Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

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

Whoops, just realized that's the same version Josh in Chicago already posted.

Still good!

And here I thought YMP just made those lyrics up himself.

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?

on record, it's 99 percent bruce. he's the only credited guitarist on the "born to run" album. "darkness" credits him with "lead guitar" and steve with "guitar." steve gets a lead credit on one song on "the river" ("crush on you"). and bruce is the only credited electric guitarist on "born in the usa" (steve's credit is acoustic guitar and mandolin).

Patti Smith is good; dissing her is tired, she doesn't care.

Because the Night is awesome, full of drama, passion and palpable yearning for love emotional and carnal.

Come on now try and understand
The way I feel under your command

is one the best pre-choruses in all of rock. Talk about Dominance and Submission.

nils "sonic" lofgren

My ideal version of "Because the Night," which does not exist, would have Bruce singing his own lyrics in Patti Smith's style, with that kind of vulnerability and intimacy, and would have the line "the way I feel under your command," and would have a saxophone solo but no guitar solo. I know this version of the song doesn't exist because I once listened to every live version of "Because the Night" I could find, in a row, which is a great way to gradually drive yourself insane.

I think I usually eventually give up on those kinds of efforts, so yeah.

This is the most I've thought about this song as anything more than something I really like from both Patti Smith and Springsteen, and a highlight of many a '78 Bruce boot.

The Springsteen lyrics website has lyrics for two different demos. I'm not sure which one Bruce gave Patti. This is the first one:

Come on now try and understand
Oh baby take me by the hand
Work all the day in the hot sun
Ah ah ah, till the morning comes

Come on now, baby here na me
Na na day, you'll be looking for me
Daylight come take me under your cover
They can't touch me now
They can't touch me now
They can't touch me now

Well love is here and now
And I would leave it on the line for love

followed by a bunch of mumbling.

This is what I meant when I said you could see where Bruce was going with the song. It's not entirely mumbling; the lyrics are about halfway done. But all the consciously poetic stuff in the song comes from Patti Smith, including the "fire I breathe" line that sounds like it ought to be Bruce.

What I find funny about Patti Smith's version is that she kept Bruce's "they can't hurt me/you/us now, because the night belongs to lovers" but it no longer really links up to anything else in the song. In Bruce's version there really is a "they" that he wants protection from. In Patti Smith's version, the memorable line is "under your command" - the sex gets dialed up, the paranoia gets dialed down.

both versions are great, Patti Smith's performance of it is *incredible*, agree with what Lily Dale seems to be saying about her verses having a 'fill in your own blank' kind of feel, thought it was a 10k Maniacs original initially (i think i was still very young when i learned that it isn't)

Full circle: here is a live set from 10,000 Maniacs when Max Weinberg was filling in on drums!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1iVIlAQekM

(No "Because the Night," though)

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.

Lily Dale's totally otm about this. FWIW, I used to fiddle with The River, trying to get "Loose Ends," "Roulette" and "Be True" into the tracklist, but I gave the released album a few close listens a couple years ago and it really struck me how I underrated Springsteen's sequencing. There really was a flow that, as Lily Dale points out, made all these songs work like snippets or vignettes of the same community. You really get a deep sense of their lives, and every track really had its place.

Re: the 1992 albums upthread, I frequently hear people say he should've combined the two, but I think the title track is the only thing I'd keep from Human Touch. I still wish the E Street Band recorded the songs, but this is what I'd put on now (with imaginary vinyl side breaks):

Side A:
Human Touch
Lucky Town
Local Hero
If I Should Fall Behind
The Big Muddy

Side B:
Better Days
Living Proof
Book of Dreams
Souls of the Departed
My Beautiful Reward

Re: The Promise, it's actually really tough to pick out an LP that I could see coming out 1979. You have some songs that were clearly reworked or stripped for parts for other songs on Darkness, some favorites that don't match their live renditions, and some favorite bits were actually recorded decades after the fact. ("Save My Love" was completely re-recorded in 2010 and my favorite part of the alternate "Racing In The Street" is the new overdub of David Lindley's fiddle.) And would Springsteen release his own version of songs he's given to others? I tried to take these into consideration, but it was impossible to do so consistently.

At the moment, I have a 45 minute playlist that's roughly sequenced:

1. Gotta Get That Feeling
2. Outside Looking In
3. Someday (We'll Be Together]
4. Iceman
5. Because the Night
6. Rendezvous
7. Give the Girl a Kiss
8. Hearts of Stone
9. Fire
10. Don't Look Back
11. The Promise
12. City of Night

FWIW, three of those songs were given to others, "The Promise" should have an extra lyric that for whatever reason was dropped from the 2010 release, and IIRC "Give the Girl a Kiss" and "Hearts of Stone" both have horn and maybe vocal overdubs by the horn section in the Max Weinberg 7 (Conan O'Brien's NBC band).

Make that FOUR of those songs were given to others, all before 1980.

Re: the 1992 albums, I might also keep only the title track from Human Touch, though I'd be willing to consider 57 Channels as well. It's obnoxious but it's also distinctive, in a way that most of the songs on that album aren't. Ideally, I think I'd want to have a fairly equal balance of songs from both albums, so that the sequence could track the change from the emotional numbness of Human Touch to the fragile happiness of Lucky Town. But for that to work there'd have to be more good songs on Human Touch, and there just aren't.

