Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

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.

So I've found myself sort of fascinated by Adam Raised a Cain lately, and I'm wondering: what do you all make of the middle verse?

All of the old faces ask you why you're back
They fit you with position and the keys to your daddy's Cadillac
In the darkness of your room your mother calls you by your true name
You remember the faces, the places, the names
You know it's never over, it's relentless as the rain
Adam raised a Cain

The first and third verses are all epic East of Eden father/son drama, but this verse reads to me like it's Bruce's first comment on the price of fame, not being able to fully go home again, being The Boss, and yet feeling a sense of kinship and responsibility toward the same community that he's no longer completely a part of. A different kind of doomed inheritance from the one in the first and third verses, but related. He's not trying to antagonize his audience here; he slips it into the middle of a song about something else, and howls it out so that it's barely intelligible, but it's the start of a through-line that's going to end w/"Local Hero": "Well I learned my job I learned it well, fit myself with religion and a story to tell."

Anyway, that's the way I hear it, but I'm influenced by having read the Kipling story "The Knife and the Naked Chalk" - Kipling's version of the "Growin' Up" story - approximately one million times, and no one else has that particular problem, so tell me if this makes sense.

It's also the familiar story of the prodigal son returning home, and his friends family and former neighbors don't give a shit about where he's been or whether or not he's successful, just that he's back home and it's business as usual. Nothing's changed, not least at home.

Interesting. I hear "they fit you with position" as them caring that he's successful, wanting him to be successful, imposing a certain idea of fame and success on him. In later performances - like, around the time he starts playing it a lot for the Tunnel of Love tour - he changes "position" to "religion." And then that line pops up again in "Local Hero," but now it's "fit myself with religion" - it's something he's done to himself.

I guess one question is: is it good or bad - or neither good nor bad, just something you can't get away from - that nothing's changed at home, that your mother calls you by your true name? (Bruce getting all Ursula Le Guin on us.) I guess I was hearing it as a good thing overall - that for all the epic struggle of the first and third verses, home can also be a refuge from fame, one place where you're not expected to play the part of The Boss.

I feel like the ideas here are sort of deliberately muddled, like Bruce is trying to work through a lot of confused anger at people he loves - including the audience that he's very emotionally close with at this point in his career - without alienating anyone, and so it all kind of gets lumped in together: his father's anger, his mother's love, the burdens and expectations of fame.

Another way to read that verse is that they're basically asking him, wait, *why* are you back? We gave you a position in life, we gave you a car, we sent you on your way. Maybe home is a place he can't escape, or doesn't want to. Cain is cast into exile, but Bruce (or the narrator) doesn't have that luxury. He's compelled to return, in some way actually a *subversion* of the prodigal son parable.

Yes, that makes sense. and I think that's sort of what I was trying to get at - the feeling that the community he's trying to write about & stay faithful to doesn't necessarily expect him back or have much of a place for him; that he's gotten too famous writing about these people to really be one of them anymore.

and yeah, I think the Cain/exile thing makes sense, the idea that fame is its own form of exile.

And yet "you remember the faces, the places, the names." They're part of him whether he wants it or not; he's like one of those Faulkner characters who carry the whole entire South around inside them at all times.

my brain's all foggy today; I hope this makes sense.

It seems to me that this verse is about how someone who thinks he has reinvented himself and distanced himself from his family is caught up in those old ties when he returns home; and maybe he can honestly see that he hasn't changed as much as he thought.

that makes total sense to me and I think I was overthinking it

It could be from a rock star's perspective, but just as easily a doctor, an academic etc. who thinks they have transcended their class background.

I do think the "why are you back?" is really important, but you're right, he doesn't have to be famous for that to be the question everyone's asking. This could be anyone who was raised in a place where being successful means getting to leave.

