Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

I was too unkind to 'Rainmaker'. The lyrics do at least contain detail and thought. If there is a mini-genre of Trump Protest Pop, this is probably one of the more intelligent members.

But the theory I arrived at before last listen was that my view might be the opposite of Lily Dale's (much as I like and appreciate what she writes about Bruce): Namely:

Late Boss is best when he is artificial, scripting, performing, playing a role, NOT when he's falling back into authenticity. The latter seems to me to produce a lack of distinction. The former produces ...

'Magic' (the voice of a Dick Cheney)

'Queen of the Supermarket' (Bruce did say he genuinely found supermarkets interesting, but the sub-adequate shopper in this wonderfully corny song is not him)

'Jack of All Trades' (I disagree with comments above about WRECKING BALL: I find the role-playing here, complete with Biblical feeling and violent anger, thrilling, one of the best things he's done in 20 years)

'The Wayfarer' (a simple lyric maybe, the musical invention brings the sense of artifice, drama, romance).

In short I think he's often good at the 'method acting'!

isn't "Janey Needs a Shooter" a Zevon track?

I don't think I understand that song.

Actually I don't understand the previous post either - my ignorance. Is it saying that the song is a pastiche of songwriter Warren Zevon (whom I don't know)?

It's a co-write! (just looked it up) Although in that case the song is "Jeannie Needs a Shooter," are their two different songs with almost the same name?

Okay, so "Jeannie Needs a Shooter" is based on "Janey Needs a Shooter." http://brucebase.wikidot.com/song:janey-needs-a-shooter

Yeah, it's a rare (only?) case of another songwriter completely having their way with an incomplete Bruce song. Usually when he gives them away they're all but done or fully formed, like "Because the Night" or "Protection."

when he is artificial, scripting, performing, playing a role,

I think the Broadway show was an essential step, because it was all four of these things *and* authentic. It literally begins with his tale of his magic trick that he also uses to start his book:

I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud. So am I. By twenty, no race-car-driving rebel, I was a guitar player on the streets of Asbury Park and already a member in good standing amongst those who “lie” in service of the truth . . . artists, with a small “a.” But I held four clean aces. I had youth, almost a decade of hard-core bar band experience, a good group of homegrown musicians who were attuned to my performance style and a story to tell.

This book is both a continuation of that story and a search into its origins. I’ve taken as my parameters the events in my life I believe shaped that story and my performance work. One of the questions I’m asked over and over again by fans on the street is “How do you do it?” In the following pages I will try to shed a little light on how and, more important, why.

DNA, natural ability, study of craft, development of and devotion to an aesthetic philosophy, naked desire for . . . fame? . . . love? . . . admiration? . . . attention? . . . women? . . . sex? . . . and oh, yeah . . . a buck. Then . . . if you want to take it all the way out to the end of the night, a furious fire in the hole that just . . . don’t . . . quit . . . burning. These are some of the elements that will come in handy should you come face-to-face with eighty thousand (or eighty) screaming rock ’n’ roll fans who are waiting for you to do your magic trick. Waiting for you to pull something out of your hat, out of thin air, out of this world, something that before the faithful were gathered here today was just a song-fueled rumor.

I am here to provide proof of life to that ever elusive, never completely believable “us.” That is my magic trick. And like all good magic tricks, it begins with a setup. So . . .

Actually, for me, the first time I saw this sort of self-aware side of Springsteen was in, of all things, his VH1 Storyteller episode, where he pulls back the curtain and tells a funny story about a strip club:

“I used to like to go to strip clubs. Back before they were fancy. Back in the prehistoric days before the lap dancing. One time, as I reached the parking lot, a man and a woman spied me and said ‘Bruce, you aren’t supposed to be here.’ I could see where they were going with the whole thing, so I said, ‘I’m not. I am simply an errant figment of one of Bruce’s many selves. I drift in the ether over the highways and byways of the Garden State, often touching down in image-incongruous but fun places. Bruce does not even know I’m missing. He is at home right now, doing good deeds.’ That usually stupefies and satisfies them. Hey, I gotta get through the world somehow.”

Even then, is the story made up? Parts of it? All of it? Who knows, right? But iirc this (2005?) was the first time I ever heard him talk about himself and what he does in this way.

Usually when he gives them away they're all but done or fully formed, like "Because the Night" or "Protection."

