Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

I heard "Dancing in the Dark" before I knew much about Bruce, and I remember how striking those lyrics were when I first focused in on them. It's hard to remember at this distance, when I've listened to it so much that its edges have been worn off. But I think the darkness and self-loathing of the lyrics stood out to me a lot when I first heard it, and even the energy of the song felt restless and fidgety rather than fun.

This is one reason why I really love listening to the live concert downloads; sometimes there's just enough newness to let me back into that feeling of hearing a song for the first time. In the performances from the Bitusa tour, there's a little "sometiiiimmmes... I just feel so lonely," bit that Bruce does toward the end of "Dancing in the Dark." I was listening to the latest release, from 1985, and this time he added, "I feel so ugly," and it was really jolting, in a good way. Like, oh, that's what it felt like to hear "wanna change my clothes my hair my face" for the first time.

iirc he and the band rarely played it on the reunion tour, if at all. But it slowly found its way into subsequent tours, and the times I saw him play it were just such a joy.

I dug out Glory Days for the “Dancing In The Dark” video info, and it was played twice on the opening night of the tour, with the house lights up, in order to get the right camera angles etc. Regarding the contrast between the lyrics and the video, Greil Marcus wrote, “On record, the song is about blind faith and struggle; here, as the comic Bobcat Goldthwait put it, Springsteen looks like a member of Up With People.”

DePalma was Bruce’s second choice. He spent a day shooting with Jeff Stein (who’d made The Kids Are Alright and I think a Cars video or two), but it didn’t work, for whatever reason.

I think Dancing in the Dark is a Good Bad Video. I wouldn't call it good in the sense that "Brilliant Disguise" and "One Step Up" are good, but I like it. It's big and cheesy and performative and try-hard and awkward, and Springsteen looks like he's playing the part of a hot muscle-bound pop star and doesn't feel quite comfortable with it yet. And none of that really matches the darkness of the song, but what it does match - maybe more than it means to - is the feeling of self-consciousness and effort and wanting desperately to transform yourself and making it work by sheer force of will, which is also part of the song and is definitely part of my whole sense of Born in the USA the album.

Lily – you should, like, write a book on Bruce (assuming you haven’t). I’d buy it immediately!

“Wanna go see some live music at My Father’s Place Thursday night?”

“Let’s wait until Friday night because I heard Alex Taylor is playing. I promise you totally won’t regret this decision for the rest of your goddamn life or anything.” pic.twitter.com/bh3So26RRr

— Super 70s Sports (@Super70sSports) August 21, 2021

Lol

xp wow morrisp, thank you so much for saying that! I've never written anything for publication, but I hope some day I can get my act together and make myself more of a writer. That's a huge confidence boost and I really appreciate it.

Lily – you should, like, write a book on Bruce (assuming you haven’t). I’d buy it immediately!

― Shallot Shortage 2021 (morrisp), Saturday, August 21, 2021 6:53 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Seriously

Might be just a matter or editing your posts in this thread together

This might be the best thread on ILM

I have a hard time mentally moving the tracks of BITUSA around because I feel like a lot of the songs come in pairs. Darlington County and Working on the Highway are a pair; so are Downbound Train and I'm on Fire - two Nebraska tracks that still sound like Nebraska - and then Bobby Jean and No Surrender. I've never seen that kind of sequencing anywhere else and it's one of the weird things about the album that I like so I wouldn't want to mess with it.

Loved this^

Book aside, would totes listen to a Lily & JIC 'Are You Talkin' Bruce At Me' pod.

And Furthermore Are You Emailing Me About the E Street Band?

All praise otm. Also I really appreciated the Obama podcast commentary cuz I'm not going near that

Great posts from JiC as well, for sure

would totes listen to a Lily & JIC 'Are You Talkin' Bruce At Me' pod.

― “Heroin” (ft. Bobby Gillespie) (C. Grisso/McCain)

Would subscribe to the patreon

Anyway I was actually thinking of starting a thread for albums with unusual structures. The two I had in mind each have a pair of songs or tracks, but you're right, I can't think of another album with three consecutive pairs of songs in the middle.