Ken Rosen, who writes the E. Street Shuffle blog, has a series called "Roll of the Dice" where he analyzes every Springsteen song in detail, in a "What is this song about, what story is it telling?" way. He's offered me the chance to write guest posts whenever I have a different take on a song from him. My first one, on "Western Stars," is running today. Hopefully there will be more!

https://estreetshuffle.com/index.php/2021/11/04/two-faces-western-stars/

So what do you do when you discover a reader whose comments deserve a “Hold my beer” subject line? Well… I hold her beer.

Thanks!

Looking forward to reading it!

Last night I had to drive one of my kids and her friends up to Milwaukee for a concert. The first half I patiently endured their music and didn't even say anything. But about halfway through my daughter, sitting in the way back, surprised me by switching the music to Springsteen on shuffle, for my benefit. And then left it there! It was great to hear them all sing along with "Santa Claus is Coming to Town." One of them, in the passenger seat, told me she was trying to get School of Rock to do a Christmas show (she's Jewish, lol), and said they claimed there weren't enough Christmas rock songs. Then she pointed to the speakers and said "hello!?!"

The shuffle also played "High Hopes," which I hadn't heard since whatever year it came out. I know the song is only five minutes long, but it felt like 20, and it's one of the better ones on that album, iirc. It made me feel a little bad for Bruce, because for a couple of albums you can really hear him struggling to do something new or different, or sonically relevant, and it just rarely works. Sure, when it *does* work you get something like "Streets of Philadelphia," but when it doesn't ... oof. I think Bruce has only relatively recently come around to fully embracing that what the fans want is the same ol' Bruce, the best Bruce he can be, which is intuitive but he only in the last several years seems to have stopped resisting it. Reminds me of a reported exchange with Sting at a 2010 rainforest benefit.

The concert’s unannounced performer, Bruce Springsteen, joked that when Sting had told him the theme was ’80s nostalgia, he had responded, “Sting, we’re ’80s nostalgia.”

That's awesome! Makes me think of the bit in Bruce's book where he walks into his kid's room and finds him listening to early Dylan, and he's clearly just bursting with pride that his kid is voluntarily listening to the music he likes. A real "stars, they're just like us!" moment.

for a couple of albums you can really hear him struggling to do something new or different, or sonically relevant, and it just rarely works.

I know what you mean; it all feels so - directionless. Like he's just throwing anything in that sounds different from his usual stuff, without having a real sense of why or what he's going for.

"Streets of Philadelphia," otoh, feels like he did have a vision and a reason for working with that particular sound; I really wonder about the other stuff that sounded like it that he scrapped.

Heard “Brilliant Disguise” in CVS today; didn’t remember the tempo being as fast as it is. Good song…

One of his best.

Definitely. Even people I know who don't like Springsteen all that much tend to single that out as a great song.

didn’t remember the tempo being as fast as it is

I just went back and listened, and yeah, it was surprising to me to, but I'm not sure why. Something about the vocals, maybe? Definitely helps give it that edgy, jittery feeling.

too

I'm sure this has been posted here before (possibly by me), but I love the Brilliant Disguise video, and I love this piece by the director, Meiert Avis, about the whole process of coming up with the concept and pitching it to Bruce and then making it: http://meiertavis.com/archives/1215

Was googling around for other stuff and found this complete, pretty well shot/sounding video of his Paris 2016 "River" gig:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBzrwbarzx4

xpost That was great, good find!

Loved your piece, too. I never listen (or did much listening) to that album, which makes your observations all the more fresh and interesting.

Thanks! I have mixed feelings about Western Stars the album - I think there are about four songs from it that I still listen to regularly - but I do like that song. I think it's partly that the use of the orchestra makes sense to me on that song, as part of the story the song is telling,in a way that it doesn't necessarily on the rest of the album.

The funny thing about writing for the blog is that I'm pretty much limited to the songs Ken and I disagree on, which isn't really that many of them. So I have kind of a random handful of songs to choose from, but it's fun trying to figure out what to say about them.

And thanks for reading! It feels like a silly thing to be proud of, but this is actually a major personal milestone because it's the first time I've brought myself to actually send out something I wrote to anyone.

