Items in the category "songs that could plausibly have been written by Bruce Springsteen, and if they had been, everyone who now correctly reviles them would be calling them classics and using the word 'Americana'", part one of a series of one
Livin' On A Prayer
We Built This City (On Rock 'n' Roll)
Sailing
The Power of Love (Huey Lewis & The News version)
The Power of Love (Frankie Goes To Hollywood version)
The Power of Love (Jennifer Rush version)
Uptown Girl
Heaven Is A Place On Earth
Everything I Do, I Do It for You
Eternal Flame
My Baby Takes The Morning Train
Heaven is a Place on Earth? Really?
ReplyDeleteOh yeah - since it's basically the same song as "Living on a Prayer", it could have fit in on a number of Springsteen albums. I wouldn't even swear that it isn't there, somewhere halfway down the B-side of "Human Touch".
ReplyDeleteare you really saying good artists have bad b-sides??
ReplyDelete[and good ones]
Well yeah. Bruce Springsteen is the Bon Jovi its "okay" to like.
ReplyDeleteBrad DeLong is a Bruce fan, but even with this compelling piece of corroborating evidence, I can't bring myself to think badly of the man who gave us Born to Run, Nebraska and the first disc of The River.
ReplyDeleteWell, duh. Bon jovi and Bruce Springsteen are from the same music scene, New Jersey boys made good.
ReplyDeleteBut "Uptown Girl"? That means war.
Point taken, but if Bruce had written them, they would have been better songs. Still not good songs, but better.
ReplyDeletePity Springsteen didn't write Downeaster Alexa
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVlDSzbrH5M
The first time I heard "Born to Run" (in 1975) I thought it was embarrassing: a bombastic pile-up of musical cliches, with a kind of blunt macho earnestness where its sense of humour should have been. Nothing of Springsteen's I've heard since has really endeared him to me.
ReplyDeleteSo yes, I can easily imagine people raving about Bruce Springsteen's "Uptown Girl". In fact I'm almost convinced he's actually covered "Uptown Girl" - you can just hear it.
Eternal Flame
Shome mishtake surely, as this already is a classic. And was the last one meant to be Sheena Easton's "Nine to Five"?
"Eternal Flame" I am hearing as a sort of breathy, desperately earnest "Streets of Philadelphia" type.
ReplyDeleteYes, that one by Sheena Easton, although I am now having trouble hearing it as anything other than an E Street Band joke-cover along the lines of "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town". Although he has never formally refudiated that one.
The real killer here (and I say this as someone who really likes some Brooce tracks, roughly the ones mentioned by CC above with the exception of Born to Run. And he seems a more or less completely likeable bloke and reasonably politically sound too) is "We Built This City". Nobody, not even the most diehard Springsteen fan can absolutely deny that there isn't at least a tiny bit of truth to that one.
ReplyDeleteKnee-deep in the mocha/making coffee right
ReplyDeleteSo many partners/working late at night
We just want to build here--IMDS, does it pass?
We call on development to complete the task!
Living the way of being,
In the Green Apron Book!
Don't you remember?
We built this Starbucks on heart and soul!
I remember being horrified when I discovered that Starship were originally Jefferson Airplane. Sums up the baby boomers I guess.
What I like about "Eternal Flame" is the way that (at least to these ears) it starts out sounding like irritatingly bland easy-listening fluff and modulates imperceptibly into someone actually singing their heart out (cf "The name of the game"). Bruce is singing his heart out from the moment the red light goes on, if not before, so the register-shift wouldn't really be there.
ReplyDeleteI might seek out Nebraska and the River some time. And I agree about Bruce being basically a good bloke. I liked "Great Pop Things"'s take on him. There's a running gag whereby each strip begins "They tried to change the world with their [whatever]!", the blank being filled in differently for every band. For Bruce it was "He tried to change the world by giving money to political campaign groups, which is actually quite a good way to change it - good thinking, Bruce".
Bruce is singing his heart out from the moment the red light goes on, if not before, so the register-shift wouldn't really be there.
ReplyDeleteHence "Philadelphia". I have access to a synthesizer with that portentous string pad of his (also on "My Home Town" and in rocked-up style, "Dancing in the Dark"), so if I can find a suitable "mumble mumble" microphone plug-in, I may record something to show you what I mean.
Total Eclipse of the Heart
ReplyDeleteSpringsteen also inspired Steve Earle to get himself together and record Guitar Town. That's a big plus for me, even thought SE has managed some terrible songs himself (including one on that very album).
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, my reference to Born to Run earlier was to the album, not to the song.
