Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

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.

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.