April 30: “Sandy,” officially known as “4th of July, Asbury Park” is a variation on the common Springsteen theme of escaping the humdrum life of adolescent carny rides along the boardwalk to some undefined place where life amounts to something. The narrator has
got tired of hangin’ in them dusty arcades bangin’ them pleasure machines
Chasin’ the factory girls underneath the boardwalk where they all promise to unsnap their jeans
And you know that tilt-a-whirl down on the south beach drag
I got on it last night and my shirt got caught
And they kept me spinnin’, didn’t think I’d ever get off
The tilt-a-whirl is an apt metaphor, since it spins you round and round and stirs the senses but never takes you anywhere. The speaker has managed to get off and now wants Sandy to join him lest she wind up like the waitress described in the lines below. On the next album, Sandy morphs into Mary of “Thunder Road,” Terry of “Backstreets,” or Wendy of “Born to Run.” Bruce apparently does not like to hit the road alone.
Sandy, that waitress I was seeing lost her desire for me
I spoke with her last night, she said she won’t set herself on fire for me anymore
She worked that joint under the boardwalk
She was always the girl you saw bopping down the beach with the radio
The kids say last night she was just like a star in one of ‘em cheap little seaside bars
And I saw her parked with lover boy out on the Kokomo
Dj’hear the cops finally busted Madame Marie for tellin’ fortunes better than they do
For me this boardwalk life’s through baby
You ought to quit this scene too
Springsteen sang the song with more conviction when he actually was trying to escape the boardwalk life with success by no means guaranteed, but for some inexplicable reason, he replaced the stellar waitress verse with an inferior one about Harley-riding angels. In more recent performances, he’s gone back to the original. But now the song’s sung with less conviction, perhaps because he could probably buy all of Asbury Park and still have plenty left over to fund his daughter’s horse-riding career and college for the others. There are two versions here, an older and a newer–the last performance with Danny on accordian. It’s up to you to mind-meld the two together to make for the ideal version. J.B.
4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) (Palace Theatre 1976)4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) (Live Version featuring Danny Federici)
April 29: In the same year that Dylan was cementing his legend with intensely personal songs on Blood on the Tracks (1975), Springsteen was making a name for himself with songs in which he kept his distance as a third-person narrator, an outsider describing what he saw, an empathetic one to be sure, but still an outsider. “Jungleland” is a case in point. Writes Dave Marsh in Born to Run: The Springsteen Story: “Springsteen is no more Magic Rat in this song than director Martin Scorcese is one of the crazy aspiring hoods in Mean Streets . . . . ’Jungleland’ opens with a sweet violin passage that gives way to a tinkling piano. As Magic Rat pulls into town and picks up his girl, there’s no sense that anthing but another romantic interlude is taking place. But that mood is suddenly shattered as the Rat and the girl move across a twisted landscaped, pursued for unknown reasons by Maximum Lawmen. Although their crime is unstated, the fact that, this time, the escapees are pursued for real casts a new light on the hope that was held out in the early songs. In the second verse, the guitars explode and the drums crash in:
From the churches to the jails
Tonight all is silence in the world
As we take our stand
Down in Jungleland
From this point on the song takes on a furious pace and tone. Even the rock and roll bands, which represent the rout out of the town full of losers, are transformed into street-fighting gangs . . . . The scene moves over to a wild dance party, then changes again, via a smoky sax solo, to a funky bedroom where lovers wrestle but love can’t win. Outside the window, Rat, the potential hero, is smashed on the pavement. Uncaring, the girl inside reaches for the light. As it goes out, Springsteen sings.
Outside the street’s on fire in a real death waltz
Between what’s flesh and what’s fantasy
And the poets down here don’t write nothing at all
They just stand back and let it all be
And in the quick of a knife, they reach for their moment
And try to make an honest stand
But they wind up wounded, not even dead
Tonight in Jungleland
Springsteen’s voice takes over, soaring above strings and sax, flat-out wailing. . . . Magic Rat isn’t dead, though. There’s hope. It is not clear how much more Rat (or we) could stand–but the idea remains that we have seen only the beginning of his story, even now.” I’m with Marsh’s interpretation until he concludes that Magic Rat isn’t dead even though the verse says his dream gunned him down and the ambulance pulls away. And the pessimism is emphasized by the fact that the poets, they who trumpet legends, can’t meet the romantic dream of dying for an idea or cause but are only wounded. But be that as it may, “Jungleland” is one of the few epic songs Springsteen still performs regularly. While some songs like “Something in the Night” get wrecked in the studio, other blossom. ”Jungleland” is one of them. Just compare the early version to the post-studio ones. J.B.
Jungleland (1974) Jungleland (Hall of Fame: 10/29/09) Jungleland-Hammersmith: 11/18/75
April 28: Years before Woody Guthrie’s populism began permeating Springsteen’s songs, there were the blue-collar anthems of the Animals, the Eric Burdon led group that was part of the British Invasion in the mid-sixties. On the same Palladium show that featured Ronnie Spector and the wall of sound in November of /76, Springsteen did two Animal cuts, an epic version of “It’s My Life,” and a more conventional version of “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” Never mind that both songs were the product of Brill Building songwriters, they expressed themes that could have come right out of Bruce’s own songbook. Indeed, here’s the formula for “Born to Run,” which he played that night immediately after “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”: wall of sound minus bubblegum romance + blue-collar desire to escape dirty heart of rat trap city= song that radio stations played even before official release and despite four plus minutes in length. The early Born to Runs are spare compared to the later ones with all the extra musicians, so I’ve chosen a version of more recent vintage to better exemplify Springsteen’s wall-of-sound approach. That it features a duet with Billy Joel should not in any way be construed as an endorsement of this other Jersey boy, who’s heart is in the right place but . . . . Indeed, it should be viewed as a rebuttal of all those who think Bruce can’t sing. Just compare vocalists, and the case will be made by itself. J.B.