Listened to "Trapped" again and was thinking (and I know he didn't write it) about what a good and odd and striking choice it was to have the anthemic chorus be the part about being trapped, not the part about knowing one day you'll escape.

It's definitely one of the all time most inspired covers. Like, "Jersey Girl," that was practically written for him. But "Trapped" took some imagination.

Yeah, and I think it's so interesting what he does with it. The original doesn't have that stark difference between the verses and the chorus; it's bouncy and determined and hopeful all the way through. Springsteen takes it and does his dark verse/anthemic chorus thing with it, but bc the hopeful lyrics are all in the verses, that means that he dials the hope way down and the frustration way up. So the effect you get is someone sort of grimly promising himself that one day he'll get out, and then giving in to this scream of rage and frustration that right now he's so far away from that.

Saw this in an old Glenn Kenny blog post on Frank Borzage's History Is Made at Night:

"Apparently when Bruce Springsteen and Jon Landau were trying to figure out what title to give the album that subsequently became Born in the U.S.A., they combed through the index of Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema, and very nearly settled on History Is Made at Night."

Great film BTW, Criterion just released an outstanding 4K restoration as well. And if you watch the Criterion extras, they point out that Borzage himself loved the title, emphasizing that it helped secure his interest in the project after a producer pitched it to him.

So with that in mind, I followed up on the discussion upthread about the BitUSA leftovers and tried piecing together an album with that title.

Running time 44 minutes, 48 seconds, all but the first and last tracks taken from Tracks. (Opener taken from Greatest Hits, closer from The Essential Bruce Springsteen's third disc of bonuses though I think they couldn't find the master and used a bootleg.)

History Is Made at Night

Side A:
1. Murder Incorporated
2. My Love Will Not Let You Down
3. This Hard Land
4. Frankie

Side B:
5. Pink Cadillac
6. Man at the Top
7. Shut Out the Light
8. Wages of Sin
9. Janey, Don't You Lose Heart
10. County Fair

Nice! Did you deliberately keep it to officially released tracks and not allow any bootlegs?

I'm trying to figure out if I would order the tracks any differently. I think I might replace Man at the Top with Rockaway the Days, and I'm not sure about Wages of Sin because there's so much lyrical overlap with My Father's House. (I also don't really like Wages of Sin, but that's just me.)

I was thinking about moving County Fair to the beginning, but maybe that would give it too much of a "Bruce Springsteen is the Village Green Preservation Society" vibe, idk.

Yes, only official releases. I wanted to program something that was reasonable on some level - like, if Landau & Co. made a serious attempt to create a second album from the leftover material and the final result had to get Springsteen's approval. It felt like official releases would bypass a lot of issues - every track would be genuinely finished, there was a better sense of how Springsteen would sequence this material thanks to Tracks, and everything would presumably come from the best known sources. (IIRC, nine of those ten were even freshly mixed from the multi-tracks. I have a feeling the multi-track for "County Fair" was somehow lost, one reason it was excluded from Tracks and the main reason why the official release sounds very similar to what's already been bootlegged.)

As the sequence fell into place, I noticed how some of it echoed Born in the USA. Like the two most dance-oriented tracks are in the second and penultimate slots. "Murder Incorporated" stuck out at as the opening track from the start, and the martial drum beat that opens it somewhat recalls Born in the USA's opening. And "County Fair" recalls "My Hometown" - both are quiet tracks that seemed to be built from small-town-life observations. "County Fair" also seemed like an appropriate ending given the album title, with the narrator holding his girl and looking up at the stars, wishing the moment would never end. (Now that I think about it, that's also the ending to the Borzage movie, but in a very different setting...hell, it's possibly the ending to MOST of his movies, especially Man's Castle.)

