Springsteen

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

200. "Nobody knows where love goes, but when it goes, it's gone gone." No hot-bodied chick walks out on tough-guy Bruce without getting an earful.

Fun Fact: This is the only "Tunnel of Love" track crediting Clarence Clemons--with background vocals. Ranked #263

[Edgy MD]

I realize this isn't an official video, but is it only music videos aimed at old people that are wallpapered with subtitle lyrics these days?

I have tinnitus out the wazoo, but hate that.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

I'm old and I like lyric videos.

I also bolster my prep for the daily Bruce dump by reading the lyrics of the song. I don't always get em first time through

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

201.Bruce got the idea for "Sinaloa Cowboys" from an article in the Los Angeles Times about migrant farm workers who become methamphetamine cookers for the better pay. This is a pretty tragic tale. Ranked #242

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

202. "A Good Man is Hard to Find (Pittsburgh)" is another Vietnam song from the early 80s that surfaced on TRACKS. Lyrics "there's a meanness in this world" and "across the Michigan line" appear in "Nebraska" and "Highway Patrolman" respectively. Nice organ, sad Christmas song. Ranked #172

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

203. I don't know how you can't like this one-- shoulda been an adult contemporary hit. Love the bass. Love the sound of the guitar. I don't really know much of Bobby King's other work but he kills it here. Ranked #157

[Edgy MD]

I like how King respectfully limits himself to Bruce's small bag of dance moves.

[Marshmallowmilkshake]

Great song and one of the highlights of that live disc!

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

204. You know I had a premonition of Bruce dying from his ulcer issues a few years back and on some level thought he felt the same or he wouldn't have taken the trouble to put "I'll See You in My Dreams" as the final cut on what might be his last studio album. I don't know what to say about this recent stuff. It's okay, it's a little too "clean" sounding, maybe. Ranked #193



I listened to some solo Bobby King (with Terry Evans) last night.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

205. "Happy" is a leftover from the LUCKY TOWN sessions, a moody, trouble-around-the-corner love song.

Note how the opening couplet resembles "My Beatiful Reward" which made the Lucky Town cut:

Happy: Some need gold and some need diamond rings
Or a drug to take away the pain that living brings


MBR: Well I sought gold and diamond rings
My own drug to ease the pain that living brings

Ranked #232

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

206. Today's Bruce-A-Doodle is a gloomy tale of a junky girlfriend, "Point Blank." This is super and another example of a Bruce song that doesn't require 1 guitar much less 3. I've said it before and this countdown goes to prove it, this was Bruce's golden era. Just astonishing. Ranked #28

[Frayed Knot]

IIRC, this one was a occasional live performance/bootleg before it was ever committed to vinyl.
Haven't heard it in years but still remember it virtually word for word.

[Gwreck]

IIRC, this one was a occasional live performance/bootleg before it was ever committed to vinyl.

Indeed. One of several cuts from The River that was first heard during live performances during the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour of 1978.

[Frayed Knot]

There were a lot of Bruce bootlegs floating around dorm rooms in that era.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

207. Bruce is an economically and sexually deprived rocker in "You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)." Ranked #136



Did you know this song had an earlier rockabilly version? I didn't till just now.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

208. Another song about leaving your workin' pants at home, "Out in the Street" ranks #78. Bruce got a little formulaic with the 2 verses, sax solo, final verse approach in this era.

In other Bruce news, another compilation album with never-before-heard tracks is set to come out in 2025. We may have to rank those separately and add onto the end.

[Edgy MD]

Pretty quintessential BS there. One foot in sixties soul, one in gritty seventies urban heroic realism, and hooky as hell.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

209. Bruce is condemned to walk the streets and fields regretting what he cannot help in the stringy "Stones." Ranked #260

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

210. I never much got Bruce's flirtation with Irish music, which sounds to me like the Dropkick Murphys, not that I really know what they sound like. Anyway this tale of immigrants includes a line: The McNicholas, the Posalskis, the Smiths, Zerillis too. Bruce's mom was Zerilli.

This is ranked way down at #332

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

211. "All the Way Home" is one of the livelier tunes from DEVILS & DUST. Bruce wrote it several years earlier for Southside Johnny's big 1991 comeback album BETTER DAYS (not Bruce's "Better Days" but Miami Steve's).. Naturally SSJ put a soul spin on it and hits it out of the park. Ranked #166

[Edgy MD]

The harmonica is the best part of the BS version that track.

Devils & Dust tends to get listed alongside Nebraska and Ghost of Tom Joad among Springsteen’s acoustic canon. Any listen to that track suggests otherwise. They may be producing sounds on acoustic instruments, but once those sounds get put through the processing on their way to the output, they’re anything but.

Not a complaint or anything, just an observation.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

212. Today I learned "Brilliant Disguise" single had a killer B-side called "Lucky Man." Guitar sounds like a car driving away. Drums like the thump of the highway, or a heart beat. Ranked #266

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

213. Bruce took yesterday off to be with his family but is back to work this morning with "Zero & Blind Terry" a 1973 leftover. This would have fit in with other epics of the era were it any good. This is actually an update of another unreleased song called "Phantoms," and Bruce himself appears to have given up on it after this recording.

I don't know if Terry (pre Backstreets) is actually blind or just described that way, perhaps because it's implied that Zero is a man of color. But good for Bruce to be out if front on social issues like that.

Anyway the ending is ambiguous and the song for all its ambition just isn't all that good. It's ranked #335; we've heard only 4 "worse" songs and there's only 1 left lower ranked than it but still you should hear it. These kids are some kind of monsters.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

214. Bruce took a few days off to visit his in-laws.

Today we get the "worst" remaining song on the list, "The Angel" from Greetings, ranked 338 of 340. I used to skip this one on the elpee.

Maybe that's why Bruce felt nobody would notice if he rewrote this song's "the interstate's choked with nomadic hordes" as "the highway's jammed with broken heroes" a couple years later.

[Edgy MD]

I didn't hate "The Angel." It sort of just misses in a lot of places. A metaphor that was supposed to be stunning comes out as cliched. A hard stop at the end of a phrase adds an extra syllable and remains annoyingly unresolved. "Baseball cards in his spokes" is meant to be subtly but heroically relatable, but it's a lazy image of the American boy warrior plucked from the pages of Good Housekeeping trying to become poetry as it's sung at a dramatically slow pace. He might as well have sung about getting his first real six-string at The Five and Dime.

"Hubcap Heaven" sounds like a late-night, curated, deep-diving, doo-wop program on WCBS-FM.

But it's got solid progressions and structure, which Bruce was very loose with around the time. It almost comes out as a knockoff or parody of Bruce Springsteen's heroic sagas. It's a miss, sure, ok, but if Meat Loaf had done a version of this in his mock operatic style, it would have been blasting out of classic rawk radio, climaxing every four-hour block for the last 40 years.