It was probably inevitable that I should come to grips with the Springsteen catalogue. It looms large in my legend. So let me explain how it all began, almost fifty years ago.
It would have been in the early spring of 1974. I was perusing stacks of second hand records at some downtown store whose name I can no longer recall. I came across a copy of Springsteen's second album. It bore the ungainly title of The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle and I could have it for $3.98. I'd never even set my eyes on a copy before, despite the fact that I was actually working in a record store myself at the time. But I had heard of it. On the basis of a remembered review in a recent issue of Rolling Stone that made it sound like the kind of thing I'd go for - I put my money down. I spent the evening hanging out with my friend Mike, at his house. We definitely played the album. I don't think we were listening all that closely, although the second track - "4th of July, Asbury Park" - got my attention.
I got home around midnight, put on my headphones, and cued up side two. Twenty-five minutes later, I put it on again. Then I played the first side. Then I played the second side again. And the first side again. This went on until about five in the morning. I could not fucking believe what I was hearing. It was... I don't know what it was. Except that it was what I had always wanted music to be. It was the music I wanted to make, the music I wanted to hear. It had everything, it did everything. The songwriting was astonishing - in what was, and remains, a verse-chorus world, with the occasional middle eight thrown in for variety - these songs could veer off in any crazy direction at any moment, without ever losing their own internal logic, without ever losing the listener. The band was with the artist every mad step of the way, providing whatever was needed - soulful R&B, Latin street rhythms, powerhouse rock'n'roll. Whatever. They could handle it. There was no lyric sheet - all I had to look at was the photo on the back cover of the artist, a wiry little guy with a wispy beard, and his five bandmates. There were three long-haired white guys and two black guys - his trim, bespectacled piano player and a bulky, barefoot fellow who played the saxophone.
But it was the songs that had me enraptured. They were so wonderful. The four songs on the first side were all really good, all lots of fun (yes, I even liked "Wild Billy's Circus Story.") But it was the three extended pieces on side two that absolutely blew my little mind. I had never heard anything like this before. It was almost cinematic - these pieces weren't long because the players were all going to jam, or because we're classically trained and we think we're writing a concerto. They were long because they had sweeping narratives contained within, stories with scope and grandeur. The doomed lovers of "Incident on 57th Street," which is basically West Side Story retold as a rock song - was it actually possible to squeeze that much romance, that much pathos, into a rock'n'roll song? Evidently it was. Which was in turn followed by the ultimate Springsteen shaggy-dog story, the irrepressible, irresistible, mythic autobiography of "Rosalita"
And finally, the moody closer "New York City Serenade," another twist on the eternal theme of a young man coming to grips with the big, cold city, with Davey Sancious' remarkable piano introduction and words one could take to heart forever:
I was so young. Obviously. But so was the artist. He was (and is) just four years and a few months older than me. You can probably only feel that way about the world, and about life, for a little while, for a brief moment. But this was that moment, for me and for him. It connected. It still does.
And no one I knew had heard of him. (Well, outside his Jersey base, the northeastern college towns, and a couple of scattered pockets of support elsewhere, like Phoenix, no one anywhere had heard of him.) It became my job, my sacred obligation, to tell everyone. So I did. I had to convert the world to this new gospel, and I could only do it one person at a time. I told all my friends. I told everyone I knew. I told all the total strangers who came into the record stores where I worked. And then I told them again. And again. I must have been so tiresome. But my work was not in vain. I was slowly making converts. I actually remember those moments. It was never on the first listening, or the second, but a moment would eventually come. I could almost see the lights come on in a person's eyes, as understanding dawned, as they murmured something like "Holy shit. This is really good."
This work went on. And on. And on. I did it faithfully, without complaint for roughly a year and a half. I'm not kidding. Did I get tired of talking about that bloody record? I did not. But finally, in August 1975, Columbia released Born To Run. The whole damn world sat up and took notice, and at last, at long last, my work was done.
There are plenty of other artists I love, many I love and admire more than Springsteen. I find new ones to this day. I believe the Beatles stand alone without peer as the greatest artists of the rock era. I know Bob Dylan to be my personal touchstone. I believe the National have made more great albums than Springsteen, that Jason Isbell is a more dependable quality songwriter. I like Taylor Swift's recent work more than anything Springsteen has done in the last thirty years.