I got fascinated by "Because the Night" a while back and went and listened to the early demos, and it actually wasn't anywhere near complete when he gave it away. Patti Smith wrote most of the lyrics, and then when Springsteen started covering the song in concert, he gradually changed the lyrics until he had his own version. (I'm not trying to WELL ACTUALLY you, I just think Bruce's version of "Because the Night" is really interesting.)

pinefox, I don't want to give the impression of not liking Bruce's storytelling, because I do - when I listened to Nebraska for the first time, I went, "OMG this guy is the great American short story writer of the late 20th century, WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME????" I think he has a great imagination, and even what seems like realist storytelling has his own signature touch of the weird and the surreal, and I don't want to discount any of that.

But - how can I put this? - I also think that in his earlier work, most of his characters are basically him. I think that early Bruce is really haunted by "what if" - what if I never found music? What if I never made it out of my small town? What if I didn't have the friends I have, or the support I have? What if I let myself drift too far out of the world? I'm not saying they're all exactly, literally him, I just find his writing most powerful when it's tinged with a kind of "there but for the Grace of God," anxiety, because it gives his writing conviction, imo, it lets him immerse himself in all the little details of people's days and nights.

I think that over years of comfort and fame, that sense of "that could be me," faded out and had to be replaced by pure outside-in imagination, which is why the songs on, say, Wrecking Ball don't carry the same conviction for me that the earlier work does. One reason Western Stars works for me is that it does convey that sense of identification, but now the central "what if" is "what if I fucked up my marriage and ended up alone?" So I like Letter to You, not specifically because it's about Bruce, but because I think it lets him tap into emotions about age and loss that are very central to him right now.

I hope I don't come across as argumentative, by the way! I respect your opinions, I'm just trying to clarify mine. I know I'm writing a lot but I'm not trying to steamroller over anyone, I just enjoy this.

I mean, tbf, I think this is the Bruce demo that established the song for Patti:

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

Is it done? Clearly not, no way. Is it 90% there? Yes, except for the lyrics. Did Patti Smith write most of those and make it the great song that it is? Absolutely!

No no no.

It took Natalie Merchant to coax forth its greatness.

Yeah, musically it's there, you're right. I think of it as a collaboration, though, because of the stop-and-start way it got written. Bruce writes the music and the hook, Patti writes the lyrics, Bruce goes back and modifies her lyrics more and more until he has the song the way he wants it, which is substantially different from her version. It seems like he must have had some block with that song, and hearing her version helped him get past it.

xpost lol. But ... kinda! She definitely made it more popular, imo. Fun forgotten trivia: touring behind their big breakthrough in 1992, the 10,000 Maniacs drummer broke his arm, and his sub was ... Max Weinberg!

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

I think that song specifically exemplifies him overthinking things. Iirc he left it off Darkness because he didn't want any love songs on there, but touring behind that album it became an epic linchpin of the set. "Fire" was another love song he left off that became a hit for someone else.

I'm pretty sure Natalie Merchant's was the first version I heard.

Anyway, I like Bruce's version of Because the Night. This idea that manual labor is not just hard and exhausting but also kind of stressful and traumatic, that this laborer dude is coming home from a workday where nothing belongs to him, not even his body, and he just wants to crawl into his lover's bed and ask her to protect him. It's the kind of thing Bruce started writing more in his mid-thirties, and it's interesting to see him starting to feel his way toward that kind of writing in 1977-78 when he's still very much in tough-guy mode.

I don't know that Fire would have fit well on Darkness, but I think Because the Night would have. It's got that same kind of simmering working-class discontent thing going on that the rest of the album has.

I have to say, though, I really wish it didn't have that big guitar solo whenever he plays it in concert. Nothing against the solo itself, but the last thing a song undercutting traditional ideas of masculinity needs is a big showboating guitar solo imo.

"Jeannie Needs a Shooter" is based on "Janey Needs a Shooter"

If I were still making mixtapes I'd find some way to get these bracketing "Janie's Got a Gun"

xpost

If you'll excuse my going on about this for a bit: one of the things that interests me about Springsteen is his obsession with safe spaces, with finding or creating places where you can be yourself, feel free, be protected from the general oppressive horribleness of the world, etc. etc. Early on, it's often a distant, far-off haven, the "place where we really want to go," in "Born to Run," the little cafe in Rosalita. Starting with "Night" and going on through Darkness and The River, there's a real focus on the night and the street as these places where you can shake off the pressures and expectations of the workday world and be yourself - little pockets of safety and freedom carved out of an otherwise stifling life. "Because the Night" marks the beginning of a different kind of search for a safe space, where two people together build a wall strong enough to protect each other from the outside world. "Cover Me" is the first song like this to make it to an album, but one of my favorite examples of this shift is "Rockaway the Days," which takes a verse from Badlands and flips it inside out:

Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king
And a king ain't satisfied till he rules everything
I'm gonna go out tonight, I'm gonna find out what I got

becomes

Rich man want the power and the seat on the top
Poor man want the money that the rich man got
Honey, tonight I'm feeling so tired and unsure
Come on in, Mary, shut the light, close the door

It's like he's running the film in reverse; that confident swagger out alone into the night becomes a retreat into safety, closed doors, the comfort of another person. And he's kept writing that sort of thing; "Burnin' Train" is a late, great addition to the genre.

This is why I find "Because the Night" so fascinating; it strikes me as a transitional moment, and one that Springsteen seems to have found difficult; he couldn't finish the song on his own, or put it on an album, but he was drawn to it enough to keep working on it. And he couldn't seem to make up his mind about how vulnerable he wanted the song to be; sometimes he sings "They can't hurt you now," but sometimes it's "they can't hurt us now" or "they can't hurt me now," which makes a big difference imo.

Jump forward a bit from "they can't hurt you now" to "Independence Day:"

Cause the darkness of this house has got the best of us
There's a darkness in this town that's got us too
But they can't touch me now
And you can't touch me now
They ain't gonna do to me
What I watched them do to you

Definitely the feeling of a shift in his songs from a hopeful (or desperate) attempt to escape to a safe place to being a ore pessimistic stuck and the outside world trying to close in, a sort of going nowhere vibe that courses though the rest of "The River" and "Nebraska." "Born in the USA" (at times) finds a bit of humor on the situation (like in "Glory Days") but maybe it's not a coincidence that he was drawn to a song like "Trapped."

Well, it seems like I'm caught up in your trap again
And it seems like I'll be wearing the same old chains
Good will conquer evil and the truth will set me free
And I know someday I will find the key
And I know somewhere I will find the key

Well, it seems like I've been playing your game way too long
And it seems the game I've played has made you strong
But when the game is over, I won't walk out the loser
And I know that I'll walk out of here again
And I know someday I'll walk out of here again

But now, I'm trapped, ooh yeah, trapped
Ooh yeah, trapped, ooh yeah, trapped, ooh yeah

Now it seems like I've been sleeping in your bed too long
And it seems like you've been meaning to do me harm
But I'll teach my eyes to see beyond these walls in front of me
And someday I'll walk out of here again
And I know someday I'll walk out of here again

Etc.

I think the songs he famously had the most trouble finding a place for are "The Promise" and "Frankie." "Frankie" I think was done and slated as a possibility as early as "Darkness." And "The Promise" was always such a beloved Boss leftover that there was shock it didn't make it to "Tracks," and only showed up - in a piano only re-recorded version, no less - on a bonus disc that either came with/after "Tracks" or came with the "Songs" book (iirc). And then it still didn't show up until the "Darkness" outtakes set, which of course knew well enough to name itself after that song.

Yeah, that's a great point about Independence Day! (Which was also written a little earlier, right? Doesn't it show up in some of the '78 concerts, or am I making that up?) But in Independence Day he's very much heading out on his own - "they can't touch me now and you can't touch me now" because I'm getting out and the cycle of abuse ends here. At some point he shifts from going out on his own to asking someone else for protection, and I think that's the part he had a hard time with.

The outtakes I'm really interested in are the ones from the BITUSA era. That album has such a unified sound, but what I've heard of the outtakes from that time don't sound anything like it, and they also don't really sound much like anything else he's released. And a lot of them are very dark, but in a different way from Nebraska. Seems like there ought to be a whole album in there somewhere. I hope he gets around to doing a BITUSA box set one of these days.

Yeah, Independence Day was definitely played on the Darkness tour. Featured on the famous "Pièce De Résistance" (Capitol Theater Passaic) '78 boot, which is probably when a lot of people first heard it.

Spookiest BitUSA outtake:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDLL1OsYjRM

"The Promise" was always such a beloved Boss leftover that there was shock it didn't make it to "Tracks," and only showed up - in a piano only re-recorded version, no less - on a bonus disc that either came with/after "Tracks" or came with the "Songs" book (iirc).

