Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Tickets

Short Biography

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
& THE E STREET BAND
ANNOUNCE JIMMY BARNES & THE RUBENS
AS SPECIAL GUESTS FOR HANGING ROCK SHOW
FRONTIER PRE-SALE STARTS TOMORROW!
GENERAL PUBLIC ON-SALE STARTS FRIDAY!

The Frontier Touring Company in association with Jacobsen International are delighted to announce that the legendary Jimmy Barnes and musical wunderkinds The Rubens will be joining Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band as special guests for their Hanging Rock performance.

Jimmy Barnes is a performer who needs no introduction. Heralded as one of the most popular and best-selling Australian artists of all time, Barnes (JimmyBarnes.com) has tasted fame both as the front man of Cold Chisel and as a solo artist in his own right.

Across a career that spans almost four decades, Barnes has accumulated 9 #1 solo releases, sold hundreds of thousands of albums and scored two inductions into the ARIA Hall Of Fame.

Since bursting onto the scene with Cold Chisel in the late 1970s, Barnes has dominated the music charts and airwaves with instant classics like ‘Khe Sanh’, ‘Flame Trees and ‘Working Class Man’.

Taken to the live stage, these songs become colossal crowd singalongs led by Barnes’ incomparable gritty and emotive voice. These vocals will be on show once again as Jimmy Barnes warms up the eager crowd in Macedon next March.

Also taking the stage at Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s hotly anticipated Hanging Rock performance will be critically acclaimed indie quartet, The Rubens. Hailing from the town of Menangle in regional New South Wales, the band have had a dream run since bursting onto the scene in early 2012.

Made up of three Margin brothers and their childhood friend Scott Baldwin, The Rubens have struck a chord with audiences across the country thanks to Sam’s soulful, bluesy vocals, Scott’s swinging, hip hop beats, Zaac’s swaggering guitar lines and Elliott’s organ tones.

Their self-titled debut album (out now through Ivy League Records) was produced by esteemed Grammy award winning producer David Kahne (The Strokes, Regina Spektor, Paul McCartney) and scored an impressive #3 debut on the ARIA Album chart.
‘This record is filled with a lot of promise and a magnificent sound. Once again, Australia is proving to the world that the music we can create is top class.’ – Sydney Morning Herald

‘This album is just plain incredible. I hope these guys go from strength to strength because I am rooting for them. This album will be my soundtrack to the forthcoming summer.’ – Musicfeeds.com.au

Carrying on from their impressive debut release, The Rubens have gone from strength to strength this year. They have performed across the country and supported The Black Keys at their New Zealand shows, scored a Triple J Feature Album and won the J Award for Unearthed Artist of the Year.

Next March, the band continue to celebrate their success and share their signature sound with the masses as they play to a sure to be sold-out crowd at Hanging Rock.

Those lucky enough to attend Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s performance at Victoria’s Hanging Rock will be in for a treat. With special guests made up of both a member of Australian rock royalty and a band that is well on their way to earning the title themselves, this is an event not to be missed.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN & THE E STREET BAND
MARCH 2013

General on-sale tickets available from 9am local time Friday 14 December

SAT  30 MAR             MACEDON, VIC  - HANGING ROCK

In-depth Biography
When Bruce Springsteen finally broke through to national recognition in the fall of 1975 after a decade of trying, critics hailed him as the savior of rock & roll, the single artist who brought together all the exuberance of '50s rock and the thoughtfulness of '60s rock, molded into a '70s style. He rocked as hard as Jerry Lee Lewis, his lyrics were as complicated as Bob Dylan's, and his concerts were near-religious celebrations of all that was best in music. One critic became so enamored that he quit reviewing to become Springsteen's manager.

But the hosannas, when piped through the publicity machine of a major record company, were perceived as hype by a significant part of the public as well as the mainstream media -- Springsteen landed on the covers of Time and Newsweek, but both magazines were covering the phenomenon, not the music. Springsteen's album, Born to Run, became a hit, and he jumped to arena status as a live act, but as many people were turned off by the press campaign as turned on by the records and shows.

Two decades later, however, Springsteen remained an established star who could look back on a career that had produced one of the best-selling albums of all time, sold-out stadium shows, Grammy awards and an Oscar, and a group of imitators who constituted their own subgenre of popular music. If he no longer seemed divine, he remained popular enough for his Greatest Hits album to enter the charts at number one, and he had won over many of those skeptics from 1975.