But to everyone who knew me in the 1970s, I will always be the Springsteen guy. Fair enough. I can live with that. As personal discoveries go... admit it, that one's pretty damn great. I was seriously ahead of the curve that night.
Springsteen has released twenty proper studio albums in his fifty years as a recording artist, and a pair of EPs. He has from the beginning taken the work of recording as seriously as possible. He's not remotely like Bob Dylan or Neil Young, artists who are first and foremost songwriters who perform their songs on stage. For them recording is mostly a necessary evil required to get these songs down in a more permanent form, an irritating and frustrating process which they prefer to get over with as quickly as possible. Springsteen has always approached recording as a thing itself, a separate form of his art. Among other things, it made him into one of the most notorious and exacting studio perfectionists the world has seen. This is a man capable of spending weeks - literally, weeks - in search of the perfect snare drum sound.
Springsteen brings a little more to the process than the dedication to basic quality control, the respect for the craft of recording, that is characteristic of artists like Tom Petty or Richard Thompson. Springsteen has almost always thought in terms of albums - not necessarily as concepts - but as things with some kind of artistic unity. They're not simple collections of the latest songs he has at hand. Every record has its own purpose and its own character. If a song didn't fit his vision for the particular album he was working on at the moment, it stayed in the vault, no matter how good it might be. He came up in the 1970s, and naturally he thinks of albums in terms of their vinyl configurations. It should run about 45 minutes or so. It will have two sides, each of which listeners will typically approach as a self-contained unit in itself. Which means each album has what Springsteen and his manager Jon Landau would call "four corners." These are the first and last tracks on each side, which simply by their placement assume a greater significance in their part of the whole. Two of his albums - The River and The Rising - should probably be understood as double albums, although it was possible to fit all of The Rising onto a single CD.
Springsteen has been an extremely prolific songwriter, someone who regularly writes and records many more songs than he chooses to put on any of his records. As so many of those unreleased songs appeared regularly in his live performances, there had always been a demand from his fanbase for him to release some of this material. Springsteen eventually decided to do so. In 1998 he put out Tracks, which collected no less than 66 unreleased studio recordings. Since then, he has released what could be considered alternate versions of Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River - both collections are filled with remarkable songs that most artists would die for - but if they had been released at the time of recording, Darkness would have been a three disc set and The River would have run to at least four.
And then there are the live recordings. So much of the Springsteen mythos is based on his reputation as a live performer. Even when he was a struggling nobody, in danger of losing his recording contract, his live shows were already legendary. And with reason. He is simply one of the greatest stage performers who has ever lived. This is one of the least controversial opinions one can have in this world. It's something that's as obvious as a mountain, as irrefutable as gravity, as undeniable as the weather. Even people who aren't part of the fanbase, even people who don't much care for his work, find themselves falling under the spell he casts from a stage.
It's worth exploring a little how this happens. Obviously, Springsteen is very, very good at what he does. He's a great showman, and he doesn't just play his songs. He gives you a show. He and his his bandmates act out hammy, ridiculous little skits. He tells stories, stories that can be deathly serious or wildly funny. Springsteen is easily the greatest raconteur rock music has produced, so gifted that he would eventually put together an acclaimed Broadway show that's essentially just him telling stories for two hours, with some songs thrown in. But these things, as much fun as they are, are not what have made his shows legendary. It's not even the music. His band is good, extremely well-rehearsed, as tight a unit one could ask for, all competent players. But lots and lots of people are just as good at what they do, and once Davey Sancious went his own way the E Street Band didn't have an instrumental virtuoso until Nils Lofgren came on board - as the second guitarist - in 1984. And Springsteen's not a great singer. He knows this - he describes his singing as "serviceable" in his autobiography. It's good enough to get the job done. But that's all. Something else is happening.
I think we have to start with his utter commitment, to the moment, to what has brought everyone together, in this place and at this time. Every show is approached with the idea that these could be our last three hours on planet earth. We need to make them count. We need to make them the best three hours we ever spent on planet earth. But how can that be? It's only a rock'n'roll show.
Wait a minute. Only a rock'n'roll show? No way. Not a chance. Get thee behind me, Satan. The most basic truth of the universe, the fundamental idea that underlines Springsteen's work, that he believes in the same way that Christians believe in Jesus, is that rock'n'roll music can make your life worth living.
It can change your life.
It can save your life.
It did for him.
