SPRINGSTEEN FROM COVER TO COVER

SPRINGSTEEN FROM COVER TO COVER

as Norman Warwick is in search of a ´but´

Bruce Springsteen has no shortage of hits of his own, but there were some songs that “The Boss” had originally written and recorded themselves that fell flat on release and then moved up the charts when they were covered by other artists.

When Springsteen released his 1973 debut Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, two of the album tracks “Spirit in the Night” and “Blinded by the Light” failed to climb the charts until Manfred Mann took them with him in the 1970s. Within this time frame, Springsteen had written the ingredients for “Because The Night,” but it didn’t come together during the Darkness on the Edge of the City sessions with the E Street Band in 1977. After sharing the song with friend Patti Smith, it became the musical poet’s biggest hit and brought her more fame with her 1978 album Easter† Springsteen released his own versions of “Because the Night” on the 1986 box set Live/1975-85and the 2010 compilation album The Promise and has performed the song solo and with Smith over the years.

In 1987, Springsteen also wrote a song for Smith’s New York punk comrades, The Ramones, but kept Hungry Heart to himself. Inspired by Lord Tennyson’s poem, For Always Roaming With a Hungry Heart, the song appeared on Springsteen’s 1980 album The River and was The Boss’ first major hit, peaking at number 5 on the Billboard charts.

Although Springsteen has had numerous songs in the Top 10, surprisingly he never had a #1 hit, although he came close when his 1984 Born in the USA hit Dancing in the Dark peaked at number 2.

There are Springsteen compositions that The Boss originally wrote or recorded for himself and the E Street Band in the 1970s and ’80s that somehow never became hits for him. In chronological order let´s examine five of those songs that became bigger hits by other artists.

Spirit in the Night was recorded by by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band in 1975 after Springsteenoriginally released the song on his debut album Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ but it wasn’t until British rockers Manfred Mann’s Earth Band got their hands on it that Spirit in the Night hit the charts. Featured on the band’s 1975 album Nightingales and Bombers when Manfred Mann released the song, it peaked at number 40 on the Top 40 and was the first of two songs that Manfred Mann would cover by Springsteen to hit the charts.

The success of Light Of Day by The Barbusters (Joan Jett and the Blackhearts) was a twist of fictional fate as Springsteen originally wrote and recorded the song for his 1983 album Born in the USA album, but shared it with director Paul Schrader for the 1987 film’s soundtrack Light Of The Day. In the film, the song was performed by the made-up band The Barbusters, consisting of Joan Jett and actor Michael J. Fox, and reached number 33 on the Billboard Hot 100 with credit to The Barbusters (Joan Jett and the Blackhearts). To this day, Jett still includes the song in her live set, even performing it with Fox in 2017 at the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards Gala in Ottawa, Ontario.

Originally released as the B-side to Dancing in the Dark in 1984, Pink Cadillac received moderate airplay, reached Springsteen’s Born in the USA tour set list, and reached number 27 on the Billboard Top Tracks chart. Though Springsteen initially rejected Bette Midler’s idea, it was later shared with Natalie Cole (left) , who made it a Top 10 single in 1988. Also featured on Cole’s 1987 album, everlasting,receiving two Grammy nominations, her R&B pop version of Pink Cadillac rose to the top of the US and UK charts, peaking at number 1 on the Billboard US Dance Club Songs chart and number 5 on the Hot 100.

Bruce Springsteen was born into the music industry with an unstoppable adoration and appreciation for those who came before him. The singer was never afraid to share his influences or pay homage to the great American songbook as he and the E-Street Band made their way up the charts and into the annals of music history.

It makes sense then that throughout his esteemed career, Springsteen has chosen to talk about his favourite artists and perform their songs as well. Few singers are able to cover another’s song quite like Springsteen.

If there was one thing we could thank the disaster year of 2020 for, it is our renewed and increased interest in the art of ‘the cover song’. Once again, it has become a fashionable thing to do as artists and bands, stuck inside with nowhere to create or perform, have turned their attention to the past to perform some of their most trusted tunes. Always ahead of the curve, however, Springsteen has never really shied away from doing a cover or two and has gone on to perfect the art of paying tribute to the original while adding his own spin.

There are lots of artists that could have included in a list of Springsteen covers, but I was surprised to see on particular name come up a number of times — that of Bob Dylan (right).

Before Springsteen became The Boss, before he’d even won employee of the month, but even then Springsteen was a huge Bob Dylan fan. When inducting Dylan into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, Springsteen once recalled that the first time he heard a Bob Dylan album (Highway 61 Revisited, in 1965), Dylan’s performance “thrilled and scared me.”

