Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

I'm listening to it now. "Follow your dreams down" is such a jarring phrase in the context of that song. Like it's pointing out a crack in the invincibility-sheild and disrupts the momentum.

He establishes certain binaries only to constantly undermine them.

the darkness and the stadium-rock energy are not either/or on the album, they are twin fuel sources. It's not that one is more true or real than the other, they feed off each other.

Symbolism aside, the alternating red and white bands on the cover hint at a structural bibary and the integration of binary energies.

the darkness and the stadium-rock energy are not either/or on the album, they are twin fuel sources. It's not that one is more true or real than the other, they feed off each other.

That's a really good way of putting it.

I think maybe that explains the connection so many have with his music and his performances. The release is there, it's real, but we all maybe see or sense the side of ourselves that yearns for something more, even if it means sacrificing what makes your life stable or safe.

I think this is also around when he starts really leaning into the therapeutic aspect of his concerts. It was always there, of course, but on the bitusa tour there's a way he talks to the audience at times that's sort of - consciously compassionate, I guess? I'm thinking of stuff like the performance of "This Land is Your Land" where he ends his introduction, "I'd like to do this for you, wishing you all the longest life with the best of absolutely everything." And there's such seriousness, maybe even sadness, in his voice as he says it, like he's worried about his audience. Like he's hoping they have something in their real life that's better than this concert, but he knows there's a good chance they don't.

One of my favorite moments in the live recordings is the very end of the LA 85 performance - the last stop on the tour, though not the last concert. After his usual encore, endless performance of "Twist and Shout" and so on, he does a final encore that's "Stand on It" and "Janey Don't You Lose Heart" back to back. Two b-sides; this is really for the die-hards. But it's also his two songs with the most explicit message of "Hey, you can do this, you can get through this, hang on." He even drops the verse of "Stand on It" in which Bobby fails to stand on it and gets carried off on a stretcher, so that there are no bummer vibes here at all, just sheer encouragement. It's like he's deliberately giving the people who might be struggling something to take away with them.

Bono is Bono, but if you've never seen his rock hall induction speech of Bruce it's worth a view, as he gets at a little of what we're discussing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d18hFamh3i0

"They call him the boss, but that's a bunch of crap. He's not the boss; he works *for* us."

xp Thanks deflatormouse for helping me answer a question that's always bugged me a little about BITUSA, which is why "Cover Me" is where it is on the album. I've always thought of the album structure roughly as Side 1: isolation, Side 2: trying to engage with the world again and not quite knowing how. But the placement of "Cover Me" didn't fit with that, and it puzzled me. Now it makes more sense.

Just wanted to say belatedly that I really appreciate the writing of everyone on this thread, and I'm constantly seeing things here that make me think about Bruce in a new way or give me questions to try to answer that it never occurred to me to ask. I'm stoked every time this thread gets bumped, because it usually means that birdistheword or someone has posted something really thoughtful and perceptive and there's going to be a couple days of great conversation.

xxp Bruce’s RRHoF speech inducting U2 is also great.

They're both good, and it's fun to see Bruce getting little digs in as payback for the elevator story. But much as I love Bruce and don't love Bono, I think Bono's speech is the better of the two. He's really mastered the art of openly and sincerely praising someone to his face in a way that's interesting and funny and just a little unnerving.

He's not really roasting Bruce at all, apart from the one embarrassing elevator story, but there's something so sharply perceptive about the way he talks about Bruce's emotional life as revealed in the songs that it almost comes off as a roast, in the sense that he's saying things you're not quite supposed to say out loud. Which I guess is part of the point he's making, that Bruce has given us that kind of access all along.

Bono is, rather as Seamus Heaney was, a great talker.

A lot of talk about 'Cover Me'. I find this song awkward. I want it to be good, and to live up to the greatness of the first track. But it can't. (The whole LP fails to do that until track 5 truly raises the quality again.)

The oddest thing about it, that I don't think has been mentioned here, is how it is built on this very corny, rather old-fashioned rhythm - da-da-da-dum-DUM-DUM - which would probably sound clearer, and cornier, if played on piano than guitar.

