Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

I fear that the balance isn't right on THE RIVER itself. Far too much straight-ahead bar-room rock, too little Darkness. I've always been mystified by that.

FWIW from THE PROMISE, songs not on DARKNESS, for a single LP?

GOTTA GET THAT FEELING
3. OUTSIDE LOOKING IN
4. SOMEDAY (WE’LL BE TOGETHER)
6. BECAUSE THE NIGHT
11. SAVE MY LOVE
12. AIN’T GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU
13. FIRE
16. COME ON (LET’S GO TONIGHT)
19. BREAKAWAY
20. THE PROMISE
21. CITY OF NIGHT
+ THE EXTRA ONE AFTER THAT ?

12 good tracks.

Yeah, I haven't counted but I def have the impression that there are more light songs on The River than dark songs. And then the dark songs are so heavy that the transition to and from them can be a rough one; sometimes I listen to The River and find myself skipping the title track because I'm enjoying the upbeat barroom-rock vibe and I don't want to be plunged into despair.

I like that tracklist! Except maybe for THE EXTRA ONE AFTER THAT which I'm not a big fan of.

"Breakaway" for starters is outstanding?
"The Promise" and the extra track also I think.
"City of Night" good enough.

"Come On" fine but didn't that become "Factory" or something?

"Ain't Good Enough For You" is good rock & roll comedy.

"Save My Love" is very strong pop albeit afaik the version we have is a late remake, not 1970s.

"Because the Night" wasn't on an original LP and merits inclusion?

"Outside / In" is OK sort of Buddy Holly pastiche
"GGT Feeling" is passable
"... Together" feels ambitious but also doesn't quite pull off the scale.

does EXTRA TRACK have a title?
I've always thought it was very strong.

Come On (Let's Go Tonight) turned into two songs: Factory and Johnny Bye-Bye. I think I might like it better than both of them, though.

Outside Looking In is pastiche, I agree, but I think that unlike a lot of the poppier songs on The Promise, it's lyrically very Bruce, and the idea that you can write a catchy pop song about being a weirdo outsider is something Bruce is still working up to at this point.

The extra song is The Way. It's the one Bruce didn't like but someone else - Jimmy Iovine? - loved, so he put it on the album as a bonus track.

I will never forgive the album version of Save My Love for not being as good as the half-finished, placeholder-lyrics-and-mumbling version from this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SN-ou-JqXqQ

I still wonder, though, to what extent the dark and the light songs go together and if it all adds up to a coherent album. Does "The Promise" really work as a title track, for instance? The immediate comparison is to "The River" because it's so dark, but unlike that song, it's not really picking up many of the themes from the rest of the album. It works fine as the title track of a collection of outtakes, because the overarching theme is just "look at all this stuff I couldn't release," and "The Promise" captures a certain feeling of outraged self-pity about that. But as the title track of an ordinary album composed of this stuff? I think it would feel misaligned with what the album actually is.

“The River” is such a great song in every way that it’s almost unfair to compare something else to it, but I for one often find it hard to think without resorting to such comparisons so I will give it to you.

1. Man, that is the first time I've ever seen Steve with no headgear! I've occasionally looked around for citations for which solos on the E street music 1975-1985 he was known to have played, but no dice. anyone?

2. I listened to Human Touch and Lucky Town out of pure curiosity recently: the former is alleged to be him trying to get a bit of what his buds Gordo and Petey G had that he might have felt his shit lacked; the latter is alleged to be compensatory for the LA slickness of the former; but honestly, I don't see what about them is so egregious that the fanbase rebuked them; both are of a piece with everything else he's ever done, probly to a fault. Is it simply that the stans thought that doing something —or anything— without the E street band was unforgivable? I probly would be more interested in him if he worked with different collaborators.

3. It seems that his response to raising ticket prices has been, "I'm doing it, you can have your money back if you don't think it's a good show," which is characteristic, if also smug. Has he said something along the lines of "my touring operation, which numbers in the hundreds," (does that sound right?) "was unable to work for three years; they are more or less my dependents and unlike me are not extremely wealthy, known to go to Spain with the Spielbergs and the Obamas; I need to raise ticket prices to help the people who have been with me for decades, not just my band but the people whose names you will never know." Maybe he should, if that is true.

