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Bruce Springsteen adds third show as swan song for L.A. Sports Arena

Bruce Springsteen, shown in a 2009 performance at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, has added a third stop at the venue on his nine-week "The River" tour with the E Street Band. It is slated to be the final event at the arena before it is razed to make way for a new soccer stadium.

Bruce Springsteen, shown in a 2009 performance at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, has added a third stop at the venue on his nine-week “The River” tour with the E Street Band. It is slated to be the final event at the arena before it is razed to make way for a new soccer stadium.

(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
By Randy Lewis
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Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band have added a third show to the Los Angeles stop on the group’s “The River” tour that not only will be the final performance in L.A. on this round of concerts, but also will be the swan song for the venerable L.A. Sports Arena.

The Sports Arena has long been Springsteen’s venue of choice for arena-level shows in L.A., going back to his band’s first shows there in 1980. Over the years, Springsteen has played 36 dates at the Sports Arena, or at the adjacent Memorial Coliseum, to some 846,000 fans in total.

Springsteen is performing his 1981 album “The River” in its entirety on this tour, and previously announced shows at the Sports Arena on March 15 and 17 quickly sold out. The third show will be March 19, and tickets go on sale Friday, Jan. 29.

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The tour comes in conjunction with the recent release of “The Ties That Bind: The River Collection,” a box set that explores both the recording sessions that yielded the double album and tour that followed.

Before settling in at the Sports Arena for most of his L.A. arena shows, Springsteen had played the Forum in Inglewood on his 1978 Darkness on the Edge of Town tour. He also was tapped to open Staples Center when the new arena was unveiled in 1999, but because of major problems with the sound mix in the opening weeks, in combination with Staples’ more voluminous interior space, Springsteen returned to the Sports Arena on subsequent tours.

The Sports Arena is slated to be demolished to make way for a new soccer stadium, a process that’s estimated to take two years.

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Randy Lewis

Randy Lewis covered pop music for the Los Angeles Times from 1981 to 2020, working in that time as a reporter, music critic and editor for the Calendar section. He has interviewed most of the members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He’s also written first-person accounts of performing the music of Shostakovich and Prokofiev on clarinet and singing Mozart’s Requiem with world-class professionals. In addition, he enjoys belting out “Wooly Bully” in dive bars with his band, the Rounders.

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