 released video was produced and edited by Thom Zimny. "All the footage that was available from Tempe was used," Zimny told Backstreets.com. "No one, for instance, cut 'Racing in the Street' because they didn't like it ─ there was no editing in that sense. We used every frame of what we had available, down to the DVD menus."

Audio for the remaining 10 songs was officially released in December 2015 on Live.BruceSpringsteen.net. It was mixed from the multitrack tapes by Bob Clearmountain in December 2015 and mastered by Adam Ayan at Gateway Mastering Studios in Portland, ME. The missing ten songs were released in response to fan feedback. "We saw the petition. We read the tweets. We heard it loud and clear," Brad Serling, founder and CEO of Nugs.net told Backstreets.

The Ties That Bind: The River Collection

The Ties That Bind: The River Collection is a Bruce Springsteen box set released in 2015 on Columbia Records to celebrate the 35th anniversary of The River album. The 10"x12" box set contains four CDs, two Blu-Ray discs or three DVDs, and a hardcover 148-page coffee table book featuring 200 mostly unseen studio and live photographs, pages from Springsteen's notebooks, single covers, images and outtakes from the original album package, and other memorabilia documenting the album, plus a new essay by Mikal Gilmore. The box set was announced on 16 Oct 2015 and released to retail on 04 Dec 2015.

The first two discs consist of the 2014 remastered version of The River album. The third disc contains The River: Single Album, a 10-track album originally planned for release in 1979, under the title "The Ties That Bind". "The songs lacked the kind of unity and conceptual intensity I liked my music to have. So we went back in the studio," Springsteen wrote in his 1998 book Songs. He scrapped the project and went on to rework some of the songs and write and record some others, leading to the double-disc release the following year. All but one of these ten tracks were previously released.

The fourth discs contains The River: Outtakes, a 22-track album collection consisting of outtakes from the 1979-1980 sessions that didn't make the cut for either the single- or double-album versions of The River. The CD is divided into two parts, "Record One" (the first 11 tracks) and "Record Two" (the remaining 10 tracks). The former consists of unreleased songs while the latter consists of previously released songs.

The fifth disc contains the 60-minute documentary, The Ties That Bind, produced and directed by Grammy and Emmy-winning filmmaker Thom Zimny. The documentary features an intimate interview with Bruce Springsteen as he reflects on writing and recording of The River. The film transitions between Springsteen telling the stories behind the music ─ and illustrating them with solo acoustic guitar performances ─ interspersed with period concert footage and rare photos of him and the band in and out of the studio.

The sixth disc (on the Blu-Ray release) or sixth and seventh disc (on the DVD release) feature(s) The River Tour, Tempe 1980, a new professionally shot film consisting of 24 songs from Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band's 05 Nov 1980 concert at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ. The film uses four cameras and is recorded in multitrack audio and clocks at 2 hours and 40 minutes. The tapes were edited by Thom Zimny and the audio was mixed by Bob Clearmountain and mastered by Bob Ludwig.

The last disc also contains The River Tour Rehearsals, which consists of a 5-song 20-minute bonus footage from Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band's private rehearsals in late September 1980 at Clair Brothers Audio in Lititz, PA. Springsteen and the band can be seen working through live arrangements of what was then unreleased material from the upcoming album.

Available Versions

List of available versions of THE RIVER on this website:

THE RIVER [Album version]
THE RIVER [Live 21 Sep 1979 version]
THE RIVER [Live 22 Sep 1979 version]
THE RIVER [Live 05 Nov 1980 version]
THE RIVER [Live 31 Dec 1980 version]
THE RIVER [Live 05 Jun 1981 version]
THE RIVER [Live 30 Sep 1985 version]
THE RIVER [Live 25 Jul 1992 version]
THE RIVER [Live 25 Oct 2021 version]

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Page last updated: 16 Nov 2015