… that Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band kicked off their first full-blown European tour. They had visited London, Amsterdam and Stockholm six years previously, on the infamous Euro stint of the Born to Run Tour that is mostly known for Bruce tearing down his own posters. But by 1981, halfway through the extensive River Tour, he had recovered enough from that experience to once again take the band across the pond.

And this time it was intended to be more than a brief promo tour for record industry people and other VIP’s. This was the real thing. Thirty-three shows, covering eleven countries, and including a multi-night stand at one of the most prestigious venues in Europe, Wembley Arena in London.

The European leg of The River Tour was, by all accounts, a defining moment in Bruce’s career. It came at a time when he was becoming aware of the world around him and of his own and his country’s history. Experiencing segregated Berlin, the worker struggles of Thatcher’s England, and Scandinavia’s welfare societies, for instance, put his own life, and the lives of his friends and family, in perspective and helped push his art forward, both on stage and on record.

But if the 1981 European Tour was an important part of Bruce’s personal story, it was certainly at least as important to his fans. Or make that, the people who went as rock fans and left as Bruce Springsteen diehards. Bruce wasn’t a complete unknown in Europe in 1981 by any means. But he wasn’t a household name either. People who were interested in rock music were aware of his existence. He had a good reputation, but it was only based on his studio output. And rumors. Very few Europeans had ever seen him live.

By June of 1981 that had changed. Bruce’s three-hour marathons of pure, unpretentious rock ‘n’ roll had made such an impact on the new converts and press alike that four years later, when the band returned during the Born in the USA Tour, it was no longer just rock fans who stood in line for the tickets. Now it was the mainstream kids.  Bruce could have played twice the number of stadium shows and still not come close to exhausting the market.

But for a generation of European fans who experienced Bruce for the first time during those two months of European River shows, life had already been changed forever. To this day, many of them regard The River shows as no less sacred than the legendary Darkness shows. They will always be the shows that everything Bruce ever does will be compared to, and, needless to say, usually unfavorably.

Still, thirty years on, the veterans of the spring of ‘81 continue to appear in force whenever Bruce descends on the continent. And when he strikes up that first harmonica chord of “The River”, at least for a moment, those thirty years seem to vanish right into the air.