Springsteen

From September 2017 through this past week and weekend, Bryant Burnette (The Truth Inside the Lie, Where No Blog Has Gone Before, You Only Blog Twice) and I did an album by album overview of Bruce Springsteen's discography under the moniker of "Saturday (or Sunday) Night (or Morning) Springsteen." 

With the recent release of Western Stars I figured it was time to get a Table of Contents sort of post up for all our reviews and overviews. Bryant was kind enough to supply all new capsule reviews of each album for this here post. Click on the link of your choice for track-by-track reviews, screencaps galore, and other fine commentaries. 

"Like a river that don't know where it's flowing /

I went out for a ride and I just kept going."

Greetings from Asbury Park (1973)

This sounds today very much like what it is, i.e., a first album by a performer/band still trying to figure out their sound.  But it's better than most such albums, and you'd have to respect it if only for the career(s) it launched.  I think it's got a lot to enjoy in its own right, though; and if I try to astrally project myself back to 1973, I think I have to conclude that from a point of view of that "when," I've never quite heard anything like this album.

The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle (1973)

This is very much a sequel to the first album, but it's a sequel that deviates from its forerunner in sound, scope, and weight.  There are some absolutely killer tracks on here, and for my money, the entirety of Side B is gold.

Born to Run (1975)

I mean, what can you say?  It's not the sound of ALL rock and roll, but it's definitely THE sound of a certain kind of rock and roll, and in that regard it will probably never be topped.  Springsteen, wisely, rarely tried.

Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978)

(Bryan here: How many times does Bruce make this face in the 70s and 80s? A lot.)

Here's another sequel; this one to Born to Run, and in many ways most of what I said about E Street Shuffle also applies to this one.  Born to Run gets all the glory, but I think this is actually a better album by a marginal degree.  But who's checking margins on these two masterpieces?  (Us, I guess!)

The River (1980)

This two-album set reflects a desire in Springsteen to run away from what he'd created in the foregoing half a decade.  Not with any malice or refutation, but with an acknowledgment: he'd climbed THAT mountain already, and he didn't want to try to better what he'd done, so he'd do something a little different.  Which The River mostly is; not entirely (it's not like you wouldn't recognize this style of music if you bought the album when it came out in October of 1980), but in little ways.  It's a great set of tunes, and in the end, that's probably all that ought to matter.

Nebraska (1982)

Now THIS was a true divergence.  If you bought THIS album on release day (some two years after The River) without knowledge of what you were about to hear, you probably would be a bit rattled.  It's not to everyone's tastes, and it's not even to the tastes of all Springsteen fans.  However, I'd venture a guess: most Springsteen fans who don't dig this album are perhaps fans more of the E Street band than of Springsteen himself.  If so, their ambivalence might make sense: this is Springsteen's core, his essence.  And it's his best album.  With maybe one exception...

Born in the U.S.A. (1984)

Rarely has a better collection of tunes been grouped together on a two-sided piece of vinyl.  What's your list of the best rock albums ever recorded?  If it is missing Born in the U.S.A., it's invalid.  I'm not saying it's THE best; but I am saying it better be in the conversation, or it's not a conversation worth having.

(Bryan again: Hear him, hear him.)

Live 1975 - 1985 (1986)

I want to be clear about what I'm about to say.  No misunderstandings, please; I'm glad Bruce Springsteen is still alive.  BUT ... if fate had decreed that he had to die early, I'd say he ought to have died sometime in the early months of 1986, so that this box set could serve as a tombstone, epitaph, and canonization.  Because in a way, it kind of already does.  Again, I'M VERY GLAD it's not in a literal sense.  But if such a thing had had to happen, 1986 would have been the best possible time.  The only good thing to come from it would have been the reverence that would be bestowed upon those years and upon this set, which is so awesome that it almost makes you wish Bruce had gone out in a blaze of some sort of glory.