Growing up in southern New Jersey, Springsteen turned to rock & roll as a teenager and played in a series of bands from the mid-'60s on, varying in style from garage rock to power trio blues-rock. By the early '70s, he was trying his hand at being a folky singer/songwriter in Greenwich Village. But when he was signed to Columbia Records in 1972, he brought into the studio many of the New Jersey-based musicians with whom he'd played over the years. The result was Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (January 1973), which went unnoticed upon initial release, though Manfred Mann's Earth Band would turn its leadoff track, "Blinded by the Light," into a number one hit four years later. The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle (September 1973) also failed to sell despite some rave reviews. (Both albums have since gone platinum.)

The following year, Springsteen revised his backup group -- dubbed the E Street Band -- settling on a lineup that included saxophone player Clarence Clemons, second guitarist "Miami" Steve Van Zandt, organist Danny Federici, pianist Roy Bittan, bassist Garry Tallent, and drummer Max Weinberg. With this unit he barnstormed the country while working on his third and last chance with Columbia. By the time Born to Run (August 1975) was released, the critics and a significant cult audience were with him, and the title song became a Top 40 hit while the album reached the Top Ten.

What Springsteen needed to do in the wake of the hype, of course, was to play and record more to consolidate his position. He was prevented at least from the latter by a former manager, who kept him in court during the next couple of years. Meanwhile, the musical world changed. Part of the reason critics had welcomed Springsteen so enthusiastically in 1975 was that he seemed a return to basic rock & roll values in a world of soft rock, heavy metal, and art rock.

By the time Springsteen returned with his fourth album, Darkness on the Edge of Town (June 1978), however, the punk/new wave movement had outflanked him, pushing him from the vanguard to the mainstream. Similar-sounding heartland rockers such as Bob Seger had appeared, so that Springsteen sounded less like an innovator than a member of an established genre. Nevertheless, he set about winning fans with an album that found the lost children of his early albums stuck in factory jobs, still longing for some escape. The album was a hit, though it did not match the success of Born to Run. Springsteen returned with the double album The River (October 1980), which topped the charts and featured his first Top Ten hit, "Hungry Heart." Nobody was calling him a hype anymore, but Springsteen retreated from his expanding success, next recording the low-key album Nebraska (September 1982), a virtual demo tape on vinyl. (Springsteen did not tour to promote the album, and in the interim E Street Band guitarist Van Zandt amicably left the group for a solo career, to be replaced by Nils Lofgren.)

But then came Born in the U.S.A. (June 1984) and a two-year international tour. The album threw off seven hit singles and sold over ten million copies, putting Springsteen in the pop heavens with Michael Jackson and Prince. After touring for more than a year, he released a five-LP/three-CD concert album, Live/1975-85 (November 1986), which topped the charts. Characteristically, Springsteen returned with a more introverted effort, Tunnel of Love (October 1987), which presaged his divorce from his first wife. (He married a second time to singer Patti Scialfa, who had joined the E Street Band.)

After another marathon tour, Springsteen gave the E Street Band notice in November 1989, breaking up a celebrated unit that had stayed together 15 years. In March 1992, he simultaneously released Human Touch and Lucky Town, and though the albums premiered near the top of the charts, they were less successful with fans than previous efforts. In the fall, Springsteen taped an MTV Unplugged segment (though he plugged in after one song), and the performance was released as an album in Europe in 1993.

Springsteen continued to tour until July 1993. In the fall, he wrote and recorded "Streets of Philadelphia" for the soundtrack to the film Philadelphia, which concerned a lawyer dying of AIDS. The song became a Top Ten hit in 1994, winning the Academy Award for Best Song and cleaning up at the Grammys the following year. At the same time, Springsteen had readied his Greatest Hits album (February 1995), reassembling the E Street Band to record a few new tracks. The album was an immediate best-seller. Springsteen followed it with The Ghost of Tom Joad (November 1995), another low-key, downcast, near-acoustic effort and embarked upon a brief solo tour. In 1999, shortly after his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Springsteen reunited with the E Street Band (including both Lofgren and Van Zandt on guitars) and embarked on a world tour that lasted until mid-2000, its final dates resulting in the album Live in New York City.

He then made his first new full-length studio album to feature the group as a whole since Born in the U.S.A., The Rising, his first album of new studio recordings since The Ghost of Tom Joad. Released in July 2002, it was followed by another successful tour and recording sessions for a new album, released as Devils & Dust in 2005. One year later he released the first covers album of his career, a tribute to the songs of Pete Seeger titled We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. Live in Dublin, featuring concert tracks done on the tour supporting the Seeger project, was released on both CD and DVD in 2007. Then it was back to working with the E Street Band for the release of Magic in the fall of 2007. ~ William Ruhlmann, Rovi