I actually don't remember 'The Promise' (the song) well now so will have to listen again.

'The River', the song, is so outstanding, almost the essence of The Boss - not much else can match it. I don't particularly agree that 'The River' shares much with the rest of THE RIVER. I wish it did.

But I think I take the point, Lily Dale, that the putative LP of THE PROMISE would feel uneven.

'The Way', from memory, is powerful!

What I was trying to get at about "The River" is that it takes place in the same world as the rest of the album, which is the world of being in a small town, working-class, in your thirties, where a lot of your life decisions got made early and not necessarily by you, and where everything kind of centers around marriage - as in, you're either married or on track to get married, or you're divorced - and where your life ends up boiled down to a series of repeated gestures that give you some sense of freedom, whether that's going down to the river or going out on a Friday night. You get a sense of that world in a series of snippets and vignettes over the course of the first side of the album, and then "The River" is where it finally coalesces into something like the story of a life.

That's what I'm missing with "The Promise" - that sense that this story is formed out of the same raw materials that form the rest of the album.

I guess to me The River fits with the rest of the album, even the lighter songs, because when you're living that kind of life you can't afford to spend most of your time thinking about your life as a whole; a lot of the time you're just, like, thinking about the coming weekend, and that smallness of focus is part of the story. I think I compared Bruce to Jane Austen once and I stand by that; the intense focus on the small details of a constricted life tells its own story.

^Booming Boss Lily Dale posts as per usual, which is what I was pretty much expecting and hoping for after I almost deliberately misconstrued your earlier post or at least focused on the wrong aspect of it.

Thank you! I don't think you misconstrued me, but it certainly helped me think about why I made the comparison. I am like the writer in a Kipling story who does not ignite but must be detonated. I wait for the rest of you to post interesting things and then jump in.

I take Lily Dale's theory to imply something like - a bland bar-room rocker is the sound of the bland Friday night of a character, who then ends up (maybe two days later, or two years later!) having the profound, melancholy emotional journey of 'The River'.

But it's also as if 'The River' has more insight than (and even into?) the other songs, more of a meta-relation to them, rather than merely being part of the same life story as them.

I realise that there are also a few more profound songs on the LP, 'Independence Day', 'Stolen Car', that don't belong on that bland category. But I'm always surprised by the low level of much of the material compared to the title track.

I am on record as a decently ardent Bruce stan. "Because the Night" is one of my least favorite songs in the universe (which is a pretty big universe, as universes go).

All versions of Because the Night, or specifically the Patti Smith version?

This is a good question because I feel like her version is much better but am wondering how others feel.

His version has always been a live showcase, are you talking about that or the eventually released studio version?

Think I am talking about the studio one.

Also reminds of a more general question about Bruce’s singing. Sometimes it seems there is an element of a Mick Jagger problem in there where he is sort of misapplying his shouty rock voice and alternating it with his whispery voice instead of actually, you know, singing. Not sure if this actually applies to “Because the Night” though.

Listened to one live version. Still prefer Patti Smith version. Because more vulnerable maybe, especially in quiet part?

Feelies did a good cover too. No sorry, that was “Dancing Barefoot.”

Here I post and I don’t know why

Lily Dale, good question. Tentative answer: probably all?

Ms. Smith was and is a punk/avant garde icon whose signature output was mostly abstract, oblique, strange, metaphorical. Mad respect to Patti.

Why, then, give her a song that is so straightforward that it could just be an instruction manual? Like, when I was a kid we were given well-intentioned books about sex that were approximately as sexy as that song.

Patti didn't need the world's boringest sex anthem. She deserved something with some metaphor, something with some nuance, something with complexity.

There is no complexity or nuance in "take me now, take me now, take me now." It's among Bruce's laziest lyrics.

"Atlantic City" has at least three more levels than "Because the Night."

Natalie Merchant was a believable vocalist for it because we didn't, generally speaking, expect profundity from Natalie "Eat For Two" Merchant. We expected profundity from Patti Smith and got "take me now" times eleventh.

For some reason I feel like I will die on this stupid hill. No one of Patti Smith's age and intelligence and creativity is just saying "take me now" over and over again. It's embarrassing and dumb and she deserved a better song.

