Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

One of the things I love about Bruce is that almost no one can agree on which are his terrible songs and which are his masterpieces.

Dude's run of teerrrrrrrrrrible album covers is legendary.

It really is absolutely remarkable.

WESTERN STARS has a good cover.

So does THE PROMISE.

Following the challenge of naming some thrilling later Bruce songs, I realise that the reverse also applies for me: there are quite a lot of earlier Bruce records I don't find that exciting.

ASBURY PARK I'm afraid doesn't do much for me.
(I don't really know E STREET SHUFFLE.)
THE RIVER amazes me by how much of it is average bar-room rock, with a few outstanding songs doing something different.
BORN IN THE USA also doesn't really live up to its reputation - it's remarkably cheesy with songs like 'darlington county' (praised above) and 'glory days' - I can enjoy these but I don't think they're more profound than much of Bruce since say 2005.
And then we can probably agree that HUMAN TOUCH and LUCKY TOWN are patchy.

Which leaves, for me, BORN TO RUN, NEBRASKA and TUNNEL OF LOVE as the really consistently marvellous earlier records.

And leads me to the conclusion that while, like most of you, I love Bruce, unlike you I'm not sure I love his earlier records more than his later ones. I think he's always done good things, always been loveable (more than almost anyone else in pop), but he's only rarely been purely excellent across a whole LP - that's not a recent phenomenon.

re: Josh's post re 'sunny day' - it is an oddity that he keeps releasing things like 'Mary's Place' and recently 'Sleepy Joe's Café'. But this goes back to the corny bar room feeling of THE RIVER in a way?

I don't even think '57 Channels' is bad.

Even though I can tell HUMAN TOUCH isn't really Bruce at his best, it can still thrill me - the guitar break on 'Man's Job'!

I recall liking "Man's Job" just fine, maybe from the "Unplugged" set? I'm not sure I consider "Lucky Town" patchy, and it does make me wonder what Bruce might have sounded like going even *more* MOR. There seemed to be a lot like this one floating around in the margins in the '90s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jssnRkHODE0

He did play "Mary's Place" a lot as a big rave up touring "The Rising," but I'm not sure it's made many appearances since then (as with most of the "Rising" material, "Sunny Day" and title track aside).

What I love about "Born in the USA" is that (for songs like "Glory Days" or "Darlington") it adds to the party rock vibe of "The River" a mirthful sense of humor that only comes from middle age, which tempers (or expands on) the otherwise pervasive theme of ... curdled nostalgia? "The River" (the album) I love for its unbalanced diversity, for lack of a better term. It's all over the place but never less than totally confident, even when it's being frivolous.

But Pinefox, you should definitely dive into "E Street Shuffle," it's the real apex of his early, funky sort of pan-genre sound, before he goes widescreen cinema with "Born to Run."

'Sad Eyes' - another little masterpiece!

Yeah, stuff like that, "Lift Me Up" ... he made a bunch of synth gems. Lotta them seemed to end up on soundtracks or, in the case of "Sad Eyes," with Enrique Iglesias. Half the comments are en espanol!

Extraordinary!

https://youtu.be/iJUm1hzTaTg

Sounds to me like Iglesias, like many covers, changes the chords and makes them less effective, for no evident reason.

side 2 of the E Street Shuffle FTW

never listened to Tracks, should fix that

Some good stuff on that.

"For You" is a bad song on paper, but I loved it when he performed it solo on "The Saint, The Incident, and the Main Point Shuffle" (my very first Springsteen bootleg) - it's from a February 1975 show that was broadcast in Philly, and he puts the song across and then some. (At least to me!)

"Drive All Night" was awesome when it was a one-minute interlude on those epic live performances of "Backstreets" from 1978. Expanding it on its own into a turgid 8-and-a-half minutes was a huge mistake. I get why he sequenced it on The River, conceptually where he placed it is kind of brilliant, but it ends up sinking the experience as it plods up to "I swear I'll drive all night just to buy you some SHOES."

"Waitin' on a Sunny Day" is great LIVE. He plays up the humor, it's always fun, and you can see how one of those performances would have made a great little B-side. But on the album, sandwiched between the solemn "Into the Fire" and "Nothing Man," delivered with an equally straight-faced vocal, it can be awful. When I first heard "I'm like a drummer without a beat," "(like) an ice cream truck on a deserted street" sung without a wink or a smile, I just thought, "man, I'm sure this is supposed to be funny, because he doesn't sound like it is."