The singer continued: “It made me feel kind of irresponsibly innocent. And it still does. But it reached down and touched what little worldliness I think a 15-year-old kid, in high school, in New Jersey had in him at the time.” Later in the speech, Springsteen even calls him “the brother I never had,” a fitting tribute to a man who had shaped his entire career. As such, it is even pòssible to pull together an entire list of Bob Dylan covers from The Boss, but that wouldn’t be as fun.

Instead, we scoured to find more covers provided by the hardest working man in rock. That means we have not only a few tributes to Dylan but also other great artists such as The Clash, Johnny Cash, Bob Marley and many more. The real thing of beauty is how purposefully Springsteen approaches each song. He approaches authentic intent and adoration, meaning that the songs always have the original pulse to reawakening them and a kick start of Springsteen’s electricity to get them up off the gurney.

The fact that in many of the performances listed below, he had the help of the original artists shows just how well-regarded by his peers Bruce The Boss Springsteen truly is.

Springsteen never reveals any irreverence for any song he covers but neither does he allow his love of the original to subdue his own interpretation.

Bruce Springsteen and Johnny Cash are intrinsically linked together with and by the love of music; that the Boss fitted into the mould that The Man In Black forged for the next generation of songwriters makes this connection one of the strongest seen between different generations of songwriters

.Springsteen admired Cash (left) because he made him believe that he could do it too, and this iconic cover of Give My Love To Rose is a remarkable moment for the singer, working alongside a hero.

Springsteen’s cover was part of an all-star evening in tribute to Cash in 1999 live from the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York that was broadcast on TNT. The evening also welcomed a surprise appearance from a severely weakened Cash who was incredibly unwell at the time.

The move came as such as shock that the audience wasn’t expecting him to be involved with proceedings—but it provided a lovely moment and the final time Cash ever performed at a major venue.

A pre-E Street band Bruce Springsteen is a rare thing to hear in itself but an audio from 1972 is a trip back in time to see The Boss at the very start of his journey to the top.

It was captured at a bar in Richmond in ’72 and sees Springsteen’s first homage to the aforementioned great man, Bob Dylan. It also sees Springsteen delivering the song with an almost casual nonchalance that belies his adoration for the material at hand. Springsteen rallies himself for a haunting and splintered rendition of Dylan’s 1965 classic with a seemingly empty bar to play to. The sparse 11-minute number shows how vitally important Springsteen believed Dylan to be. The crowd rouse themselves to join in with the appreciation, and it makes for one of the more curious covers because of it.

When Bruce Springsteen was invited to perform at the John F. Kennedy Center For Performing Arts to pay tribute Dylan who was receiving Kennedy Centre Honours, there was only one song he had in mind—the archetypal protest song The Times They Are A-Changin´.

While the song may act as a unifying moment whenever it’s heard, Springsteen’s solo performance of the track feels all the more poignant. His introduction to the track where Springsteen describes Dylan as standing in the fire of the civil rights explosion to capture the sound of the moment is all the proof you need of his adoration.

Springsteen. of course, subsequently became an outspoken political voice, and we might imagine Dylan personally helped him to achieve.

hoto 7 Springsteen, who has long ties with The Clash and the late frontman Joe Strummer (left) , put his own spin on the song Clampdown back in 2014 as part of his High Hopes tour. The song is a Clash fan favourite and taken from the iconic record London Calling. It’s the mark of Springsteen’s admiration for the band.

The feeling of admiration between Springsteen and Strummer was mutual, and, in an interview withMojo prior to his death, The Clash frontman said: “Bruce is great. If you don’t agree, you’re a pretentious Martian from Venus. His music is great on a dark, rainy morning in England, just when you need some spirit and some proof that the big wide world exists.´´

Likewise, Springsteen said: “The Clash were a major influence on my own music. They were the best rock ‘n’ roll band. Thanks, Joe.´´ He says thank you in the best way possible with this potent cover.

Two of the rock world’s brightest stars rarely share the stage together for long, and the same can be said for Neil Young (right) and Bruce Springsteen, who have only connected in front of a crowd on a few occasions.

That said, every time they have joined forces, the duo deliver a plethora of reasons as to why we want to see more of them. Their joint rendition of Young’s classic track Down By The River is one of the best of those reasons.

The Boss is often covering songs by his heroes, but Springsteen has only ever performed this song alongside its creator, which suggests that he holds the highest respect for the track and Neil Young..

Joining The Rolling Stones (left) on stage is an accolade that few stars can claim. The Boss, however, felt perhaps more at home than any other artist when he joined Mick Jagger and co. for a performance of their fan-favourites Tumbling Dice.