That's the gospel, brothers and sisters. That's the good news that he's come to share with everyone gathered together in this place and at this time. It is impossibly romantic, utterly corny, thoroughly ridiculous - and Springsteen knows perfectly well how romantic and corny and ridiculous it all is. He laughs at it himself. But he truly doesn't care how silly it might be. He believes it anyway, with every fiber of his being, and he's going to do everything in his considerable powers to make you believe as well. He has come to create something transcendent. And he's very, very good at what he does.
And why the hell not? This is the same spirit that has underlined every great faith that human beings have ever shared. Faith always exists in spite of the evidence, in spite of reason, in spite of common sense. And at the church of rock'n'roll - well, it turns out that believing in something like this, even if only for three hours, really is just about as much fun as one can have on planet earth. I've been there and I can bear witness. Consider this my testimony.
Needless to say, no recording could quite capture that, although there was demand from his fanbase for a live record almost from the beginning, a demand Springsteen chose not to meet for the longest time. Even during that two year period when he was legally barred from recording, he resisted the temptation to fill the gap with a live record. (In the meantime, his fans collected and traded and hoarded bootlegs - after all, no two shows were ever the same. The set list always changed from one night to the next, the shaggy dog stories grew stranger and funnier - and surely, no artist has ever made a bigger deal out of the simple act of introducing the members of the band.)
Finally, after Born in the USA had sold fifteen million copies, spawned half a dozen hit singles, and made the artist one of the biggest performers on the planet, he released Live: 1975-85. This was a three and a half hour anthology of live performances, and good as it was, it simply didn't capture the flavour of a Springsteen show. Even if it was about as long as one. It was, after all, drawn from a decade of performances, with different iterations of his band. All of the live recordings he has released since, another six through Columbia, and many, many more through his website have consisted of specific shows. Springsteen has soundboard recordings of almost every show he's done since 1977. He regularly has mixes done of the best ones so they can be made available as downloads. He has made 68 shows available for download covering the years 1975 through 2013. He has clearly tried to make sure that every tour is represented, any one-off appearance of note, any show already famous among his fanbase (and probably bootlegged to death already.) Since then, however, it seems that he has decided to make every show he does available for download in the event that you were there and would like a souvenir. This has added another 119 live albums you can own if you like, for a total of 7 live albums from Columbia and 187 live albums from the artist. There are doubtless fans out there who would like every one. Not me, folks. No way, no how. But I'm not going to tell you how many I do have.
He's an album artist. His singles have all been drawn from his albums. He would in time get into the habit of using the B sides to put out unreleased songs, so his fans tended to snap them up as well. But the B-sides would eventually find a more permanent home in one of the various collections from the vast store of unreleased material that he lets the world hear from time to time, like some alternate history. The road not taken. Here, we'll follow the road he chose to take.
20. Working on a Dream (January 2009)
Springsteen was excited over some songs left over from the Magic sessions, and the E Street Band was coming off the road, and in such fine form that he wanted to get back in the studio and record some more. He wrote a whole lot of new songs, they cut them fairly quickly, and this is what you get. The band was indeed in fine form. Unfortunately, it's the worst bunch of songs Springsteen has ever gathered on a single record. There are interesting ideas scattered all through the record that could have become better songs than they did. A few songs come close to being pretty good. They don't actually get there, though. And the cover is pretty bad, too.
19. High Hopes (January 2014)
What's all this? Three songs he'd previously released, but re-recorded here? A couple of covers? Half a dozen new songs scattered amongst them? It seems like a weird miscellany from an artist who had always been meticulous about album construction, like something the Rolling Stones might put out. But as always, it was planned that way. Springsteen had some songs he liked, but hadn't found a place for on his recent albums. So Springsteen and the E Street Band went into the studio and recorded those songs (the leftovers went on the American Beauty EP.) I don't think all that much of most of them, although I have a soft spot for "Frankie Fell In Love." Steve Van Zandt was absent most of the time, working on his television show - Tom Morello, from Rage Against the Machine, was taking his place. It was Morello who suggested the two covers. Morello had also recorded "The Ghost of Tom Joad" with his old band, and often performed it with Springsteen as an on-stage guest. That was one of the three previously released songs that Springsteen re-recorded for this album. Another was the title track, which came from the 1995 EP Blood Brothers.
