Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

Have you heard "The Klansman"?

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

xp Yeah, The Promise one I meant. Yeah, really I should've said faster arrangement or whatnot.

Josh in Chicago: I have not. Baffled by how many extras songs the Boss wrote.

On LETTER TO YOU, I don't understand 'Janey needs a shooter', 'if I was the priest', and 'song for orphans'.

Does anyone else?

I know that Janey needs a shooter, like, now!

That's a good reading, Maffew12. Hard to disagree.

There's a light on yonder mountain and it's calling me to shine
There's a girl over by the water fountain and she's asking to be mine
And Jesus is standing in the doorway in a buckskin jacket, boots and spurs so fine
He says, "We need you son tonight up in Dodge City
'Cause there's just too many outlaws trying to work the same line"

Now if Jesus was a sheriff and I were the priest
If my lady was an heiress and my Mama was a thief
If Papa rode shotgun on the Fargo line
There's still too many bad boys trying to work the same line

Well sweet Virgin Mary runs the Holy Grail saloon
Well for a nickel she'll give you whiskey and a personally blessed balloon
And the Holy Ghost is the host with the most, he runs the burlesque show
Where they'll let you in for free and they hit you when you go
Mary serving Mass on Sunday and she sells her body on Monday
To the bootlegger who paid the highest price
He don't know he got stuck with a loser, she's stone junkie what's more she's a user
She's only been made once or twice by some kind of magic

If Jesus was a sheriff and I were the priest
If my lady was an heiress and my Mama was a thief
And Papa rode shotgun on the Fargo line
There's still too many outlaws trying to work the same line

Well things ain't been the same in heaven since big bad Bobby came to town
He's been known to down eleven, then ask for another round
Me I've got scabs on my knees from kneeling way too long
It's about time I played the man, took a stand where I belong
And I forget about the old friends and the old times
There's just too many new boys trying to work the same line

Well if Jesus was a sheriff and I were the priest
If my lady was an heiress and my Mama was a thief
And Papa rode shotgun on the Fargo line
There's just too many outlaws trying to work the same line

Well there's a light on yonder mountain and it's calling me to shine
There's a girl over by the water fountain 'cause she's asking to be mine
Jesus is standing in the doorway, six gun drawn and ready to fan
Said, "We need you tonight son up in Dodge City"
Told him I was already overdue for Cheyenne

If Jesus was the sheriff and I were the priest
If my lady was an heiress and my Mama was a thief
And Papa rode shotgun on the Fargo line
There's still too many bad boys trying to work the same line

A Western fan, I like the Western theme. But still don't know what the song's saying. Maybe it's not saying anything.

must be some good shit in that balloon

Interesting article here about Janey... and Zevon's interpretation of the shooter as the bang-bang type:
https://estreetshuffle.com/index.php/2020/07/27/roll-of-the-dice-janey-needs-a-shooter/

I had no idea Priest was one of this first tunes
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/covid-19-in-long-term-care-rudy-giuliani-channels-veep-the-rise-of-parler-springsteen-s-manager-and-more-1.5800016/after-48-years-bruce-springsteen-has-finally-released-the-song-that-launched-his-career-1.5800018

Song for Orphans is the other song on the record written in the 70s. It's funny that you seized on these three. He was wordier back then.

Springsteen on NPR a few months back:

INSKEEP: In the old songs, you hear a cascade of images that may or may not be related. The wordplay caused early critics to hear the influence of one of your heroes, Bob Dylan.

SPRINGSTEEN: I wrote for several years in that style.

INSKEEP: Were these songs narratives and they're just so complicated I don't get the narrative? Or was it just imagery?

SPRINGSTEEN: I don't get the narrative, either, so you're not alone.

(LAUGHTER)

SPRINGSTEEN: All I know...

INSKEEP: Well, that interests me, though, because within a few years, you were telling stories with specific characters that you could relate to and events you could follow. What made you change?

SPRINGSTEEN: I changed the style because of all the Dylan comparisons. Sometimes I regret not holding onto that style a little bit longer just because it was so much fun.

That interview is reassuring in that it suggests that I'm not missing anything coherent.

In 'song for orphans' he mentions a 'Confederacy' which I find interesting but puzzling.

I just read that blog post on 'Janey needs a shooter'. At last, I've learned something!

Read that a while back, but need a refresher

Janey's been seeing a lot of guys but she needs someone who really knows her well, who's a straight shooter who tells it like it is, whose peen isn't quite as large as the policeman's.

Oh you don't think he means a shooter with a gun? OK.

I don't think I have ever heard 'shooter' to mean 'straight talker', but this does make sense with the rest of the song.

"straight shooter" is someone that tells it like it is
then there's shooter as in gun
then there's shooter as in needle
then there's shooter as in a shot of liquor

shooter's a pretty versatile word!

But I thought the actual meaning of the song was a 5th thing: a man with a gun.

One thing for sure is that there are altogether too many bad boys trying to work the same Janey.

Janey needs a break.

Who has it worst in Springsteen songs in general: Janey, Bobby or Johnny?