I might replace The Big Muddy with Gave it a Name, and I would definitely include Loose Change, probably somewhere on the first side. Let's see, how about this:

Human Touch
57 Channels
Loose Change
Gave it a Name
Local Hero

Lucky Town
Living Proof
Better Days
If I Should Fall Behind
My Beautiful Reward

Great posts.

"Human Touch" is sound, solid only in retrospect; I loved his solo at the time.

Ooh, "Gave It Name"'s a good one. I have nothing against "The Big Muddy," but it does feel like a strange choice that doesn't really fit in with the album's thematic continuity. "Souls of the Departed" too for that matter.

I also have a soft spot for "Sad Eyes," "Over the Rise" and "Happy," also from Tracks - Disc Four didn't get much love when it was reviewed, but I kind of like those quiet, mood pieces. I also grew to enjoy the B-side "Part Man, Part Monkey" after the 2005 tour, it became a hilarious response to the Creationist/anti-evolution nonsense that was getting a lot of attention at the time.

my dream one-album version of human town also includes the christic institute version of "real world."

"Real World" and "Happy" would both fit well on the first side of my version, as they're both songs where he's saying he's happy but that feel depressed or anhedonic; they go along with the low-expectations, "I'll take what I can get" message of "Human Touch." I like the idea of ending the first side with "Local Hero" as it's kind of a transition between the two; it's got a burned-out vibe but also ends on a note of renewal.

So I've been trying to put this together as an album with two sides, but if I just treat it as a playlist, here's one possible sequence. It starts with the singer in a relationship that is working but that isn't enough to get him out of his haze of depression; there's a sense of trying very hard to be happy and not quite succeeding. Then there's a break marked by the frustration of "57 Channels" and the outright self-loathing/depression/paralysis of "Gave it a Name" and "Loose Change," then a tentative coming back to life with "Local Hero" and "Lucky Town." By "Living Proof" the happiness is real but fragile, and that carries us through to the end of the album.

Human Touch
Real World (Christic)
Happy
57 Channels
Gave it a Name
Loose Change
Local Hero
Lucky Town
Living Proof
Better Days
Souls of the Departed
If I Should Fall Behind
My Beautiful Reward

I wouldn't want a 1992 LP without 'Man's Job' - which includes one of my favourite of his instrumental breaks.

For sure 'Sad Eyes' is superb, but I don't know the background of TRACKS material enough to say which of it should go on which LP / period.

I wouldn't want THE PROMISE without 'Breakaway' or indeed the hidden 'The Way'.

He seems like a good bloke, and I really enjoyed his autobiography, lots of things to take away there.

Didn't make me want to dash out and buy any of his records though.

I used to say I never owned any Bruce, but thanks to Discogs logging, I find he's on one of the NME cassettes doing 'Viva las vegas', and I admit I was tempted by his version of "Dream baby dream" on 10” but the price was/is ridiculous.

It's also on the High Hopes album.

But then you have the High Hopes album, which is quite a burden.

His cover of that song is not that good anyway. Feel like I recently revived another thread about this.

Oh, here: Covers of Elvis Presley tunes

FWIW, IIRC the "Dream Baby Dream" 10" single uses a live performance from his 2005 tour that hasn't been officially released elsewhere (not even on nugs.net)

I have a couple of his 2005 shows from nugs and his performance of that song was pretty consistent night after night, so I never felt the need to buy it elsewhere.

High Hopes is disposable, but it does have a couple of tracks I really like: "Hunter of Invisible Game" and "The Wall"

"41 Shots" is a great song, but you're better off with the live version from 1999, either on record/CD or DVD.

Bruce Springsteen's cover of "Dream Baby Dream" reminds me of this bit in The Last Samurai by Helen Dewitt:

I would say But he is like a man who plays Yesterday on the piano with Brahmsian amplitude & lushness and so casually kicks aside the very thing which is the essence of the song he is like the Percy Faith Orchestra playing Satisfaction

I've gone back to ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps8s-wQStgU

That was really really good.

Bruce Springsteen paid a visit to Shane MacGowan ahead of the E Street Band's shows in Dublin this week.

Credit: @victoriamary pic.twitter.com/OzyKYHaI3M

— CONSEQUENCE (@consequence) May 3, 2023

Bruce Springsteen holds court at Irish town pub, leads patrons in song: https://t.co/7ZqmQxI4Iv pic.twitter.com/BSzczfFuhQ

— CONSEQUENCE (@consequence) May 4, 2023

The Darkness Tour '78 , a selection of 20 tracks from previously released full shows:

https://open.spotify.com/album/09rNh6weVS43LVc4sRt5WV

https://brucespringsteen.net/news/2023/celebrating-45-years-of-darkness/

I return to LETTER TO YOU, having been disappointed by it.

I actually enjoy it. I'm liking how often it does a thing I like which is "guitar solo plays the melody". And I'm at last just hearing much of it as "pastiche of the E Street Band".