On October 19, 1974, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played Union College’s Memorial Chapel in Schenectady, a $2.50 student-committee booking that filled the roughly 1,000-seat hall and left hundreds more outside on the lawn. Following local openers Goebel & Lang, Springsteen played for just over two hours, opening with “Incident on 57th Street,” working through most of The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle and closing with the Chiffons’ “A Love So Fine.” Midway through, he previewed two songs nobody in the room had heard on record, “She’s the One” and a 12-minute “Jungleland,” both headed for Born to Run the following August. Fifty-two years later, the night stands as a snapshot of Springsteen on the eve of stardom, still playing college chapels.
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