Tunnel of Love (1987)

And now for something completely different...  Well, look: it's not hard to see why some people might have turned their noses up at this in comparison to what had come before it.  Hell, I'm the guy who just had to dance around not saying that he wishes Springsteen had died at the top of his powers, and thus ascended into the realm of myth and legend.  No myth or legends are apt to come out of Tunnel of Love, which is indeed a completely different thing.  And yet, it's got enough excellence on it that it really does add to both the myths and the legends, provided you are willing to expand your notion of what that means.  Great album; not iconic, maybe, but great all the same.  And, I'd argue, the last great album he'd make for quite a while.

Human Touch and Lucky Town (1992)

A weird idea, putting out two albums on the same day.  Doing that kind of denies them their own identity, and you wonder why it wasn't just a double-disc release under a single title.  But the albums do have their own identity, provided you are interested enough to look for it.  In the case of Human Touch, it's ... uh ... well, I don't know, but I know it when I hear it.  If that's an anticlimactic pronouncement, well, it's an anticlimactic album.  It makes for interesting supplemental material to a biography, but the tunes themselves are mostly not great.  Some aren't even good.

Springsteen and his new band sound more engaged with the material on Lucky Town, but in all honesty, it's six versus half-a-dozen; the distinction doesn't make all that much difference.

MTV Plugged / In Concert (1992)

This is the sound of a guy trying to keep up his awesome live presence with a different cast of musicians.  And it's not a bad try!  You can tell that Springsteen is going to put on a great show no matter who is on stage with him; give him a microphone, a guitar, and a bunch of ferrets in tutus, and it would probably still be fun.  This is better than that.

Greatest Hits and more (1995)

A good sampling, and a few good "new" tracks, but there's no excuse for this not having been two discs.

The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995)

Springsteen delivers a book of mediocre poetry and does so in musical format.  I love a couple of the songs; the rest, I can't even remember.  It's not that they're bad; they're just so ephemeral that the wind takes them and they go someplace I can't mentally access them.

Tracks (1998) and 18 Tracks (1999):
Pt. 1 and Pt. 2

A hell of a collection of tunes, most of which will never be heard by a mass audience.  If somebody had been a bit more mercenary, there are probably three or four top-ten albums that could have been made from all this at the height of Springsteen's powers.  But hey, so be it; the hardcore fans know what's up.

Live from New York City (2001)

We've yet to see Jesus return on HBO, but we did see The E Street Band return, and if Jesus returning can be better than that then we've all really got something to look forward to. 

The Rising (2002)

A strong collection of tunes, done absolutely no justice by paltry ideas about what "Bruce Springsteen" should sound like.  Hey, look, I get it; it wasn't 1979 anymore.  Maybe trying to sound like it was wouldn't have worked.  But in trying to sound like 2002, they managed only to sound like 1979 trying to sound like 2002 Man, be what you ARE...!

The Essential Bruce Springsteen (2003)

(Bryan here: Kind of weird of Bruce to put out another retrospective so soon after Greatest Hits isn't it? This one is a better selection of songs for my money.)

Devils and Dust (2005)

Scroll up to my comments about The Ghost of Tom Joad.  Same for this one.

We Shall Overcome: The Pete Seeger Sessions (2006)

This is Bruce's only post-eighties album that actually satisfies me.  All the others have a few good songs at a minimum (and most have a few greats), so you'll never catch me wishing they didn't exist.  But whatever happened on this album didn't happen on the others; this is the sound of inspiration striking.

Hammersmith Odeon London '75 (2006)

(Bryan here: I guess I don't have any summary remarks from Bryant on this one, probably because he was really not feeling this one on our listenthrough. Click the link for all the grumpiness, as well as links galore to vintage E Street sound and mayhem.)

Live in Dublin (2007)

Springsteen live albums tend to be pretty glorious, don't they?  This one is no exception.

Magic (2007)

Boy am I glad we did this series of posts!  Thanks to that process, I now know that I can blame some of my dissatisfaction with new-millennium Springsteen albums on piss-poor production.  This album wasn't the first to have lousy sound, but it might be the lousiest-sounding of them all.  It sounds fake.  It sounds like a computer simulation of "Bruce Springsteen."