Here’s a question: is Bobby Jean a boy or a girl? I always assumed a girl, but I guess that’s not definite (“we liked the same clothes”)?

(I always pictured two “New Waver” kids.)

Let's also bear in mind that Incident on 57th Street's character wasn't really named Jane. By that token, was Spanish Johnny really a Johnny? Was he even Spanish?

I think of Bobby Jean more as a boy, but really I think it's more like - both? Neither? A blank wall of gender on which you can project whatever Bobby Jean you happen to be carrying around locked in your own personal heart?

There's something kind of shapeshifty about Bruce's Characters of Indeterminate Gender, I think - less like they're actually trans or nonbinary, more like they're an Ursula Le Guin character who is sometimes male and sometimes female in the same narrative.

No Surrender is another one. I always heard it as written to a woman and telling a story that's a lot like The River, because of the way it seems to start out with them lying in bed together, him wanting to go out and party and her wanting to go to sleep. I heard it as they were young and had this wonderful friendship and now they're married and settled down and aging together, and he's having a midlife crisis and is angry at her for reminding him that his youth is behind him and is thinking about having an affair. But then everyone including Bruce says it's a song of friendship for Steve Van Zandt, and the "blood brothers" line does make more sense that way. I'm not totally sure it's the same character all the way through the song.

That line “I hear your sister's voice calling us home across the open yard” is so evocative to me; I’m not even sure why. The sibling of a friend evokes a deep connection somehow.

It’s like those David Berman lines:

I had this friend his name was Marc with a "c"
His sister was like the heat coming off the back of an old TV

yes! Me too. Like those Rod Stewart lines from "You Wear it Well": "Remember them basement parties, your brother's karate, the all-day rock and roll shows?"

And also this amazing song which I have been listening to ALL THE TIME lately, thanks Bruce for playing the Vulgar Boatmen on your radio show and turning me on to them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDts6e9UKMo

wow, no thanks ilx for the weird stretchy type thing

Wait, we didn’t tell you about Vulgar Boatmen here?

You did! But I heard Drive Somewhere on Bruce's show first and asked about it on the Vulgar Boatmen thread.

No Surrender is pretty clearly about Van Zandt imo or a bandmate, we learned more from a three minute record than we ever learned at school, the drummer, maybe we'll find a place of our own with these drums and these guitars. seems pretty explicit to me

Do you see why I heard it the other way first, though, before I had any idea who Steve van Zandt was?

Tonight I hear the neighborhood drummer sound
I can feel my heart begin to pound
You say you're tired and you just want to close your eyes and follow your dreams down

And then the end:

I want to sleep beneath peaceful skies in my lover's bed
With a wide-open country in my eyes
and these romantic dreams in my head

Now, obviously that's not what this is. It's a portrait of him and Steve; he says so, the lyrics you quote say so. And yet I can't shake the feeling that the Steve story has been spliced together with another story, one that's more like "The River."

I've never, ever, ever heard 'No Surrender' as being addressed to a woman romantic partner. Though I think with that one line ('just want to close your eyes') I can see why Lily Dale had that idea.

Isn't the song about someone (fictional, say) from an early age (say, 15, or even less), whereas the E Street people are from later years in his life?

Meanwhile in parallel ... I'm astounded that people thought that Bobby Jean was a boy. I always thought it was clearly and definitely meant to be a girl. Was that a strange cognitive error on my part?

I suppose there are really only two features that suggest female: 1) the name 'Jean' (but if that's female, well 'Bobby' is more male) and 2) 'I miss you baby' in the last line.

Re: No Surrender, there's also the interesting detail that when he performed it on the Born in the USA Tour and dedicated it to van Zandt, he also changed the last verse; now it's

But it's good to see your smiling face
And to hear your voice again
Now we could sleep in the twilight
By the river bed
With a wide open country in our hearts
And these romantic dreams in our heads

"bobby jean" is pretty widely (i think) understood to be about steve, too, and i think the sequencing of "no surrender" and "bobby jean" back to back to start side 2 of born in the usa is no accident. not that the sequencing of springsteen records is ever an accident. but there are plenty of good, valid reasons to hear either song another way. bandmate, lover, spouse, best friend, soulmate... is there really that much of a difference?

I suppose there are really only two features that suggest female: 1) the name 'Jean' (but if that's female, well 'Bobby' is more male) and 2) 'I miss you baby' in the last line.

Yeah, this is the crux of it. The name is super ambiguous (it’s not “Bobbie Jean,” or “Bobby John”), and “baby” could work either way as well… but I always heard it as a girl.

Springsteen is one of the only really hetero-scanning mainstream male rock artists who attaches really vivid, romantic feelings to male friendship, sometimes verging on almost...sexual maybe?...but I get where you are coming from Lily Dale.

Totally agree with that, and I think he def is willing to write songs of friendship as love songs, and that sometimes those songs veer into sexual territory (see This Hard Land for instance.)