Any thoughts as to the structural role of the 6 'outer' songs? BitUSA is so much bigger and redder musically- like, there's a striking contrast, I think, between the monumental scale of the opening track and the rest of the album, but in particular the last song. And the national/local scale thing is spelled in the song titles, but that's all i got.

I would totally read a Lily Bruce book!

BitUSA was one of the first albums i had on tape as a kid, i think my very first unsophisticated impressions were of different light

...different light sources. A few of the songs were daylit, cover me had more of an 'indoor' feel, dancing in the dark had a distinct torchlight glow etc.

I listened to it once a couple of months ago but otherwise hadn't heard it since childhood

I know BITUSA better than most albums, from hearing it so much as a kid; but probably haven't listened to it all the way through in... 35 years? Looking at the track list now, I'm a little surprised at how it shakes out – "Cover Me" is track 2? "Dancing in the Dark" is the next-to-last song? I would have thought for sure that the "Darlington"/"Highway" pair fell on Side 2... etc.

xp You guys are so kind, and this is all filling me with combined elation and despair because I would LOVE to write a Bruce book but I have no confidence at all that I could do it. I'm one of those people who writes essays just for myself and puts them away and never sends them out. And I have a lot of impostor syndrome when it comes to writing about music because I know so little about it. But I want to write for publication, I'm just paralyzed by how confusing and daunting it seems. This is lovely encouragement to start trying.

I think of BitUSA as having a kind of v-shape to it - a journey down into the depths of Nebraska and then a climb back up, ending with a song that has a lot of reflective sadness to it but also less desperation, less anger, and more sustained human connection than the rest of the album.

For real, this is the only book I wanna read right now. So, so sorry if this causes you despair of any kind :(

Just wanna say that if you don't know a lot about music, it really doesn't seem to be getting in your way at all. This is everything I want from music writing but never really get.

I can totally relate to not having confidence, not finishing things, don't wanna push. You have something to offer that I don't think anyone else has. We have every confidence that you can do this. Or if this thread and board is where it's on offer, that's great too, I'm so glad to have found it.

I think of BitUSA as having a kind of v-shape to it - a journey down into the depths of Nebraska and then a climb back up, ending with a song that has a lot of reflective sadness to it but also less desperation, less anger, and more sustained human connection than the rest of the album.

Yeah :)

No, it's a good despair! Don't apologize!

One thing about all the paired songs on BitUSA, it makes me start mentally pairing other songs that might not otherwise go together. Does "Born in the USA" pair with "Cover Me?" If they weren't stranded together at the start of the album, right before three sets of pairs, I would probably say no. But when you put them together like that, you can hear "Cover Me" as an answer to the isolation of "Born in the USA," and the two of them together could even be a kind of rough road map for the album as a whole.

See, I'm not even much of a Springsteen fan but it's this kind of analysis and care which keeps me on ILX. So add me to the agitator chorus please.

Certainly Lily Dale is the best poster on the Boss, on ILM, that I can remember; and maybe on Dylan also.

Being realistic, the best way to start 'writing' is probably just posting things up on a blog. That can sometimes get a good writer a reputation that takes them forward (Chris O'Leary on Bowie being the most distinguished example I can think of).

Um, not to be that guy, but didn’t Chris O’Leary have a day gig writing about other stuff?

writes essays just for myself and puts them away and never sends them out.

So you're halfway there! Just keep writing essays for yourself, make some of them about Bruce, and when you've accumulated a lot, reassess, and then pitch it as a personal journey - essays and epigrams and whatnot - about Bruce from (insert perspective here). No surrender!

James Redd: I know little about him, but I know (as I suppose others do also) his vast Bowie book (or is it two books?) was originally a blog that he was writing and posting up for free.

So he seems the best example I can think of of someone who went from blogging about something he loved, to making a book (or two).

I was hoping Lily could do a 33 1/3 on BitUSA but Gregory Hines published one in 2005.

when you put them together like that, you can hear "Cover Me" as an answer to the isolation of "Born in the USA," and the two of them together could even be a kind of rough road map for the album as a whole.

The midway between isolation and connection might be "Shut Out The Light," the b-side to the "Born in the USA" single.

I can see that - the kind of profound alienation that having someone there to reach for can't actually help with. And "Dancing in the Dark" is another midpoint, in a different way - it captures that in-between moment where you know you need to make a change but aren't quite sure how.

