The Ghost of Tom Joad Tour was a worldwide concert tour featuring Bruce Springsteen performing alone on stage in small halls and theatres, that ran off and on from late 1995 through the middle of 1997.^[1] It followed the release of his 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad.^[2]

The tour represented Springsteen's first full-length, solo tour;^[3] he traveled with only an instrument technician and a sound engineer.^[4] As such it was a marked departure from the high-energy shows with the E Street Band that Springsteen had become famous for.^[5] The album itself was quiet, dark, and angry, and Springsteen presented it as such in the shows on the tour.^[3] Older songs from Springsteen's catalog, such as "Born in the U.S.A.," were presented in very different, often harsh re-arrangements.^[2][6]

The result, especially in the tour's first leg of shows, was an uncompromising portrayal of pessimism;^[7] Jon Pareles of The New York Times said that with the tour's performances, Springsteen "has taken his music to an extreme, a depressive's view of tedious, unending woe."^[6] Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune wrote that "In contrast to past tours, which have been celebratory events tinged by introspection, Springsteen brought a sobering sense of solitude" to the shows of this tour.^[2] By some of the later shows of the tour, however, Springsteen relaxed the mood a bit by interweaving a few new songs with an almost comedic bent.^[7]

The tour began on November 21, 1995, at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey.^[8] The first group of shows ran through the end of the year in major media centers such as Los Angeles, the San Francisco area, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston.^[9]

After a winter holiday break, the show visited other North American cities in January 1996, including a stop in Youngstown, Ohio, due to "Youngstown" being the album track most (relatively) played on radio.^[10]

February and March saw shows in Western Europe,^[11] followed by a three-week break during which Springsteen attended the Academy Awards show in Los Angeles. The tour resumed in Europe through early May.^[12]

A family man with three small children at the time,^[13] Springsteen took off the summer of 1996 and then started again in the U.S. in mid-September, playing smaller markets and colleges, as well as local stops in Asbury Park and his old St. Rose of Lima School in Freehold, and finishing in mid-December.^[14]

Another winter holiday break was taken, then in late January 1997 Springsteen took the show to Japan and Australia for three weeks.^[15] In May the final leg started up; first Springsteen went to Stockholm to accept the Polar Music Prize,^[16] then he toured Central Europe, seeing Austria, Poland, and the Czech Republic, before concluding with additional shows back in Western Europe. The 128th and final show of the tour was on May 26, 1997, at the Palais des Congrès in Paris and was attended by hundreds of fans from around the world.^[17]

While the Ghost of Tom Joad album was in the more acoustic, somber vein of his earlier Nebraska, it did contain some limited additional instrumentation and arrangements. Given that Springsteen was famous for his full-band, high-energy, crowd-rousing concerts, this tour was sure to be a surprising departure. Advertisements tried to make this clear, and all show tickets were printed with Solo Acoustic Tour on them^[18] to give audiences a firm understanding of what to expect.

Due to the small venues played on the tour, often in the 2,000–3,000 capacity range, tickets were often hard to get, creating a "ticket scalpers' heaven."^[19] Dave Marsh's Two Hearts biography assessed the tour as not expanding Springsteen's audience any, but helping to solidify it, especially in Europe.

The Asbury Park Press characterized a November 1995 Count Basie Theatre show as Springsteen "spinning his acoustic tales of desperation and hope ... he played with power and poise ... The lyrics are bleaker than usual for Springsteen and the music reflects the solemn mood." The New York Times said a December 1995 Beacon Theatre show "easily qualifies as the most earnest concert of the year," that "Where [Springsteen] once saw open highways, he now sees roads to nowhere," and that "Springsteen turned in a painstaking and convincing performance. But with that material, he has turned himself into nearly a one-note performer."^[6] The Washington Post, on the other hand, found a December 1995 DAR Constitution Hall performance showing strains of the "sense of triumph" that Springsteen's previous work had evoked, although his physical appearance made him "look more like the custodian at Constitution Hall than the star attraction."^[20]

The collection Hard Travelin': The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie, edited by Robert Santelli and Emily Davidson, found praise for the tour, saying the album's songs gained onstage and that the shows, "although hushed and void of the anthemic rockers that made him the greatest performer that rock has ever known, managed to bring Woody Guthrie back to life again."^[5] Jimmy Gutterman's Runaway American Dream: Listening to Bruce Springsteen criticized the first leg of the tour for producing "the most dour performances of his career".^[3] However Guterman praised later legs that incorporated new material that was "sly, low-key, and funny."^[7]

Portions of the December 8 and December 9, 1995, shows from Philadelphia's Tower Theater were later broadcast on the syndicated Columbia Records Radio Hour on U.S. album-oriented rock stations.

Several shows were released as part of the Bruce Springsteen Archives:

• Kings Hall, Belfast March 19, 1996, released September 1, 2017
• Freehold, NJ 1996 Saint Rose of Lima School Gym, released May 4, 2018
• Asbury Park 11/24/96, released November 1, 2019
• Nice France 1997, released February 5, 2021
• ‘’Philadelphia 12/9/95’’ released February 4, 2022
• Asbury Park 11/26/96, released November 4, 2022

Source:^{[21][22] [23][24][25]}

• Guterman, Jimmy. Runaway American Dream: Listening to Bruce Springsteen. Cambridge: DeCapo Press, 2005.
• Marsh, Dave. Bruce Springsteen on Tour: 1968–2005. Bloomsbury USA, 2006. ISBN 1-59691-282-0.
• Santelli, Robert, "Beyond Folk: Woody Guthrie's Impact on Rock and Roll", in Robert Santelli and Emily Davidson, eds. Hard Travelin': The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1999.
• Santelli, Robert. Greetings From E Street: The Story of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006. ISBN 0-8118-5348-9
• Killing Floor's concert database supplies the itinerary and set lists for the shows, but does not support direct linking to individual dates.
• Brucebase the same, with ticket and promotional images as well.