FWIW, "Into the Fire" and "Worlds Apart" are also much better live - they belong on the album for conceptual reasons, but I wish they had arranged and performed them like they do live (see the 2002 Barcelona DVD for a good example).

Yeah, "Sad Eyes" is a gem, much better than nearly everything on Human Touch. I kind of like the quiet, mood pieces that wound up as outtakes, but I can see why he shelved most of them, it's not something that would sustain a whole album.

Lucky Town has one outright dud for me: "Leap of Faith." I think I resequenced the album by removing it, then adding "Human Touch" at the start and sequencing it so that "Better Days" kicks off what would be 'Side B.' That's the album I wish he put out in 1992.

I like "Darlington County" and "Glory Days," they're done all shiny and poppy and the latter has been overplayed and overused in a terrible way, but lyrically "Glory Days" is pretty great. (Again, part of Springsteen's appeal to me is how he's successfully adapted an art form that at its best was long associated with youth.) "Darlington County" is catchy enough that I have no ill will towards it, I enjoy it.

I like those party rock tunes on The River too (and that includes "Crush on You"). I thought that was a great concept of making all of those songs work together. It's not just a manic-depressive split, it really is cinematic in building this whole community where you picture those different songs capturing all sides of life for the characters inhabiting that world. I think the darker songs work differently and in this case more effectively when they're not presented in this vacuum where their lives are devoid of the euphoria or hedonistic abandon the party songs capture. (Even Nebraska has a bit of that in the Chuck Berry numbers like "Open All Night," except he takes it a step further, making the sound organic to the more harrowing numbers and most notably arranging those songs so that they seemed to be played in complete isolation.)

I like Springsteen's album covers up to and including Tunnel of Love. Some rightfully iconic ones, and they all fit their albums well. It's not until the local-magazine-advertisement flavor of Human Touch and Lucky Town that it really gets bad. Why are they so terrible anyway? It's the same with Dylan. They're still on Sony/Columbia, don't they have good art departments? (On a related noted, here's Jeff Gold's blog entry on working with Prince. Gives you an idea of how things should work when someone submits a bad album cover.)

My theory on big stars with bad album covers is that once they reach a certain level they get more artistic control and then either they have no idea about design themselves or they delegate it to some friend or family member who fancies themselves a designer.

Makes sense.

Okay, this is awesome.

At one point, he asked with incredulity ‘What do you want me to do, wear overalls like R.E.M.?’ A bit later he said ‘Maybe I should have some clothes made for you’. I was wearing jeans and a button up shirt; he was wearing lime green skin-tight pants, high-heel boots, and a day-glo green, pin-striped, see-through shirt.

My favorite part that I so wish we could have seen is this:

After one pause, he said ‘show me some album covers you’ve done.’ I ran upstairs to my office and collected about 20 cd’s I’d worked on, most from my previous job at A&M Records. He looked at each one, saying something dismissive about it...

I would feel bad for Gold but you know Prince would be saying some mean yet hilarious shit.

Yet another excellent interview for the books:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/bruce-springsteen-interview-new-album-touring-e-street-band-1059109/

Tons of great personal stuff, of course, in this case re: old friends, Clarence and race in particular, but also news (old news?) that he has been working on a second Tracks set, may have a couple of shelved albums ready to release (he's always saying that), that Max says he has redone some drums on at least 40 songs from the archives, that they were planning to tour in spring 2021 but probably won't tour until 2022. I'm still always shocked how thoughtful and smart and honest he is about so much.

For example:

For Springsteen, the Black Lives Matter movement has unearthed truths he hadn’t quite grasped, even when he became the rare white rock star to take on police violence against black Americans with “American Skin (41 Shots),” back in 2000. “White supremacy and white privilege have gone much deeper than I thought they did,” he says. “I think my feeling previously to the past three or four years was that racism and white supremacy and white privilege were veins in our extremities, rather than an aorta that cuts through the very heart of the nation, which I feel it is now. So that was eye-opening, whether I was previously stupidly innocent to that or not.”

He’s proud that his 30-year-old son, Evan, has been marching in New York City. “There’s not going to be any post-racial society,” Springsteen says. “That’s never gonna happen. But I think that a society where people really see one another as full men and women, as Americans, is possible. It’s a movement of tremendous hope, and it’s a tremendously diverse group of young people that are out on the street. And it’s a movement that history is demanding right now.”