I do find myself thinking about the b-sides and outtakes a lot when I'm trying to wrap my head around this album. I was looking through something I wrote in my notes about BitUSA a while back, and realized I ended up summing up the album by talking about two songs that aren't on it at all. But I thought I'd copy the last paragraph of it here anyway bc it more or less fits with what we're talking about. Some of this is stuff I've posted bits of before.

And all that's without talking about the way this album sounds. I used to think that the key to listening to Born in the USA was looking past the big arena-rock fun-times sound to the bleak lyrics behind it. Now I think it’s just the opposite. The bleakness is the starting point, not the end point. This is an album about starting from emptiness and desolation and just pushing and pushing it until it turns into fun, until a sucking black hole of depression becomes a source of pure, joyous rock and roll energy. If this album has a guiding philosophy, it might be this so-dumb-it’s-profound lyric from the b-side “Stand on It”: “If you’ve lost control of the situation at hand/ grab a girl, go see a rock-and-roll band.” Think of that, and then of the ending of “Child Bride,” the original version of “Working on the Highway”: “I imagine I put on my jacket/ go down to a little roadside bar/ pick a stranger and spin around the dance floor/ to a Mexican guitar.” One song is upbeat, the other hauntingly melancholy, and yet it’s fundamentally the same vision of freedom and salvation: a stranger, a band, a dance floor. A single night, a fleeting human connection, some music. It’s nothing much, really. It’s no substitute for family, friends, meaningful work, a place in a community. And yet when you see it here, juxtaposed against the abyss, it feels like everything.

Yeah, that's great. And possibly explains why the album was such a blockbuster: he broke the code. We've all talked about it a bunch here, but it's telling that "Hungry Heart," his first top 10 hit, was conspicuously both bubblegum pop and strikingly dark. Though few explicitly recognized it or knew about it at the time, Springsteen himself, as a person, kind of represents that same contradiction as well. He's a guy that's prone to depression, both in his music and personally, and yet has come to epitomize the joy and salvation you so astutely describe. 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. That right there is some high romance. Bruce would risk it all for the sake of Rosalita, rock and roll, and racing in the streets, and if you bring the beer he'll bring you along with him.

Both really excellent posts^

I def think "My Hometown", rather than "Cover Me", is "Born in the USA" 's complement and pair, and that the V-shaped structure of the album highlights those 2 songs.

They're a contrasting pair but there's a symmetry.

xps

I think that's right, 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. The implicit sadness in "Glory Days" is what makes its big jaunty riff so necessary, and also what gives it weight. (See in contrast Knopfler's self-consciously Bruce-y "Walk of Life," which feels cheap and easy because there's nothing at stake.)

A binary kind of a pair and a binary kind of symmetry, is what i was trying to say
xp

Yes, I agree. I was thinking of it almost as the structure of an essay: "Born in the USA"/"Cover Me" as the thesis statement/road map for the arc that's going to take us all the way from "Born in the USA" - total vertiginous isolation - to the tenuous stability of "My Hometown."

There's something so grown-up to me about "My Hometown," the couple lying in bed at night having a conversation about their future and realizing they have to leave the town that they love so their kid can have a good life. I think this might be the most stable relationship I’ve seen in a Springsteen song; even if the community this couple lives in is crumbling and they’re on the verge of a move that could upend their lives, they’re still two adult human beings making a difficult decision together. And it might be Springsteen’s calmest, sanest song about his hometown: all the adolescent guilt and angst and anger have burned themselves out, and what’s left is just an honest, reflective sadness about what’s happened to small-town America.

OTM :)

And that's after a second side full of incomplete, fragmented almost-relationships; people reaching out toward a future that's not quite in sight yet, or looking back to a past that's lost but that they can't let go of.

"Born in the USA"/"Cover Me" as the thesis statement/road map for the arc that's going to take us all the way from "Born in the USA" - total vertiginous isolation - to the tenuous stability of "My Hometown."

Yeah, very well said.

I was gonna say I think the role of Cover Me in the sequence is that it kind of sections off the first song quite abruptly and distinguishes it as a statement. But I like the way you said it much better, def feeling them as the thesis/into to the body of an essay

Thanks for all the incentive to dig back in to this record.

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.