I just wonder if some of the mysterious shifting gender stuff in his songs comes from that refusal to distinguish between friendship and romance, combined with an approach to songwriting where he's constantly chopping up his drafts and combining them with each other. Like, if love and friendship are exactly the same thing, why not drop bits of an early draft of "She's the One" into Backstreets? Why not take a story of a fading romantic relationship and mash it up with the details of his friendship with Steve van Zandt?

One of the things I used to find awkward about Bobby Jean but have since come to love is how transparent the veil of fiction in it is: it starts out apparently about two teenagers, but by the end, with the verse about "you'll hear me sing this song," he's given up on that and the song is very clearly about him and Steve. There's something similar going on with the sound of it, too, I think - the big ONE TWO THREE FOUR arena-rock opening, and then it's actually kind of a one-note dirge. It's a song that feels slightly uncomfortable with what it is, but that ends by being honest.

I think maybe he does something similar in No Surrender, but without the reveal at the end, or maybe the reveal comes gradually, over the course of rewriting it for the Born in the USA tour.

To clarify: I'm just talking about the songs where you don't know the gender of the person he's singing to, or where the person seems to shift between genders in the course of the song. Agree that he has lots of songs about male love/friendship/romance as well.

Like Terry's Song from... Magic? Which is both about male friendship *and* another gender ambiguous song, despite being about a real (male) person.

One of the things I used to find awkward about Bobby Jean but have since come to love is how transparent the veil of fiction in it is: it starts out apparently about two teenagers, but by the end, with the verse about "you'll hear me sing this song," he's given up on that and the song is very clearly about him and Steve.

I don't get this at all. I've read his memoir but I don't even remember Bruce knowing Steve Van Zandt when he was a teen - shows what I know.

But I take the song at face value: he's singing to a teen friend (a girl, I've always thought) who has left, and then there's the tremendous poignancy that Bruce is actually a recording artist and that lost friend might actually hear the song on the radio.

No sense whatever that this is about a fellow rock star who plays in a famous band with Bruce - how could it be? The whole lyric contradicts that! The whole sense of 'maybe you'll hear me on the radio' here is that this person has been lost from his life, into the wide open highways of America, and he has no idea where she is, let alone her telephone number.

The shift of time frames reminds me of eg: Pulp's 'Something Changed' which I heard on the radio yesterday. I don't love Pulp but I really admire the paradoxes of time and causality here - 'I wrote this song a few hours before we met', etc.

What I meant was that the "you'll hear me sing this song" assumes that the song is going to be played on the radio, which doesn't seem to match up with the first part of the song, where the singer seems much younger than Bruce Springsteen. At least, "I went by your house the other day/ your mother said you went away" sounds to me like the characters are still young enough to be living with their parents.

I take it that the basic story is sort of like "Independence Day" from the POV of the best friend who gets left behind. They live in this small town, they're both the weirdo outsiders there, they depend on each other - and then one of them gets sick of this shit and leaves, and the other one is heartbroken.

But there are already some contradictions there; "ever since we were sixteen" doesn't quite match up, though it does match up with when Bruce met Steve. It would be weird for someone 18 or 19 - young enough that "your house" is automatically also your mom's house - to think of "ever since we were sixteen" as a long time. But it is a long time for two 34-year-old rock stars to have been best friends.

As for the end - the whole point is that Steve doesn't play in the band anymore, that he's left to go solo. And Bruce knows the song will be played on the radio because he's not really a bereft teenager stranded in a small town without his best friend, even if he feels that way; he's a 34-year-old rock star writing a hit record.

At least that's how I interpret Bobby Jean when I stop to think about it. But the storyline is so vague, and the emotion behind it so strong, that there's something very universal about it despite the "I'm a rock star" ending; it feels like it's about any time that a friend has suddenly disappeared from your life, for any reason.

Like, even though I know this song is about Steve van Zandt going solo, in my mind it's about my friend Bobby who lived down my street in Fairbanks and died by suicide in a motel room in Anchorage. So I don't want to intellectualize it too much.

Speaking of songs that admit they're a song, I was listening to "Hold On" by Tom Waits and it occurred to me that the last verse is like "Bobby Jean" from the POV of Bobby Jean:

Down by the Riverside motel
It's ten below and falling
By a ninety-nine cent store
She closed her eyes and started swaying
But it's so hard to dance that way
When it's cold and there's no music
Oh, your old hometown's so far away
But inside your head there's a record that's playing

A song called "Hold On"

Someone said 'Bobby Jean' was monotonous. I think of it more in terms of the marvellously gallant, overreaching, melodramatic, corny keyboard phrase - which feels like it ought to have been used many times, but perhaps only belongs to this song.

On the other hand I was thinking about the Boss's melodies the other day and reflecting that 'No Surrender' was a pretty poor, minimal effort.

The melody for sure is pretty standard, but it's all worth it for that final exultant verse:

Now on the street tonight the lights grow dim
The walls of my room are closing in
There's a war outside still raging
you say it ain't ours anymore to win
I wanna sleep beneath peaceful skies in my lover's bed
With a wide open country in my eyes
And these romantic dreams in my head

Plus of course the line "We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school" does as well summing up the Bruce ethos as anything else in his catalog.