"Rockaway the Days" is catchy, that simple acoustic guitar riff was burned into my memory after one listen. That track and at least three others were in the running initially, but I wanted to keep the whole thing to a realistic LP length. At one point I had "Man at the Top" before "Bye Bye Johnny" - it seemed interesting to connect those two songs, but ultimately the latter was so short that it didn't seem to register as much as I would have liked. I've always liked "Wages of Sin," but Springsteen especially liked it after forgetting about it altogether - IIRC it was one of his favorite finds for the box set, so I thought it should have a slot.

What's a good outtake that hasn't been officially released? Anything you'd want to sequence in?

That all makes sense, and now that you've said it, I totally see what you mean about echoing the structure of Bitusa, especially side two. I just wonder if maybe "Murder Incorporated" promises an album that's not actually what you get from Bitusa outtakes, since the overall vibe here is so much more uncertain and flattened and wistful than Bitusa.

It does sound like an opening song, though, and you're right, "County Fair" is a good closer and matches nicely with "My Hometown;" I take back my suggestion about opening with it. (I think what I was going for had something to do with growing up, maybe? It starts out with this sense of youthful wonder, and then by the end of the song you're older and life has taken you and deposited you somewhere further on and lonely, and I think that's why I saw it as an appropriate opener to an album about being in your thirties and adrift from the things that used to make life meaningful to you.)

I like "Man at the Top" fine, but it stays in the outtake category for me because "aim your gun and shoot your shot/ everybody wants to be the man at the top" feels like a retread of "Hungry Heart." "Rockaway the Days" I think is a cool song in a few ways; I like that riff, the story is a rare (at the time) attempt at third-person narrative, and it's one of his classic songs about how you should have sex with him because the world is terrible, which is a Bruce theme I always like.

It makes sense for "Wages of Sin" to have a slot; it's a good song and a big song, I just find it hard to listen to. (I get an abuser vibe from it that disturbs me because it seems unintentional, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be on the album.)

I'm thinking about bootlegs, and I'm really not sure - maybe "Drop on Down," but I have no idea where to put it.

My brain is insanely fried from teaching after a four day weekend, so I hope at least some of that made sense.

After a quick listen, I get what you mean about "Murder Incorporated." If you sample the other nine together then go back to it, the differences are even clearer. It does feel like it should be setting up an angrier and more defiant album.

Your description of "County Fair" actually reminds me of Bob Seger's "Night Moves" and how both songs end with a desire for time to stand still - in one case, to freeze a feeling happiness, in the other to keep the past from drifting further away while everything moves deeper into an uneasy future. There's plenty of good reasons to start an album that way as it sets up a lot of territory to explore. ("Night Moves" nearly does, it was the second track.)

I also noticed beginning with The River, Springsteen ended his albums quietly, and I think that may have been another reason why ending with "County Fair" felt like a natural choice to me. Born to Run and Darkness finished with big, defiant climaxes, but then you have "Wreck on the Highway," "Reason to Believe," "My Hometown" and "Valentine's Day," and I get a similar unease from each of them. Even when there's a wife or child serving as an anchor, life's taken the narrator further from comfort (a comfortable past or some earlier peace of mind or false sense of security about their lives). Those albums were done when Springsteen hit his 30s, so it's possible getting older played a natural role in his inclination to close an album that way.

Almost forgot the ending to "Rockaway the Days"! That's a strangely common scene in a lot of movies where something awful has happened and the couple has sex. Off the top of my head, that's what happens in JFK when they find out RFK has been assassinated, there's a scene like that with Denzel Washington in He Got Game, etc. That must've been the inspiration behind Will Ferrell's line in Wedding Crashers: "grief is nature's most powerful aphrodisiac."

And I know what you mean about "Wages of Sin." Springsteen actually speculated he set it aside because it touched a nerve. There's no description of abuse IIRC, but it sets it all up. Like the mindset and all the trouble brewing in the narrator's mind - domestic violence feels like a logical and inevitable result. Like others have said, he has an amazing gift for empathy and he's brilliant whenever he taps into that, but the results can be chilling depending on the subject.

Just think, you have a four (or five?) day weekend NEXT week! I love this time of year but work-wise it does throw you off a bit.

