A forty-three-year-old memory was triggered recently as I looked around the internet for Christmas music to include in a trip journal post. The memory involves a pair of trips to the Fox Theater in Atlanta, Georgia. The second was from my home near Cincinnati but the first originated in Eufaula, Alabama.
It was fairly early in my Bruce Springsteen addiction, The Boss was booked into the Fox, and I was visiting friends in Eufaula. Although it’s possible that the timing of my visit to Eufaula was affected by the concert, that wasn’t its purpose. My friends had only recently moved to Alabama and for several years I visited them at least once each year. Regardless of whether the overlap was by design or happenstance, it became a key aspect of the trip when my friends obtained tickets — very good tickets — to the show.
Arrangements were made for a neighbor to watch my two sons, who were with me, while the three of us made the approximately 150-mile drive to Atlanta. As I recall, we arrived well ahead of showtime and ate dinner near the theater. We then walked to the theater and noted the lack of a crowd as we approached. At the theater, we found the doors locked and finally looked up at the marquee. The show was canceled. Bruce was sick and both this show and one the previous night in Birmingham were affected. We would have known this if we had just listened to the radio on the drive up or paid attention to any number of news sources, but…
That was July 23, 1978. The show eventually gets rescheduled for September 30, but my friends are unable to attend so I had all three tickets. My girlfriend and I drive down the day of the show with a spare ticket that I ended up trading for a Beatles teeshirt at one of the vendors set up near the theater. It is a very different scene at the Fox than the deserted one of two months earlier.
Our seats were near the front at stage left. It’s the closest I’ve ever been to the band in the twenty-five or so times I’ve seen Springsteen perform. In those days, Bruce often left the stage and mingled with the crowd with mic in hand. Tonight he worked the aisle at stage right while Clarence walked and played in the aisle near us. I believe the last time I ever saw him do this was at a show in Oxford, Ohio, a couple of months later. The Springsteen rocket was taking off and audiences were becoming more boisterous. In Oxford, he made it just a few feet into the crowd before retreating to the stage for safety. I was nowhere close.
In Atlanta. the band took a break after ten songs then started the second set with the song that prompted this memory. During a legal battle with his manager, Bruce had wrangled some airplay by recording “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” and supplying it to radio stations. Set two in Atlanta opened with the song. Bruce frequently led into “The E Street Shuffle” with a story about meeting Clarence at night on a dark street told over sparse accompaniment. He now started a similar story over some familiar-sounding piano and drums. The approaching figure again turns out to be Clarence but now it’s Clarance as Santa Claus. And he’s coming to town.
During my memory triggering search, I learned something about the performance that was totally new to me. Plastic snow had fallen during “Santa Clause is Coming to Town” and was something of a slippery hazard that had to be dealt with. While stagehands swept away the fake flakes, the band filled the time with an instrumental version of “Night Train”. Apparently, that was completely spontaneous. It’s the only time they ever performed the song on stage.
It was not the only time “Santa Claus…” was performed although it might be the only performance that included snow. Here’s a performance in Houston that preceded the Atlanta show by about ten weeks:
The show at the Fox was on a Saturday. The plan had been to drive home on Sunday in order to go to work on Monday. But the weather was great and we decided to spend Sunday at Six Flags Over Georgia and do the driving on Monday. Before hitting the road early Monday morning, I literally called in well.