Working on a Dream (2009)

Not a whit better than Magic in the sound department.  Some decent songs, though.  

The Promise (2010)

How is it even possible that after Tracks, there can be this much great stuff still lying around?  Other bands must hear this and begin weeping.

Wrecking Ball (2012)

I don't LOVE this album, but it's a step up from the previous couple, and it sounds like Springsteen is still very much engaged with the process of writing songs.  He's trying new things, he's not simply copying and pasting his old style.  Still, I think he needs to find a producer who really understands his career; that hasn't happened in a good long while, even if they all swear they do.

High Hopes (2014)

This isn't great or anything, but it's fundamentally solid.  If Springsteen puts out albums "only" as good as this and Wrecking Ball for the rest of his career, then he's still doing alright in my book.  I'll be there for every bit of it I can get!

Chapter and Verse (2016)

 
I'd happily have listened to a full two-disc set of stuff from this era. And you just KNOW such a thing could have been done. (This one also reviews The Ties That Bind.) 

Springsteen on Broadway (2018)

Coming soon.

Western Stars (2019)

The best album of new material he'd put out since The Rising, if not Tunnel of Love. I think this is rather a triumph; maybe just a low-key one, but when you've had a career like the career this dude has had, that's saying something.

~

 

We Did Not Count Tomorrows, We Took What We Could and Ran: Chapter and Verse

Bryan: When I first contacted Bryant about the possibility of doing a listen-through of the Springsteen catalog, I'd only heard up through 2002 (The Rising) or so. (And of that, I only really knew the material up through 1987's Tunnel of Love.) My interest in Springsteen had run cold over the years, but sometime last year I listened to the Live '75 - '85 set. And I remembered just how huge a Bruce fan I was in those mid-80s years. The more I listened, the more memories came back (scattered throughout this series of posts), and the more I found to enjoy.

Tonight we get to the end - on a project that I wasn't even aware existed when this project first began, namely:

(2016)

Bryan: This was a companion album to Bruce's autobiography Born to Run. You can do that sort of thing when you're a musician - and you should! Criminally few do, though. So I'll just put that out there: if one day you're a famous enough musician to be releasing a memoir, put out something like Chapter and Verse alongside it.

Bryant: Here's my capsule review of Born To Run:

This is a great autobiography, and I'd say that for the most part I was much more captivated by the sections that weren't about the music. That's not to say that Bruce fails to be engaging when he's discussing his work and his career. He's got some great insights and anecdotes. But you can tell that to some extent, he feels like he said everything he had to say about most of the songs in the process of writing, recording, and performing them.

Where the book really sings is in its stories of life outside the recording studio, especially his early, pre-fame years. I don't mean the story of his first two albums (although yes, that, too); I mean the EARLY early years, like his childhood. He's got some great stories about growing up in a family of Italian immigrants, mixing with other groups and being spoiled by his grandmother and being electrified by seeing rock stars (first Elvis, later The Beatles) on television. Teaching himself to dance because he knew girls liked to dance, and even if you sucked at it it would earn you time with the opposite sex; smart kid, that Bruce Springsteen.

Perhaps the best chapter is one involving his pre-recording-contract band driving to California to play some gigs there and try to make a name for themselves. It's an amusing journey in some ways, and a harrowing one in other ways, and you'd watch the hell out of a movie that was made out of the story. Don't be shocked if somebody does that eventually. There are also a number of great stories involving Springsteen's father, whose presence looms very large for most of the book. So does the presence of Patti Scialfa, once she shows up; it's clear that this lady probably saved Bruce's life and career in more ways than one, on more than one occasion.

It's a great read, and if you're inclined to do so, you could do worse than check it out on Audible, where there's an unabridged version read by the author.

Bryan: Here's some remarks on the "new" tunes on Chapter and Verse.

"Baby I" (by the Castiles)

Bryan: 3/5 I love early glimpses of stuff like this. Reminds me in spirit of that first disc of the Beatles Anthology. Not particularly enjoyable listening but interesting - definitely would find room for these on some Ultimate Bruce Mix for ambience/ contrast / history.

