Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

good interview w Jon Landau about last Saturday’s show

https://variety.com/2021/music/news/bruce-springsteen-jon-landau-broadway-born-to-run

oops https://variety.com/2021/music/news/bruce-springsteen-jon-landau-broadway-born-to-run-1235007957/

‘The screen door slams, Mary’s dress...’ waves? Sways? An investigation into The Boss’ mystery verb

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2021-07-15/bruce-springsteen-thunder-road-waves-sways

Was on an 80s dive on Youtube a few days back and heard the Boss's down under cover of "Don't Change" - got to say it was pretty damn good and a pretty classy move.

yeah, super great!

I'd kill to hear the Boss do "She Sells Sanctuary".

Dude should go against the grain and do a covers record of stuff like that The Cure, The Smiths and The Damned.

the cover of Stayin Alive they did at the Brisbane(?) show was good as hell too

Every Day Is Like Sunday, Mister

I've always heard "waves" and in this context both mean the same thing, right?

I don't really care what the dress does, but I assumed it was "sways" because it rhymes with "plays" in the next line.

“sways” feels like better word choice I guess(?) I suppose a dress can “wave” (like a flag), but the verb/noun pairing trips me up… I picture the dress waving hi 👋

i always heard “waves” like trees waving
it feels more active somehow & fabric-y

my secret Springsteen tribute band name idea: "hello, we are the Screen Door Slams and this one is called..."

Listened to Darkness yesterday and want to bring back my crowdfund campaign to have Nick Cave cover the entire album.

Grinderman version of Candy's Room would be something

i always heard “waves” like trees waving
it feels more active somehow & fabric-y

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Friday, July 16, 2021 2:14 AM (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I can't hear it as "waves" -- it conjures up an image of an anthropomorphic dress. "Hey, Bruce is here! Hi Bruce!" "Goddammit you stupid dress, stop waving at him! You're embarrassing me!"

This is all strange and fascinating.

I doesn't strike me as strange that Bruce would switch between the words, depending on what shade of meaning he's going for with that night's arrangement, or shifting over the years. Strange that people think there's a canonical text to recover.

xpost lol at Screen Door Slams for the name of a Boss cover band.

Something very odd about those first two lines imo; I remember them giving me a very misleading expectation of what the song was going to be like the first time I heard it. Two lines of third-person scene-setting before the singer starts talking to Mary and the whole voice and POV shifts. And that image of Mary as manic pixie dream girl dancing across the porch - dancing, really? There's a sense of twee unreality there, but it vanishes with the next line, as soon as he tells you it's Roy Orbison on the radio. From "like a vision she dances across the porch" to "Roy Orbison singing for the lonely, hey that's me!" It's an amazing shift; all of a sudden we're grounded in reality, we're with this lonely guy in his car listening to a specific song on the radio, and even the language changes. It's the same trick he uses at the end of the song, now that I think about it.

Good point

The last time I listened to this album, really listened to it, I was struck by its poetry. Which, I mean, duh, it's so self consciously poetic. But I'd gotten so used to the myth and pageantry behind everything that it'd been too long since I just listened and let it wash over me. I was reminded of, of all things, the Tears for Fears Songs from the Big Chair doc, where they marvel at how well these words written by kids stand up today. Richard Thompson says as much in his book, about iirc Meet Me on the Ledge, observing how strange it is to hear and still sing words written by yourself so long ago yet have no real idea of their inspiration or meeting. Bruce was college-age when he wrote much of the Born to Run album. How many of us wrote or made anything back then so full of meaning we'd still be proud of several decades later?

I’m still proud of the negative review of Mighty Aphrodite I wrote in the college paper.

Lol

It's now officially "sways."
https://www.app.com/story/entertainment/music/2021/07/18/bruce-springsteen-thunder-road-lyrics-marys-dress-sways-waves/8007408002/?utm_campaign=snd-autopilot

totally baffled that people would think or hear 'waves' but it seems like this is indeed a thing

that's what i always thought

Crazy that it turns out we could just ask Jon Landau and have him resolve this decades-long mystery. What else could we ask him?

is it Hungry Heart or Hungry Fart?

if it's officially sways bruce shd now change it to waves bcz it makes the song and the line better

then he shd place a nice sharp pin on landau's office chair bcz fvck that guy

What’s wrong w/Landau, is he disliked in BruceWorld? (I don’t know a lot about him)

nor do i

Landau's's fine.

