Six months had passed since Three Mile Island, but the fear hadn’t. The partial meltdown in Pennsylvania had put a knot in everyone’s stomach that wouldn’t just go away. Word got around that concerts were being organized at Madison Square Garden by a group calling itself MUSE, Musicians United for Safe Energy. Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Graham Nash and John Hall were behind it.
Five nights in late September 1979 were planned, with a festival in Battery Park City to follow. For me, buying a ticket felt less like going to a show. I desperately needed a distraction from the end-times doom and gloom that seemed pervasive in my small Pennsylvania suburb.
The lineup could have been pulled straight from my record collection. Browne, Raitt, Crosby, Stills & Nash, James Taylor, Carly Simon, the Doobie Brothers, Tom Petty, Gil Scott-Heron (your typical teenage fare of the late 70s). I would have made the trip for any one of them, but all of them? I simply had to go.
It was a surprise when I realized that most of the people around me had come for one act, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.
Waiting for Bruce
You have to know what it was like back then to understand that this was a HUGE deal. Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town had made Springsteen a star, and everyone had a story about his shows. Marathon sets, leaving fans covered in sweat and changed for the better. But we didn’t have TikTok or YouTube, and Springsteen carefully guarded these shows from being filmed. Unless you caught the show yourself, everything you knew was secondhand, and you couldn’t help but think this was all hyperbole. Could he really be that good?
He played two nights, the second right around his 30th birthday. Because it was a benefit with a crowded bill, his sets were shorter than the marathons we’d heard about, but that didn’t matter, because every second counted.
The Show
The harmonica and piano of “Thunder Road” came on, and I could feel my heart stop as the whole Garden seemed to take a breath at once. Up and up and up the song climbed. Clarence Clemons’s saxophone finally broke through, and I felt like I could finally breathe. Strangers grabbed each other by the shoulders, and shouts broke like waves from every direction on the stage. We weren’t a crowd, but a single organism breathing in time. If you were there, you would understand.
Next came a song nobody recognized. “The River” hadn’t been released yet. Quiet and sad, it pulled that enormous room down to a near hush, and I remember feeling like I was overhearing something private. None of us knew it would become the title track of his next album, but it felt important.
Then the party was let loose. Gary U.S. Bonds’s “Quarter to Three” was turned into a frantic, soaked, joyous finale, and not one person stayed in their seat. Jackson Browne and Rosemary Butler were brought out for “Stay,” which made the stage feel like a family reunion. With the “Detroit Medley,” a run through Mitch Ryder songs, the band showed exactly where it came from: bar-band soul, played as if the rent depended on it. Bruce leaped. He slid across the stage. He collapsed as though he were finished, only to be hauled back up by his bandmates so he could do it all again. Each time he went down, the roar of the crowd seemed to lift him. Exhausted just from watching, we still didn’t want it to end.
Out on the street afterward, the same sentence could be heard over and over: The stories are true. Not hype. They’d been undersold, if anything.
Seeing It Again
The No Nukes film arrived in 1980, and a big share of its screen time was handed to Bruce. I felt oddly proud, as if the rest of the country was finally being shown what we’d seen. No review could have done as much for his reputation.
For decades, that film and a few grainy bootlegs were all anyone had. In 2021, The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concerts was released: a restored film and album of his complete sets from both nights. Watching it brought everything rushing back, the heat and the noise and the sense of a band at the very peak of its powers. What I’d believed for forty years was confirmed. Nobody in rock was better live in 1979.
Why We Were There
The music is easy to remember. The reason for it is easier to forget. Those concerts were part of a real wave of activism after Three Mile Island; money was raised for anti-nuclear groups, and the debate was pushed onto front pages. Many of the performers had belonged to that movement for years, and their conviction could be felt from the stage. Bruce said little about politics back then. His statement was left to the music, and somehow that said plenty.