The Tunnel of Love Express Tour was a concert tour by Bruce Springsteen and featuring the E Street Band with the Horns of Love that began at the end of February 1988, four and a half months after the release of Springsteen's October 1987 album, Tunnel of Love. Considerably shorter in duration than most Springsteen tours before or since, it played limited engagements in most cities which fueled the high demand. The tour finally grossed US$50 million not counting merchandise. Shows were held in arenas in the U.S. and stadiums in Europe. A historic performance in East Berlin took place on July 19, 1988.
The Tunnel of Love Express was designed to disorient Springsteen's audiences. A theatrical entrance began the show, a full horn section appeared, band members were rearranged from their customary positions, and on-stage spontaneity was kept to a minimum. Set lists were unusually static, and many of Springsteen's most popular concert numbers were omitted altogether. Instead, the shows featured Springsteen B-sides and outtakes as well as renditions of obscure genre songs by others. Critical reaction to the concerts was generally favorable, with some mixed reviews, while audiences were sometimes baffled.
The show featured backup singer Patti Scialfa brought to center stage as the object of sexually themed presentations deemed unusual for Springsteen. That, combined with the dour nature of many Tunnel of Love songs, led to speculation that Springsteen's marriage to Julianne Phillips was troubled. Further visual evidence of Springsteen and Scialfa becoming a couple emerged as the tour progressed, his separation from Phillips was officially confirmed, and for the first time Springsteen became the subject of a tabloid fervor. Springsteen and Scialfa eventually married, and the Tunnel of Love Express shows were the last full-length ones Springsteen would play with the E Street Band for eleven years.
Itinerary The tour came four and a half months after the release of Springsteen's 1987 album, Tunnel of Love, which had sold well – although nowhere near the blockbuster levels of its predecessor, Born in the U.S.A., which the album was partly a counter-reaction to – and already generated a hit single in "Brilliant Disguise". In part, the unusual lag reflected the ambivalence of the album; Springsteen had first recorded it solely by himself, and then some E Street Band parts had been dubbed in. Indeed, Springsteen and the band had started to drift apart over the previous two or three years, seldom speaking amongst themselves.Symynkywicz, The Gospel According to Bruce Springsteen, p. 105. Springsteen had considered going out on tour solo, and his management had provisionally booked 3,000-seat halls around the country.; however, he eventually decided against that approach, feeling the tone of the resulting show would be too dark.
The tour was officially announced on January 6, 1988. One of the few Springsteen tours to be formally named, the "Express" part came from its shorter duration – roughly half his typical length – and the shorter stays in any given location, generally just one or two nights.
The United States leg of the tour took place in arenas,Derkins, Bruce Springsteen, p. 70. starting on February 25 at the Worcester Centrum and continuing for 43 shows. There were five-night stands in two major markets, at the Los Angeles Sports Arena and at New York City's Madison Square Garden; the shows at the latter closed the American leg on May 23. The European leg commenced on June 11 at the Stadio Comunale in Turin, Italy, and continued for 23 shows in stadiums, concluding the tour on August 4 at Barcelona, Spain's Camp Nou.
The tour became the first one in which Springsteen did not play his home state of New Jersey; speculation that he would play a special series of dates there upon his return from the European leg proved unfounded.Derkins, Bruce Springsteen, p. 75.
The show Springsteen's concerts from his beginnings up through the massively popular Born in the U.S.A. Tour had been a linear progression of basically the same show, scaled to greater and greater heights. Apparently having achieved all he could along those lines, and feeling that the Born in the U.S.A. Tour had done too much of it, Springsteen sought to change directions.Santelli, Greetings From E Street, pp. 76-77. As Springsteen later wrote in his 2016 memoir, "Tunnel was a solo album, so I wanted to distance the tour from being compared to our USA run."Springsteen, Born to Run, p. 350. The Tunnel of Love Express was, as rock author Jimmy Guterman later wrote, "a tour intended to disorient."Guterman, Runaway American Dream, p. 173.
Springsteen augmented the E Street Band with a five-piece horn section led by Richie "La Bamba" Rosenberg. Generally known as The Miami Horns, they had recently been performing on the Jersey shore bar scene as La Bamba and the Hubcaps and were billed on this tour as the Horns of Love. This addition to the band would be both highly visible and audible. (Springsteen had wanted to carry a ten-piece band with a horn section going back to his pre-E Street, Bruce Springsteen Band days, but had not been able to afford it heretofore.Marsh, Bruce Springsteen On Tour, pp. 45–46, 178.)
The stage backdrop was a tapestry of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The entrance of the band on the stage, heretofore a casual affair, was now elaborate and stylized. It was set up to mimic fairgoers entering a carnival ride, with Springsteen assistant Terry Magovern playing a ticket-taker at the gate near an ominous and foreshadowing sign that said:Marsh, Bruce Springsteen On Tour, p. 172.
