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Album dossier / 1980

The River

Bruce Springsteen · Rock

Recorded over roughly 14 months at New York's Power Station -- a Grammy-winning gig that was engineer Neil Dorfsman's first real engineering job, taking over after Bob Clearmountain started the sessions and had to leave for a prior commitment -- the sprawling double album was tracked entirely on the night shift, with Dorfsman and his crew tearing down and rebuilding the same live room setup six or seven nights a week. Of roughly fifty finished songs recorded across the extended sessions (an earlier, scrapped single-LP version was titled 'The Ties That Bind'), only twenty made the final cut; the mixing process alone became legendary, with engineer Toby Scott and producer Chuck Plotkin averaging about 75 mix variations per song on Clover Recorders' API console, printed to a prototype Sony 1610 digital recorder. 'Hungry Heart' -- written with the idea of giving it to Joey Ramone and the Ramones before Jon Landau convinced Springsteen to keep it -- was recorded live in June 1979 with Flo & Eddie (Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan of the Turtles) on backing vocals, mixed by Bob Clearmountain, and later had Springsteen's vocal pitch-shifted up for a more radio-friendly sound. The River topped the Billboard 200 on release in October 1980, powered by the E Street Band's alternation between bar-band rave-ups and stark character ballads.