Bryant: Oh, wow, this was an original?!? Shit, I just assumed it was a cover of some song I'd never heard. (I listened to these five songs cold and then looked them up to see what Wikipedia said about them.) As you say, this is nothing you'd get much enjoyment out of divorced from the context of what/who it is. But it sounds like credible stuff to my ears, and that says a lot. 2/5

"You Can't Judge a Book by the Cover" (by the Castiles)

Bryant: This isn't much of a performance, especially vocally, but ... damn, you can kind of hear the energy that made these guys a popular bar band. I can't swear to it, but I think I've heard the original version (written by Willie Dixon, performed by Bo Diddley). Or perhaps one of the many covers. This one isn't great, but it's far from the worst thing I've ever heard. 1.75/5 

Bryan: 2.5/5 Totally agree on the bar band ambience to this one.

"He's Guilty (The Judge Song)" (by Steel Mill)

Bryan: 3.25/5 This one's kinda cool. I dig it.

Bryant: I'd love to be able to listen to this with no knowledge of who it was. I probably wouldn't like it. But I do know who it is, and whether that's influencing my feelings or not, I kind of love this. You might can even scratch the "kind of." Having read the chapter of the autobiography in which they take that trip out to California, I now kind of want to see a movie made in which this song is the triumphant finale. 2.5/5

"The Ballad of Jesse James" (by the Bruce Springsteen Band)

Bryan: 3/5 Sheesh - this is a tough slog, but what strikes me is how much it sounds like a Black Crowes outtake. 

Bryant: This is very credible Southern-inspired rock. And while it does sound like Springsteen's writing to my ears, it also sounds NOTHING like what his first album would end up sounding like ... or any of the many that came after it. (You can say the same of "He's Guilty," too.) That's fascinating to me. It almost seems like we got our hands on that Ur-Kindle and peeked for a few minutes into the career of some other level's Springsteen. And hey, it ain't bad! 2.5/5 

"Henry Boy"

Bryan: 2/5 Kind of dig this one, too. Too many early Bruce songs have this kind of verse melody/ delivery, though. But that's the challenge of this unreleased stuff, since he cannibalized/ casserole'd it for all the stuff that made it onto albums over the years. 

Bryant: I mean, this is just an early version of "Rosalita," isn't it? (I say "just," but no diminishment is intended.) And I hear some echoes -- pre-echoes, perhaps -- of "Blinded by the Light" as well. I guess that's (as you intimate) just kind of what Bruce sounded like circa spring 1972. I'm okay with that. 2/5

~

Bryan: Total 13.75 Avg. 2.75 I'm happy to have this collection of home movies.

Bryant: Total 10.75, average 2.15  I'd happily have listened to a full two-disc set of stuff from this era. And you just KNOW such a thing could have been done.

Bryan: Absolutely. And probably still will be, thankfully. I suspect we've by no means heard the last from the Springsteen Archives. And speaking of, before we do the Final Rankings, Bryant was kind enough to write up these thoughts on:

(2015)

Bryan: Take it away, sir!

Bryant: Okay, so with this set, discs 1 and 2 are just The River. Disc 3 is The Ties That Bind, an album (you already know this, but just so you know what the disc itself represents) that Springsteen almost released but didn't. Some of it made its way onto The River, some of it did not. Discs 4 and 5 are Blu-rays, and Disc 6 is a mess of outtakes, some of which are familiar, some of which are not. I’m going to only score the audio discs, and I’m going to split those up, since one of them is an assembly of a would-be album, and probably ought to be judged that way.

Here goes:

Disc 3 – The Ties That Bind

(1)  “The Ties That Bind” – A lot of these songs are songs from previous releases, of course, so I thought I’d have a little fun by not consulting my previous scores and just judging them from the mindset I’m in this morning. Might be instructive for me, if nothing else.  Anyways, I am 99.9% positive that this is a different take of this song than what ended up on The River, so a different score makes sense if so. I’ll go with 2.75/5.