Maybe this rhythm and these melodramatic chords recall, say, Del Shannon? But they're still out of place in a serious song set in the 1980s.

Lyrically: 'well, I'm looking for a lover who will / come on and cover me' is not good. The phrase 'cover me' is OK in suggesting 'covering fire', punning on more like 'cover me with a blanket' (in a sense the former very masculine, the latter more maternal). But the line, with filler like 'come on and', is too slack.

Bono is, rather as Seamus Heaney was, a great talker.

Just one more thing about Bono, I always thought the story around hiring Eno for the first time was hilarious. Specifically how Eno hated U2's music and turned them down, and then Island Records head Chris Blackwell refused to consider Eno because he thought it would be commercial suicide. The way Bono himself talked both men into going along with the whole thing is damn impressive - like if you ever need someone to pitch, plead or negotiate something on your behalf, it would be Bono.

Re: Cover Me, I know a lot of people hate it but I persist in liking it. I'm a sucker for songs where the chorus comes up on you really fast, and I like the way he goes "wrrrap your arms around me cover me." But I can also see finding it all very annoying.

That lyric you quoted - it's come on in and cover me! This is the song he wrote for Donna Summer and then decided to keep, and you can definitely see that in the lyrics imo - this graphic sexual double entendre that he doesn't bother to change once it's him singing it. It's one of the things I find fun about the song, that he ended up with this very homoerotic line more or less by accident and then just sort of shrugged and kept it.

He did try for a while to rework it with different (less gay) lyrics, but he scrapped it; it's one of those outtakes that's only around as a bootleg. I really like it, but it doesn't fit at all with the sound of the album so I can see why he abandoned it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iQh-UzJiH4

Which imo is one of those enduring questions about BitUSA: why was it so important to him to have a unified sound for the album, when he has all these outtakes from the same time period that don't sound like that at all?

I think he's sometimes driven to these ineffable visions he has trouble verbalizing. Like, the infamous "Darkness" doc, where he's fixated on Max's snare drum? I still don't know what Bruce was talking about.

Today in the supermarket I heard some pop cover of "Dancing in the Dark." No idea who it was, but in researching I discovered this lovely reimagining by our man Trevor Horn:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gkVIIf74A4

That the song was written for Donna Summer at least gives some idea of why it doesn't fit in with the Boss's songs as well as you might expect it to.

I admit to not having thought much about the detail of the lyrics as Lily Dale has here - pretty sure I never realised it was supposed to be a double entendre that way.

I like the song - I just wish I liked it more, and it were better, given its prominence on such a big LP by an artist I like so much.

I suppose one thing I do quite like is the amount of screaming lead guitar on it.

This bootleg that Lily Dale linked to is phenomenal! Miles better than half what's on the LP!

I like "Cover Me"! I don't know if it helps that I like Donna Summer too, but the guitar is pretty awesome and brings to mind Bruce's fiery work on Darkness on the Edge of Town.

I really like the recorded "Cover Me," a lot. It's one of my favorite E Street Band performances, actually. The last time I got to see him and the band live, in 2016, they killed it, especially Nils:

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

That the song was written for Donna Summer at least gives some idea of why it doesn't fit in with the Boss's songs as well as you might expect it to.

Because I never know what anyone has heard or not heard, here's another Bruce song written for and actually recorded by Donna, and he absolutely nails it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMIs8Y23mBc

xp Now you can see why I'm so excited about the idea of a BitUSA box set! I love the outtakes from this era - there's a whole self-contained phase of his songwriting here that you don't see in any official releases, with the exception of "Shut Out the Light" and maybe "County Fair."

It was also the peak of his outtakes, not just in terms of his prolific production but also literally, the end of leaks, once he moved to his own studio. In fact, afaict there's really been next to nothing if not absolutely nothing leaked from anything he's done post-"BitUSA."

Think I've heard of 'Protection', but never heard that it was connected with the Boss.