The other song redone for the occasion was the chilling, haunting "American Skin (41 Shots)." In February 1999, four New York City police officers, in search of a serial rapist, stopped a 23 year old Ghanian immigrant named Amadou Diallo. When Diallo reached into his pocket to show them his wallet, the cops fired 41 shots at him. He didn't have a gun. He didn't have a knife. He was dead, with 19 bullets in him. Springsteen began performing this song on his tour the next summer. The NYPD called him a "dirtbag" and demanded a boycott of his shows. The mayor of New York asked him not to play the song when he came to town. Springsteen went into Madison Square Garden and played it for everybody. Then he made sure the whole world heard it on the Live in New York television special and record. Ten years before Trayvon Martin, twenty years before George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Bruce Springsteen was singing
Man, I was proud to be a fan.
18. Western Stars (June 2019)
Since Born in the USA, with which Springsteen fully realized every ambition of stardom he may have ever entertained, he has felt free to simply pursue his muse into whatever weird corner it led him. Whether it suited his gifts or not. This is something of a genre exercise, as close to a country album as this artist has ever done. It doesn't work for the most part, because country music doesn't suit his gifts. He doesn't have the melodies. Springsteen is a great rock songwriter - but he's not like Paul McCartney or Brian Wilson. He doesn't automatically come up with melodies that sound as if they've been lodged in the human cortex forever and the composer merely found them. (And he's not like Leonard Cohen either, whose considerable melodic gifts always catch you completely unaware because they're not what you expect from that artist.) This state of affairs is exacerbated by the approach Springsteen typically takes when he's singing quieter material - he habitually adopts an almost conversational, half-sung half-spoken approach, that actually undermines whatever melody he has to work with. But hey - if the whole exercise - the songwriting, the vocal approach, the album itself - was simply a way, and an excuse, to come up with a song as great as "Moonlight Motel" maybe it was all worth it.
17. We Shall Overcome - the Seeger Sessions (April 2006)
Another left turn, a collection of songs closely associated with if not written by American folk icon Pete Seeger. Springsteen came to American folk music somewhat late in his musical life, probably under the influence of his long-time friend and manager Jon Landau. Their idea of American folk music is not mine - I think they vastly overrate the importance of the Woody Guthrie-Pete Seeger branch, and overlook the weird old American traditional music that Bob Dylan has spent the last fifty years excavating (Dylan was a Guthrie acolyte when he was very young, but he got over it in a hurry.) This is still a fun record. These are all good songs, and Springsteen throws an enormous change-up in his approach to recording them. He doesn't approach them like an old-fashioned folksinger, alone with his guitar. Instead, he assembled the biggest band anyone had ever seen - guitars, banjos, fiddles, keyboards, lots and lots of horn players - and they bashed out the record in less than a week, everyone banging their acoustics as loud as they could and singing at the top of their lungs. It was probably much more fun to make than it is to hear, but that's all right.
16. Human Touch (March 1992)
This was one of the two albums Springsteen released on the same day, and this was the one he had invested by far the most time and energy into making. In its moment, I liked it quite a bit more than most Springsteen fans, but I've since reconsidered. It was always a record that had trouble finding its way in a hostile world. For one thing, it was very much out of step with the sounds of the day, which were coming from Seattle. And it was one thing for Springsteen to record without the E Street Band - by now, he had gone so far as to dismiss the band entirely, leave New Jersey behind, and move across the country to Los Angeles. His fans weren't quite sure what to make of that. He'd divorced his first wife, married his backup singer, and was starting a family. And then he'd made this slick, polished piece of product with a bunch of session musicians. What was going on? Well, as is his habit, he was shaking things up and trying something new. It hasn't worn very well. The songs aren't happening, for the most part. "Roll of the Dice" came to life on stage, as did the darkly funny "57 Channels" and the title track was a fairly impressive ballad. The best song, easily, was the first decent country song he ever wrote, although Springsteen didn't seem to realize that when he recorded it. But I promise you this - Willie Nelson was born to sing "I Wish I Were Blind." Someone needs to tell Willie while there's still time.
15. Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. (January 1973)
Springsteen was brought to Columbia by none other than John Hammond himself, the legendary record producer and talent scout who had signed Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan to the label when they were barely out of their teens (and who in his own youth had brought Benny Goodman and Billie Holiday to the label. There was a reason John Hammond was an industry legend.) Columbia saw their newest artist as a singer-songwriter - like everyone else, they were looking for the new Bob Dylan. Springsteen would one day remark "I don't know why, the original was 30 years old!" But Springsteen, John Prine, Elliott Murphy were just some of the many young artists being squeezed into that particular pigeon-hole. Springsteen, however, always saw himself as a guy with a band. He didn't actually have a band at this point, but he still managed to get many of his Jersey shore chums on the record. It's a wildly uneven album - the singer-songwriter cuts, typically, are soggy and barely listenable. But on about half of it, especially on the second side, you can hear E Street itself beginning to wake. Springsteen has always seemed extremely fond of the first two tracks on the first side. He still performs them fairly regularly. He would one day confess that he wrote both with a rhyming dictionary at his side - trust me, you could already tell - and quite often the energy and exuberance is simply too much, too over the top. But the makings of a contender were quite clearly present.
14. Wrecking Ball (March 2012)
That is one hideous album cover. This was another attempt to broaden his musical horizons, recorded with almost none of the E Street band involved. But it's not a quiet record, there's nothing remotely laid back about this music whatsoever. It's some of the angriest music he's made in his life - the songs simply rage about the state of contemporary America with a particular focus on economic injustice. He seems especially interested in making noisy, Pogues-like Irish folk music - but he also tries to incorporate a bit of hip-hop, country, gospel, and rockabilly into the stew. One admires the ambition and the open-mindedness that went into the enterprise. One also wishes it had all worked just a little better. The tracks that work best are still the ones closest to his usual wheelhouse - the furious rocking opener "We Take Care of Our Own," the classic Bruce anthem that is "Land of Hope and Dreams," and especially the wonderful title track. It was written to mark the demolition of Giants Stadium, in the Jersey Meadowlands. Which it does, but it sounds even more like an oath of defiance as a rock'n'roll lifer moves into old age, vowing to rage against the dying of the light.
13. The Ghost of Tom Joad (November 1995)
This was widely seen as the son of Nebraska when it came out. The difference is that this time, it didn't happen by accident. Springsteen had made a deliberate choice to make a record of quiet acoustic songs. The title track invokes The Grapes of Wrath - the closing verse actually quotes from Tom's famous speech - and more than any other record he had made to this point, the songs were about the people left behind by the American dream. The problem, as usual, is that the diffidence in the way he sings this type of music - and a certain sameness in their musical settings - makes it difficult for the individual songs to stand on their own. But the best ones are truly remarkable - the Vietnamese refugee of "Galveston Bay," the doomed Mexican brothers of "Sinaloa Cowboys," and especially the bitter and betrayed union man of "Youngstown"
12. Letter to You (October 2020)
Cut mostly live in the studio in four days, with the entire band playing together. After a year of performing almost entirely on his own, doing his Broadway show, it sounds as if Springsteen badly wanted to plug in with the band and just rock his brains out. Well, there's nothing wrong with that. The initial spur for this project was the death of George Theiss, one of his old musical comrades from the Jersey shore back in the day. The world at large had never heard of him, but he meant a lot to Springsteen, who had just turned seventy and seen two of his own longtime bandmates pass on in recent years. His mind is on what it means to be in a band, to give your life to this weird project, and the ghosts one leaves behind. Three of the songs come from deep, deep in the vault - from a time before he'd made even his debut album. I think they're among the strongest pieces on the record, something which doesn't speak too well for the songs he's writing now. I think some of the lyrics needed a lot more work. It was recorded at speed, and I suspect it was written at speed as well. But you know what? After all these years, the E Street Band in full flight is still something to behold. So this generally sounds pretty great while it's playing, and as always one wonders how he could sit on tunes like "If I Was the Priest" and "Song for Orphans" for half a century without letting the world hear them.
11. Lucky Town (March 1992)
We've already noted how weird it was for Springsteen to release two completely new albums on the same day. He had actually worked much longer and harder on the other record, Human Touch - this one was written and recorded in a comparative hurry. He still did most of it on his own - drummer Gary Mallaber is the only other player on most of it. Springsteen wanted to put out all of his new music, but he thought the two records were different enough from one another to make any double album basically incoherent. Releasing two albums at once was his solution. This one is by far the rawer and looser of the two records. It's so lacking the usual polish that the songs themselves occasionally sound as if they're not quite finished. Even so, the best ones - "Leap of Faith," "Souls of the Departed," "Living Proof," and the title track - are much better than the ones on its companion record.