Springsteen had performed alongside Jagger before, as part of the 1988 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony but this time was different. With a huge crowd in front of him, all there to see the Stones, Springsteen got to live out his fantasy.

“I had a fantasy of Mick Jagger getting sick before his show at Asbury Park Convention Hall and the Stones needing me, of course, to get up there and take over, which of course I would do, pimply-faced kid´´ , Springsteen said to The Sun in 2016.

´And all of the crowd, of course, goes insane and they’re not so anxious to have Mick back. So I was dreaming about that when I was 15. All I wanted initially was just to play rhythm guitar in a nice little local band and have the thrill of being on stage in front of people and knowing a few chords and a few songs´, he added.

It’s happened to us all. No matter how hard we try, the infectiousness of reggae music is a hard thing to avoid. Even the most ardent aggressor against the laid back jams has found their toes tapping every so often. Bruce Springsteen, it would seem, is also a big fan.

In 1987, while performing with reggae artist Jah Love, The Boss would delight his fans with a cover of two Bob Marley and The Wailers tracks One Love (right) and People Get Ready. While the latter is still a stone-cold classic, it was The Boss’ rendition of the classic One Love that has really stood the test of time.

Considering it is over 30-years-old, the cover still feels as fresh as ever.

photo 11 Two of the biggest names in American song-writing have joined forces on a few occasions but there’s no better showing of the admiration Bruce Springsteen (left) and Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder have for one another than on their touching duet of Better Man.

The duo shared the stage as part of Springsteen’s 2004 Vote For Change tour in aid of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. The track is also of significant emotional importance to Vedder and it was written while he was a teenager in angst at his stepfather who his mother remarried following his father’s death. At some shows, Vedder has been known to dedicate it to “the bastard who married my mother”.

‘Better Man’, in a bizarre way, also represented the American political landscape of in 2004 and their relationship with George W. Bush when there was a “better man” for them to find. It’s one of the more crystalline moments from what was a crazy time in American politics. Thank God that’s over…

Perhaps one of the more surprising contributions on this list is Springsteen’s cover of the 1979 Suicide classic ‘Dream Baby, Dream’ (right). The song is a subversive pop ditty that has littered the inner reaches of indie dance-floors for years but nobody could have expected Springsteen to have jumped on such a song.

The truth is, Springsteen has never sectioned himself off from the rest of the music industry. Though he had his roots in heartland rock, he still appreciated the efforts of the different genres and styles that surrounded him, meaning, when he was approached to record ‘Dream Baby, Dream’ as part of Alan Vega’s 70th birthday celebrations, he couldn’t get behind the mic quick enough.

It remains one of Springsteen’s finest covers to date as his soaring vocal adds a golden texture never before heard in Suicide songs.

With arguably one of the greatest songs ever written, Bruce Springsteen paid tribute to Prince (left) in 2016, just two days after his unexpected and tragic death, by performing the classic ‘Purple Rain’ to his adoring audience.

A lot of people have tried to cover Prince their time and most fail spectacularly. That’s because Prince is such a unique and talented voice that it is hard to replicate his style. Perhaps knowing this impossibility, Springsteen instead turns the song into his own version of the track, a real homage to the artist who created it.

Springsteen, speaking in 2016 to Rolling Stone said of the singer’s passing: “It was a terrible shame. It was a great loss and a tragedy. I felt a great kinship with Prince. And he was a guy, when I’d go to see him, I’d say, ‘Oh, man, OK, back to the drawing board.’

There was a film of him on the Arsenio Hall show, where he plays a series of songs in a row. It’s just some of the greatest showmanship I’ve ever seen. And he knew everything. He knew all about it, and then could put it to work.”

I said somewhere at the top of this article that I have a Bruce Springsteen Greatest Hits (or some such) collection on my cd shelves, but I should also say that I have a copy of his incredible folk-tribute album We Shall Overcome (right). It is probably the best album of covers I´ve ever heard and is certainly the loosest and most joyous.

This saw Springsteen and, effectively, the E Street band record covers of old folk songs. Fully titled We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions is the fourteenth studio album by Bruce Springsteen. Released in 2006, it peaked at number three on the Billboard 200 and won the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album at the 49th Grammy Awards.

The track-list includes Pay Me My Money Down, Oh Mary Don´t You Weep, My Oklahoma Home and Shenendoah, as well as the title track, meaning that Springsteen was paying homage to song collectors and writers like Lydia Parish who published the first-named of that list in her 1942 book, Slave Songs of The Georgia Sea Islands.