It's bizarre that someone such a performance in his own right also wrote so much for others. Bizarre, or just very impressive.

https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/rs-238653-Alamy_EM857F.jpg?w=580

He had a very signature drum fill. During the recording of what would become Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA album, Street Fighting Man was really intriguing me because of the sound, the toughness, the beat; the fact that it was apparently recorded on a tour drum set or a box, on a cassette player, and sounded incredibly dangerous and tough. Charlie does this thing where he plays, quickly, three eighth notes: bap-bap-bap. And when Bruce presented the groove to Born in the USA, it reminded me of Street Fighting Man, so on that song, I’m doing Charlie Watts.

ha, I always thought Max was doing a kind of approximation of Keith Moon on that song.

Like, the infamous "Darkness" doc, where he's fixated on Max's snare drum? I still don't know what Bruce was talking about.

I think there was just a certain snare sound Bruce was after, but most professional studios in 1977-78 had carpet on the walls: resonance-free flumpf was the order of the day. And it was in the days before the standard practice of a truckload of snares being brought into a session so that the artist or producer could spend a week getting just the right snare sound.

I don't know if Max just didn't tune his snare the way Bruce wanted, or if tuning it didn't help, or what. But in the Darkness doc, you can see at least one rototom where a standard tom would normally be. A single-headed drum like that is thought by some to be easier to tune, mic, and eq than a double-headed drum. So they were after...something...and whatever that was, it doesn't seem like the studio could accommodate it. (See also: the rototoms on VH's 1984.)

Iirc he kept calling "stick!" like he could ... hear the stick?

“Drum sounds were always bigger in my head,” the now 61-year-old Springsteen says in the film, looking back on the days when he and the E Street Band worked intently on their fourth album. “We were chasing something unobtainable.”

He meant "Chapman Stick".

It's funny, I did a quick google for Springsteen with Tony Levin, since there's only one degree of separation between them. Original E Street piano/key guy was of course David Sancious, who went on to be Peter Gabriel's guy during his popular peak. And of course Gabriel and Springsteen toured together on the Amnesty International outing. But no, Bruce probably took one look at Levin, declared "stick!" and from then on the promoters knew best to keep them apart.

Come to think of it, you know who else was on that tour? Tracy Chapman.

I reflect that the large amount of highly expert, technical discussion of drumming and how to set up drum kits, on ILM recently, has been impenetrable to me.

Here's a good lesson. Next time you are around a snare drum, give it a good whack. Listen to how much it rings and how loud it is, then consider how relative few recorded snares actually sound like that. Similarly, give a cymbal a good hit and listen to how loud *that* is, how bright that is, and how long it sustains, then consider how few recorded cymbals sound like *that.* And then every time you listen to a record, listen to all the different ways the snare drums sound, from a bright clangy racket (early Elvis Costello, say, or Fugazi) to big '80s marshmallow drums, to ultra-dry, tight, controlled '70s sounds, to the tight crack of the Police or James Brown. and so on. Drums are by default loud and intrusive; I used to be a drummer and boy did I wish they had a volume knob, as even drums played quietly can be pretty loud. Recording drums is a matter of bringing out their character (or whatever character you have in mind) while in essence reigning in their extremes.

Also re: Springsteen, I think he ran into the challenge Jimmy Page famously illustrated. The drums can be loud, or the guitars can be loud, but they can't *both* be loud. Listen to Zeppelin and hear how much lower in the mix the guitar often is compared to the drums (not that the drums are particularly bright or in your face on those records, either). Then listen to something from the '80s that sounds terrible, like Motley Crue or other hair metal records, and you hear the sound of everything being cranked up (no pun intended) pretty artlessly and obnoxiously.

I used to be a drummer and boy did I wish they had a volume knob, as even drums played quietly can be pretty loud.

I was in the marching band in high school, and I remember the day they switched the snares to kevlar heads. (They were supposed to last a lot longer and I got the impression that was the main reason for buying.) They were fucking LOUD, and you heard it even as we were marching off the field when the snare beat was echoing through the space between buildings.

Next time you are around a snare drum, give it a good whack.

I am never around snare drums.