I think it's quite a good melodramatic rock song and I like Bruce Springsteen's version of it, and respect him for writing it.

I don't think Patti Smith is my cup of tea.

To me "Because the Night" is kind of a sequel or answer to "Tonight's the Night" by The Shirelles, so I don't care if might seem silly for an older person to sing it since it sort of bridges some kind of gap.

See also "Tonight," by the Raspberries. It's a worthy genre excercise in this sort of very specific micro-niche of the teenage longing song.

I don't like the song much either (the lyrics are so awkward... "Love is a banquet on which we feed"!). I think Natalie was a good vocalist for it, not necessarily because we don't expect profundity from her, but because it works well with her voice and "removed" approach to the lyrics she's singing generally.

He should have given "Because the Night" to Robert Gordon and "Fire" to Patti Smith.

Heh

What I find really interesting about "Because the Night" is that Bruce's version is like this broken link between something like "Night," with its theme of "I work all day but at night, out in my car by myself, I feel free" and a later song like "Cover Me," with its theme of sex as protection from a scary and depressing world.

In Patti Smith's version, it's basically just a love song, though I think "the way I feel under your command" is sort of uncomfortable in a memorable way. But in "Because the Night" (Bruce's Version), the chorus actually means something; it matters that the night belongs to lovers, because the singer doesn't feel like anything else in his life belongs to him. This is a blue-collar dude, someone who's supposed to be tough 24/7, basically asking his lover to help him build a blanket fort to hide in because he feels powerless and bullied at work. Even that "take me now," sung by a man to a woman, feels more startling than the other way around; it's a romance-novel cliché, but it's usually the woman's line.

Take me now, baby here as I am
Pull me close, try and understand
I work all day out in the hot sun
Break my back till the evening comes

Come on now, try and understand
I work all day pushing for the man
Daylight’s gone, take me under your covers
They can’t hurt us now
They can’t hurt me now
They can’t hurt you now

But Bruce couldn't actually write that version of "Because the Night" - not then anyway, and not without help. It could have been like "Hungry Heart" - the song where Bruce figured out how to tell his own distinctive kind of story and write a big anthemic pop hit at the same time. But he wasn't there yet, and it's kind of a missed opportunity, because I don't think he ever wrote another song that so explicitly linked the sex-as-protection motif to the abusive nature of blue-collar work. "Cover Me" is more like "please have sex with me because I read the newspapers too much," which is also fine but not the same.

Lily Dale, I respect you immensely and this is a good conversation to have.

I still think it's a bad song and I hate that it exists.

Like, how can someone write masterpieces, and also this tossed-off trifle, and get praised to the skies for the dross instead of the masterpieces?

Personally I don't get it, but de gustibus and such. People can like it if they want but it's not my cup of tea.

First, great posts Lily Dale! Really enjoyed reading through this conversation. Second, I can see all the knocks against “Because the Night” and I don’t especially like Bruce’s version — but I’ve always loved Patti Smith’s. I think she nails the Springsteenian epic tone and makes it sexier — Patti was less abashed about sex than Bruce.

That's why this and "Fire" were left of "Darkness," iirc, because he didn't really want any of that stuff on the record. "Candy's Room" is there, of course, but that song is the furthest from romantic (or Romantic).

Personally, I think that was just a convenient excuse for not being able to finish the song until after he'd handed it off to Patti Smith. It would have fit the tone of the album fairly well imo, in a way that "Fire" doesn't; it's driven by the same simmering working-class anger that you see in the rest of "Darkness." I think Bruce just couldn't write that kind of song yet, and Patti Smith was - as you say, tipsy mothra - more comfortable writing about sex than Bruce was at that point.

Holy crap, this thread got a ton of posts today. Lily Dale, I need to think about that tracklist - will circle back later!

There was a Patti book that came out not long ago with some details (though I find rock icons sometimes write/remember their own truth):

Today, Jimmy Iovine is known as a legendary producer and music industry mogul who founded Interscope Records and cofounded Beats Electronics with the hip-hop pioneer Dr. Dre. But in 1977, Iovine was a scrappy engineer in his mid-twenties who was currently engineering sessions for Bruce Springsteen that would become “Darkness on the Edge of Town.”

