Live at the Paradise Theatre Boston, Massachusetts December 23, 1978

by William RuhlmannSouthside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes were at a crucial point in their career the day before Christmas Eve, 1978, when they performed the concert heard on this archival live album. Two months earlier, they had released their third album, Hearts of Stone, the most critically acclaimed album they ever made. Like its predecessors, I Don't Want to Go Home and This Time It's for Real, Hearts of Stone was produced by Miami Steve Van Zandt and featured songs written by Van Zandt and Bruce Springsteen. Both of the band's first two albums had been moderate sellers, with the second one breaking into the Top 100. Hearts of Stone needed to be a bigger seller to advance the Jukes, but as of December 23, it was just becoming apparent that this might not happen; the LP had stumbled in the charts, and no single had emerged. If the band was apprehensive about its future, however, that only translated into a more fervent performance in Boston. The set includes four selections from the new album, among them the Southside/Springsteen/Van Zandt composition "Trapped Again," introduced as the new single. Favorites from the second album include the title track, which opens the show, and "Love on the Wrong Side of Town." And the first album is recalled with its title song and the Southside signature song, "The Fever," here given an 11-plus-minute reading. All of these songs hew to the band's R&B showband style, but their covers of Sam Cooke's "Having a Party" and Wilson Pickett's "Stagger Lee" make their antecedents plain. The show ends, inevitably, with a pair of Christmas songs that have not appeared on any previous Southside Johnny collection. It all sounds like a triumphant evening, with a tight band and its bantam frontman playing well before an enthusiastic audience. Within months, as Hearts of Stone proved a commercial disappointment, the Jukes would be dropped by their record label, and though they were quickly picked up by another, they would turn out to be a journeyman act that never found its way to a mass audience. Maybe they were never intended to do that. Maybe they were meant to play to audiences like the one they found at the Paradise Theater and the one that will seek out this album. (Note that, especially at the start, the sound quality is not as good as you'd expect from a more polished release. Annotator Ann Pace, who apparently did not have a finished copy of the album to refer to, mentions two titles, "Take It Inside" and "You Mean So Much to Me," that aren't really on the disc.)