10. Devils and Dust (April 2005)
His third singer-songwriter album, and in some ways the best of the three because he's finally figured out that this type of record needs more musical variety than he'd been in the habit of providing. It's not the best of the three only because none of these songs can touch the best songs on Nebraska, but no shame there. Not too many songwriters can touch those songs. He still swallows up too many of his melodies in that old understated vocal approach, but he's got a lot of interesting stories to tell here and he tells them well.
9. Magic (September 2007)
An E Street Band record, and generally a high energy album of pretty hard rock music, mostly recorded by Springsteen and the core rhythm section of Weinberg, Tallent, and Bittan with the others coming in to overdub their parts as required. I especially like "Livin' In the Future" where Springsteen turns in an uncanny vocal simulation of his own long-time consigliere, Steve Van Zandt. This is not a happy record - the artist is in his mid-fifties and the world is going to hell all around him. It was written and recorded during the Bush years, with the Iraq war dragging on, and Springsteen's anger and frustration leaks out of every note. The title track is about the art of deceiving people. Even the album's most romantic moment, the gorgeous "Girls in Their Summer Clothes," is infused with melancholy. Springsteen had reached the age where some of his friends were beginning to disappear - dying young, perhaps, but dying nevertheless. It's something else for him to think about. "Terry's Song" is a eulogy for his long-time assistant Terry Magovern. And "Gypsy Biker," one of his greatest songs, turns out to be about a funeral. It's a very strong album - my one reservation is that too many of the songs tend to resemble one another, in mood, tempo, sonic approach. A touch more variety would have served it well.
8. Born in the USA (June 1984)
The album that elevated him from being merely a rock star to a significant figure in American culture. It sold and sold and sold - it's quite unbelievable how many units an enormous hit like this moved back in the day. It has now sold 30 million copies. I don't quite get it - I think it's pretty uneven. Of its 12 tracks, there are two I love with no reservations whatsoever, three I like quite a lot - and the rest will do. They're all right. I like the aching lament "My Hometown" and the little rockabilly ballad "I'm on Fire." I really like his irritated response to his manager nagging him to try to come up with a hit single - first he snapped "you want a single, you write the fuckin' thing." Then he went home and wrote "Dancing in the Dark."
The song everyone noticed, and rightly so, was the title track. The President of the United States noticed, and like many others, he assumed that it was a flag waving anthem. Springsteen was bewildered and appalled - the song of course was a furious screed about how America had drafted its young men, sent them off to war, and turned its back on them when they came home. It was also an astonishingly hard piece of rock music, almost out of control, teetering on the edge of chaos almost every second. The arrangement had been dreamed up on the spot in the studio. The recording is the second time the band had played the song. It had been written for Nebraska, and Springsteen had usually performed it by himself playing slide on his acoustic. It's a great song, and it's an awesome recording.
But I love "Bobby Jean" even more, with all my heart - a song about friendship and love that sounded an awful lot like his own farewell to Steve Van Zandt, heading out on his own and leaving Springsteen's band. It would be almost 20 years before he would make another record with the E Street Band.
7. Darkness on the Edge of Town (June 1978)
A lot of very serious people think this just might be his best record. I can't agree. And the tour that followed now occupies an almost mythic place in music history, a series of shows that remain legendary forty years after they took place. You bet your ass I agree with that. Darkness was his first album with what would become the most famous version of the E Street Band. (Drummer Max Weinberg and and pianist Roy Bittan had joined in time for Born to Run, but Steve Van Zandt wasn't yet in the band and organist Danny Federici was mysteriously missing.) A legal dispute with his first manager had prevented him from going into the studio for exactly two years. Everybody still had rent to pay, and they spent that period on the road. It was time well spent. Finally free to record again in mid-1977, Springsteen spent six months recording these ten songs and at least twenty more that he didn't see fit to place on the album. No one, not even the artist, could possibly believe that the album he released had the ten best songs from these sessions - but it had the ten songs that best suited the type of album he wanted to make at this moment, and the themes and subjects he wanted to sing about. Some of the other tracks went straight into his concert repertoire anyway, and some would appear two years later on The River. As a rule, all the fun rock'n'roll tunes stayed in the vault. They didn't fit this particular vision, and he gave some of them away to other people, who went out and made hits of them: Patti Smith ("Because the Night"), the Pointer Sisters ("Fire.")