(One of the tour T-shirts being sold proclaimed "This is not a dark ride", but as both a newspaper reviewer wrote at the time, and a fan who later became an author wrote later, that was a lie.) Roy Bittan was already on synthesizer as an extended intro to "Tunnel of Love" was played. Band members entered the stage two by two, taking tickets from Magovern, each (with the help of a professional costumer) more sharply dressed than for previous tours:Marsh, Bruce Springsteen On Tour, p. 175. Max Weinberg and Danny Federici, Garry Tallent and Nils Lofgren, the horn section. Next came Patti Scialfa in a tight mini-skirt, big hair and carrying a bunch of balloons: more foreshadowing. Once in their positions, band members started their parts in the song. Penultimately, Clarence Clemons entered with a single rose between his teeth. Springsteen appeared last, dressed in trousers, a jacket and white shirt that departed from his past denim-and-bandanas look, matched the Annie Leibovitz-photographed look from the Tunnel album cover, and emphasized the greater formality of what was about to come.Marsh, Bruce Springsteen On Tour, p. 178. Once present, the band's traditional positions on stage were flipped: now Clemons was on the right, Bittan on the left, and so on; Weinberg moved from the center to the side, and backup singer Scialfa from the back riser to the front where Clemons had been. Cover story. Springsteen declared this to be evidence of his desire to shake things up when rehearsals began: "The first thing I did was make everyone stand in a different place."
The music of the show itself was a departure, and the show overall more subdued than in the past, with the return to arenas making the show more accessible. Yet at the same time the stage presentation was more stylized and choreographed than on any tour before. The country-influenced rock and serious ballads of the new album were not ideal stage material. Audiences expected the moody "Tunnel of Love" to open, but the second slot — which in past years was filled by well-known rousers such as "Badlands", "Out in the Street" or "Prove It All Night" — now was "Be True", an obscure, lightweight B-side to the underperforming 1981 "Fade Away" single. The show's theme was quickly established — an examination of relationships, often of the failed, sour variety, much as the album had been. A long spoken introduction to "Spare Parts" over a quiet piano backing by Roy Bittan reiterated the song's hardscrabble setting. Theatrics were up throughout A tortured rendition of the Biblical "Adam Raised a Cain", sitting on a park bench with Clemons in a long prologue to "All That Heaven Will Allow", the horn section throughout swooping and swaying and doing every bit of stage shtick known to horn sections.
Plenty of songs (typically eight or nine) from Tunnel of Love appeared,Cavicchi, Tramps Like Us, p. 86. but the dominance of obscurities, of B-sides and outtakes, continued, with immediate audience response sacrificed for what might be a slower but deeper understanding. Springsteen said, "The idea on this tour is that you wouldn't know what song was gonna come next. ... [The show feels] real new, real modern to me. I figure some people will wrestle with it a little bit. But that's okay." Some fans worried that Springsteen looked like he was not having as much fun on stage as in the past. The first set saw "Roulette", a previously unreleased number from The River sessions about the Three Mile Island accident, (which was paired with the previous tour's "Seeds" to lend an element of sociological anguish to the personal). The second set saw Springsteen assuming the manner of a televangelist or professional wrestlerMarsh, Bruce Springsteen On Tour, pp. 179–180. delivering "I Am a Coward", a remake of Gino Washington's little-known 1964 local Detroit hit "Gino Is a Coward", and "Part Man, Part Monkey", a never-before-heard, Springsteen-written quasi-reggae ode to the Scopes Monkey Trial by way of Mickey & Sylvia's "Love is Strange".Guterman, Runaway American Dream, p. 175 Audiences were bewildered.
Gone completely were several of Springsteen's most popular numbers and traditional concert warhorses: "Badlands", "The Promised Land", "Thunder Road", "Jungleland". Springsteen had said as the tour began, "when I went to put this show together, I said, 'Well, what were the songs that were the kind of cornerstones of what I had done? Those are the ones I automatically put to the side.'"
The first set did close with a blockbuster pairing of "War" and "Born in the U.S.A."; compared to the latter's opening of shows during the Born in the U.S.A. Tour, it now served to sum up a set's worth of personal struggles and counter any mistaken notions about the song's patriotic intent. The first hour and a half of the show featured no selections from Springsteen albums prior to Born in the U.S.A. other than "Adam Raised a Cain". The main set closer, a position long held by "Rosalita" until cut during the Born in the U.S.A. Tour, was now held by the fairly obscure, roadhouse-flavored and hotly played, Springsteen-written-but-Joan Jett-recorded "(Just Around the Corner to the) Light of Day" (it would hold this position for band-based Springsteen tours through the end of 2000).Marsh, Bruce Springsteen On Tour, p. 182.