Cover me: Bruce Springsteen's top 7 cover songs

By David Hinkley
New York Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com
Wednesday, July 23rd 2008, 12:23 PM


This July 17, 2008 file photo shows Bruce Springsteen, right, as he performs alongside Clarence Clemons on saxophone during a concert in Madrid, Thursday, July 17, 2008.
Bruce Springsteen will be at Giants Stadium on July 27, 28, and 31.
(AP Photo/Paul White, FILE)

It's probably a good measure of how much fun Bruce Springsteen seemed to have on the just-concluded European leg of his "Magic" tour that he dusted off a couple of rock 'n' roll classics.

As the sets got longer - a show that was running maybe two and a half hours in the U.S. got as long as three hours and 10 minutes in Oslo - first Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues" and then the Isley Brothers' "Twist and Shout" dropped in for a visit.

This is always good news - not because Bruce does them better than anyone else, but because 1) those seminal rock classics fit perfectly with what Bruce still does with his own music, and 2) they say that he's still a rock fan. You have to figure the main reason he plays "Summertime Blues," besides it being summer, is that if he were in the audience, he'd love to hear it himself.

And who wouldn't? (Note clever classic rock joke there.) Among the many great early rock lines, there will always be a place for:

"I called my congressman
And he said, quote,
I'd like to help ya son
But you're too young to vote."

It will be interesting to see if those classics, or others, make an appearance when Springsteen visits Giants Stadium July 27, 28 and 31, kicking off the final month of the "Magic" tour that ends Aug. 30 in Milwaukee. Some folks privately say they think Bruce's European audiences have been responding better than his U.S. audiences for a while now, and that, subsequently, he sometimes has more fun there.

In any case, Springsteen has a pretty impressive song catalog of his own. But like his pal Bob Dylan, about whom the same can be said, Springsteen has never restrained himself from doing someone else's songs if he's in the mood.

He's sung hundreds of other people's songs, maybe thousands if you go back to the live shows of the early days when he would sing Motown, soul and garage. As time went by, those songs from his own top-40 and rock radio youth were joined by folkier songs he discovered further on down the road, like Woody Guthrie's "Vigilante Man" or "I Ain't Got No Home."

Then there are the times he's joined artists he likes or admires on stage, like when he was part of the band behind Roy Orbison for the famous 1987 tribute show, or the night he helped sing backup behind Dion at the Garden.

Throw in the hundreds of jam sessions at Jersey shore clubs, and it's hard to think there are many early rock classics he hasn't played at some point. That absorption was just part of the music culture in which he grew up. That's why his band years ago became one of hundreds corralled by Chuck Berry to back him up when he came to town. Chuck liked to travel light and he figured, correctly, that everyone who had the slightest connection to rock 'n' roll knew his songs, so why bother hiring and paying a standing band of your own?


Bruce Springsteen performs during a concert in his 'Magic Tour' at Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona July 19, 2008.
REUTERS/Albert Gea (SPAIN)

In any case, the deal with Springsteen singing other people's songs is not to compare his version with someone else's, but to gauge how they fit in with his own songs. Does Bruce sing "War" better than Edwin Starr? No. Did it complement and enhance the music and messages around it in a Bruce show? Absolutely.

With that in mind, then, let's take off on a kind of fool's errand, which is picking the top seven Springsteen renditions of Other People's Songs.

And before you read the list and assume I forgot some major ones, which is entirely possible, I didn't forget about the "Detroit Medley." I know many Bruce fans cherish it as a pinnacle of pure rock 'n' roll excitement. I just think he's done better.

1. "Quarter to Three." It may have helped that he built elaborate stage raps around this classic Gary U.S. Bonds song, like about not eating a cheeseburger before you sing it. It definitely helps that by singing it, he helped enshrine one of the great party songs ever. But mainly, he sounded like he enjoyed it as much as Bonds enjoyed it, which seems almost impossible to anyone who knows the original. It's part of Bruce lore, and it should be.

2. "Jersey Girl." In contrast to the way "Quarter to Three" kicked matters into a frenzy, he used this one to slow things down. It would be a hot summer night and he'd work everybody into a sweat and suddenly the lights would drop and out would come this beautiful Tom Waits love ballad. A lot of people assume Springsteen wrote it because he took it over so thoroughly. He even added a verse of his own, though it's not as delicate and subtle as Waits' originals. But he understood the importance of the "sha-la-las," which mean just as much as the other words. He understood the girl about whom Waits was writing, too, and while his version is different from Waits', it's equally powerful. As an added bonus, it inspired a great line that Waits used many times in subsequent years about how sure, he wrote this song and Bruce sung it, but now, well, Bruce was just going to have to go the rest of the way on his own.

3. "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town." Not a heavyweight, you might say. You'd be right. But he just does it so perfectly. This is the definitive rock 'n' roll rendition of a Christmas song, one of the few peers to Phil Spector's Christmas album. The rap is perfect, too ("Clarence, Santa gonna bring you a new saxophone?"), and mainly, it just so fits the exhilaration of the season. In fact, it fits any exhilarating moment. He threw it into a European set one night a few weeks ago.

4. "Who'll Stop the Rain?" No one sings this with the jagged edge of writer John Fogerty. Not even Bruce. But Bruce sings it mighty mighty well, and even though he sometimes puts it in a playful context - he's been known to use it as a show kickoff on a night when the skies are threatening - he also conveys its dark metaphoric warning. It may be the most unsettling cosmic question rock 'n' roll has ever asked, the global counterpart to "Will you still love me tomorrow?"


Bruce Springsteen (L), Little Steven van Zandt (R) and the E Street Band perform at the Olympic Stadium in Helsinki July 11, 2008. REUTERS/Hannu Kivimaki/Lehtikuva (FINLAND).

5. "Trapped." Hardly anyone heard this when Jimmy Cliff first recorded it, but one listener - Bruce - was enough. A song of restless unease became, in Bruce's hands, a roar of pain - and it might not be too much of a stretch to suggest Bruce felt a little of it himself, since he broke it out on the "Born in the USA" tour that made him rich and famous, but also clearly made him feel like he might be getting shoved into an anthem-rocker box.

6. "Chimes of Freedom." A recent UK article on later versions of famous songs called this one of the worst ever. Here, as in signing the non-aggression pact with Germany in 1938, a Brit was quite simply wrong. Bruce picked this song, which is one of Bob Dylan's best, which is really saying something, to kick off the Amnesty International tour a few years back. The enduring version is one he performed live on a radio broadcast and then issued as a single, largely to help promote the tour. Bruce doesn't have a big problem with song envy, but you know he wouldn't mind having written this one.

7. "Pay Me My Money Down" and "Old Dan Tucker." Personally, I'd put the whole "Seeger Sessions" project here. Those two songs sounded especially fine in the live performance, but so, on any given night, did a dozen others, from Sis Cunningham's "My Oklahoma Home" to Blind Alfred Reed's "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live." Springsteen added a couple of his own lines on that last one, turning a scratchy old lament into a message for modern times as well. The new-for-Bruce sound of the "Seeger Sessions" was a big part of their appeal, obviously, but the fact Bruce was poking into these great old songs at all helps explain why he's done so many versions of Other People's Songs from the beginning: He hears a song, likes it, identifies what he likes and figures out how to convey it to us. That may be easier with "Twist and Shout" than with "Oh Mary Don't You Weep," and it obviously resonates with a larger audience. But it's the same impulse and the same process and at the very least, it explains why this conversation is worth having.

Discuss this Article
5 comments so far.