Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

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

Renegades = globally famous, incredibly successful rich people

For anyone who's paywalled, that NYT article says that Bruce and Obama are going to release a book based on their podcast.

Considering that the podcast itself was just the two of them reciting stories that they've already told in their memoirs, this opens up dizzying possibilities: book-podcast-book-podcast-book-podcast, on into infinity.

Leave it to Tom Morello to make "Highway to Hell" suck like something from the end credits to "Transformers 8." But I bet it would have worked with just Bruce and Eddie Vedder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuNlA6BB28E

yeah otm — esp the bridge! that part was super annoying. i’m into interpretation but that was just willful jagoffery, guitarwise.

I don't get how anyone can listen to Bon Scott AC/DC and think, 'you know what this needs - the echo and reverb from a Pink Floyd cover band'.

F'n wrong, next question.

Aww yeah - https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bruce-springsteen-born-in-the-usa/

I luv Sam S.'s writing, but if anything I wish he had dwelled a little more on how great the album and its songs are. Too much historical "context" here (a common pitfall of these Sunday retro reviews).

Meanwhile, Bruce's daughter got a silver medal in Olympic horsey jumping.

I actually like that Fork piece a lot, esp. the way the whole thing hinges on "No Surrender," which is a good hook.

Is the conceit of the opening paragraph—suggesting that Bruce was concerned the message of the title track or cover art may be misinterpreted—actually true?

No, in fact iirc the opening graf says it *wasn't* either of those things.

I read it is saying they were concerns, but not his primary concern. If he wasn’t thinking of them, why mention them? Seems “anachronistic” or something.

I think he's just presenting it like "here are all the things you've heard about this album that have since become points of discussion, but none of those things are what was actually bugging Bruce."

Big Bruce should have got the tony soprano role

The pissing on the flag thing is dumb. Did anyone ever really think that? I always thought it was one of those fake urban legends.

(Misinterpreting “BITUSA” the song is dumb too, but at least I know that really happened)

Ugh "No Surrender" is the bane of the album for me. Should've swapped it out for "Pink Cadillac."

Should have swapped it out for "This Hard Land," which I would have put in place of "Working on the Highway" on side one, and maybe moved "Highway" to the start of side 2. "No Surrender" has always been a full-on "album track" to me.

I like BitUSA just fine, but if he wanted to, he could've saved his B-sides and released a solid follow-up just months later using those and other outtakes - "Frankie," "This Hard Land," "Pink Cadillac," "County Fair," "Shut Out the Light," "My Love Will Not Let You Down," "Janey, Don't You Lose Heart," "Wages of Sin," "Man at the Top," "Lion's Den," "Stand On It," "Johnny Bye-Bye"...that's more than enough.

That would work better imo than trying to sub any of those b-sides or outtakes into the album itself, since BITUSA has such an identifiable sound, and there's a lot more variety in the outtakes.

You've all heard my thoughts on "No Surrender" before; I've never understood why people think it's hopeful. I've always found it one of the more depressing songs on the album, a midlife crisis in song form. Frustration with your friend/lover/partner/whoever for getting older and not wanting the same things you both wanted together when you were younger, because it's easier to be angry at them than to acknowledge that you're getting older too.

I like the line about the energy of the album being a prolonged runner's high, but the rest of this essay doesn't really match my sense of what Born in the USA is.

I have a hard time mentally moving the tracks of BITUSA around because I feel like a lot of the songs come in pairs. Darlington County and Working on the Highway are a pair; so are Downbound Train and I'm on Fire - two Nebraska tracks that still sound like Nebraska - and then Bobby Jean and No Surrender. I've never seen that kind of sequencing anywhere else and it's one of the weird things about the album that I like so I wouldn't want to mess with it.

It’s obviously a helluva challenge to review a totemic album from the ‘80s… the two paragraphs in the middle where he’s talking about the album’s sound are great, but I think Sodomsky tried to find his way in via a side door and sort of got lost.

I agree, but I don't think it was necessarily a bad idea to focus on Steve's departure from the band, which I do find interesting because it's kind of a fault line in the middle of the album. I mean, one of the things that really stands out to me about Bitusa is how much recording time it covers, so that it ends up tracking a change in Bruce's songwriting over a couple of years. The album to me feels like half Nebraska - pure dangerous isolation - and half a struggle to break free from that kind of isolation; desperate energy and a sense of reaching out for any kind of human connection, however tenuous.

And I think Steve leaving is probably part of that change, from like a "let's psychoanalyze Bruce!" standpoint. For one thing, it means the collapse of any illusion that the band is just going to be a family forever. If you're a naturally family-oriented guy and you've been relying on your coworkers to fill that space in your life, that would be a fairly jarring wake-up call.

a sense of reaching out for any kind of human connection, however tenuous

One might even call it... a human touch

It's kind of remarkable that his second most famous foil spent so little time actually recording in the band during its formative years.