In 1957, Reverend Claude Jeter wrote an arrangement of “Mary, Don’t You Weep” for his gospel ensemble, the Swan Silvertones (left) , an ensemble subsequently lauded in song by Paul Simon. Mary, Don’t You Weep had been around as a spiritual since before the civil war, and gospel quartets had performed it before, but Jeter’s version took on a life of its own.

Agnes “Sis” Cunningham (right) was an American musician, best known for her involvement as a performer and publicist of folk music and protest songs. She was the founding editor of Broadside magazine, which she published with her husband Gordon Friesen and their daughters

“Oh Shenandoah” (also called “‘Shenandoah“, “Across the Wide Missouri“, “Rolling River“, “Oh, My Rolling River“, “World of Misery“) is a traditional folk song, sung in the Americas, of uncertain origin, dating to the early 19th century.

The song “Shenandoah” appears to have originated with American and Canadian voyageurs or fur traders traveling down the Missouri River in canoes and has developed several different sets of lyrics. Some lyrics refer to the Oneida chief Shenandoah and a canoe-going trader who wants to marry his daughter. By the mid 1800s versions of the song had become a sea shanty heard or sung by sailors in various parts of the world. The song is number 324 in the Roud Folk Song Index.

Other variations (due to the influence of its oral dispersion among different regions) include the Caribbean (St. Vincent) version, “World of Misery”, referring not to an “Indian princess” but to “the white mullata”.

That title track of We Shall Overcome On September 2, 1957, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., visited Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. Part of the school’s mission was to help prepare civil rights workers to challenge unjust laws and racist policies that discriminated against African Americans. The school also made a point of bringing Black and white people together to share experiences and to learn from each other. It was a dangerous idea. At a time when southern laws kept Black and white people segregated (or separate), some white racists terrorized African Americans with deadly violence.

Dr. King delivered the main speech that day, honoring the school’s 25th anniversary. As part of the meeting, folk singer Pete Seeger got up with his banjo. He plucked out a song he had learned at Highlander and led the audience in singing it.

Later that day, Dr. King found himself humming the tune in the car. “There’s something about that song that haunts you,” he said to his companions

That song was “We Shall Overcome.” It soon became the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It offered courage, comfort, and hope as protesters confronted prejudice and hate in the battle for equal rights for African Americans.

“We Shall Overcome” has a long history with input from many people and places. Part of the melody seems to be related to two European songs from the 1700s, “Prayer of the Sicilian Mariners” and “O Sanctissima.” Enslaved Black people in the U.S. mixed and matched similar tunes in the songs “I’ll Be All Right” and “No More Auction Block For Me.”

After 1900, it seems the lyrics of another gospel song, “I’ll Overcome Someday” by the Methodist minister and composer Reverend Dr. Charles Tindley, were added to the musical mix—though the music was very different. Around 1945, gospel arrangers Atron Twigg and Kenneth Morris apparently put together the essential pieces of the now-famous words and melody.

“We’ll Overcome” first appeared as a protest song during a 1945–1946 labor strike against American Tobacco in Charleston, South Carolina. African American women strikers seeking a pay raise to 30 cents an hour sang as they picketed. “I Will Overcome” was a favorite song of Lucille Simmons, one of the strikers. But she gave the song a powerful sense of solidarity by changing the “I” into “We” as they sang together. Other lyrics were improvised for pro-union purposes, including “We will organize,” “We will win our rights,” and “We will win this fight.”

In 1947, Simmons brought the song to Highlander Folk School and shared it with other labor activists there. Zilphia Horton, head of the school’s cultural program, learned it and later taught it to Pete Seeger. At some point, the nationally known folk singer revised the lyrics “We will” to “We shall.”

“We Shall Overcome” proved easy to learn and sing at different types of civil rights protests, such as sit-ins, marches, and huge rallies. “It’s the genius of simplicity,” Seeger said about the song in a later interview. “Any…fool can get complicated.”

The song, regularly performed at rallies by folkies such as Joan Baez (left) spread rapidly as the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum. Protesters sang it as they marched for voting rights. They also sang it as they were beat up, attacked by police dogs, and hauled off to jail for breaking laws enforcing segregation. News and pictures of brutality shocked people across the U.S. and around the world.

Slowly, gradually, more Americans of all races recognized the justice of the civil rights cause. At long last, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 nearly a century after the U.S. Civil War forced an end to slavery. The new law banned racial segregation in schools, restaurants, theaters, and hotels.

President Lyndon B. Johnson, a southerner from Texas, signed the landmark legislation on August 6, 1964. In a special speech before Congress, he used the title of the song to make clear his beliefs, saying:

“This great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education and hope to all: black and white, North and South, sharecropper and city dweller. These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They are the enemies and not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too, poverty, disease and ignorance, we shall overcome.”