This was the case even before we were all affected by a deadly global pandemic which has meant that I rarely leave my home.

I can tell my job is getting to me after only a week and a half, because I felt compelled to listen to Nebraska on my commute, and it's never a good sign when work is so stressful I need to spend the day in Nebraska, USA instead. I also have way less time for posting here which is a bummer.

But on my drive in I was thinking about the voice Bruce uses on Nebraska and how much I respond to it with an instant, visceral sense of relief and recognition. I find all his voices interesting, because he seems to have a different one on each album; there's that sort of mushmouthed drawl on The Wild, the Innocent, and then his Roy Orbison-inflected BTR voice, and then the artificially deep voice of Darkness, and it's not until The River that I start to think I might actually be hearing what Bruce's voice sounds like. And then of course he goes all Western twang in the later years, which I sometimes find pretty hard to take.

But on Nebraska, he taps into this voice that you don't hear anywhere else, and yet it doesn't feel artificial to me at all, it doesn't feel like something put on for the album (as his Darkness voice does, for instance); it feels more like something real that he's - I was going to say "pulling out of somewhere inside him," but I'm not sure that's right, it feels more like something he's pulling from somewhere outside himself, like he's tapped into all the ambient sorrow and pity in the world and is channeling its voice. And it's amazing to me that someone with so many voices - some of them grating, most of them varying levels of artificial - was able on this one album to come up with something so real and so essential. There's something about it that I find deeply and calmingly familiar, as if it were a voice from my childhood rather than something I heard for the first time at age 35.

Does anyone else respond in that way to the Nebraska voice or is it just me?

I can’t imagine listening to such a heavy emotional record on a commute. It would make work that much harder

Well, see, what happened was that one day two and a half years ago I was waiting for a bus outside the school where I taught at the time, absolutely crushed under a level of burnout + loneliness and small-town-to-big-city culture shock that I had no idea how to carry (plus the literal weight of a backpack full of textbooks and a bag of grading, so picture me all hunched over in my work clothes), and as I climbed onto the bus for my hour-long commute back to my shitty apartment I looked at my iPod and thought, hmm, I've never heard this song "Reason to Believe," maybe I'll give it a try. And that first verse, with the guy poking the dog with a stick, felt so true to the way I saw the world at that moment that as I listened to it I could feel the coil of tension in myself easing for the first time in months. Like I was down at the bottom of the ocean all by myself, and the pressure was unbearable but I didn't know how to get to the surface, and suddenly here was a decompression chamber and if I hung out in it for long enough I could go back into the world again.

So I curled myself into a window seat and started the album from the beginning, and then I listened to it all weekend, and then for the rest of that shitty, shitty school year I was okay. Because I had somewhere to go in my brain, and I could stand in front of my classroom and smile and speak French, and inside my mind "State Trooper" would be playing. My current job is, I hope, much better, and I'm not a first-year teacher anymore, but there are still days when I feel like a bad teacher and then I find "Nebraska" comforting.

Anyway, that's how I became a Springsteen fan. Classic conversion narrative. I'm just glad it was Bruce that came along at that particular psychological moment, and not, like, Jesus.

Amen

I think for me it was “dancing” on the school bus radio when I was a kid or maybe “freeze out” when rediscovered him in university

I discovered Springsteen twice: first when I moved to a small town and bought a car and started listening to the Greatest Hits cd followed by BitUSA, Darkness and The River, and then again nearly a decade later when I left that small town and was dealing with massive culture shock + burnout and suddenly had to listen to all Springsteen, all the time.

And now I'm embarrassed by those posts because it's like, well, obviously I have this weird emotional connection to Nebraska, naturally I'm going to respond to the Nebraska voice the way I do.

But I'm genuinely curious whether other ppl also hear him as basically doing a different voice for each album?

I can’t imagine listening to such a heavy emotional record on a commute.

Heh, my perpetually upbeat Australian brother in law had "Nebraska" is his truck's player on repeat and as we bounced around the farm doing chores I don't think he ever thought twice about it.