I think the biggest source of confusion stems from it being both "waves" and "sways" in official documents (books, songbooks, etc.), which is weird. For example, I have the official songbook right here, and it's "waves":

https://i.imgur.com/Sn7C38a.jpg

Given how carefully they (esp. Landau) watch over stuff, it's so strange that they should ever have fucked up the lyrics to the first song, one of his best known, on possibly his most beloved album, for so many years.

That said, I agree it should be waves, like a flag. Trees sway, not dresses.

Meantime you'll all want to listen to this

https://slate.com/podcasts/hit-parade/2021/07/bruce-springsteen-billboard-chart-records-slate-music-podcast

Hmm, not sure I buy the stated premise. It's not like he gave away "Blinded" to Manfred Mann (who also covered one or two other Bruce songs). See also: Bowie (another early adopter), or, like, Allan Clarke from the Hollies, who released a cover of "Born to Run" in 1975 (!).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9pQjDaxAKE

I think Bruce just had more songs than he knew what to do with. Also, "Fire" (I want to say originally intended for Elvis (RIP)), and "Because the Night" and other songs from the "Darkness" era, apparently just didn't fit the mood of the record, though of course Bruce had no problem incorporated both into his stellar live sets of the time. There were a handful of Bruce songs he tried again and again to get onto records ("The Promise," "Frankie," etc.), but they just didn't fit, either.

xp I can't dislike Landau after reading the part of Bruce's memoir where he has his first big depressive breakdown and calls Landau in a panic from across the country and Landau not only convinces him he needs therapy but immediately finds him a therapist and gets him to an appointment in a matter of days. Getting your severely depressed friend therapy from across the dang country is not easy (I've tried), and from what Bruce says in the memoir, it sounds like it pulled him out of a pretty scary place.

As for Landau's effect on Bruce's work, I'm inclined to think that if Landau hadn't turned up when he did, Bruce would have found himself someone else like him.

Allan Clarke from the Hollies, who released a cover of "Born to Run" in 1975 (!).

Clarke is quoted in the liners to the Hollies Epic Anthology that they'd received a large package of Springsteen publishing demos sent out in hopes of generating covers. He had just rejoined the band, but was still recording as a solo artist, so he saved "Born To Run" for himself and cut "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" with the band. They liked the songs, but thought they were too long, so each recording is trimmed down from the originals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S1t43j1I_g

I should really listen to the podcast before passing judgment, but it seems to me that for a while there - "Darkness" era, maybe "River" era as well - Bruce was really good at writing catchy but slightly derivative pop songs that didn't really express that much of his own personality or artistic vision. "Fire" is a good song but it's very much Bruce doing Elvis, and I think "live staple that's not on an album" is the perfect place for it.

With "Because the Night" he got close to writing a big pop hit that also sounded like him, but he couldn't finish it without help. There's a reason why "Hungry Heart" was the first of those songs that he kept for himself, imo; it's because it was the first one that really worked, as far as telling a Bruce Springsteen story efficiently within the framework of a super-catchy pop song.

So it seems to me that it's less about Bruce figuring out how to keep his hit songs for himself, and more about Bruce figuring out how to write hit songs that told the kind of stories he wanted. (And maybe allowing himself to write that kind of song, as well.)

otm about "Hungry Heart," that's why I ended up making it #1 on my ballot for the ILM Bruce poll — it distills Bruce-ness to a compact 3-minute single, from its loser/loner POV to its explicit Spectorisms. (Despite being a perfect single, still didn't crack the top 40.)

D'oh, I take that back — I was looking at its year-end chart ranking. "Hungry Heart" actually peaked at #5 on the top 40, his first top 10 hit. So, yes, a perfect single.

It's amazing how long it took him. Never had a number one! (Neither did CCR, iirc)

guys - you're not going to believe this but it's actually

Mary's dress weighs

:O

They've announced on FB a new concert film built from the No Nukes footage that'll be out later this year.

except that it turns out the show wasn't actually called "no nukes." it was "no newts." a salamander protest event. springsteen fans have been hearing it wrong for 40 years. this will be corrected in the movie and in all other materials going forward.

Mary's dress

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/the_slatest/2015/02/26/the_dress/150226_SLATEST_TheDress-proof590.jpg.CROP.original-original.jpg

👋 🌊 👋

oh give me a break

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/22/books/barack-obama-bruce-springsteen-renegades-spotify.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=US%20Politics

Yanni's dress waves
Laurel's dress sways