Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

It's a Wonderful Life or a Bruce Springsteen song, here you go:

1.As a child, you watched your father being humiliated by someone richer and more powerful than him and swore that would never happen to you.

2.You feel a lifelong compulsion to help out your baby brother, even though he never does anything for you.

3.Your brother went off to war. You stayed home.

4.You feel trapped in this miserable little town and you’re going to get out, do great things, and take Mary with you.

5.You and Mary got married too young, and let’s face it, you’re not all that happy anymore.

6.You got Mary pregnant, and man, that was all she wrote.

7.You’re basically an honest guy, but when someone close to you commits a crime, you automatically cover for them.

8.The slow death of all your dreams has turned you into a seething mass of barely-controlled rage.

9.Overcome by the general crappiness of your life, you decide to drown yourself. You’re contemplating the water temperature when Clarence shows up and saves your life.*

*Technically this last one is a "Growin' Up" story rather than a song, but close enough.

the answer is...yes?

i love this

as far as I can tell, the answer to every McSweeney's "x or y" list is yes

i see now the conceit

I told my students that Bruce is my favorite singer and showed them a picture of him, bc I thought we'd bond more if they had something to make fun of me about. Mentioned offhand that today is his birthday (I was speaking French and birthday is a word they know) and for some reason they got all excited about that and crowded around one student's computer to look up this info and verify it. Middle schoolers are funny.

Now that I think about it, I don't think I knew any of my teachers' musical tastes up to middle school with the exception of the music teachers: IIRC, they were fans of Lionel Richie and Bobby McFerrin. May help explain why I never got excited about music classes.

ooh la la, la chef

le chef. dammit. i only have the compulsory Canadian 4 years, I'm sorry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDc5j0gpG3I

Thought the thread might enjoy this clip. I caught this on Twitter and started watching the show. It's ok. They could use the capoiera fighting alpaca a bit more.

"Bruce Springsteen song or Sandwich."

very belated xp: omg I just had a business idea so good it probably already exists. Local Hero, a Jersey-based sandwich shop using all ingredients sourced from local farms, including Bruce's.

https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2020/04/13/PAPP/e53ad3a8-4bf3-47da-8156-9d1b17f604cd-BruceHotDog.jpg

Do you think if we got Jon Landau's blessing on the name Bruce would show up at our grand opening and pose like that with our signature sandwich?

if we survive the signature sandwich debate

70 year old man eats hot dog: details at 11

Glory Dogs

We go down to the WC

Blew up the men’s room at Subway last night

lol

So despite my Springsteen obsession there are still quite a few of his middle/late albums that I haven't listened to all the way through because the idea of them depresses me. But I listened to the Late Era podcast about Human Touch/Lucky Town - which I really enjoyed - and it inspired me to finally listen to both of them. I knew people thought of Lucky Town as much better than Human Touch, and I think I was sort of dubious about that because I figured they were probably both bad. But yeah, I agree. Human Touch is pretty much trash imo. 57 Channels isn't that bad for what it is, and "Cross My Heart" is listenable, but yeah, this album sucks.

Lucky Town, on the other hand - it's a much better album, but if Bruce had suppressed HT and only released this one, and I had been around to buy it at the time, I think I would still have been intensely disappointed. Because this strikes me as a decent album by the Springsteen that we have now, the artist who's still talented, still works hard, but is just a much lesser artist than the guy who put out the first eight albums. If Springsteen put out an album like Lucky Town right now, it would get nice reviews and everyone would be pretty happy with it, because we don't expect BitUSA from him anymore. Following Tunnel of Love, though? It would have been a huge shock to the system even without Human Touch dragging it down.

Random thoughts:

Local Hero is my favorite song from Lucky Town by a lot. The tone is tricky but I think he gets it just right; it doesn't strike me as self-involved or self-pitying, just as an honest assessment of the pull of fame and the costs of it.

I wish Bruce would stop writing songs that sound exactly like Book of Dreams; it wasn't good the first time.

I know Tracks so much better than this album that I've come to think of the Tracks songs as the "real" versions; it's weird to hear lines from "Gave it a Name" in "The Big Muddy" and realize that at some point Bruce decided "The Big Muddy" was better and more deserving of being on an album than "Gave it a Name."

I probably have more thoughts but I've had a migraine all day and I should go to bed. Migraines muddy my thinking so anything else I wrote would come out garbled anyway.

I like Lucky Town too - it's a good album. I'm a little reluctant to combine it with Human Touch for a variety of reasons, but I think Jimmy Guterman had a pretty solid proposal, which was to add the title track "Human Touch" while dropping "Leap of Faith" (my least favorite cut). Some re-sequencing may be needed to make it work - maybe open with "Human Touch" and open side B with "Better Days"? - but I think it works.

I actually like "Book of Dreams" - I love how it fits into that flow of songs, it shores up the album thematically for me.