In this dirty old part of the city Where the sun refused to shine People tell me there ain't no use in tryin' Now my girl you're so young and pretty And one thing I know is true You'll be dead before your time is due, I know Watch my daddy in bed a-dyin' Watched his hair been turnin' grey He's been workin' and slavin' his life away Oh yes I know it (Yeah!) He's been workin' so hard (Yeah!) I've been workin' too, baby (Yeah!) Every night and day (Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!) We gotta get out of this place If it's the last thing we ever do We gotta get out of this place 'cause girl, there's a better life for me and you Now my girl you're so young and pretty And one thing I know is true, yeah You'll be dead before your time is due, I know it Watch my daddy in bed a-dyin' Watched his hair been turnin' grey, yeah He's been workin' and slavin' his life away I know he's been workin' so hard (Yeah!) I've been workin' too, baby (Yeah!) Every day baby (Yeah!) Whoa! (Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!) We gotta get out of this place If it's the last thing we ever do We gotta get out of this place Girl, there's a better life for me and you Somewhere baby, somehow I know it We gotta get out of this place If it's the last thing we ever do We gotta get out of this place Girl, there's a better life for me and you Believe me baby I know it baby You know it too
We Gotta Get Out of This Place (Palladium: 11/4/76) Born To Run (Rock Hall of Fame w_Billy Joel: 10/29/09)
April 27: 
Born to Run (1975) and “Born to Run” are Springsteen’s attempt to emulate Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound: A thick layer of instrumentation (drums, guitar, bass, a horn section). Bruce spend many hours dubbing the guitars over and over on mulitple tracks to get that supercharged effect. What’s remarkable about Spector’s creation is that he had to do it with just two tracks before the invention of the invention of the mult-track recorder available to Springsteen. In 1975, while he was trying to get that wall of sound in the studio, Bruce performed one of its prime examples on stage at the Bottom Line, “Then He Kissed Me.” Later, in 1976 at the Palladium in New York, he invited Ronnie Spector to sing three tunes with the E Streeters providing the wall of sound–and they do a helluva job of it. Below is some background about Spector’s meteoric rise and sudden decline from History of Rock:http://www.history-of-rock.com/spector_producer.htm
Over three decades since its heyday, Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound still stands as a milestone in recording history. It changed the the course of pop record producing and produced some of rock’s best loved music. Spector raised pop production’s ambition and production by overdubbing scores of musicians to create a massive roar.
Spector was a millionaire at the age of twenty-one. He now began recording on the West Coast, where he developed his Wall of Sound in earnest, using session men as guitarists Glen Campbell,Sonny Bono, and Barney Kessel, pianist Leon Russell, and drummer Hal Blaine. Within three years Spector had twenty consecutive hits, including the Crystal’s “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Then He Kissed Me,” and “He’s Sure the Boy I Love”; the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” “Baby I Love You,” (The Best Part of) Breakin’ Up,” and “Walking in the Rain”; Darlene Love’s “(Today I Met) the Boy I’m Gonna Marry” and “Wait ’til My Bobby Gets Home”; and Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans’ Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah.” In 1963 Spector made a Christmas album, featuring Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Some Home)” and the Crystals’ “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” In 1964 Tom Wolfe profiled Spector dubbing him “the first tycoon of teen.”
Phil Spector and Philles Records continued to have hits through 1964, the year of the British invasion. By this time Spector had become obsessed with Ronnie Bennett and by 1965 Ronette singles were now being credited to the Ronettes featuring Veronica Bennett. He even started Phil Spector Records which only issued Veronica singles, but by this time even he could not stand up to the British onslaught. He started Annette Records, named for his wife, and discovered Cher, calling her Bonnie Jo Mason on her first Annette single. However no matter what he did nothing succeeded.
Next he took on the white, blue-eyed, soul singing Righteous Brothers. and produced “You Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.” This got him through 1965.
As the Righteous Brothers popularity waned he took a genuine soul act, Ike and Tina Turner Revue. Pairing them with his Wall of Sound, “River Deep, Mountain High” that was to be a glimpse into the future of rock and roll music. Instead it was a miserable failure.
Devastated, Spector turned his back on the music industry and became a virtual recluse. In 1968, he married Ronnie Bennett and made a brief attempt at producing for another label in 1969 with Sonny Charles and the Checkmates, Ltd’s “Love Is All I Have To Give,” “Black Pearl” and a re-make of “Proud Mary.”
He worked with the Beatles and John Lennon, but the magic was no longer there. In 1969, he had a brief cameo as a drug dealer in Easy Rider. His time had passed, and time itself had passed him by. Spector was almost thirty.
Then She Kissed Me (Bottom Line, N.Y.: 8/15/75)Be My Baby (W/ Spector: Palladium: 11/4/76)Walkin’ in the Rain (W/ Spector: Palladium: 11/4/76)Baby, I Love You (w/ Spector; Palladium 11/4/76)
April 26: During his heady years from the seventies to the eighties, Springsteen was known for returning to his motel after a show and writing more songs, some of which would occasionally show up in a concert before they showed up on a record, if they did at all. “Something in the Night” is a case in point. The performance here occurred at the tail end of 1976, well before the album the song appeared on, Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978). Sometimes the live performances led to better version on the records, sometimes not. The Darkness version of “Something” has more sturm and drang and propulsive energy, but the stirring melody of the live version has been lost. Although I enjoyed the record version, which I heard first, the live version stirred me in a way the record did not. Here are the two versions so you can compare them yourself. J.B.
Something in the Night (Palladium N.y.: 11/4/76) Something In The Night (Darkness album ‘78)
April 25: Tunnel of Love (1988), considered to be Springsteen’s equivalent to Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks (1976), is a breakup album in two ways: 1) a breakup with the E-Street Band for about a decade; 2) a breakup with his first wife, Julianne Phillips, a model and actress. His divorce from the blonde Phillips and his subsequent marriage to the red-headed Patti Scialfa would seem to prove that while you can take the man out of Freehold, you can’t take the Freehold out of the man. Embodying the very idea of the Horatio Alger American Dream in which a nobody becomes a rich and famous somebody by dint of his own talent and dogged determination, Springsteen would seem to be deserving of “all that heaven would allow,” yet judging by today’s song, “Brilliant Disguise,” and others on the album, he seems to have felt himself unworthy of a higher-class babe like Phillips, an impostor waiting to be unmasked from his brilliant disguise by a woman whose best asset seems to have been her blinding beauty. Of course, the persona of the song isn’t necessarily Bruce, but there sure seems to be a lot of correspondences between the conflicts in the songs and those in reality.
When Bruce wed Phillips, the match didn’t set well with his fan base. According to Elizabeth Stanley, quoted in Nicholas Dawidoff’s “The Pop Populist,” “People felt he should have married a Jersey factory girl.” Coincidentally, or luckily, he’d hired one for the Born in the USA tour of 1984, the aforementioned red-headed woman, this after having rejected her for a job some years earlier. And a collision course was set. ”During the early years of his Phillips marriage, Springsteen would go off for lonely drives central Jersey, ending up in Freehold, where he’d idle in front of the houses he’d grown up in, brooding about the past.” Meanwhile, his affection grew for Scialfa, “who grew up just ten miles from Freehold in Deal, New Jersey, where her father owned a television shop.” While separated from Phillips, he got caught, well, red-handed with Patti by tabloid photographers in Italy, and within three years, 1991, Patti was slipping that band of gold on her finger in Deal, New Jersey. The people had spoken! But about Phillips, Bruce says: “My first wife’s one of the best people I’ve ever met. She’s lovely, intelligent–a great person. But we were pretty different, and I realized I didn’t know how to be married.” Tact apparently kept him from adding:”Mister, your whole life’s been wasted/till you’ve got down on your knees and tasted . . . ”
Brilliant Disguise (Stockholm: 7/3/88) Brilliant Disguise (Christic Institute: 11/16/90)
April 24: I have a cousin who maintains that Springsteen went downhill when his piano player David Sancious left after The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. Frankly, I think Bruce wrote too many great songs to mention after that album, and the Professor, Roy Bittan, is as accomplished as piano players come, having taken Sancious’ parts and run with them. In fact, Bittan has a reputation as being able to do a song perfectly in just a take or two, unlike the other E-Streeters. Yet Sancious is the one who came up with the parts like the one on today’s featured song, “New York City Serenade,” and it’s clear that he brought a certain streetwise jazziness that’s gone missing in inaction ever since. For many, hearing “Serenade” in person has been something like the Holy Grail. Indeed, Rusty Omens of Rockademia U counts hearing it as one of his more treasured musical memories.
In Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story, Dave Marsh writes: ”New York City Serenade” is about . . . self-discovery. Bruce croons it with all the faith of the truly wild and innocent, describing a fool’s paradise and the rules by which one lives within it.’It’s midnight in Manhattan/this is no time to get cute/ It’s a mad dog’s promenade. So walk tall . . . or baby don’t walk at all.” In the end the city and the song merge in a single metaphor: ‘Hey vibes man, hey jazz man, play me your serenade/Any deeper blue and you’re playin’ in your grave.’ There’s great delicacy in this song, with its acoustic guitar and light piano, rumbling bass, and crying strings. But in the guitar, there’s an edge like a knife, and Bruce’s voice aches with desire. At the very end of the song’s ten minutes, the music glides and soars with the singsong celebration of a junkman, whose singing, singing, singing becomes a triumph of life itself. For in this place, beauty is everywhere balanced by something sinister. Here is Springsteen the great seducer.” The version here comes from the famous Main Point show, when Bruce was about to turn to a more rock sound with Born to Run.
New York City Serenade (Main Point, Philly: 2/5/75)
April 23: A pair of Oscar contenders: ”The Streets of Philadelphia” (1994) and ”Dead Man Walking” (1995), both showing the deeper and darker side of Springsteen.
From Song Facts: (http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=1051)
“Director Jonathan Demme used this to open his movie Philadelphia. Starring Tom Hanks, it was about a lawyer dying of AIDS. Demme met Springsteen in 1985 on the video shoot for “Sun City,” but had not seen him since. Demme first cut the title sequence of Philadelphia to “Southern Man” and asked Neil Young to write a song like it for the movie. Young gave him “Philadelphia,” which he used at the end of the film. Still needing a song for the open, he called Springsteen.
Demme asked Springsteen for a rock song to open his movie. Bruce started writing it based on lyrics he had previously written about the death of one of his friends, but it did not work over a rock beat. Springsteen sent what he came up with to Demme, considering it an unfinished demo. Demme loved it and felt it was perfect for his movie just as it was.
Springsteen recorded this in his home studio in New Jersey, where he did the entire Nebraska album.
This was the first of 5 previously unreleased songs included on Springsteen’s 1995 Greatest Hits album.
The highest charting Springsteen song in England.
This won the Oscar for Best Original Song in 1994, beating out Neil Young’s “Philadelphia,” which was also written for the movie. Tom Hanks won his first Best Actor Oscar for his role in the movie.
Demme wanted people not familiar with AIDS issues to see his film. He felt Springsteen and Young would bring an audience that would not ordinarily see a movie about a gay man dying of AIDS. The movie and the song did a great deal to increase AIDS awareness and take some of the stigma off the disease.
This won Grammys for Song Of The Year, Best Rock Song, Best Male Vocal, and Best Song Written For a Motion Picture or Television. Springsteen opened the show in 1995 performing this.
This was the first song Springsteen wrote specifically for a movie. He gave Paul Schrader “Light Of Day” for the 1987 movie, but did not write it specifically for him.
Demme directed Springsteen’s video for “Murder Incorporated” in 1995.”
Streets of Philadelphia (Academy Awards 1994)
Springsteen’s “Dead Man Walking” is part of the movie soundtrack that the Sony Music website describes as “an extraordinary album of music from Tim Robbins’ new film, Dead Man Walking, which boasts major recording artists performing new songs inspired by, and written directly for, the film. A companion piece to the film, the album features twelve songs, each carefully composed to reflect specific scenes and characters in the film. Included on the album are such prestigious artists as Bruce Springsteen (who won an Oscar last year for his title song for Philadelphia), Johnny Cash, Suzanne Vega, Lyle Lovett, Eddie Vedder with Pakistan’s premiere recording artist Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Tom Waits, Michelle Shocked, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Steve Earle, and Patti Smith.” And for a change, this isn’t all hype. The soundtrack really is quite impressive, with Bruce’s contribution joined by these: Ali Khan, Michelle Shocked, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Steve Earle turn in particularly stellar songs, though all are quite good.
- Johnny Cash, “In Your Mind,” produced by Ry Cooder
- Suzanne Vega, “Woman On The Tier (I’ll See You Through)”
- Lyle Lovett, “Promises”
- Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan with Eddie Vedder, “The Face of Love”
- Tom Waits, “The Fall of Troy”
- Michelle Shocked, “Quality of Mercy”
- Mary Chapin Carpenter, “Dead Man Walking (A Dream Like This)”
- Tom Waits, “Walk Away”
- Steve Earle, “Ellis Unit One”
- Patti Smith, “Walkin Blind”
- Eddie Vedder with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, “The Long Road”
Ali Khan, Michelle Shocked, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Steve Earle turn in particularly stellar songs, though all are quite good.
Dead Man Walking (Academy Awards: 1995)
April 22: Kitty is one of the many colorful characters who populate the sidestreets, back alleys, and amusement parks of The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle– Spanish Johnny, Rosalita, Sandy, Janey, Madame Marie, and Jazz man to name a few. They all seem to be on the make or being made, looking to scratch out an identity and some turf for themselves as they drift into adulthood. Kitty seemed to have escaped the rat trap and suicide rap, but now she’s returned. In “The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle,” an excerpt from Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, Ariel Swartley has this to say about Kitty’s return:
“When Kitty comes back, it’s almost too good to be true, for her departure was a double betrayal, forsaking the hometown and the kids in the alley for marriage and the big city, power, prestige, and opportunity. Her return not only vindicates her small-town admirer, but all of those who’ve never left. And their victory is as sweet and keen-edged as the notes of Springsteen’s guitar. Yet her defection raised doubts and questions that still hang like the sax’s final whistling high note. As envied and disdained as a resort visitor, as threatening and tempting as the city, adulthood glimmers just over the horizon, too. And like the Corner or the Street, it has to be claimed.”
There are many stellar live versions of this song, which many consider one of the better rock shuffles and bar songs ever written, but this rendition from a Conan O’Brien appearance, probably made possible by Mighty Max’s being Conan’s drummer, too, features an outstanding horn section and that extra juice being on national TV can supply. It’s also a rarity for TV–a nine-minute song. I kept waiting for them to cut to a commercial. J.B.