When Springsteen appeared on Charlie Rose in November 1998 to promote Tracks, Rose asked him why he left off "The Fever" and "The Promise" (he asked specifically about those two in separate questions - I guess Rose was a diehard Springsteen fan or had someone on staff who was). Springsteen said it's well known he was never of "The Fever" and that he was never happy about the way he recorded "The Promise" in the studio. Just about every review of Tracks probably mentioned "The Promise" as a major omission.

18 Tracks came out in April of the following year, and according to the liner notes (assuming they're accurate), he re-recorded "The Promise" in 1999, so it's likely he heard all the complaints and came up with the compromise of recording a studio version he could be happy with.

I actually prefer the re-recording. Ideally I think he should've used one of his original live performances from '77 or '78 - they were more or less the same solo piano arrangements too - but I think he sings it more convincingly on the 1999 recording. He really sounds older and beat down by life, and it fits the song perfectly.

(Forgot, he also included "The Fever" and for some reason "Trouble River" on 18 Tracks. The disc was supposed to be a budget sampler of the box set, and not a very good one since it missed a lot of highlights in favor of some so-so material. Not surprisingly, adding those three bonuses made some fans cry "rip off" but it eventually became a common staple of dollar bins.)

xpost to Josh in Chicago:

Yes! That's a powerful one. "Don't Back Down" has some good lyrics as well: "I want to weep but I'm broke inside and the tears won't run/ I want to sleep but there ain't no dream and the sleep won't come."

"Drop on Down" is absolutely gorgeous and sort of gives me W.H. Auden vibes for reasons I can't quite explain.

And Fugitive's Dream/ Unsatisfied Heart both strike me as very revealing - I hear both of them as a naked expression of fear that one day he'll get married and then his attraction to men will leap out at him like the beast from the jungle and drag him away from the life he's worked so hard to build, but I suppose there are other interpretations.

There's so much full-on depression in these songs - not the vibrant darkness of Nebraska, not the reaching-for-human-connection-by-any-means-necessary energy of Born in the USA, but just sheer listless misery, and I kind of love it?

Personally, I think Springsteen made the right call not releasing "The Promise." I think it's good, but it's also self-pitying in a way that is fine in an outtake/b-side/concert highlight but would be off-putting (to me, at least) on an album track.

The songs I most want to see on Tracks II are "Drop on Down" and "Child Bride." I honestly think "Child Bride" is one of Springsteen's best songs, and the version on the Nebraska tape is complete and doesn't need any re-recording, so why not just release it?

Sorry, by the way, about hijacking a discussion of Letter to You to talk about "Because the Night" and a bunch of outtakes from 1983! I've reached a weird place in my Springsteen obsession where I've listened to the albums too much, and now I'm chasing the same rush by trying to dig up live performances and outtakes that I missed the first time around. Declining returns, I'm afraid.

My favourite TRACKS track is 'Sad Eyes'.

Josh in Chicago's post about artifice is good - with that marvellous quotation:

"I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud. So am I. By twenty, no race-car-driving rebel, I was a guitar player on the streets of Asbury Park and already a member in good standing amongst those who “lie” in service of the truth . . . artists, with a small “a.”" - etc.

Yes, the intelligence is marvellous as that book shows such awareness of his persona, as does the Broadway show, with the great line about having made millions from songs about work and never done a day's work.

But does LETTER TO YOU do this? My impression is that it replaces the mythology of blue-collar work with the mythology of the bar band.

.... great series of posts over past couple of months. Appreciate the deep knowledge and analysis. Bruce merits the time and energy.

My favorite outtake from that era is the "Born in the USA" b-side "Shut Out The Light." It almost combines "Born" and "Dancing in the Dark" as far as a PTSD-suffering veteran picking up a woman in a bar. It has all those motifs Lily Dale just articulated so well, of darkness and escape and literally being held.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uy1lb5s7gg

Heard (though barely listened to) "You Give Love a Bad Name" on the radio today. There is definitely some small element of Bon Jovi that is just bad, warmed up leftover Bruce, but this song in particular ... it's totally a vaguely hair metal "Because the Night."

I had bad joke once that Bon Jovi just wanted to be Mellancamp who just wanted to be Bruce who just wanted to be Dylan who just wanted to be Guthrie.

I think at some version there were a few other people in there.

Eazy, I meant to reply to your post about "Shut out the Light," but got delayed by a migraine. I like that one a lot. I was just thinking the other day about the last verse and how much it conveys without saying it outright. There's something very chilling about the way Springsteen switches from "Johnny" to "Johnson Lineir" just for that verse. It somehow gives the effect of reading a friend's obituary and seeing his full name written out for the first time.

