Setlist Given to Alan Vega

Bruce Springsteen's setlist for his Devils & Dust Tour performance at the Arena at Harbor Yard, Bridgeport, Connecticut, on 20 July 2005 — the night Springsteen dedicated his solo cover of Suicide's "Dream Baby Dream" to Alan Vega, in the audience as his guest. The setlist was given to Vega personally by Springsteen after the show.

Springsteen and Vega first met in the early 1980s, when Suicide were recording their second album and Springsteen was working in the same New York studio, down the hall from each other. The friendship that began in those adjacent rooms carried across the following decades, with Springsteen citing Vega as one of the most influential artists to him of all time — placing Vega among his twenty-five biggest musical heroes in Rolling Stone, and remarking after Vega's death in 2016 that "there was nobody remotely like him."

For the Devils & Dust tour Springsteen was closing his entire set with "Dream Baby Dream" — Suicide's 1980 closing track, a song Springsteen would eventually record his own definitive studio version of as the final track on High Hopes (2014). When Vega went to the Bridgeport show, Springsteen jumped off the soundcheck stage to greet him. That night, before the encore, Springsteen said from the stage: "We have a very special guest in the audience. I wanted to dedicate this song to the man who wrote it — Alan Vega is with us." He then performed "Dream Baby Dream". Vega was moved to tears by Springsteen's reading of his song; "I could never do this song again. His version of it is so beautiful."

On the reverse of the photocopied setlist, in Springsteen's hand, are his home address and the contact details for his personal assistant.

PROVENANCE:

The Estate of Alan Vega / Saturn Strip, LTD