Kitty’s Back (O’Brien Show: 12/11/02
April 21: Like “Born to Run” and “The Promise,” Springsteen’s soul-styled “The Fever” was a favorite in the underground before it saw the light of day. According to Dave Marsh in Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story, it was “released to radio stations only in tape copy” in 1974. What that omits is that Springsteen didn’t like the song and scrapped it. However, his manager Mike Appel had a different take and snuck the song to radio stations, another reason Bruce fans own him some thanks.
Southside Johnny recorded it on his first album in 1976, and he and Bruce performed it together live, as well, but Springsteen’s own official release of the song didn’t occur until Tracks, his four-cd release in 1998. By then, the song had acquired legendary status, especially since he played it live now and then starting with the Darkness tour. Equating desire with heat is hardly a novel idea, but Springsteen pulls it off with aplomb, as he does with “Fire,” “I’m on Fire,” and other songs. Long before Springsteen, though, there was Peggy Lee and her rendition of the similarly titled “Fever,” a jazz classic. Was this the inspiration for Bruce’s version? I don’t know. Or really care. They’re both excellent members of the Torch Song Hall of Fame.
The Fever (Winterland: 12/15/78) Fever – Peggy Lee
April 20: Monumental, titanic, stupendous, stupifying–the first three superlatives describe Springsteen’s long version of “Backstreets.” The last word describes the decision to edit the long version on Live 1975-1985, presumably in an effort to squeeze more songs in and attract more customers–never mind that vintage Springsteen got squeezed out. I was fortunate enough to see Springsteen perform it 1977 and 1978, and it ranks among my more memorable musical experiences, especially the first time. I am not alone. In “The Promise,” Backstreets founder Charles Cross has much to say about the song’s impact on him.
“‘One soft infested summer me and Terry became friends, trying in vain to breathe the fire we was born in.’ So begins Bruce Springsteen singing ‘Backstreets,’ for my money one of the most emotional and affectionate songs ever penned. Within this one tune, Springsteen addresses all the major elements to his work: rebellion, liberation, love, death, friendship, and salvation. These are themes that speak to my own human experience and no doubt, to yours, too.”
Later, after describing how he and his friend Carl were still reeling after breakups with emotionally unavailable women, he writes: ”We were driving through the seamy part of townand I popped the Winterland ‘78 tape in the stereo as Carl had never heard the ‘78 version of “Backstreets,” the one that includes the ’sad eyes’ seque. I think it’s the best thing Springsteen has ever done, the emotional zenith to his body of work. . . . Carl was completely transfixed by it: ‘I’d drive all night, just to buy you some shoes and to taste your tender charms/to have you hold me in your arms/for just one kiss/for just one look from your sad eyes,” Bruce sang, ‘Just one look.’
Springsteen only played the song this way for a few months in 1977 and 1978, and they edited it off the Live album for reasons that have never been clear to me. He’d always vary the story told in the song, but it was always intense and true. The version from Orlando in 1977 with the story about watching some kids burn down a bard, and watching the fields catch on fire and how the flames rushed towards him and his lover sitting on the hood of a car, is monumental. I’ve liked all I’ve hear but particularly am moved when Bruce added the line ‘just to hear you tell me you loved me.’ It was as tender as Springsteen gets.”
Then after describing how his own lost love had sad eyes, Cross writes: “Which is why I understood the depth of emotion in Springsteen’s voice when he gets to the part of the song where he literally screams ‘But baby, YOU LIED!’ It’s as close to a primal scream as I’ve ever heard, and it’s a scream that sums up his loss, Carl’s loss, my loss, and loss of every other broken-hearted hero who ever looked into someone’s eyes and felt a spark. Carl was stunned. He’d later say that listening to the tape was one of those experiences where the world just stops around you and there’s nothing but you, and it is looking you in the face, and you can’t turn around and you can’t go back. You just can’t.”
All I can add to that is that seeing it in person was even more revelatory. That YOU LIED still rings in my ears decades later. Rarely does a performer allow himself to stand exposed in the spotlight like that, yet Springsteen did repeatedly from 1976-1978. Two versions are included here for comparative purposes. The first is from Boston in 1977, which is similar to the Orlando version Cross describes; the second is from Cleveland show on New Year’s Eve of 1978, the second-to-last or the last time he did the long version. (If you want to hear the Winterland version, the whole concert streams at Wolfgang’s Vault.) Notice how the song gets more disciplined and scripted. The later version has a drum roll accompanying the crescendo. Notice too how “drive all night” later became a song in its own right on The River. I much prefer it as part of “Backstreets’ and can’t listen to it without wanting to cut and paste it back in its original and rightful position. J.B.
Backstreets (Boston: 3/25/77) Backstreets (Cleveland 12/31/78)
April 19: ”Trapped,” written by the reggae great Jimmy Cliff, is another example of Springsteen’s ability to interpret a song and lift it to a whole other level. The original is quite good, but Springsteen’s cover of it is transcendent. Debuted during The River tour, the song proved to be one of the highlights of his concerts to many. Long before Nirvana made a name for itself with “Smells Like Teenage Spirit” with its abrupt shift of volume and intensity between the verse and the chorus, Springsteen had mastered the technique. Think “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” for example. A key difference between the Springsteen concerts of the seventies versus those of the eighties and after is the dynamic range. Through ‘78, Springsteen had a number of songs which modulated between soft and loud and/or which built in intensity. It was one of his defining traits. But commencing with The River tour, such songs became fewer and farther between. “Trapped,” therefore, stood out more than it might have otherwise. The version here is from the We Are the World record.
Trapped (We Are the World) Trapped (Cliff)
April 18: ”The Ghost of Tom Joad,” the title cut from the 1995 release of the same name, is another song inspired by a movie based on a book, specifically the John Huston film of 1940 based on John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940. It could also be influenced by Woody Guthrie’s “Tom Joad” songs, posted below.
According to Wikepedia, ”The film tells the story of the Joads, an Oklahoma family, who, after losing their farm during the Great Depression in the 1930s, becomemigrant workers and end up in California. The motion picture details their arduous journey across the United States as they travel to California in search for work and opportunities for the family members.”
Somewhere around the time of Darkness on the Edge of Town, Springsteen turned from simply reflecting blue-collar America to specifically and consciously writing to it, in a sense becoming a latter-day Woody Guthrie. Whereas Dylan started with Guthrie and moved on for the most part, Springsteen started with classic rock and soul and gravitated towards Guthrie, where he remains to this day, a rock star who’s also a populist and political activist. Personally, though I think Bruce’s heart is in the right place, I believe it’s a death trap and a suicide rap to limit your songwriting options by writing with a particular audience and set of values in mind. Since becoming a blue-collar champion, Springsteen’s topics have narrowed, as if he’s been cornered by his role and ideology. By contrast, Dylan’s have broadened. Because he kept one step ahead of any particular label, he can do just about any type of song now without his followers crying foul.
