released from the album in the United States, but "Youngstown" was the song that Columbia Records most pitched to album oriented rock radio stations. The effort met with little success; as one station program director remarked, "Yeah, that'll get everybody up and dancing." The song was popular in Youngstown itself, getting frequent local radio airplay and generating brisk sales of The Ghost of Tom Joad. An editor at The Youngstown Vindicator said that town reaction split into three camps: "Some people are taking this as, 'Yea Youngstown! Finally somebody noticed!' Some people are taking it as a real vindication of the working man. And some people feel, 'Oh no, we thought we had all this behind us!" Springsteen made a point of playing Youngstown's Stambaugh Auditorium in January 1996 during the solo acoustic Ghost of Tom Joad Tour, and tickets for the 2,600-seat venue were sold in record time. During the visit he was given the key to the city by Mayor Patrick Ungaro. Springsteen introduced "Youngstown" at that show by saying, "This is about the men and women who lived in this town and who built this country. It's about [the people] who gave their sons and daughters to the wars that were fought ... and who were later declared expendable." He added that "You get into tricky territory when you write a song about someone's hometown. You don't want to get it wrong." The audience, which included many who worked in the mills or had family members who did, was hushed during the performance and then gave Springsteen a standing ovation after its completion. Afterward, Springsteen was relieved that the performance had gone over well and changed his travel plans to stay an extra day and visit historic sites in the area. Live performances The reception to the Youngstown performance was not unique; whenever Springsteen played the song in the Midwest during the Ghost of Tom Joad Tour, audiences kept quite still. Beyond that tour, "Youngstown" has been a prominent song in many of Springsteen's live concert performances. It was a featured song on the 1999–2000 Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Reunion Tour, starting a five-song sequence (that also included "Murder Incorporated", "Badlands", "Out in the Street" and "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out") that anchored the middle of almost every show. Here it was heavily rearranged into a hard rock vehicle, with pounding drums from Max Weinberg and