Patti Smith Group, "Because the Night" (1978)

May 13, 1978, #13
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I did not know or suspect for a long time that this is a Bruce Springsteen song, and now I have to wonder how I ever missed it. Recorded in 1977, it has the heroic thrust and optimistic face to the sun of his autopilot mode down to the thundering drums and tinkling circling piano intro. It's co-credited to Patti Smith because she reworked Springsteen's original lyric, though Wikipedia tells me he has also performed it over the years with his own lyric. I hope that doesn't mean tensions because I have long indulged a romantic sense that this was the result of a serendipitous connection between two New Jersey natives. Certainly their personas are simpatico here. Smith is a natural at the Springsteen swagger, which had to come from somewhere, and the tumbling surreal bent of her wordplay is part of what makes it work. I have to think the romantic view holds. They're playing and singing the hell out of it. The guitar solo from Lenny Kaye is a model of economy, a hallmark of its times (compare Iggy Pop with James Williamson, "I'm Bored"). And Springsteen had a way of insinuating himself into the greater New York City area elite, as remember also he showed up mumbling, "Well hey, man, that's just a lie" on Lou Reed's masterpiece title cut of Reed's Street Hassle LP. Springsteen was likely dealing with a fair amount of pent-up creative energy at the time, precluded from releasing anything while a legal battle with his former management was resolved. The dispute erupted shortly after he appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek, three years before. Problems, problems. And out of all that came this wonderful surprise hit song in the spring of 1978.

Bruce Springsteen, "Downbound Train" (1984)

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More confessions of a one-time Bruce Springsteen snob: This is pretty much the song that turned me around on him forever, the reason I favor Born in the U.S.A. of all his albums (also the sequence of which this is part from "Cover Me" through to "I'm on Fire," and speaking of which also all those hits too, except the title song). I know it's the triumphal ascendance point of his career, an annoying point in the careers of many. It's harder to feel special when you're sharing the object of your adoration with whole stadiumsful  of people showing up late. And some signs here already perhaps of the problems that were ahead, the frustrating admixture of bloat and vacuousness in there with all the good stuff. But one of the things I like most about Bruce Springsteen is that he looks around and feels sad, genuinely sad. "Downbound Train," which feels like a lost alternate-universe fragment of a chapter from The Grapes of Wrath, might be the best example of that I know. He's talking about injustice in as lucid and straightforward a manner as could be. He's not looking away from anything. He's working in a carwash. It grounds the high points of his other songs, delivers their joys better knowing all the extremes are acknowledged and felt. This is how I think Bruce Springsteen does it. He is carrying a heavy load in this song—presumably why it's a train. I love the way the burden flattens the words in his mouth into rounded vowels and sliding growls. On the lines "Now I swing a sledge hammer on a railroad gang / Knocking down them cross ties, working in the rain," he is practically just moaning and honking. It's good that people make lyrics available on the Internet, although thinking about it now every sense of those words is there in the vocal—the sense of working, and futility.

Wrecking Ball (2012)

This has been a fairly constant companion for me a lot of this year, first in the late spring and summer when I had it installed in my car as a feature for a few months, and more lately just letting it come up a lot in the mix. So I'd like to put a good word in for it at this late hour, though no doubt you have already made up your own mind if you are even interested. It's the first time I've lived with a Bruce Springsteen album so intensely since Tunnel of Love (I did try very hard to establish such things with Human Touch, The Rising, and that Tom Joad one too). There's a lot of earnestness to go around here, but this was a good year for feeling earnest, and it's ultimately nice to experience it so clear-sighted, plainspoken, and yet acute too. For example, one of the most prominent themes in this set puts Springsteen at the back of a boulder pushing it up a hill attempting to reclaim Christianity. Seriously, there's a lot of Jesus and the Bible here, not just sweet beautiful strains of gospel (embedded in his DNA as birthright with rock 'n' roll, rhythm and blues, and soul). Personally, I've always been comfortable myself with the conception of Jesus the Christ as first and most immaculate hippie—it makes sense on many different levels. But of course exactly that is profoundly rejected by those carrying the biggest megaphones for Christ these days and I really don’t care to discuss it with them. I take it as just another aspect of this bizarro up-is-down world we seem to be living in now—you mean Jesus really didn't favor the poor over the rich, inherit the earth, eye of a camel, all that jazz, OK, whatever. This is the point where I begin to mumble and look down in these conversations. But there is Mr. Bruce Springsteen (as Randy Newman would say) taking it to them on the very issue, at least as far as I can make out, and it's only one of a bunch of things here that manage to touch me really deeply, as heartfelt and profoundly on point, which he has done before. Here, I mostly just appreciate hearing someone say things like "The banker man grows fatter / The working man grows thin," if only as an affirmation of what I see and feel myself. There's all kinds of basic touchstones of specific experience here. "We've been traveling over rocky ground." "This is my confession / I need your heart / In this depression / I need your heart." "We are alive." Et cetera. And that goes for this too: "If I had me a gun / I'd find the bastards and shoot 'em on sight." I know, I know, it's all role playing in the end with these things, but that's also my point. Signals such as these helped me understand I wasn't traveling alone this year.