But be that as it may, The Ghost of Tom Joad album is Springsteen’s retro-folk equivalent to Guthrie’s The Dustbowl Ballads, a bookend to Nebraska, and an updated complement to the stories of John Steinbeck all in one; and the title song itself remains relevant. Perhaps if the market had crashed into another Depression, it would be an anthem. The version here features Tom Morello’s ear-popping solo, he of another group with a populist bent, Rage Against the Machine. J.B.Tom Joad Part II (Guthrie)
The Ghost Of Tom Joad (w/ Tom Morello: 2008) Tom Joad Part I (Guthrie)
April 17: “Shut Out the Light,” a song that would have fit nicely in Nebraska, always reminds me of Ernest Hemingway’s work. When Hemingway was an ambulance driver during WWI, he was struck by a bullet that shattered his psyche as much as it did his body, and a significant portion of his work derives from existential questions prompted by that startling and harrowing brush with death. He was never able to sleep without a light on, a trait shared by some of his characters, who, like Hemingway, have no confidence in society, order, God, or personal triumph. The best man can hope for against the encroaching darkness is “a clean, well lighted place,” to conduct himself with dignity and show grace under pressure.
Johnny, the character in “Shut Out the Light,” has returned home from untold horrors he experienced in the jungles of Nam; and the simple banalities of sex, family, “polish[ing] up the chrome” of a car, and returning to his factory job can’t beat back that “river without a name” with its cold, black water.” For him, the light and the arms around him are the only comforts he knows, and they’re not enough. This is Springsteen at his deepest, singing of grim realities without sugarcoating them for the sake of a larger audience.
Shut Out The Light (1985) Shut Out The Light (Asbury: 11/26/96)
April 16: ”I never saw the movie, only the poster in the theatre lobby.” Thus said Springsteen of the inspiration for the title of the opener of Born to Run, the timeless tour de force “Thunder Road.” The movie, released in 1958, featured Robert Mitchum, who also co-wrote the title song with Don Raye. InBorn to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story, Dave Marsh writes that the song is a ”statement of purpose; in its way, it encapsulates the whole story of the album. It cleebrates the virtues of day-to-day living and loving, while articulating the hero’s deepest fears:
So you’re scared and you’re thinking 
That maybe we ain’t that young anymore
Show a little faith there’s magic in the night
You ain’t a beauty but hey you’re alright
Oh and that’s alright with me
This is not a story of salvation or heroism (searching for such imponderables is declared a ‘waste’”), yet there’s always a chance if the girl (here Mary, though she has other names) will only believe as deeply as the singer:
roll down the window
And let the wind blow
Back your hair
Well the night’s busting open
These two lanes will take us anywhere
Cars and guitars are not a panacea, of course–but they may be a way of escaping these cruel streets, of leaving the poverty and desperation of the empty lives around them. The singer has both car and guitar, and he’s splitting; it’s up to Mary (and to every listener) to take a chance with him, or to risk being trapped. To call this temptation isn’t fair–anyone half-alive has to take the chance; this romantic ambition is too seductive to ignore. . . . It’s such a brave boost that the fact they’re going to drive in circles doesn’t really matter–at the moment. Later, it might be the only thing that counts.”
In its way, “Thunder Road” is a carpe diem or seize-the-day song along the lines of “Prove It All Night”–hop in and hit the road with me before it’s too late, time is of the essence. This sort of seduction song has a long history, suggesting it WORKS, especially if you’ve got a way with words. Springsteen’s setting is urban whereas those of antiquity are more pastoral, as in Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” the first stanza of which goes:
| COME live with me and be my Love, | |
| And we will all the pleasures prove | |
| That hills and valleys, dale and field, | |
| And all the craggy mountains yield. |
I
In later efforts, Springsteen signifies the death of that romantic dream with songs like The Promise and Wreck on the Highway. What makes the song particularly remarkable and enviable to other songwriters is its sophisticated, aria-like structure. If you follow along carefully, you’ll notice that it doesn’t have a rigid and predictable verse/chorus or verse/chorus/bridge structure. Yet it all hangs together seamlessly and is easy to remember because of the repetition of thunder road. If you try to play it on the guitar or piano, you’ll see what I mean. In masking its structure, the song is reminiscent of Roy Orbison, who, fittingly, is singing for the lonely as the radio plays. Since there are many great live versions of the song available, I’ve posted a less commonly known piano only version from the show at the Guthrie Theater in Mpls. in 1975. This show is the only one I know of that features piano only versions of both that and “Incident on 57th street.” The Multimedia page has an excerpt from his 1977 St. Paul show. J.B.
Thunder Road (Guthrie: 9/21/75) In Dreams (Roy Orbison) The Ballad of Thunder Road (Robert Mitchum)
April 15: DID YOU PAY YOUR TAXES YET? READ NO FURTHER TILL YOU HAVE.
It has to be intimidating to perform a song Frank Sinatra made famous as he sits at a table in front of you while a nationwide television audience looks on, especially when your style of music couldn’t be more different and you’re both sons of New Joisey, yet that’s what Springsteen did when he joined Dylan and others in feting Sinatra on his birthday in late 1995. His spare performance of “Angel Eyes” sounds like a Nebraska outtake, only here the protagonist disappears in drink instead of a New Jersey turnpike in the dead of night. It was reported that after the birthday bash, Springsteen and Dylan partied with Sinatra, who took a liking to their maverick, hard-driving spirits even thought his wife thought they were seedy dudes.
Angel Eyes (Sinatra) Angel Eyes (11/19/95) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lxAUYfgLL4
Some background on the song from WICN Public Radio:
“Composer Matt Dennis wasn’t happy with the title of the song that he and his lyricist, Earl Brent, had just written: “Have Another Beer on Me’’ didn’t sound right. Brent changed the song’s title to “Angel Eyes” and a saloon ballad to rival “One for My Baby” was born.”
. . .
“After Frank Sinatra had become a solo performer, he recorded “Angel Eyes” on his legendary 1958 album Frank Sinatra Sings For Only the Lonely. His rendition has been called the definitive version of the song, and today the song is most closely associated with him. He excelled at singing drinking songs and claimed, “Being a saloon singer, that’s my racket.” His treatment of “Angel Eyes” displayed the master in peak form. Instead of beginning “Angel Eyes” at the chorus, as do most singers, he began at the release, “So drink up all you people”, which proved to be very effective and moving. In 1971 Sinatra announced his retirement at age 55, and began his series of farewell concerts. He closed these concerts with “Angel Eyes”, exiting the stage after singing the last line, “Excuse me while I disappear.” Despite this dramatic finale, Sinatra didn’t stay retired, returning to the stage in 1973 and continuing to perform and record until 1995.”