(2)  “Cindy” – I like this a lot, although it kind of goes nowhere. 2.5/5

(3)  “Hungry Heart” – I think this is the same take as the River version, but I swear to God it sounds ever so slightly slower to me. Am I imaging things? Maybe not. This version runs 3:28, whereas the one on The River runs 3:19. WTF?!? I’m giving this a mere 5/5 out of sheer confusion.

(4)  “Stolen Car” – This is pretty good, but I don’t think it’s got the pathos that the real version has. So I’m giving it a 3/5, and if that’s more than I gave the River version, then I need to rescore The River.

(5)  “To Be True” – Not the best version of this song I’ve heard, but it’s alright. 2.5/5  Sounds like a demo, which is true of this entire “album” so far. That might be why it never got to the release stage of things back in the day.

(6)  “The River” – This is basically the same song as the one on the album that bears its name, but, and correct me if I’m wrong, I think this is a different take. Still great, though. 5/5

(7)  “You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)” – Well, now I feel better about some of this, because this is absolutely a different version of this particular song. More of a honky-tonk feel to it. I don’t like it as much as the Gene Simmons soundalike version, but I do like it as its own thing. 2.25/5  Bruce’s vocals are good, and I like the echoey quality, which I assume is a byproduct of wherever it was recorded.

(8)  “The Price You Pay” – 2.75/5

(9)  “I Wanna Marry You” – 2.5/5

(10)  “Loose Ends” – I remain of the opinion that this is a heck of a song. 3.5/5 Sounds a little rough here, but still a winner in my book.

Overall – 31.75 total, 3.18 average. Pretty respectable, but it’s buoyed significantly by the two classics that ended up on The River.

Disc 6 – The River outtakes

(1)  “Meet Me in the City” – This is kind of like “Out in the Street” except I like it better. 2.5/5 I wonder if my scores reflect that?

(2)  “The Man Who Got Away” – Okay, so, this isn’t like the second coming of “Light My Fire” or anything like that, but what kind of madman keeps this sitting in a vault for 25 years? Name rhymes with Truce Greenscreen, that’s who. 2.5/5

(3)  “Little White Lies” – This rocks. 3.25/5 Unreleased for such a period of time that it could have damn near rented a car. (Bryan: I love this one. A more cleaned-up version could even be knocking on 4.5 to 5/5 out of territory for me. What the frak, Bruce?)

(4)  “The Time That Never Was” – I thought for a while that this might be a new favorite, and while it didn’t end up being that, I do like it. 2.75/5

(5)  “Night Fire” – Take those marbles out of your mouth, Bruce! His vocals here are awful.  I kind of dig the song, though. 2.25/5

(6)  “Whitetown” – This is alright, but both the production and the performance are lacking. 2/5 It’s not bad, though; I can imagine it growing on me.

(7)  “Chain Lightning” – Great guitar riff at the beginning, and when the bass kicks in it’s even better. The song never manages to really go anywhere from here, though, so it ends up not fulfilling the promise it seems to have. 2.25/5

(8)  “Party Lights” – Steve seems to be exerting himself on this one, which is fine by me.  It’s not a great song, though. I find it to be guilty of your “We Built This City” rule. 2/5 (Bryan: See here for full details.)


(9)  “Paradise by the ‘C’ ” – A studio version of a live staple. Not a bad little tune. Nonessential, but a lot of fun. 2.5/5

(10)  “Stray Bullet” – This is a rather beautiful performance. Clarence, in particular, does a great job. But I like everything in this one. 3.5/5 I’m being a little conservative with that score, too; I thought about going higher.

(11)  “Mr. Outside” – This is just Bruce dicking around in front of a recording device of some sort. But as far as that sort of thing goes, this is fun. 2.25/5

(12)  “Roulette” – A furiously great riff right up top on this one. Is this the same version as appears on Tracks? I think so. I wonder if I’ll give an identical score? If not, I think that’s okay; after all, context and proximity do undoubtedly influence things like that. It fucking rocks, so I’m going with 4/5. If I were Vladimir Putin, I’d make it mandatory for Russian bands to cover this song at least once per year, because that would be funny.