ReplyDeletedd - you're just jealous that the UK has never produced a single rock star who can hold a candle to DA BOSS!
ReplyDeleteI just found out that Joey Ramone asked Bruce to write the Ramones a song and Bruce wrote "hungry heart" that night for him. Apparently, Bruce's manager convinced Bruce to not give the song to the Ramones.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that the songs Bruce did give to other artists (poiner sisters' "fire" and patty smith's "because the night") don't sound tremendously bruce springsteen-like in those versions makes me think that you are right.
You know what Springsteen has that those chumps don't? A glockenspiel!
ReplyDeleteAnd then there's Louis Armstrong's uncanny resemblence to Brittany Spears. Musically speaking. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEZRvIq3kkI
ReplyDeleteOr the Richard Thompson version:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAS4ltt7DzI
Oh come on Daniel, Sheena Easton was class. John Peel liked (OK, fancied) her. Mind you, Peel liked Rod Stewart as well (if you saw the TOTP thing on BBC4 at the weekend).
ReplyDeleteExhibit A: from 2:25.
Exhibit B: from 0:55.
Beat that Springsteen, Dylan et al!
Peel also like the Wedding Present. So there's that.
ReplyDeleteI was just thinking that Patti Smith's Because the Night was basically a Springsteen song. Apparently that's because it is.
CC: I may dislike his music, but I'm glad he was successful because he's basically done good things with that success, and doesn't seem to have a huge ego. All of which seem like good things to me.
I was listening to some of Steve Earle's kid's album recently. If you thought Earle was fucked up...
"Total Eclipse" is so a lost Bruce Springsteen song. I mean, it's a hell of a lot more that than it is an erotic fantasy about a boys' school full of ninjas.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm not hearing a word against the young Rod Stewart. You can have everything he's done since 1975, mind you.
John Peel liked (OK, fancied) her
ReplyDeleteSo did Prince. She was the Kylie Minogue of her day.
I can't bring myself to think badly of the man who gave us Born to Run, Nebraska and the first disc of The River.
ReplyDeleteI think you'd have to add "Darkness On The Edge Of Town" to that list
There's also Thunder Road (though I actually prefer Bonnie Prince Billy and Tortoise's version). That said, with the possible exception of Everything I Do..., I know which songs I'd rather actually listen to, drunk or sober.
ReplyDeleteThere's also Thunder Road
ReplyDeleteaka, "the lost Meatloaf song".
Heh. Actually, the typical Springsteen discussion is remarkably like the standard Clash discussion with men of a certain age. There's an interesting comments thread on the topic here.
ReplyDeletehttp://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2011/03/the-clash-should-i-stay-or-should-i-go/#more-20905
"The Clash Are The Rock’n'Roll Preservation Society: that was how their fandom came over by 1991"
ReplyDeleteActually that was how their fandom came over by 1979.
I was never seriously into the Clash, but I read in the NME that they were always a bit pseudish and they went right off around the time of Give 'Em Enough Rope, so that was good enough for me. This made the band's subsequent career an interesting exercise in instant nostalgia ("actually, no, they were quite good until 1983..."). (I still bought London Calling, and Sandinista! even, but that was plenty.)
In case anyone's considering taking "collaborated with serious artists" as a proxy for 'is a serious artist', this. And yes, I own it, and I've listened to it, once.
ReplyDeleteOh, also, Total Eclipse and most of Meat Loaf's ouvre reflect the fact that Jim Steinman, who wrote them, is a Brooce-loving Joysey Boy.
ReplyDeleteIIRC, Billy Joel has described being in a NYC club when Meatloaf was first performing the Bat Out of Hell material, and how everyone went nuts for it.
ReplyDeleteIt took me until last year to realize that "Paradise by the dashboard light" was a pun. Opinions differ as to whether the pun goes all the way back or was invented by Meatloaf's lyricist.
ReplyDeleteWhere is the pun in "Paradise by the dashboard light"? I don't want to spend the next thirty years wondering.
ReplyDeleteThose two fuzzy dice you see in redneck cars. it's the Las Vegas version of fundamentalism.
ReplyDeleteThis is something I only realised when I was 30 or so, when I was reading a USAn software manual which recommended that the short form 'CHAR' was pronounced 'care', "just as it is in 'character'". The American 'ar' (as in 'paradise' or 'character') is a genuinely different sound from ours. What for us is just an A followed by a consonant - like the first A in 'cadmium' or 'planet' - they hear as an 'air' sound: 'pair-adise', 'care-actor'.
ReplyDeleteMore evidence for the "Bruce is a good person" faction.
ReplyDelete