Bruce Springsteen performs with Bleachers at Radio City Music Hall (WATCH VIDEO)

by JAY LUSTIG
springsteen bleachers radio city

Bruce Springsteen and Jack Antonoff of Bleachers at Radio City Music Hall in New York, July 26.

Bruce Springsteen joined the band Bleachers at Radio City Music Hall in New York, July 26, for the band’s “Chinatown.” You can watch a video of the performance below, posted to YouTube by Rich Russo.

Springsteen has performed at Radio City Music Hall four times before, but never at a concert (only at awards shows).

Jack Antonoff of Bleachers called it “the honor of a lifetime” when Springsteen sang backing vocals on the studio version of the song (which appeared on the band’s 2021 album Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night) and appeared in the video.

Antonoff grew up in Bergen County. Springsteen, he said at the time, “is the artist who showed me that the sound of the place I am from has value and that there is a spirit here that needs to be taken all over the world.”

In a 2017 interview with Pitchfork, Antonoff said that when he was growing up, “I heard Bruce after I had discovered the punk music that was coming out in New Jersey, and I thought his music sounded like the cohesive version of all those punk songs, in the most simple way. All the content was exactly the same.”

He also said in that interview, “what I really connect with is this Springsteen or Robyn mentality of songwriting, where one person’s dancing to it, and another person’s weeping to it. That’s a big Jersey thing, where it’s all so huge — whether it’s Springsteen or the punk music I grew up listening to — and then in those lyrics there’s this hell.”

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