I have nothing against "The Big Muddy," but I do love "Gave It a Name"...I was surprised by this though:

While working on the box set, Bruce was unable to locate the master tape for GAVE IT A NAME, so he re-recorded the song with Roy Bittan on 24 Aug 1998 at Thrill Hill Recording (Springsteen's home studio) in Colts Neck, NJ, and hence, the song was the only track recorded from scratch specially for Tracks. The original recording probably took place in Dec 1990 or Jan 1991.

I'm not sure how different the original outtake would be, but the re-recording is a gem on its own.

It's a shame, really, because "Lucky Town" has a couple of his best (or at least prettiest) songs, but because "Human Touch" has so many of his worst (or at least worst sounding) it just totally overshadowed it. I'm not sure either could be whittled or combined into one great record, swapping songs, inserting b-sides, just because Springsteen himself was I think so aimless ("Man, I'm just tired and bored with myself") with his goals, especially post "Tunnel of Love." "Tunnel" was of course his most personal, intimate album to date, and while he ended up touring it with the E Street Band (and recordings of those shows are a lot of fun) it's the only tour he's done to date with a set, standard, virtually unchanging iirc setlist, so clearly something was afoot in his conception of himself and his music. It took the hard reboot of the solo "Tom Joad" tour to reset himself.

He's always been pretty self-aware about who he is and what he wants to be, but the overwrought session shlock sound of "Human Touch" might be the first time any of us heard such a natural talent, a real force, struggling to just be himself. And in a sense nothing he's done since has sounded nearly as natural and instinctive as his formative years. It mostly all sounds a little *too* self-aware, which is to say, cautious and safe, even (and maybe especially) when it's trying so hard not to be. That he is so often great despite this attests to that aforementioned natural talent. It also explains why he's remained the gold standard of live performance. You can't be wishy-washy or unsure of yourself when you're anchoring an arena, you've got to relent and give in (and give back) to what god gave you.

I understand frustration with the 1992 LPs, if judged against other Boss, but then again - I like things on them. They can just be enjoyed.

'Man's Job', on the LP everyone here is saying is so bad, is such a marvellously simple, elegant construction, above all in its lead guitars.

I always had a lot of time for both 'The Big Muddy' and 'Souls of the Departed'. The latter, you could say, prefigures DEVILS & DUST.

xp I was probably too hard on "Book of Dreams." I think I liked okay on a first listen, but having heard "Letter to You" and "Land of Hope and Dreams" first made me start skipping it on later listens. Those all sound very similar to me and at this point I'm sick of that particular melody and cadence from Bruce.

I like "The Big Muddy" fine. The idea of repurposing a Pete Seeger war-protest song to be about cheating and low-level personal shadiness is interesting in itself; definitely says something about Bruce's focus at this point. But I love "Gave it a Name." I didn't know that about the re-recording but it sounds great.

Human Touch is interesting because I don't know that I've ever heard someone struggling so hard to say nothing at all. I feel like what would come through in Human Touch if he really let it - what comes through in the title track and maybe unintentionally in "Real World" and the outtake "Happy" - is an album about being in a relationship that is objectively good, that should make you happy, and still not actually being happy, and struggling to justify and rationalize that. But an album that really leaned into that would be a follow-up to Tunnel of Love, and he doesn't want that, so he writes all these empty songs and tries to puff them up in the studio and it just doesn't work.

'Man's Job' works.

We have very different tastes. I think "Man's Job" is the one song that made me skip to the next track even on a first listen. It's so weird and uncomfortable to me to hear Bruce doing the "I'm a MAN" thing without irony, without seeming to question or push against the same traditional idea of masculinity that he's drawing on.

This is just to say that I love his guitar solo in "Human Touch."

This is just to say that I love his guitar solo in "Human Touch."

Yeah, it's great - it's a shame his compilations use the 'single edit' because it fades out early and loses a large chunk of it. Guterman thought it was comparable to Richard Thompson's work and it does sound a bit like it.

Re: Human Touch, there are nice bits and pieces all over the place that I can see being used for better songs - I haven't heard them in a while but if "Roll of the Dice" and "Long Goodbye" had a less generic sound and a better set of lyrics, they could be all right. I remember "57 Channels" and "Pony Boy" being not bad, though IIRC they're fairly low-key pieces, not enough to do much for an album that really needed a lot more substance.

Lily: we don't have such different tastes. We both love the Boss! :D

I hear more intelligence in that song than you do. But in any case I don't think it's all about the words - as I said, I love the crisp clean music.

"57 Channels" oddly became a kind of catchphrase / signature / buzzword, despite not even being a great song - didn't it?

For the kind of thing that D F Wallace was describing in his TV essay, published just the following year. I'm sure that Jonathan Lethem casually quotes it somewhere as a phrase that everyone knows (in the 1990s, or maybe early 2000s).

I remember Bruce performing it on SNL, it did sort of have a Zeitgeist-y feel back then (despite, yeah, not being a great song).