So, there is obviously a gravitas about Springsteen that enable to not only identify the importance of music to the communities parochial and global, and he is articulate enough to communicate to huge audiences.

Even on the ´serious´ songs on We Shall Overcome, Springsteen somehow communicated his delight and joy in their power.

There was, too, another, more flippant while sounding steeped in tradition was a staple diet in all the UK folk clubs I played in with Colin Lever, as Lendanear, during the seventies and eighties.

Some scholars believe this song probably originated in Scotland circa 1600. Its first publication as words with an associated tune is dated to 1611 under the title “The Marriage of Frogge and the Mouse”. The song is known under many names, including, “Froggie Went A-Courting [or “A-Courtin'”]”, “The Frog Came to the Myl Dur”, “Frog in the Well”, “The Frog’s Wooing” and “The Frog and the Mouse”. It is collected in the Roud Folk Song Index as Roud 16 under the primary title that appears here.

The song may have originated as a satire of Queen Elizabeth’s habit of giving animal nicknames to her ministers. A version was created to express popular displeasure over her proposed marriage to a foreigner. Sir Walter Raleigh was known as her fish, Leicester her lap dog, and at the time of her proposed marriage to the Duke of Alencon and Anjou, Simier, the French ambassador was her ape; the Duke himself her frog. The song actually became something sung in nurseries and passed down that way over the generations.

There are verses of the odd marriage party gets out of hand, with different outcomes to the participants in the various versions, ranging from death to frog and mouse to living happily ever after.

This song that Springsteen´s album brought to a wider public was one that we as Lendanear (left) used to perform in folk clubs, or at least Colin did. 99% of what we performed on stage in the eighties was our own material but we would occasionally throw in the odd ´comedic´ cover, like Digging This Hole or Froggie Went A-Courting. And that might be mine and Lendanear´s own only claim to real fame; that we were singing the song on stage long before Bruce Springsteen ever thought to do so. We extend that claim somewhat when we tell people that Springsteen must have somehow got hold of a bootleg copy of one of our tapes,…. so similar to ours was his version of the song !?! Amazingly I also remember as I write this paragraph that we also used to deliver a fairly powerful and dramatic version of another Springsteen song, Factory Town, in our very early days.

So, after researching this article I remain confused by what might be interpreted as my ambivalence to Springsteen´s music. It should not be seen as indifference on my part because truth be told my quite narrow row of a very small field of Americana music was already hoed and sowed, with John Stewart, Guy Clark, Tom Paxton and Townes Van Zandt grown to bloom before I ever heard Bruce Springsteen. I was happy in my folksy country small-holding and there was really no room for the kind of blue collar rock with which the boss made his entrée into the recording industry.

photo 20 Brilliant Disguise is a song by Bruce Springsteen from his 1987 album Tunnel of Love. It was released as the first single from the album, reaching the No. 5 position on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and No. 1 on the Mainstream Rock chart in the United States. The follow-up single, Tunnel of Love, also reached No. 1 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, giving Springsteen two consecutive No. 1’s .The single reached the top 10 in four additional countries including Canada and Ireland and the top 20 in Australia, Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Brilliant Disguise was nominated for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance at the 1988 Grammy Awards.

By the time I realised there was gold like Brilliant Disguise hidden among Springsteen´s streams my shelves were stacked with gems from Alabama to Why Arizona and spaces in my collection were by then at a premium.

But bouyed by the reminders I have found on line of what makes Springsteen such a hero, then I just might issue one or two eviction notices to ensure Bruce Springsteen can squeeze on tracks from at lease Tunnel Of Love and perhaps, too, Nebraska which has a lot of my much loved Americana flavour.

The primary source for this article were Paste on-line articles and features from American Songwriter, and we recommend them as ideal reading for discerning music lovers.

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This article was collated by Norman Warwick (right) , a weekly columnist with Lanzarote Information and owner and editor of this daily blog at Sidetracks And Detours.

Norman has also been a long serving broadcaster, co-presenting the weekly all across the arts programme on Crescent Community Radio for many years with Steve Bewick, and his own show on Sherwood Community Radio. He has been a regular guest on BBC Radio Manchester, BBC Radio Lancashire, BBC Radio Merseyside and BBC Radio Four.

As a published author and poet Norman was a founder member of Lendanear Music, with Colin Lever and Just Poets with Pam McKee, Touchstones Creative Writing Group (for which he was creative writing facilitator for a number of years) with Val Chadwick and all across the arts with Robin Parker.

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