Bruce Springsteen, "Independence Day" (1980)

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If Bruce Springsteen ultimately won me over by way of osmosis, across a period of many years, I can still remember the moment when I clicked over to being admirer and fan, which came with this song. I was moving from Minneapolis to Seattle, dragging a U-Haul trailer behind an iffy Dodge station wagon, going out of my way to head first to a small town in South Dakota that had represented the Midwest to me since I was 8 years old. I thought I was taking advantage of a chance to visit it once more. I didn't realize until this song happened to start that I was actually detouring to say goodbye to the Midwest and the first half of my life, at which point I burst into tears—I mean the hard, wracking sobs kind. It would be easy enough to quibble with the fuzzy aspect of the lyrics here, the inexpertly rendered and incoherent scene between a father and son. It doesn't matter. It's the sound of this song, the doleful mourning quality of it, the way he sings, "Just say goodbye it's Independence Day," focusing it so explicitly on the word and the idea of "independence." That's what did me in. This is one of the truest expressions of "independence" I know, going way past the usual screechy good humor associated with it—the way Dick Cheney said we would be greeted in Iraq in 2003. This song feels like it's doing its work at the greatest depths. Because "dependence," remember, does come with its comforts. An independence day is a mixed thing, that's the reality. It is also a loss, and thrusts one into a future without certainty. These are thoughts and feelings I suspect people such as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, etc., etc., knew and felt too.

18. Bruce Springsteen, "The River" (1980)

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Bruce Springsteen works best for me in a doleful mood—it's the thing about him that took me awhile to figure out, that finally got me past his fans and my worst contrarian impulses and those early exercises in beatnik poetry and all the hoopla attached to him like skin ink. I arrived as a doubter and left as a believer, late as usual, which I doubt will impress either his skeptics or his most ardent partisans, but there it is. The sad take of "The River" on the state of marriage has always gone to work on me the moment I hear its mournful sounds fading up. It comes from a singer, at least—and a songwriter too, I'm pretty sure—who believes in the institution, and if it's ultimately more about class and the grinding conditions and above all the loss that class imposes than it is about love, it's about love too. It has to be. The loss amounts to more, even to something else entirely from love: youth, hope, wonder, the sense that life holds great things in store for anyone with the opportunity to go skinny-dipping on a warm summer night with one's partner. But it starts and ends with faith in love. I'm still not entirely sure about Springsteen's many first-person songs addressing some anonymous authority figure known only as "mister" (which is to say I'm still not entirely sure about Nebraska), but it works here. As do the concrete details, even when they veer dangerously close to cliché. And as does, more than anything, the critical center of this song, the impossible question we're left to ponder: "Now those memories come back to haunt me / They haunt me like a curse / Is a dream a lie if it don't come true / Or is it something worse?" Answer that one and you get a prize.

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

"Downbound Train" Immediately following the "future of rock 'n' roll" covers of "Time" and "Newsweek" in 1975, little old contrarian me settled into long-term resistance to Bruce Springsteen—Born to Run, the many pleasures of Darkness at the Edge of Town, "Because the Night," the "Street Hassle" cameo, and the outstanding high points of The River all notwithstanding. But his best and most popular album finally won me over. Following the model of Thriller or Rumours, it was a giant hit-making factory unto itself, eventually spawning some seven of them, all top 10. Some people, including little old contrarian me in some cases, would consider that a bug rather than a feature (hi Alanis!), but the sounds herein are so joyful, forthright, authentic, and stirring that I just don't know how anyone can resist it, and certainly I couldn't, especially after hearing it spread so persistently far and wide. I suppose I could do without the title song, which never really gets off the ground, or even up from the floor, too busy reveling in its bombast. And of my favorites here, the story of the birth of rock 'n' roll distilled to intuitional essence in the 1-2-3-4 of "Darlington County," "Working on the Highway," "Downbound Train," and "I'm on Fire," only the last successfully made its way to radio. I found out later that I actually worked into this album essentially the way it was recorded, across gaps over the space of a couple of years, by vinyl LP sides, absorbing the first first (lifting the needle over the first track). The second side, while its sound is more generally coherent, more pure E Street Band, at least in its '80s incarnation, came to me more in pieces assembling—the plainspoken courage of "No Surrender," the poignance of "Bobby Jean," the silly but affecting baseball pathos of "Glory Days," the poise and muscle of "Dancing in the Dark," until finally the sad elegy of "My Hometown" worked its way in too and erected a home in some suburban development of my heart, where it and the whole album resides still in a kind of timeless glow. It's one for the ages.