Following “Radio Ethiopia”’s lack of success, Arista Records would have strongly preferred that Patti hire someone with more of a production track record. “So I fought for Jimmy, and he had something to prove,” Patti said. “Jimmy worked really hard with us, but he really wanted to make a special mark on this record.” Springsteen had a backlog of material for his record and was continuing to write, so he had a lot of unfinished songs lying around. This included a track initially called “The Night Belongs to Lovers.”

As it happened, this was the first song Springsteen recorded on his first day in the studio, but he only had a rough vocal and no lyrics except the chorus. As Bruce moved his record in a different direction, Iovine zeroed in on the song. The details of when and where Iovine got Springsteen’s blessing to walk that Maxell C46 cassette out of the studio differ slightly each time either of them tells the story, but it boils down to Iovine campaigning Springsteen for the song, and Bruce saying yes.

Springsteen told me, “I was a tremendous admirer of Patti, you know, and I was just flattered that she was interested in collaborating, and I was just happy that she found something that she could do with the song, you know, because that song would still be in my archives if it wasn’t for her. And it would be something that nobody had ever heard of.”

There was one big problem: Patti was not interested in singing someone else’s songs. She felt strongly about wanting to write and record her own material, whether by herself or with someone in her group. So the tape went home and sat on her mantel. “Even now it makes me laugh,” Patti explained in 2017. “Every day I’d come to the studio, he (Iovine) wouldn’t say hello to me, he’d say, ‘Did you listen to the song? Did you listen to the song?’ I’d say, ‘No, I haven’t listened to it yet.’ ‘Should we go back to your apartment and listen to the song?’ For days. ‘Did you listen to the song?’ ”

She continued:

“At that time, I was building a romance with my future husband, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, and he lived in Detroit, so I only got to talk to him once a week. I’m home and I’m waiting for Fred to call. 7:30 comes, he doesn’t call. 8:00 o’clock, I was getting really agitated, and I noticed the tape sitting on the mantle and I thought, ‘I’ll listen to that darn song.’ I put it on and — it’s flawlessly produced, great chorus, it’s in my key, it’s anthemic. So Fred finally calls me at like almost midnight, but by midnight, I’d written all the lyrics.”

The next day, Patti had a different answer when Iovine asked, “Did you listen to the song?” They recorded and finished it in two days.

The song, now titled “Because the Night,” was released as a single right as “Easter” hit the streets and spent three months on the Billboard Hot 100, reaching number 13. In the United Kingdom, the single went to No. 5 and was certified silver by the British Phonographic Industry, which means it sold more than 250,000 copies.

I asked Springsteen whether he remembered the first time he heard the song on the radio and whether he had any regrets. “I was just happy because I realized I had written a great chorus — that, I knew,” he said. “But I didn’t have the rest of the song! I had me mumbling kind of a few things and had a great hook, I knew that… A great hook, as great as one can be, is still not a great song. And so she turned it into a great song.”

“Bruce wrote the music, and I always think of myself as the translator,” Patti told an interviewer in 1978. “He gave me the music, and it had some mumbling on it, and Bruce is a genius mumbler, like the sexiest mumbler I ever heard… He wrote the tag ‘Because the night belongs to lovers,’ which was in between the mumbling… I respected his lyrics, and I thought it was a very nice sentiment, so I built the rest of the lyrics, which are obviously mine, around his sentiment.”

Springsteen continued, “Was I expecting for it to go to the Top Five, or whatever it did? Well, as far as I knew, none of us were doing that. I wasn’t having any big hits, you know. (He laughs.) So it was a surprise when the record kind of actually cracked mainstream Top 40 radio. It was a surprise just because of the type of artist that Patti was — but when it works, it works!”

There was some rockist partisanship at the time of the single’s release, with detractors muttering that Smith didn’t actually do anything, that it was Bruce’s song, and others once again charging that she had “sold out.” The best response to that is her own: “Punk rock is about freedom, it’s not about your chart position. And I’ll sing any song I fucking want.”