I guess one way of thinking about the album closer is: where do the characters end up? Out under a bridge somewhere, making their stand on the streets, out on a highway late at night trying to get home, at home in bed with their girlfriend thinking baout things, down by the river waiting for something that's never going to come, etc. etc. So if you compare County Fair to My Hometown, in that sense they're not that closely aligned. My Hometown takes us up to the Present Moment: a couple making a difficult but adult decision together, a man saying goodbye to his hometown with love and without bitterness. County Fair, otoh, lets us drift off into nostalgia and cricket sounds and a vague sense of loss.

And thinking about the songs that make up this album, there's nothing here quite as decisive as My Hometown or even Dancing in the Dark, so I don't think we can really get somewhere in the same way that we do with BitUSA. I see this album as kind of a waystation in life; this is a period of drifting, of loss and tenuous connections and hoping for better things in a future that isn't quite here yet. I think that was what I was going for when I suggested starting with County Fair and ending with Janey: starting with a vague feeling of having somehow lost the thread of ordinary boring cheerful life; going on through the darker territory that comes with isolation and alienation: Wages of Sin, Shut out the Light, the impossible wish-fantasy of This Hard Land, then in the second half (as in BITUSA) striving to re-establish human connection, starting with "My Love Will Not Let You Down," and ending with "Janey Don't You Lose Heart," which leaves you in roughly the same place you started in, but with a friend and with the promise that you can keep hanging on until things change.

(Not that I'm saying that would necessarily work, and I don't have a track listing in my head for it - just thinking out the possibilities.)

Re: Rockaway the Days - yes, and the chorus, too, though you don't know who he's talking to in the chorus until the reveal at the end. What it really reminds me of is John Prine's "Six O'Clock News," with the step-by-step narration of this kid's doomed life and then the chorus of "C'mon baby, spend the night with me," as if you're taking refuge, in the chorus, from all the human misery going on in the verses.

"Wages of Sin" - yeah, the mindset is that of an abuser imo, and it is chilling; the way he sees his girlfriend in tears and goes straight to "you're doing this to make me feel guilty" --> "this means the truth is you only stay with me so you can make me feel guilty" --> "people have been making me feel guilty all my life and now you're doing it too." Total abuser logic and exactly the way my cousin's scary ex talks to her, and I'd feel better about the song if I felt sure Springsteen meant the character to be an abuser. The overlap with "My Father's House" makes me think maybe he didn't.

And yes, just a week and a half till Thanksgiving! I just had a long weekend and I already feel like I need another one, which is generally how it goes. I don't have my planning done for tomorrow so I have to set my alarm for five and frantically make slides, and of course I stayed up an hour later than I meant to, writing this.

Amazing points, I really enjoyed reading that! Re: "roughly the same place you started in, but with a friend and with the promise that you can keep hanging on until things change," that feels like the main thing holding the world together when I listen to his albums through the '80s. There's not a lot of realistic hope and a lot of the socioeconomic realities reflected in the songs only got worse in the long run, but I'm not sure how else anyone can hang on without those relationships and human connections, not unless you want to drift into psychosis (which is pretty much what happens in Nebraska's darkest moments).

That reminds me, I actually thought Wages of Sin was an outtake from The River until I took a closer look at the liner notes. Granted, that's because Springsteen sequenced it with those songs rather than placing it later, but the fact that he put it there says something - like if you don't look at the date, it feels like the type of song that would lead to the darkest parts of Nebraska. But wherever "Wages of Sin" took him, that wasn't where he wanted to go for his next records. I have to check, but with regards to the records he actually released, I think Nebraska may have been the last time until The Ghost of Tom Joad (or maybe for the first verse in "Paradise" in The Rising?) where he stepped into a warped, dangerous mind. It was right for that album and what he wanted to say, but I imagine it didn't make sense to him to have that sort of nihilism in anything else he put out until much later.

This is such a great thought-experiment!

