Springsteen has said that writing Born To Run's songs on a piano finally let him realize the sweeping "golden oldies grow up" vision he'd had for his music from the beginning. But his early songs still come to life in the right context, even with a guitar carrying the bulk of the load. The Greetings From Asbury Park version of "It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City" sounds as muffled and crazily loquacious as the rest of that album does, but the version on Live 1975-1985—recorded at the Roxy in 1978—gets all the cockiness and menace that had always been intended. The dueling Springsteen and Steve Van Zandt solos that close the performance sum up the time and place described in the song better than the lyrics' overheated metaphors.
"It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City" by Bruce Springsteen
Springsteen has always done "summing up" remarkably well, which speaks to his faith that the right song at the right time can transform people. Toward the end of the sets during The E Street Band reunion shows of 1999 and 2000, Springsteen played "Land Of Hope And Dreams" (available on Live In New York City), a pastiche of "People Get Ready" and "This Train Is Bound For Glory" that linked up Springsteen's mutual love of R&B and folk music, and presented his version of an America built to carry all passengers.
But the ultimate valedictory song in his repertoire is "4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)," from The E Street Shuffle. The overwrought, overstuffed descriptions of the previous album give way to a more relaxed tour of the boardwalk, as Springsteen points out the carnies and hustlers that make Asbury Park so colorful and so sad. The beauty of the song—arguably the most beautiful song Springsteen has ever written—is the way the travelogue evolves into an argument. The narrator is getting ready to leave, and trying to convince Sandy to go with him. Does she say yes? Check "Thunder Road" for the answer.
“4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” by Bruce Springsteen
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The promise of The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle gave way to the commercial breakthrough of 1975's Born To Run, which tempered the youthful exuberance of Springsteen's earlier albums with tighter song-structures and a little bit of the creeping working-class melancholy that has been the dominant subject of his songs for the last 30 years. In an era of surface-deep corporate rock, Springsteen's direct, honest appeal inspired artists like Tom Petty and John Mellencamp to let go of the payola-and-coke-spoon star-track that both of them started out on, and try instead to make music about where they were from. Meanwhile, Springsteen's Darkness On The Edge Of Town, The River, Nebraska and the blockbuster 1984 hit Born In The U.S.A. all reached an expanding audience with simple songs—many with hummable choruses—that describe how it is to live under the specter of divorce, unemployment, war and, worst of all, mediocrity.
Not for nothing did Springsteen first want to name The River after its leadoff song, "The Ties That Bind." Along with community-defining anthems and tales of young love, Springsteen has written a large body of songs about family, responsibility, and the tangled legacies parents leave their children. One of the sweetest is "The Wish," a Tunnel Of Love leftover dedicated to a mother who buys her son a guitar and gets a song in return. The loving memories of mom's working clothes and the pleasure she took in dancing are among the most unabashedly happy in Springsteen's songbook. At this very moment, "The Wish" is just waiting for some country star to cover it and make it a new standard.
"The Wish" by Bruce Springsteen
But again, "The Wish" is pretty much an aberration. For a more typical Springsteen take on what happens to families and people in love, start with "Darkness On The Edge Of Town," the title track of his 1978 album about broken promises and painful endurance. The song's narrator has lost everything, for reasons only hinted at: "I'll pay the cost for wanting things that can only be found in the darkness on the edge of town," he sings, indicating that no matter how warm home and hearth may be, there's something alluring lurking outside, drawing him away from what he knows is proper.
Perhaps that something is the stolen car of "Stolen Car," which the song's narrator drives because he's hoping to get caught. "Stolen Car" has been released in two versions, both essential in their way: the murmuring, minimalist take from The River, and the country-ballad version that preceded it on The Ties That Bind. In both, Springsteen sings about the gap between youthful passion and middle-aged respectability. The narrator explains that they threw a party when he got married, and he's certain that somewhere, they're still partying without him. So he ventures out into the darkness, waiting for his sins to catch up to him and shut him away once and for all from the good life he isn't living.
"Stolen Car" by Bruce Springsteen
Then again, maybe all he needs is a good scare to wake him up. In "Wreck On The Highway," also on The River, the narrator drives at night—just like everybody else in a Springsteen song—until he passes an accident scene, and a dying man. And he starts thinking, mainly about a woman who'll never see her husband or boyfriend again. So now the narrator stays home nights, sitting up in his bed in the dark, staring at his own wife, and contemplating death.
Death also pervades "Gypsy Biker," the best song on Springsteen's latest album, Magic (a return to the E-Street-Band-fueled glory days of The River and Born In The U.S.A.). Over lashing guitars and pounding drums, Springsteen sings about a death in the family—possibly a military family—and what it means to the people left behind. In its performance alone, "Gypsy Biker" is one of the most intense songs The E Street Band has recorded since the Born In The U.S.A. era, but it's also chillingly elegiac, as Springsteen sings, "To the dead it don't matter much 'bout who's wrong or right." In the past, Springsteen has been able to use the lives and deaths of others to recontextualize the protagonists of his songs. Here, the meaning is that there is no meaning. Just finality.
"Gypsy Biker" by Bruce Springsteen
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