I love him more as I grow older. Only recently got into "Tougher Than the Rest" which is kind of the archetypal Bruce song

Super-surprised more country people don't cover Bruce. Check out this loveliness:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfeh5rTv2rM

Yeah, that's a good interview. I'm feeling a little more hopeful about the album based on some of the song descriptions, though I'm trying not to get my hopes too high. Love Steve van Zandt saying of Bruce (re: the very gradual shift in his approach to recording), "He's a little slow."

yeah new album sounds like it could be good

The first Bruce single I bought was the cassingle of 57 Channels, then the first album I listened to closely was The Rising (which I got off Kazaa) which, I think, doesn’t have a single bad track on it. It’s a great intro-to-Bruce record. That said, Magic is the last thing of his I’ve had patience for (Living In the Future is THE BEST, i will brook no disagreement).

Chuck is a young person

TS: Bruce Springsteen's "Livin' in the Future" vs. John Prine's "Living in the Future"

(Living In the Future is THE BEST, i will brook no disagreement).

― Chuck_Tatum, Sunday, September 20, 2020 4:05 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm x 1000000

also agreed that nothing on the rising is bad. it's just lonnnnnnnnnng

I do really like the way he sings "bootheels clickin' like the barrel of a pistol spinnin' round."

"I'm still always shocked how thoughtful and smart and honest he is about so much."

I tend to agree.

Did you see the film of WESTERN STARS?

I did not. That album didn't really catch my ear, and the film version seemed a little ... precious? But maybe I'll give it a shot.

I love the album. The film is mostly a straight live delivery of it, but with wonderfully corny, yet wise, statements from Bruce in between eachj song. I feel that anyone who loves the Boss would enjoy it!

I was fortunate enough to see it at a UK premiere where the Boss appeared afterwards for a Q&A. An astounding, magical experience for me.

I love the Boss and liked Western Stars better than most of his more recent stuff, but the film didn't do for me. I like Bruce better when he leans into the specific details of the stories he's telling and makes fun of himself, as he did in the Broadway show. I love his radio shows, though - they've been keeping me going throughout the pandemic. I was really happy to see that he did one last week, as I was thinking that maybe with summer winding down and a new album coming out, he wouldn't feel the need to keep going with them.

Went back to the first LP today, GREETINGS FROM ASBURY PARK, NJ.

It has never really done it for me, and ... it still doesn't.

'Mary Queen of Arkansas', what on Earth is that cobblers?

That Bruce can't now make LPs as extraordinary as he did in 1982 or 1987 - I agree.

But I still like him now better than I like what he was doing c.1973.

Greetings from Asbury Park is the reason I didn't get into Bruce until my mid-twenties. My parents aren't Bruce fans, but they got me his first album when I was ten or so, figuring it might be a good place to start. I listened to it, liked Blinded by the Light but found the rest kind of dull and overwrought, and ended up with a vaguely negative impression of Bruce that lasted until I turned 26, moved to a small town and bought a car. (At that point, of course, a Greatest Hits CD materialized in my car stereo and the rest was history.)

I'm about a third of the way through listening to the latest live release - August 6th, 1984 - and so far it's fantastic. A great version of "Open all Night" with a story, and one of the best versions of "Nebraska" I've ever heard, with a little intro about technology and how it's supposed to bring us closer together but we just keep getting more isolated.

71 today.

My hero.

I love "Sad Eyes."

I can't believe (well, I mean, I *can*) it took him as long as it did to start releasing live shows.

hbd boss!!

Happy Bruce Springsteen's birthday to all of you! I'm going to celebrate by listening to his latest radio show while cleaning.

Some truly Good Person (not me!) tagged and uploaded the first 6 installments of his radio show!

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13o82qg0LpuotRgCE4dEn4x0xLdqMiFRr

Of those first six, I really recommend #3.

There's a fun look back in Backstreets about the history of "Hungry Heart" live, at least before the song was released/was a hit:

http://www.backstreets.com/news.html

HBD Brooce <3

I love this version of Something in The Night SO much (Red Bank NJ 76 - Thrill Hill Vault)

https://youtu.be/ioQ2eF1XbYY

this is v cool

Here's a great letter from Bruce Springsteen (71 today!) to the LA Times in which he politely refuses to contribute to a story about the Stratocaster because his guitar of choice is the Telecaster. https://t.co/SYk1ui4LlV pic.twitter.com/B4tepcqKqd

— Letters of Note (@LettersOfNote) September 23, 2020

Wow, I'd never seen that version of Something in the Night before. So great!

that he even though to turn it into a kind of hymn, and to be in the audience to see it?
just incredible

as a telecaster person i giggled the whole way through that letter