To my mind, all this is a bit of a shame. But that's mostly because I find two of the tracks on Darkness - "Streets of Fire" and "Something in the Night" - to be utterly dismal, almost unlistenable, desperately overwrought. And "Factory" seems pretty pedestrian as well. In 2010, he would release The Promise, which gathered together the 20 songs that didn't make the original album or its successor. I suppose one can forgive him for leaving off the hits he gave away to other people - but the song "The Promise" fit the mood of the 1978 album like a glove and would have easily been one of the two best tracks on it. What do you do with a guy like this? The four corners provide the record's strongest moments, but I actually find there's something almost predictable about such famous rabble-rousing Springsteen chestnuts as "Badlands" and "Promised Land." That said, they work unbelievably well from the concert stage - the rabble gets roused - and so do the furious rockers "Adam Raised a Cain" and "Prove It All Night." And of course "Racing in the Streets" is simply one of his greatest songs ever.
6. Nebraska (September 1982)
Springsteen followed his first ever Top 10 hit with this bleak, stark collection of songs accompanied only by his own acoustic guitar. A strange career move indeed, but it happened by accident. He had grown enormously frustrated over the years by the immense amount of time it took him to make a record. He had spent six months on "Born to Run" - not on the album, on the song. (His buddy Steve Van Zandt would laugh at him, saying anything more than three hours was too much.) It was his own damn fault, of course. But he decided to blame it on the band. The problem, he said, was that they were too good. They made everything sound so great that Springsteen could no longer tell if the songs were any good. His solution was to get a little cassette four track, and make a bunch of demos. If he liked what he had, he could take them to the band. His cassette demo blew everyone away - Van Zandt immediately said "this is an album" - but Springsteen tried all this new material with the band. And none of the band arrangements worked nearly as well as the spooky demo on the cassette he was carrying in his pocket. So then he tried recording the songs the same way he'd recorded the demo, but in a proper studio. It just wasn't the same, it was lacking some essential flavour captured only on this rough cassette. So, despite a myriad of unprecedented technical issues that had to be solved, the cassette demo became his next album. It's frightening, dark night of the soul music with some truly remarkable songs - grim tales of criminals and killers, losers and ordinary people at the very end of their rope. The narrative of the remarkable "Highway Patrolman" would provide the basis for Sean Penn's first screenplay. And "State Trooper" is as downright eerie as any song I've ever heard.
5. Tunnel of Love (October 1987)
He didn't even attempt to follow Born in the USA and its triumphant tour with anything in a similar vein. He couldn't help himself. He went home with his new wife and suddenly began to question "just what I've got in this new thing I've found." That's from "Brilliant Disguise," one of the greatest songs (and the greatest video) he has ever made, an exploration in four minutes of the impossibility of ever truly knowing the other person, or oneself for that matter. Springsteen hadn't written much about relationships on his first six albums, but he was a newly married man, and for maybe the first time he was thinking seriously about love. How it worked, how it lasted, where it went. He wasn't nearly as sure about it as he thought he should be and these songs were the result. The E Street Band is mostly missing in action - everybody shows up, separately, on a track or two - but it's mostly Springsteen recording on his own at home. There's something very powerful about how full of hope these songs are, how much is invested in the hope that love will prevail - and yet there's this nagging doubt in the back of the mind, that just won't go away.
4. The River (October 1980)
This album is notable for finally providing Springsteen with his first top ten hit - the breezy "Hungry Heart" - but as always the process of making the record was fraught with hesitations, changes in direction and the usual indecision. By the end of 1979, a ten song album to be called The Ties That Bind was ready for mixing - and then Springsteen changed his mind. He went back into the studio to cut some more tunes. He was also worried that the single album he had prepared was a little too much fun and not enough pain. All told, he ended up recording 50 songs for the project, and releasing 20 of them on two pieces of vinyl. Three of the songs planned for the original record were dropped from the final released version. Three songs worked on during the Darkness sessions - "Sherry Darling," "Independence Day," and "Point Blank" - took their place. The latter two had been performance fixtures all along. Ten new songs were added and as it turned out, the new songs did not appreciably change the ratio of pain and pleasure. What it did provide was a larger canvas that gave all the songs some room to breathe. On a single, 10 track album, dumb mindless rockers like... well, like "I'm a Rocker" or "Cadillac Ranch" or "Ramrod" couldn't help but seem more significant than the trivial bits of enormous fun that was all they were ever intended to be. Here they balance out the dark intensity of tracks like "Point Blank" and "Stolen Car." It is almost a reflex with me to say of any double album that it should have been a single, and there are certainly tracks here I can happily live without. But there's a logic to this album being what it is.