“Because the Night” was made for FM radio, but it also stood out amid its competition. Patti’s performance of the song embodied an intense vulnerability and yearning, and the emotional delivery of the lyrics was frank and unapologetic. Nowadays someone would probably call it “fierce,” but reaching for an easy and overused label is a way of minimizing a woman taking up space and could not be further from the intent of the song. “Because the Night” was a grown woman singing about her wants and dreams, and there are no more perfect couplets than “love is a ring, the telephone” no matter the decade in which you listen to it. How do those six words manage to perfectly encompass that feeling of elation and relief when the phone finally rings and the right person is on the other end of it?

There was no way to know how this song would expand to fill the space it was given, that there would be a new cover of it in every generation, that it would fly out over the rooftops and become an anchor for the people who needed to hear it. In 2010, at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Concerts at Madison Square Garden, Bono introduced the song by saying that “this is the song we wish we’d written” before inviting both Bruce and Patti out to perform it with U2. As Lenny Kaye said, “I don’t think that either Bruce or Patti understood the power of that song until it became a song and started riding up the charts… And together we all made something that was greater than all of us.”

Bruce cedes the solo to Nils these days, but here he is tearing it up in '78:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Evp0MrJ9lk

HI DERE

I fear that the balance isn't right on THE RIVER itself. Far too much straight-ahead bar-room rock, too little Darkness. I've always been mystified by that.

I think one of the elegant constructions on The River is the way that each of the four sides ends with one of the more downcast, pessimistic numbers, like he has to leave the listener with a bone to chew on.

I like "Because the Night" because I prefer Patti Smith's short, pop numbers. When she tries to do Jim Morrison, she's worse at it than Burton Cummings.

Patti totally sells "Because the Night." Bruce's versions sound stiff to me, like he's acting but Patti sounds like she's feeling it.

We heard for so long that Bruce had trunkloads of songs as good as the released stuff and for the most part it's been really underwhelming. I love his core catalog but the vast majority of his shelved material is definitely b-side level stuff.

The River is just right. Party and have fun over some beers but then you go home and there are all of your problems.

^More great posts on this weekend of great posts on this thread.

I will die on the Patti Smith hill

it's the rawness, call her a poser all you want (cuz she is), doesn't take away from the desperate longing she conveys

Cow_Art otm

I totally agree with everyone saying Patti Smith sings it better. I just like Bruce's lyrics better, and I wish there were a version that combined the two.

So is it being said here that there are two versions of the song, with different words?

I don't like Smith so have never much investigated hers.

I listened to THE PROMISE CD1 twice more after last night's posts here and had to add:

1:
I was much too lukewarm in my defence of 'because the night'. First, it's a fine exercise in a melodramatic mode that clearly isn't Bruce's own mode exactly but that he's exploring and showing he can do. It has good lines like 'love is a ringing telephone' (?). No, apparently 'Love is a ring, the telephone'? Even more striking I suppose!

It has a good chorus though I think Bruce always undersells it by not fully articulating the melody of 'belongs to lovers' - which I think maybe Smith does.

But it also has the tremendous bridge, which hasn't really been mentioned - what a wonderful construction, how Bruce lays that melody over it as he sings about 'the vicious circle' etc. This alone shows me that this is great songwriting talent.

2:
'Candy's Boy' is also intriguing. Clearly it appears to overlap with 'Candy's Room' (which is another super melody in the vein just mentioned) - but it's a totally different song. It has this chugging, deliberately simplistic rhythm guitar. But then it has quite dark lyrics over the top, and in the final (?) verse a marvellous line about 'there's fire and machines for us on the edge of town' - which suggests that the story of this song is another angle on the story of 'Racing in the Street'. Bruce is telling the same stories, showing the same ideas, from different angles as he tries out these songs.

What I feel about 'Candy's Boy' is how Bruce had this ability to do something very simple yet make it feel resonant, as if something important or even ominous must be going on despite the simplicity.

Yes, sorry, I should have clarified. Bruce had just a few lyrics when he handed the song off to Smith - not much, mainly the opening lines and the hook. There's enough to get a sense of where he was trying to go with the song, but most of the lyrics were written by Smith.

Then Bruce started playing the song live and gradually adding more of his own lyrics, until he eventually evolved this parallel version of the song that's about being burned out from work and taking refuge with his lover. You can hear that version on a lot of live recordings, though the lyrics change a tiny bit each time and he sometimes interpolates some of Smith's lyrics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Evp0MrJ9lk