April 14: Like its album mates on the existential masterpiece Nebraska (1982), “Atlantic City” was a startling departure from the hard-driving rock fans had come to expect from Springsteen. The darkness formerly on the edge of town had settled in the souls of these characters straight out of Terence Malick’s Badlands and Flannery O’Conner’s Wise Blood. That darkness was reflected in the spartan arrangements, blank, uninflected vocals, and unflinching looks at that gray landscape beyond the windshield of the car on the cover of the album. If Springsteen wanted to capitalize on his rising popularity after The River, this was exactly how not to do it. Yet for my money, Nebraska ranks next to Born to Runas his seminal achievements of songcraft across an album, and the pity is he left off equally worthy songs like “The Losing Kind” and “Child Bride,” later turned into the vastly inferior “Working on the Highway.” If there’s an album with more depth, I don’t know of it; it’s as good as a book of short stories, and lot quicker to get through.
Always an empathetic writer, Bruce seems to have inhabited the very mindset of the characters, all of whom have no illusions about which side of the line they’re on. In Glory Days, Dave Marsh connects the songs from Nebraska to counterparts in earlier albums. ”The loser daring the big score in “Atlantic City” was a near relation to the one in “Meeting Across the River.” The version here is from 1984. Bruce’s more recent versions have a communal feel during the bridge, as if the power of shared hopes and dreams can overcome the bleakness being lived out in the song itself.
Atlantic City (11/19/84) Atlantic City (Brixton: 4/24/96)
April 13: If Springsteen’s use of the car as metaphor in”The Promise” is as good as it gets, the same can be said of his use of the river in “The River,” his 1980 masterpiece with two sources of inspiration. The first was the real life pregnancy of his older sister. Nick Dawidoff writes in “The Pop Populist”: “The girl who gets pregnant at 17 in The River is [Bruce's] older sister. The other is the “hurt” songs of old timers like Hank Williams. According to Bryan Garman in “The Ghost of History: Bruce Springsteen, Woody Guthrie, and the Hurt Song,” in the late 1970s, “as Springsteen continued to to write about working class lives, he found that for inspiration he went ‘back further all the time. Back into Hank Williams, back into Jimmie Rodgers. Because the human thing in those records is just beautiful and awesome.’ Captivated by the deep emotions Rodgers and Williams expressed, Springsteen drew on the pain embedded in their hurt song “to make a record like today, one that’s right now. Several songs on The River (1980) were influenced by his studies. The title song was based on William’s ‘Long Gone Lonesome Blues . . . .’” Though Springsteen continues to play the song today, performances of “The River” during the 1980 tour had an urgency and immediacy that come when a song and its themes are fresh and in the moment.
The River (Nassau: 12/30/80) Long Gone Lonesome Blues
April 12: Another great Springsteen creation that didn’t make the Darkness album, “Because the Night” was recorded by Patti Smith on her Easter album and earned her a top twenty hit in 1978. In Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story, Dave Marsh describes what happened: ”After Jimmie Iovine [a recording engineer who went on to found Interscope Records] took a demo for “Because the Night” to the studio next door, where he was producing a record for Patti Smith, Springsteen let Smith finish the lyric . . . .” Despite leaving it off the album and The River that followed, Springsteen did perform the song regularly during the Darkness tour, using his own lyrics exclusively. The versions here are from 1978 and 200. The former is distinctive for its incendiary introduction, the latter for Nils Lofgren’s stupendous solo. If there’s a bad performance of this song, I have yet to hear it.
Because The Night (Cleveland: 12/31/78) Because The Night (Paris: Summer 08)
April 11: When I’m asked for an opinion on Springsteen’s concerts, I say “great through 78, after that, too late.” Sure, he and the E Streeters still put on exciting shows which invariably feature a handful of great performances, but his shows have never hung together or had the intensity they had through 1978. ”Prove It All Night,” “Backstreets,” “Growin’ Up,” and the rarely performed “It’s My Life” are but shadows of their former selves, the epic versions having given way to the standard issue ones. The other case in point is the song featured today–”She’s the One.” In ‘78, Springsteen’s preface to the song featured Bo Diddley’s “Mona” or Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” w/ “Gloria.”
What was inspired about this is that in less than fifteen minutes you had the lineage of the Bo Diddley beat from its origins in Africa all the way through the fifties and into the seventies with Bruce’s use of it. The jungle howls and yelps over the beat at the beginning of the medley are fun but also serve to signal the origins. The medley also shows how musicians lift and twist a beat or a theme to their purposes. Hard to imagine a more engaging music lesson. When I hear the song today, it’s still welcome, but I miss the context. If you’re interested in a video clip of a ‘78 version, albeit only about three minutes long, go to the Multimedia page.
.Mona/She’s the One (Roxy: 7/7/10)
And here’s a bit more about Bo Diddley and the beat from an article following his death.
“His original style of rhythm and blues influenced generations of musicians. And his Bo Diddley syncopated beat — three strokes/rest/two strokes — became a stock rhythm of rock ’n’ roll.
It can be found in Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” Johnny Otis’s “Willie and the Hand Jive,” the Who’s “Magic Bus,” Bruce Springsteen’s “She’s the One” and U2’s “Desire,” among hundreds of other songs.
Yet the rhythm was only one element of his best records. In songs like “Bo Diddley,” “Who Do You Love,” “Mona,” “Crackin’ Up,” “Say, Man,” “Ride On Josephine” and “Road Runner,” his booming voice was loaded up with echo and his guitar work came with distortion and a novel bubbling tremolo. The songs were knowing, wisecracking and full of slang, mother wit and sexual cockiness. They were both playful and radical.”
April 10: ”Independence Day” is one of a number of Springsteen songs that lose something in translation when they’re given the full band treatment, something that happened the classic Nebraska, an album recorded and released with just Bruce on a cheap four-track recorder after E Street workups failed to produce winning songs. Written around the time ofDarkness and “The Promise,” as Bruce will tell you in the intro of this piano only version, this “rite of passage” song offers a more tender take on his relationship with his father.
Around 28 at the time he wrote the song, Bruce would seem to fall into a typical behavioral pattern as described by Gail Shehy in Passages, the celebrated book about the predictable stages of life. Does this sound apropos? “Buoyed by powerful illusions and belief in the power of the will, we commonly insist in our twenties that what we have chosen to do is our true path in life. Our backs go up at the merest hint that we are like our parents . . . . ’Not me’ is the motto,’I'm different.” And in Bruce’s case he was, though he has said in a more recent interview that nowadays when he looks in the mirror he sees his father. Scary thought!
Independence Day (Roxy: 7/7/78)
April 9: ”Prove It All Night” is a classic example of a carpe diem song. No, that’s not a genetically altered super carp cleaning out the Great Lakes but a Latin phrase for ”seize the day.” This motif goes back ages, and to paraphrase one of many commercials that exploit, its dominant argument is to grab all the gusto you can now because you only go around once in life. It’s an argument that probably wouldn’t sway Shirley Maclaine and adherents to religions which believe today’s bejeweled rich could return as tomorrow’s bedraggled poor or vice versa, depending on their karma, but it has always played well in the West. More often than not, there’s a sexual context, as in Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” in which he tries to convince a resistant woman to
“tear our pleasures with rough strife,
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.”