3. The Rising (July 2002)
Widely seen as the artist's response to 9-11, which people were actually calling upon him to provide. People he met in the street. Which is strange when you think about it. What other pop musician would this happen to? In fact, some of the album had been written before the towers fell, but the record's most powerful songs are clearly in response to that grim morning. It was the first time he'd recorded an album with the E Street Band since Born in the USA, almost 20 years earlier. He had brought back the entire band that had recorded his most famous work, along with the two who had joined up along the way, guitarist Nils Lofgren and his wife Patti Scialfa, He also brought in Brendan O'Brien as producer - he would later say he needed someone who knew how to make a modern record, that he and his gang had lost the knack. It runs 73 minutes, like four sides of vinyl - I think it's a little long and would make much more sense if four songs were removed. But Springsteen clearly wanted to lighten the listener's load by including some tunes that were a little more cheerful and provided a bit of innocent fun. One can understand why.
As always, he is utterly fearless. "Paradise" actually seems an attempt to penetrate the mind of a suicide bomber, but without judgement or condemnation; "Worlds Apart" makes use of Middle Eastern rhythms and Qawwali singers. Many of the songs are focused on the people left behind, facing a world that has changed on them - "Lonesome Day," the heartbreaking "You're Missing." But the idea that clearly weighed on his mind, the thought he couldn't let go of, was of the people who ran into the devastation. It's the story he tells in the title track, of the fireman with the 60 pounds of gear on his back - the rising itself turns out, at the end of the song, to be souls leaving this world behind. And finally it's the prayer of a chorus he sends them in "Into the Fire," which may be the most emotionally powerful piece of music he's made in his life. Listening to it is shattering, in the same way King Lear is shattering, in the way only the very greatest art created by a human being can ever be.
2. The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle (November 1973)
Yeah, this is where I came in. I already talked about it at some length above. So I'll just add that I still love it every bit as much as I did the night I first listened to it. I love it as much as I love any music I've ever heard. It's his only record where I really like every single song. I know it's not his greatest record - it comes pretty damn close - but it will always be my favourite.
1. Born to Run (August 1975)
This was so different from his second album that it actually took me a few listens before submitting, entirely and forever, to its power. Two things had changed - Springsteen had made a conscious decision to streamline his songwriting, in particular to pare down the wild wordplay that could sometimes seem simply excessive, there only for its own sake. And the band had changed - drummer Vini Lopez had been fired and a few months later pianist Davey Sancious had left with the replacement drummer to form a jazz group. Sancious was a jazz virtuoso on the piano. His replacement, Roy Bittan, was a classic rock pianist, a little like Elton John but better. Lopez was a very busy drummer, with something of a jazzy feel himself - his replacement, Max Weinberg, was a straightforward rock'n'roll powerhouse. This all changed the sound of the band and the music quite a bit. It doesn't have quite the same range as the old outfit - but it's suddenly become a mighty rock'n'roll machine. With a batch of songs perfectly suited to what they could do.
I don't much care for the third track on each side - "Night" seems like what would later come to be Springsteen-by-numbers, and the best thing about "Meeting Across the River" is that it gives you a chance to catch your breath. Because the second track on that side is sheer dynamite, as Bittan's indelible piano phrases collide with a primal Bo Diddley beat and all hell breaks loose. Oh yes, she's the one. And the second track on the first side ("Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out?" What does that even mean? Springsteen himself doesn't know, but why worry?) begins the process of building his own mythology by telling a story about the band coming together. The other four songs, the first and last track on each side, the corners of the album, is music that delivers on every promise rock'n'roll ever made to anyone who loved it. The gorgeous melody, the romance of the invitation, the runaway momentum, of "Thunder Road." The haunted piano, the bitter lessons, that hide on the "Backstreets," where at night sometimes it seemed you could hear the whole damn city crying. The thundering title track, in which Springsteen throws an entire kitchen sink of classic rock tricks and devices into a timeless anthem about... taking your girl for a ride. And finally "Jungleland," the stunning closer, the opera out on the turnpike, with the greatest sax solo in the history of rock music (maybe not a whole lot of competition there, but it wouldn't matter if there was.) We're not going to argue this one, surely. This is the kind of music that makes life worth living. What else do you want?
"Holy shit. This is really good."
No comments:
Post a Comment