Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

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.

The thing that knocks me out about this period is the energy level, it’s like they start at a 10 and end on a 15! they must fully collapse after each show, it’s so crazy

Honestly, I got many other same vibes during the reunion shows. It would feel like it's hitting peak, then you realize you're only 90 minutes, halfway, and how many must play songs he's going to get around to.

yeah, i mean they still have a crazy energy level even now, but those late 70’s show to me are like a whole different level

hook them up to a generator & they could power a small midwest town!

I totally agree. My take in 1999 was basically "this is incredible ... and 20 years past his peak."

Mr Veg got the 2-night SF Winterland shows from 1978… so good. Another reason love the 78-79 shows are that almost every song in the setlist is a favorite lol

Highlight: night 2 - “The Fever”
Such a great rare track, I love when it shows up in his setlists because the whole song is such a mood. I read that until the 78 darkness tour they hadnt played fever for like 5 years or something

from wiki:

“RADIO INTERVIEW ED SCIAKY August 19, 1978, WIOQ-FM (Philadelphia) Ed Sciaky: Wait a minute—you didn't do “Fever” for about five years. Bruce Springsteen: It was just a surprise, you know. We'd done it two or three times and the tape had gotten out through someone's help whose name I won't mention. So we did it a few times and we had to do it here. I used to have kids run up onstage and yell in my ear, “BRUCE! ‘FEVER’!” That was always a request. Ed Sciaky: You used to say you didn’t like the song, and a lot of people think it’s one of your best. Bruce Springsteen: I don’t know. It was just something that I wrote so long ago. It was just an older song and never a real favorite of mine. I liked it. I always liked it. But just for myself. I liked Southside Johnny’s version—I liked what he did with it a lot. But we wanted to have something extra, so we pulled it out.”

and Candy’s Room from night 2 sounds fucking amazing

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

Just got a vintage half-speed master Darkness on vinyl for $5!

wrote another piece for the E Street Shuffle blog
https://estreetshuffle.com/index.php/2021/11/27/two-faces-rockaway-the-days/

Looking fwd, esp. since i just now read the first one!
One of the striking quotes (after Tennyson's"baths of the western stars," for inst)
East to the desert where the charros, they still ride and rope
Our American brothers cross the wire and bring the old ways with them. Scary bit in there, I think, and another reminder, as is your whole take, that the song can go where the narrator and maybe writer can't see, maybe doesn't want to see, if he "takes the optimistic view," and maybe also the writer wishes, without saying it out loud to himself, that his own life was as simple as the guy's in the song, simple and upholstered/filtered just enough, so far (R. Crumb character: "Is this a system?" Sure it is!)

Wow. Study of verses/ and x chorus otm---wonder if he'd been thinking about the "Born In The USA/"Glory Days" syndrome, where dark verses keep getting upstaged by bright choruses, too easy to take out of context, esp. the former, getting played at Republican ralltess?

(Tyler and I were talking about that phenomenon on the The Band thread, re some peoples' takes on "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.")

I wonder! It was really hard to do the recap part of that one because of the sheer amount of flat exposition in the verses; so much of it is "well this happened, then this happened, then this happened."

He's definitely trying something different with narration, a lot like "Shut out the Light," which also has that third-person verse, first-person chorus thing going on. Though in "Shut Out the Light" the chorus and verses are pretty clearly about the same person; it doesn't have the ambiguity there is here.

Entirely possible I'm reading too much into it and "Rockaway the Days" is closer to "Shut Out the Light" than it is to "Wreck on the Highway."

In contrast to the selections whose currents, plot-twists, depths are so well explored by Lily Dale, here's one that plays itself in my head pretty often, something simpler, but distinctive (my comments to a bonus track for personal Top 50, posted in the series of such lists on RockCritics.com):
Bruce Springsteen labored for years on Born To Run, as the title became ironic, but a lot of it worked, to varying degrees–most of all, for me, in “Meeting Across The River,” which still sounds like a magical one-off: a seemingly basic scenario, with no purple passages, as written, sung, and played. Roy Bittan’s keys get room to breathe, Richard Davis’s bass slips through shadows, as it did on Astral Weeks, and Randy Brecker, having left his own purple passages far behind in Blood Sweat & Tears and The Brecker Brothers Band, leans his trumpet waaay out of
Cherry’s nightside window and fire escape (I don’t think she’s home).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6OAtvjSf1Y

(PS: this may be the only instance of Springsteen having a solo complete the song---a trumpet solo, of all things---rather than full E Street and maybe more, as setting for words and journeyman vocal.)(Or same function for small group/unaccompanied guitar)

Lily Dale, anybody: check w RockCritics.com editor to see if he's still taking lists; they're still showing up on there for sure---comments and links aren't required---scottmichaelwoods at gmail dot com (at least get on the mailing list, for some fun reading)

Wrote one about "Cynthia"
https://estreetshuffle.com/index.php/2021/12/06/two-faces-cynthia/

Completely unintentionally posted on the anniversary of Roy Orbison's death, which I hope doesn't come across as mean-spirited.