Compare that to Bruce:
“Baby, tie your hair back in a long white bow
Meet me in the fields out beyond the dynamo
You hear their voices saying not to go
They’ve made their choices and they’ll know
What it means to steal, to cheat, to lie,
What it means to live and die
To prove it all night.”
Some things never change! This song has become a staple of Springsteen’s shows, and Nils Lofren’s incendiary solos at the end must be heard to be believed, but I’m sure I’m not alone in wishing Bruce would return to the live version from 1978, which had one of the most inspiring guitar intros ever, one with a building intensity that suited the theme of the song perfectly. Bruce might not have the pyrotechnics of other guitar slingers, but when he plays a solo, you feel it, and the intro to this song is a prime example. Shame on the Live: 1975-1985 box set for leaving this off, forsaking quality for more titles to hook the casual fan with, many of the tunes not what made Springsteen a live legend. To demonstrate how Bruce develops a song over the course of a tour, you have an earlier and a later versions here. If these don’t convince you of the greatness of Bruce and E Street Band in those early days, maybe you should try Rick Springfield live.
Prove It All Night (Roxy: 7/7/78)
Prove It All Night (Winterland:12/15/78) The whole show streams at Wolfgang’s Vault www.wolfgangsvault.com/
And here’s another famous carpe diem poem:
“Get Drunk!”, by Charles Baudelaire
One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters;
that’s our one imperative need. So as not to feel Time’s
horrible burden one which breaks your shoulders and bows
you down, you must get drunk without cease.
But with what?
With wine, poetry, or virtue
as you choose.
But get drunk.
And if, at some time, on steps of a palace,
in the green grass of a ditch,
in the bleak solitude of your room,
you are waking and the drunkenness has already abated,
ask the wind, the wave, the stars, the clock,
all that which flees,
all that which groans,
all that which rolls,
all that which sings,
all that which speaks,
ask them, what time it is;
and the wind, the wave, the stars, the birds, and the clock,
they will all reply:
“It is time to get drunk!
So that you may not be the martyred slaves of Time,
get drunk, get drunk,
and never pause for rest!
With wine, poetry, or virtue,
as you choose!”
April 8: Written at a time Springsteen was in serious danger of losing control of his music to his prior manager, Mike
Appel, ”The Promise” debuted at Red Bank N.Y. in August of 1976 and was a special encore through 1978 or so. I had the misfortune of missing much of it in 1977 in my haste to leave his Chicago concert at the Auditorium Theatre after what I’d presumed was the last song. I was almost at the lobby when I learned my mistake and hurried back to see Bruce by himself at the piano playing this arresting ballad. I never made a premature exit again, but neither did I ever hear “The Promise” live again.
In Dave Marsh’s Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story, John Milward gives an excellent explication of the song: ”The song’s metaphor is ‘The Challenger,’ a race car that the singer has built by hand ‘to carry the broken dreams of all those who have lost.’ But the real twist comes during the song’s bridge, when he sings the words ‘thunder road’ and immediately transforms his car into his rock and roll dreams. In ‘The Promise,’ Springsteen mythologizes himself and compares his struggle to be true to his art to the desperate struggle of the young racer. He sings in ‘Thunder Road,’ that ‘tonight’s the night all the promises will be broken,’ but the dream etched in ‘The Promise’ and put into perspective by Springsteen’s own experience is clearly a romantic notion that is not easily shattered. Despite a landscape filled with losers–the singer eventually sells his car when he need money–it’s clear that in Springsteen’s hearth the Challenger’s potential will never die.”
Along with the scorcher “Don’t Look Back” and the heartfelt ballad, “Independence Day,” another slant on his relationship with his father, “The Promise” was a candidate for Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), but after many failed attempts to find a niche for it, Bruce left it off. He would record a piano version for Tracks, but it’s rushed, omits a verse about his father, and is sung with less urgency and conviction than the early versions when so much was at stake.
The Promise: (live ‘78). The Promise (studio ‘78)
April 7: When he was a rock critic, Jon Landau said of Springsteen that he had the power of making you think you were hearing music for the first time. Anyone who witnessed Bruce’s overpowering version of the Animals’ anthem of independence between 1976 and 1977, “It’s My Life,” would understand exactly what he was talking about. Set to ominous and brooding music, Bruce tells a narrative about his conflict with his father to chilling and compelling effect, giving a context to the song itself that puts it on an epic scale, the tale of all sons trying to liberate themselves from the rigid rules and restrictions of their fathers. And for those who grew up in the sixties, when so many fathers did battle with their songs over long hair, race, the Vietnam War, and sex, drugs, and rock and roll, to name a few issues, the story-song will have special resonance. The version here was recorded on the last night of the ‘76 tour, capping six straight sellouts at the Palladium. In a few days, an incomplete video of his performance in St. Paul in 1977 will be posted at the Multimedia page. Check back then, if not sooner.
It’s My Life: (Palladium N.Y.: 11/4/76)
April 6: Comparatively speaking, “Rendezvous” is one of Springsteen’s fluff songs, but a good one in the style of Mannfred Mann or the Searchers, not a wincing one, and since I also happen to have a partial video of it from his 1977 St. Paul show, I felt it worth inclusion, as a sort of twofer. During his 1976/1977 tours, it often occupied the number two slot in the setlist, coming immediately after “Night.” A Dylanite who was slow to warm to Springsteen for various reasons (more on that in an upcoming podcast), I didn’t see a Springsteen concert until February of 1977, and I remember “Rendezvous” as being a welcome melodic followup to the percussive and gnarly “Night” that preceded it.
It was the first song I really liked that night, but by no means the last. In fact the show become increasingly awe-inspiring and revelatory. I was hoping he’d put it on his next album, which turned out to be Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), but it didn’t quite mesh with the other material and never made it to an official album until a live ‘78 version was released as part of Tracks (1998). He still performs the song from time to time, and I’ve included a more recent version. To see videos from ‘77 and 2008, go to the Multi-media page. I leave it to you to compare and contrast the versions. J.B. More videos from St. Paul to come.
Rendezvous (N.Y. 11/4/76) Rendezvous: (Paris: 6/27/08)
April 5: If, as Bob Dylan once wrote in the liner notes to Another Side of Bob Dylan, “a poem is a naked person,” so too can a song be. In 1996, Springsteen had no band to hide behind when he toured with a collection of reworked oldies and tunes from the spartan The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995). Looking something like an unemployed Greyhound bus driver going to seed with his drab grayish outfit, slicked back hair, and Fu Manchu, he had only a set of guitars and harmonicas to help him make his way through a couple hours’ worth of material. Of all the songs he performed, the one that showed him at his most naked and mesmerizing is “Across the Border,” in particular the ethereal and haunting hymn he does right before the last harmonica break. Few performers would dare to allow you an unobstructed glimpse into their soul, but I know I’m not alone in sensing that’s exactly what Bruce was doing. As a friend commented at the time, it made your hair stand on end. 