(13)  “Restless Nights” – 3.25/5

(14)  “Where the Bands Are” – I’m pretty sure we’re entirely at the end of the songs we’ve not heard before, but that’s okay, let’s press on and score these anyways. 2.5/5 for this one.

(15)  “Dollhouse” – What the hell are they saying in the backing vocals? I am assuming it is “gopher Lynn” and unless you can prove me wrong, that’s how it is staying.  2.5/5

(16)  “Living on the Edge of the World” – 2/5

(17)  “Take ‘Em As they Come” – 2.25/5

(18)  “Ricky Wants a Man of Her Own” – This sort of thing does happen, no doubt about it. 2.5/5

(19)  “I Wanna Be With You” – 3.25/5 Another Gene Simmons impersonation.

(20)  “Mary Lou” – 2.25/5

(21)  “Held Up Without a Gun” – 2.5/5

(22)  “From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)” – 3.75/5

Overall – 58.5 total, 2.66 average. That’s not a terrific score, but I think this “album” of outtakes is awfully enjoyable. I wish it was a little more widely available; burying it inside a $100 box set is kind of a dick move. I guess Bruce got to eat, though.

FINAL

RANKINGS

Bryan:

Lucky Town 2.15

Greetings from Asbury Park 2.19

Magic 2.27

The Ghost of Tom Joad 2.44 
American Beauty 2.56
Working on a Dream 2.71

Chapter and Verse 2.75

In Concert / MTV Plugged 2.82

Tracks 2.83

Chimes of Freedom 2.86

Wrecking Ball 2.86

Blood Brothers 2.88

Human Touch 2.9

The Promise 3.08

Book of Dreams 3.1

Hammersmith Odeon, London 3.1

The Rising 3.3

Devils and Dust 3.36

High Hopes 3.39

The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle 3.43

Live in New York City 3.5

Loose Ends 3.63

Greatest Hits (New Tracks Only) 3.65

We Shall Overcome: The Pete Seeger Sessions 3.67

The River 3.71

Tunnel of Love 3.8

Darkness on the Edge of Town 3.82

Live ’75 - ‘85 4

Live in Dublin 4.11

Born to Run 4.41

Nebraska 4.5

Born in the USA 5.4

Bryant:

Human Touch 1.7
American Beauty 2.00

Hammersmith Odeon, London '75 2.04

Lucky Town 2.15 

Chapter and Verse 2.15
Working on a Dream 2.23

The Ghost of Tom Joad 2.46

Magic 2.46

Devils and Dust 2.48

Book of Dreams 2.58

The River outtakes 2.66

Chimes of Freedom 2.69

In Concert / Mtv Plugged 2.75

Greetings from Asbury Park 2.75

Wrecking Ball 2.77

Tracks 2.81

High Hopes 2.83

Blood Brothers 2.9

The Promise 2.99

The Rising 3.1

Live in Dublin 3.22

Tunnel of Love 3.35

We Shall Overcome: The Pete Seeger Sessions 3.37

Greatest Hits (New Tracks Only) 3.38

The River 3.39

Live in New York City 3.48

The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle 3.68

Live ’75 - ‘85 3.7

Loose Ends 3.92

Born to Run 4.35

Darkness on the Edge of Town 4.4

Nebraska 4.63 

Born in the USA 4.88

~

Bryan: This concludes our album by album overview of the Springsteen discography. There'll be a Table of Contents type post with all new remarks on each album still to come, but that's just good housekeeping. As of this writing, Bruce is on Broadway doing his thing and makes the occasional interesting live appearance at the "gathering of the youths."

Fun version of "Glory Days" with the guys in Phish here.

Here's hoping there'll be cause for a few more of these write-ups. Thank you, Bryant, for accompanying me on this musical journey, and thank you, out there, for reading. To rock and roll!