He did, however, choose one recent news item to react to — a certain lyrical debate that peaked just as Springsteen on Broadway went on break. After singing the first line of "Thunder Road" — "The screen door slams, Mary's dress sways" — Bruce took a dramatic pause before repeating that last word, speaking it loudly and clearly: "Sways."

LMAO

I was just at the Tuesday show! Can confirm.

Actually posted this in the wrooong forum.

Anyway, finally got around to revisiting Born in the USA, and surprisingly I loved it without reservation.

I was going to listen to it in light of that Pitchfork article, but I got caught up in other records, and in the meantime famed Columbia exec Walter Yetnikoff died. Never heard of the guy so all the crazy stories about him were new to me. Anyway, I bring that up because as soon as I put it on, I remembered Yetnikoff's comments about hearing it for the first time, and I really thought about what that would be like: it's 1984, you're a label exec, and this record lands on your desk, completely new and ready for company review. No one outside of Bruce's camp has heard it. There's no baggage or anything. Somehow that helped me really zero in on the words, and I came away with a much greater appreciation for the album.

Springsteen has been down on it for being too grab bag rather than a cohesive statement, but I think that may help - sometimes a concept can burden an album, where everything's got to have its place in a pre-designed narrative. In this case we just run the full gamut of material, and naturally they all feel like they flow through the same characters and occupy the same community. To me, that's enough for cohesiveness. And the stories are brilliantly detailed. Just about everything that catches a character's eye is perfect. I know it was fashionable to knock it for being pop or sounding dated, but so what? That's kind of what I like about it - having ultra-catchy, slick pop songs like these carrying these lyrical details and these types of stories.

Another thing I realized is how much I don't like the videos. Springsteen got top talent to direct them, but they do seem reductive and corny in retrospect. That really sank in with "Dancing in the Dark" - again thinking like I've never heard this before, the words rise up to the surface and it kind of feels like it's a guy at home alone in the dark, twitching with energy and anxiety, dying to get out of his rut, out of his life, etc. I guess that video helped sell it, but it seems miles in the opposite direction of what it really evokes.

if you don’t love Bruce dancing in his Bruce way then i don’t know what to tell you

for me that video was a MOMENT and it still feels that way even though i am not 9 years old anymore

i dunno. maybe you have to connect w the wish fulfillment aspect for it to really click?

anyway i love it

I have nothing against the dancing in itself. I get a huge kick out of that bootleg video floating around of Springsteen energetically leading the E Street Band into learning some dance moves circa 1984. I love it! It ain't Prince, but amazingly it all works at its own level.

I don't like the videos because of how they're interpreting the song, but I get that videos (for better or worse) can actually strip context and be be enjoyed in a different way on its own. It's likely most of my favorite videos are really like that - not for how they're interpreting or expanding a song but how they play on their own with the music being incidental.

Anyway, I don't deny those videos were very much part of that huge moment when Springsteen became bigger than Coca-Cola. I don't think a cultural moment of that size could have happened at that time without videos almost any listener would know.

It's corny, but I think a lot of Bruce's songs, certainly live, are about just giving in to the party vibe and enjoying yourself. The themes of his fun songs are almost never hedonistic, not in the least, just kind of celebrations, a release and embrace of the weekend after a long week. So Bruce dancing, or him giving Clarence a kiss, or whatever, it's never sexual, it's just being silly and having fun. And a nice balance to the heavy stuff.

It is a good question, though, whether Springsteen would have been as popular without MTV. Maybe not *as* popular, but he was one of those guys, like Metallica, that was already filling pretty big places more or less based on word of mouth alone, certainly without the benefit of videos. In 1981, Springsteen filled (for example) the local arena here, so momentum was on his side, which might have been more or less on par with Prince around the same general time, though of course Prince already had more hits (and music videos) and was soon dominant enough to keep Bruce from that first number one record.

Listening to the official nugs release for August 20, 1985 - didn't notice this until now, but the Band's studio version of "Atlantic City" released in 1993 is based on the full-band live arrangement heard here. (The Band basically made it all acoustic, adding mandolins, an accordion instead of a synthesizer, etc.) Always thought it was a nice arrangement, but credited it to the Band.

I take poster birdistheword's point to be specific -- that 'dancing in the dark' is a dark song, or a song that involves or emerges or struggles with darkness -- and the video doesn't recognise any of that.

(But I haven't seen any of these videos for a long time, if ever. Did 'born in the USA' itself ever have a video?!)

Yes. Directed by John Sayles.

xpost Of course even the "Nebraska" version has mandolin, doesn't it? So it was always on his mind.