Across the Border (Stockholm: 3.13.95)
April 4: ”Adam Raised a Cane,” the second song on Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), reflects the influence of Springsteen’s new manager, Jon Landau, in two ways. 1) Unlike Bruce’s former manager, Mike Appel, who thrilled to the epic story-songs that marked the earlier albums, Jon Landau–yes, the former rock critic famous for declaring “I’ve seen the future of rock and roll, and its name is Bruce Springsteen” (not to mention his own future)– preached the gospel of the short, commercially viable song. Hence, along with all the other tunes on the album, “Adam” is fairly short. 2) A film critic,too, Landau also began exposing Bruce to the works of novelist Flannery O’Connor, John Ford, Terrence Malick, and Elia Kazan, specifically his film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.
I think the long-form, occasionally operatic quality of Springsteen’s work is actually what distinguished him from the pack for many, but if Bruce’s adherence to his manager’s view has spared us from epics the quality of “Outlaw Pete” with its convoluted evocation of a Sergio Leone/Ennio Morricone spaghetti western soundtrack, I guess we owe him a muted thanks for that.
But there can be no question that the literary/film exposure sparked some of Springsteen’s greatest work. ”Adam Raised a Cane” is a case in point. Here we get Bruce as an estranged James Dean who’s east of Eden (the American Dream) and who feels the stain of original sin like the characters in O’Connor’s Wise Blood, a favorite work of Bruce’s that exists in both book and movie form. As East of Eden centers on a father/son conflict, so too the song, one of many in which Bruce tries to exorcise the demons of his relationship with his father (more on this in later posts).
With this song and the album, the Bible and his Catholic roots begin to play a prominent role in his work, albeit in secularized fashion. The choral mob before the last verse is a great touch that almost has us ducking from those who would cast the first stone. There are many stellar versions of this song, but this one from Stockholm has the benefit of a horn section and that extra juice that comes from knowing you’re being broadcast across the world on the day before the 4th of July.
In the Bible Cain slew Abel
And East of Eden he was cast,
You’re born into this life paying,
for the sins of somebody else’s past,
Daddy worked his whole life, for nothing but the pain,
Now he walks these empty rooms, looking for something to blame,
You inherit the sins, you inherit the flames,
Adam raised a Cain.
Adam Raised a Cain (Stockholm: 7/3/88)
April 3: So what’s a beach ball got to do with Springsteen? According to Fred Goodman’s The Mansion on the Hill,Springsteen’s manager Mike Appel “pulled some strings just prior to the recording of The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle and got Springsteen an opening slot on an arena tour by Chicago, then at the height of their popularity. The twelve-date tour would allow him to play to his largest audiences yet–between ten and fifteen thousand per show. 
Initially, the dates went well. But when the band played the Spectrum in Philadelphia, a city Springsteen considered his home territory, it proved a humbling and frustrating experience. Kids were throwing rolls of toilet paper during ‘For You,’ Appel recalls. When a beach ball landed on his piano, Springsteen had had enough. Kicking over a chair backstage, he vowed he’d never open another tour. ”Mike, we can’t do this anymore,” he yelled. ”We can’t do this! When this tour ends, we’ll call it quits and go back to the clubs and start from zero!” Jump ahead more than thirty years, and Springsteen is playing it on piano in Paris before thousands, but not before playing an electric and electrifying version in a small club in L.A. with a large radio audience tuned in. It’s probably safe to say no beach balls were flying. J.B.
April 2:
On the same Main Point show that gave us the definitive piano Incident, we got Bruce’s superlative interpretation of Dylan’s “I Want You.” Never mind that he muffs some of the words and the playing gets a bit spotty in the middle, Springsteen does what all superior artists do with cover songs–make them their own. With Danny Federici’s impromptu rendition of “The Anniversary Waltz” as a preface, you can almost visualize the “dancing child with his Chinese flute.” Springsteen’s singing is tinged with passion and loss, as if he’s not sure he’ll get what he wants. You should keep in mind that all of Born to Run had yet to be recorded at the time of this show and that the band was in a state of flux. Interestingly, David Brooks cited the show in a recent column as a source of inspiration. Guess Republicans like bootleg recordings too.
Incidentally, just as many fans swore Dylan off after he turned to rock, a sizable number did likewise when Springsteen went from jazz-inflected street waif to rock star. Ditto when he went from lean rock star to Iconic Hunk. To their minds, if you didn’t catch him live by ‘75, you were too late. As to me, I say ‘78. Not that he hasn’t done some wonderful live performances since then, but those early shows had an epic and titanic intensity you get only when a young turk is on the do or die cusp of making his mark. With his first two albums having flopped, Bruce had one last chance to make it real or be dropped from Columbia. With Born to Run, he learned how to make his guitar talk in the only language record companies understand, sales. J.B.
I Want You: (Main Point: 2-5-75)
April 1
This post is the first of many that will form sort of a super concert of the best of live Springsteen. For reasons I’ll describe in an upcoming podcast, the piano version of “Incident on 57th Street” Springsteen performed on his Born to Run tour of 1975 has a special significance for me. It was the first song where I thought Jon Landau’s pronouncement that he “saw the future of rock and roll, and its name is Bruce Springsteen!” might be more than just a half-baked and hyperbolic allusion to Charles Dickens. It turned out that Bruce wasn’t actually the future of rock, as punk, grunge, and rap were just around the bend, but he sure was the future for a particular brand of literate and spirited rock, and today he stands among a select few as an enduring icon, too much so if you ask me, and probably him too, since pedestals seem unbecoming of rock’s anti-authoritarian roots.
Though there are many beguiling versions of “Incident” from that tour, including one from the Guthrie Theater in Mpls. that I’ll be playing in an upcoming podcast, the one from a live broadcast Springsteen did at the Main Point in Philly is the definitive one, featuring Suki Lahav on violin and an evocative siren at the end that helps put you on the unforgiving streets of Harlem on a dying summer night. Lahav, who’d sung the choir-like vocals on “4th of July, Asbury Park” and played the violin on “Jungleland,” was gone from the band a month later.
The electric version of “Incident” is from the flip side of the single, “Fire.” The snap, crackle, and pop you hear is one reason I prefer the digital format. The record was released around the mid-80s and the song is available as an import but at a highly inflated price. This version has a distressingly tinny piano sound, but Bruce’s lead guitar is phenomenal, and many consider this version to be the best electric one. After this performance, for reasons no one can fathom, Bruce deep-sixed this stellar song until 1999. I’ve sat through many lackluster tunes wishin’ and hopin’ he’d play it, along with “New York City Serenade,” but all to no avail. Can’t always get what you want, I guess.
Incident On 57th Street: The Main Point 2/5/75
Incident on 57th Street: Nassau Coliseum: 12/29/80.
And, finally, here’s a link to a site with tons of Springsteen covers.