The Night Bruce Springsteen Played to 7,102 Empty Seats in Johnson City

A couple of weeks ago I posted a column about the Best Concert I Ever Saw: Bruce Springsteen in 1976 at Atlanta’s Fox Theater. That was when he was still a New Jersey punk and before he became The Voice of the Common Man.

I saw him a couple of weeks later at Johnson City’s Freedom Hall, a near-empty Freedom Hall. (The attendance reminded me of a Christmas tournament basketball game in Sprankle Gym against Blountville. Assistant Coach John Whited came in the dressing room as we were preparing to take the floor and said, “Boys, a couple of thousand people are going to miss this game.”)

I had always heard that Springsteen – who had just been on the covers of Time and Newsweek – vowed never to play Johnson City again. I knew it was a small crowd but I never knew how small until this weekend. WJHL-TV News ran a story about why Freedom Hall doesn’t get the shows it once did. Included as a web extra was a chart of all the rock shows since the Hall opened in 1974.

And there on the list is the Springsteen show I attended with Bruce Haney, Rosemary Haney and 895 other people (total attendance was only 898 – not even 900 people in an auditorium that held 8,000). No wonder I remembered mostly empty seats.

It’s a fun list to peruse: artists’ names, dates of shows and attendance.

Springsteen’s show was at the bottom in attendance.

Among the top-drawing shows were The Eagles, Deep Purple and Ted Nugent, Kiss, Elvis, AC/DC and Molly Hatchet.

Even Dan Fogelberg outdrew Springsteen.

You can check out the list here. 

https://www.wjhl.com/news/local/web-extra-list-of-freedom-hall-events-performances/