I think Bruce, for myriad complicated reasons, long suffered from low esteem, or imposter syndrome or whatever. ("I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face.") I think a result of this was perhaps a desire to hide his true self, or at least try on lots of (literal and figurative) hats until he was able to define his true self. So you get the early Bruce and its novel mish-mash of Dylan and Van Morrison and early rock and roll or, as someone once astutely put it once, the '50s plus the '60s. He records "Born to Run" and ... sits on it for 6 months, because he's sure he ripped it off. Then Landau turns him on to a bunch of books and movies and suddenly Bruce shifts gears and scope. He's not singing about himself so much or what was once a conception of himself and/or New Jersey, he's singing about some bigger picture of America, and sometimes his place in it. He's also still fussing over song selection and working in the studio, second-guessing track lists all the way up to "BitUSA," worried about sounding contemporary and agnostic about being commercial, unsure which direction to go in.

"Nebraska," recorded by himself, is in a way an even further distillation of this American portrait, but this time a really reduced, really dark portrait of dark cloud America, on a much smaller scale. You get the sense Bruce thought it almost too intimate. That's what the demo captured, the sound of a guy going darker than he maybe wanted to go and, in the process, capturing a side of himself he maybe didn't like to see (or even that he knew was there and long tried to disguise). Maybe that explains the less than full (or full-voiced) commitment of Bruce on that record; he's singing things to himself that maybe make him feel uncomfortable, like he's cut to a deeper truth he'd more artfully couched in the past. This might be what so many Bruce neophytes are responding to when they claim they don't like Bruce, except for "Nebraska."

I think, getting to the point (too late), that in some ways "Tunnel of Love" gets his voice best. It's personal and dark, still, but Bruce (like "Nebraska," again working mostly by himself) is maybe more confident and comfortable with what he his projecting out into the world. He's successful in every sense so has the strength to bear its emotional honesty. The downside of that I think is that, having achieved this internal goal, he never really does it again. Everything since then, with a few exceptions, has been some degree of cautious or conservative, more or less, perhaps with the biggest exception of the "Seeger Sessions," where he is clearly having a blast.

https://books.google.com/books?id=nRTHPE2gZ0QC&pg=PA191&lpg=PA191&dq=bruce+springsteen+human+touch+guitar+world&source=bl&ots=FWuMU1hpR-&sig=ACfU3U1eauyqto0ihNdiLPjOpGE6sav_2Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjFhLCFpPfyAhWFMlkFHU0JBAIQ6AF6BAgkEAI#v=onepage&q=bruce%20springsteen%20human%20touch%20guitar%20world&f=false

See p. 196-197, re: "other people's fingerprints on their mind".

Really one of the best interviews given by any musician that I've read

Yeah, I think I have that one in a collection called "Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen."

Man, Neil Strauss. He's one of those writers that used to impress me, or at least I was impressed by his output, but then he just fell off a cliff. It began with his infamous Rolling Stone profile of Jewel that I actually clipped and saved, since it was one of the most ridiculous things I'd ever read.

Dovetails with what you wrote about a desire to hide his true self or try on lots of hats.

Honestly finding one's own voice is incredibly difficult, it's a major artistic achievement I would say, and his insight as to why is eloquent as anyone's

Curious now to see the Jewel piece :)

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/a-search-for-truth-about-jewel-233904/

At the house, I strip the guest bed of its myriad pillows and leave Jewel alone to talk with her mother in the kitchen. As I lie under the covers flipping, through a glossy color picture book of Alaska, Jewel walks in wearing a green zipper sweatshirt and either sweat pants or cotton pants, I can’t remember which, and gets under the covers with me. She lies on her left side, I on my right. Between our heads is a large pillow, which blocks part of her face. We keep pushing the pillow down as we talk so we can see each other completely and feel more intimate. But we know the pillow can never be removed completely: That would be too intimate.

Holy shit

JEWEL: HOT, READY, AND ALASKAN!

Hahahaha, omg that is so ridiculous

C’mon Neil, were they cotton pants or sweatpants — I demand every detail of this rockcrit fantasy!