I've been thinking about what an album that used a lot of the bootlegs and unreleased outtakes would look like, and about your idea of following the sequence of BiTUSA. I'm imagining a sort of shadow version of BiTUSA - to be called Shut Out the Light, maybe - where the sequence is roughly the same thematically, but each track is darker and sadder than its counterpart on BitUSA. Starting with Shut out the Light/Drop on Down in place of Born in the USA/Cover Me, and going on from there.

Shut Out the Light
Drop on Down
Maybe the Nebraska demo version of Pink Cadillac in the Darlington County slot?
Child Bride (Nebraska version of Workin' on the Highway)
Richfield Whistle, maybe? (this is the part where I get lost bc you can't get sadder than Downbound Train)

This Hard Land (even shares some lyrics with the version of No Surrender that Springsteen plays in concerts in '84)
Fugitive's Dream (Not really sure what to put in the Bobby Jean slot, but in the interest of keeping the homoeroticism quotient up to the level of BitUSA, lets go with this one)
Don't Back Down
Rockaway the Days
Janey Don't You Lose Heart (We don't have any relationships in this album as permanent as the one in "My Hometown," so we'll end on a song that offers a little bit of hope or at least empathy.)

So far I don't have counterparts for I'm on Fire or Glory Days, so it's a shorter album, and I feel like the second side sort of trails off; it needs something big toward the end to balance it. I was trying to avoid having songs on here that are actually on BitUSA, but you could potentially have the Nebraska demo versions of Downbound Train and I'm on Fire in their original slots on the first side, and then end the album with Richfield Whistle.

This is amazing, I never heard a few of these before until I jumped on to YouTube - remember the dark days when you read about a bootleg and had to imagine what it sounded like? It's cool how that sequence comes together because it really smooths out the transition between Nebraska and Born in the USA.

The demo of "Pink Cadillac" is amazing, like a lost Sun outtake from Elvis. "Child Bride" I did know, that is a great pick. Pretty amazing how some of these circulate in great quality.

I can't think of anything that would be a counterpart for "Glory Days" - is it Springsteen's first song that deals directly with aging? I don't think he would dive back into that until later. (I also love how he would play that up on the BiTUSA tour whenever they did "Glory Days" - IIRC there's one show where he reads off the passing years and screams "I don't want to die!" Hilariously uncomfortable.)

This was the version of "Don't Back Down" I was thinking of, by the way - there are a few of them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAEphLhWX0w

I've always wondered if "Glory Days" was influenced by Paul Simon's "Slip Slidin' Away." But no one ever seems to mention Simon as an influence on Bruce - which is weird to me, actually, because "America" has such a proto-Springsteen feel.

That comic riff of his on aging is why I like those concert performances of Glory Days much better than the album version. The song itself always feels to me like a rare instance of Springsteen punching down, despite the "I hope when I get old" ending, so I like that he shifts the focus away from peaking in high school - something he can't really empathize with - and onto his own insecurities about getting older. (Also I listened to it the morning of my 36th birthday, and hearing Bruce wrestling with the word "thirty-six" and then giving up and yelling, "BIG MAN! WE'RE ADULTS!" made me feel much better about the day.)

"Child Bride" is legit one of my favorite Springsteen songs; I can't believe it's still unreleased.

Goddamn the No Nukes 1979 shows are fucking killer. I had no idea!

I mean, i thought the Agora Cleveland show was my favorite of all time & now we are listening to No Nukes tonight & I have to admit I clearly know shit about fuck because my god

holyyyy fuck

What the! This is coming out on remastered video!?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwdZAwB3D9w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-YaKwrzaS0

Right!?!

will watch

Love what Tom Petty said about those shows. Before he went onstage, someone said, “Now Tom, it might sound like people are booing, but they’re actually saying ‘Brooooce!’” Petty said, “Well…what’s the difference?”

lol

xpost it's pretty wild to consider, but just about every springsteen show from the '70s through the BitUSA tour is pretty awesome. just different to degrees.