Greg Tate on Bruce Springsteen

Where are all my Negroes at? Why aren’t there more Black people out here screaming Bruuuuce like Dolly Earshatterer to the rear of my right lobe? Could it possibly be because The Boss’s ascendancy roughly coincided with the landing of The Mothership and the rise of another hellified Jersey band by the name of Parliament-Funkadelic? But Springsteen? Man, I didn’t know, fool that I sometimes be. Wasn’t like folk hadn’t tried to tell a brother— Nelson George proclaiming Bruuuce The Hardest Working Man Since James Brown and whatnot, moreso than The Artist even.

But to finally see Springsteen live is to become some kind of believer. First, because he’s truly unruly and got That Thang, which one might roughly translate as the ability to enchant, delight, and power-fuck a crowd for two and a half hours as he did at the Meadowlands Saturday night. Second, because he’s not taking indifference for an answer and you’d have to be dead to not respond to his shock tactics. From his humble and introspective MTV/VH1 sound bites you wouldn’t necessarily know Springsteen was such a stage hogg, dogg. A shameless ham with an ego the size of Bill Gates’s money tree who lives to leave an already hysterical crowd limp or speaking in tongues.

Like David Bowie is the last rock star, guardian of that music’s aristocratic high castle, Springsteen is the last real rock and roller, final embodiment of that working-class music hero whose name and fame got built from hometown roots on up. Twenty-five years beyond superstardom Bowie and Springsteen still impress because they both still take it to the stage like they’re hungry for your love. To see Springsteen in a Jersey arena is to see Springsteen under a revival tent. It’s in fact where his blue-collar creed connects up with his all-American Confidence Man Carny Barker Televangelist shtick. So that you get band introductions being delivered as prophecy (“And the gypsy woman said you need looooove in your life! Introducing Patty Scialfa, ladies and gentlemen! And she said you need rhythm! Max Weinberg!”) and the man’s patented grandstanding on top of Roy Bittan’s grand piano being made into a forum for crowd-incitement that would give Robert Duvall’s Apostle a run for his money, or maybe even the Muhammad Ali of What’s-My-Name fame. Springsteen’s rapport with his folks staggers not only for the degree of adulation present, but for his ability to move them from vulgarity to deep thought in a heartbeat.

I do not think that the existence of Parliament-Funkadelic meant that you couldn't or shouldn't like Bruce Springsteen. Plenty of people like more than one band. At one point I suspect I might even have liked three (3) different bands

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8lRKCw2_Pk

xpost you are missing the point slightly
also dude just passed away & it’s a great piece!

"Since I accepted my editor’s offer of a fool’s mission to write about some cat I’d barely paid attention to in 30 years of record buying, all I can offer by way of apology is that I’m now catching up on my homework."

Hah, nice!

Maybe Jon Bon Jovi finally got through to him, because Bruce has apparently allowed himself to go grey!

https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/263409066_270088391825896_7104403400672515086_n.jpg?_nc_cat=103&ccb=1-5&_nc_sid=8bfeb9&_nc_ohc=UxINKshyOhcAX96Wa4b&_nc_ht=scontent-ort2-1.xx&oh=9a6cde27305882491015d99496cf744a&oe=61B78CD0

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/dec/16/bruce-springsteen-sells-entire-back-catalogue-of-music-to-sony-for-500m-report

Meanwhile, Bruce appeared at a Steve Earle benefit show the other night for his first electric (mini) set since I think 2016 (SNL aside), and he sounded good!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lyR_VpBTWA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOGg6IluugY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jVltfkL-xo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evOJmE2OCXM

Jesus I was not prepared for how big mad online people were going to get for Springsteen's catalog sale. Jesus some people are furious that he's not like, giving the songs away for free because he's already too rich?

I guess people are just mad that Bruce managed a (relatively) rare feat in the music biz, being able to hold onto the rights for an impressively large and fruitful catalog long enough to cash out on his hard work. Good for him, tbh, I mean isn't that what every songwriter would want to do?

Yeah, especially since Bruce is otherwise such a relative purist. No endorsements, not even a Bruce-model Tele, only that one (shitty) commercial that got pulled so fast it almost makes me think it was a stunt, doesn't typically license songs for TV or movies, certainly usually not for commercials, Jeep-ad exception aside, keeps concert ticket prices modest (by major artist standards). Probably better to sell the rights now and pocket the money than die and let people squabble (and sell/license your shit, anyway).

Let him sell his music and tax the shit out of it is the actual answer here imo. Anyway yeah, it's a dumb windmill to joust with. You're not going to persuade Bruce fans to be mad at him for being rich, that ship has long sailed.

He wrote actual songs about that ship sailing iirc.

Someday we'll look back on this and it will all seem funny.

Your papa says he knows that I'm a filthy capitalist

Everybody sells out
Baby that's a fact

Adam raised a bitcoin