Dylan made sort of a similar effort a few years earlier, with "T.V. Talkin' Song"

In a September 2014 post on Facebook discussing the video, Springsteen wrote, "Shot back in the quaint days of only 57 channels and no flat screen TVs, I have no idea what we were aiming for in this one outside of some vague sense of 'hipness' and an attempt at irony. Never my strong suit, it reads now to me as a break from our usual approach and kind of a playful misfire."[1]

I was surprised my Late Era boys loved "57 Channels," my pick for worst Springsteen single to date.

I've never once thought of that song as being even remotely trenchant. Like songs deriding televangelists, it seemed like pretty easy pickings at the time, just one in a long line of "get off of my lawn" songs written about watching TV.

There’s a profile of Steve Van Zant from last weekend that makes me wonder if Human Touch and Lucky Town’s relative mediocrity was the by-product of changing the band’s dynamics.

Yet Van Zandt’s life has been bisected by his own decision to quit. He left the E Street Band in 1984, in protest at his lack of a formal role in decision-making. After that, he writes, suicide was his “constant companion and temptation”. Although he rejoined the band in the late 1990s, he still agonises over the decision. “It was the biggest mistake I’d ever made in my life, and everything I’ve accomplished was accomplished because of it,” Van Zandt, 70, says over Zoom from his home in New York.

E Street Band guitarist and actor Steven Van Zandt talks Springsteen, The Sopranos and why he doesn’t want to be the boss with @henrymance https://t.co/rTWblqBgoP

— FT Weekend (@ftweekend) September 28, 2021

There’s a profile of Steve Van Zant from last weekend that makes me wonder if Human Touch and Lucky Town’s relative mediocrity was the by-product of changing the band’s dynamics.

It didn't help. To my ears he started writing what people expected a Mature Bruce Springsteen to write and record with L.A. hired guns. The trouble is, Tunnel of Love and BIUSA were perfectly realized Mature Springsteen albums.

just one in a long line of "get off of my lawn" songs written about watching TV

I honestly think after "TV Party," no one should bother trying... those guys did it right, close the f'in book!

"Human Touch" is a weird song - the bridge/solo comes in really early (less than halfway through), followed by the first taste of the "outro" section; then the song keeps marking time until the real outro kicks in (followed by another solo), but the outro feels dissipated rather than having the desired "yeah!" effect.

There’s a profile of Steve Van Zant from last weekend that makes me wonder if Human Touch and Lucky Town’s relative mediocrity was the by-product of changing the band’s dynamics.

I can't find it at the moment, but IIRC Van Zant heard the two 1992 albums before they came out and told Springsteen he should re-record them with the E Street Band (probably a bit facetiously from a practical perspective but also as an honest critical assessment). They've done some songs like "Souls of the Departed" that weren't radically different but had an extra charge to them that really helped.

I think 57 Channels and Nothin' On is one of those lines that's better as a title than as an actual song. It's added a phrase to the language that instantly means something concrete to people who may never have heard the song, and the more our attention span gets eaten up by a huge variety of meaningless bullshit, the more useful the phrase is.

morrisp OTM there.

Broadly agree with Lily Dale but actually - I'd be happy now to actually hear '57 channels' again. That low bluesy edgy intro, Bruce singing into a big space about his bourgeois house - and the whole thing retains a kind of restraint doesn't it?

I like Bob's TV Talkin' Song too btw.

I quite like the Christic version of 57 Channels, it's more laid-back - doesn't take itself as seriously as the album version.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNkqW-MrJZU

Yeah, the Human Touch songs don't sound so bad on those shows. One of my favorites from Springsteen's nugs releases, I wish he put it out back in 1991 instead of sitting on it for 25+ years!

Just when I wanted to cut him slack, I see his hair.

xp yeah, amazing shows all around. The performance I really love from Christic, though, is the one of "My Father's House," which manages to be better imo than the one on Nebraska.

I LOVE that song, and it really is a great rendition. Nebraska is my favorite (it's what made me a Springsteen fan for life) so the Christic shows were especially enjoyable for that reason alone - I don't think he performed many of those Nebraska songs alone and acoustic in concert before.

Those shows are great to hear back-to-back with the Broadway album. Sometimes the two blur together in memory, but the spoken interludes about his therapy sessions play well next to the Broadway show. I guess that was the first time the rest of the world found out about his personal struggles and how he found professional help? Even the (nervous?) audience laughter says a lot.

yeah, I think it must be! the way he says "I went to see this psychiatrist" and the audience laughs like it's the start of a joke and he has to say, "no, this is true, this is true." And then it's just such a good story; one of his best, I think. Up there with the Vietnam draft story, with that devastating last line just before the song starts.

If I'm remembering right, there's a similar moment at the start of "The Wish," which replaced "My Father's House" on the second night, so it seems like he deliberately carved out space in both shows to let the audience know about his therapy sessions.

The new song with mellencamp is pretty cheesy old man music, but it's fine.

wtf why is someone else named Lily writing about Bruce Springsteen for the New York Times?

I just saw the article, haven't read it yet, but felt the need to come here immediately and say that my name is not actually Lily and that is not me.