Wow, I never caught that as his name before. (Listened to the song hundreds of times but never saw the lyrics until now.)

I love how this one has narrative fragments without continuity (we get the woman’s point of view for a few lines, and then she’s gone; the forest gets two lines before he’s in the picture). And that change of name, wow.

I loved his inauguration performance. I've never had much use for "Land of Hope and Dreams" before, but in this setting, on this day, it seemed exactly right.

Just saw "Blinded By the Light." Good feel good movie from a different perspective, we all liked it a lot.

Nothing to do with me, but I was surprised to see a post from a FB friend tonight--someone older than I am, someone whose opinions on music and films I respect a lot--saying he was let down that Springsteen had a jeep commercial in the Super Bowl. The post seemed very out of character.

Has he done ads before?

Makes him look like a joke...

Since the Capitol attack, he's been trying hard to reach Christian Trump supporters; there was A LOT of religious language in his latest radio show. It sounds like Jeep approached him with this message, it lined up with what he was already trying to say, and he liked the idea of being able to reach a broad audience that would otherwise tune him out.

I think it's a waste of time and not worth giving up his rep as the guy who never does ads, but if he still hopes he can bring people back to sanity, I can't really fault him for trying.

Has he done ads before?

No. There was a long article about this in Variety but he's NEVER done advertising before. The closest thing they could find was an appearance on a radio show in 1974, when the deejay let him read some copy for a wine ad as a joke.

The short version is that the CEO of that car company had been pursuing him on and off for ten years after Jimmy Iovine introduced him to Jon Landau. Before Springsteen rejected every pitch, Landau always made it clear that it wasn't likely to happen, ever. This time, the agency came up with a pitch that had the church, and how it was always open and considered the geographical center of the U.S., and how they wanted to use that as a metaphor. Springsteen actually liked it, but the agreement was that he got complete control, and he basically treated it like his own short film/PSA - he directed and produced it (insisted on visiting the place himself, planned out the shots, supervised editing), and it was his call not to use any songs, he decided a new score was more appropriate and composed it himself.

I'm not surprised if some fans are disappointed but I think it's misguided to equate this with, say, Dylan's commercials where it's completely about selling cars (or IBM).

From what I can see, a lot of people are interpreting the "meet in the middle" message to mean that both left and right need to compromise, and I don't think he intended it that way; I think it's very much directed at white christian MAGA types. But I can see why a left-wing audience would react poorly to an old white dude in a cowboy hat standing in front of a church and talking about "the middle." Overall I think it was a bad idea.

I like Bruce (and don't think advertising is necessarily a betrayal).

But yeah I do rather bristle at the implication that for all of us to heal, we need to go to rural white America and go to church. I am giving him the benefit of the doubt that he doesn't intend it this way, but it can be read as implying that the people who need to change are coastal atheists, and (of course) people of color. City dwellers. People who don't drive cars. Etc.

Agree with Lily Dale that we're probably not the audience.

"But yeah I do rather bristle at the implication that for all of us to heal, we need to go to rural white America and go to church buy a Jeep."

Boss needs to eat, too.

Haven't seen the ad yet, to be honest. But if Bruce's message the last couple decades has largely been one about healing, politically I think he's a little left of centrist, so this was probably strategic messaging on his part. Reading the write-up on Backstreets, it doesn't necessarily sound like a message of finding *political* middle ground, just personal middle ground, to encourage people to mellow out and appreciate the things we have in common , which is a pretty innocuous message, ultimately. Though the era of that message finding receptive ears might be long gone. My wife told me that she's already read a lot of push back from our Jewish friends who felt pretty alienated by all the crosses and church imagery.

A lot of stuff here:
http://backstreets.com/news.html

Gotta say, for a Jeep ad, this is a pretty canny way to get your brand identity out there:

"We just have to remember the very soil we stand on is common ground.
So we can get there.
We can make it to the mountaintop, through the desert...
and we will cross this divide. "

I'm not surprised if some fans are disappointed but I think it's misguided to equate this with, say, Dylan's commercials where it's completely about selling cars (or IBM).

true it's wrong to equate this with Dylan, who all least isn't bullshitting us or, more importantly, himself

Corny or no, it sounds like more of a brand integration than a mercenary project. This isn't Bruce doing a Victoria's Secret ad. Cynicism is not his jam.

I said bullshitting himself

I don't doubt he believes it