Bruce Springsteen Tracks (1998)

From nodepression.com

In his introductory note, Bruce Springsteen describes Tracks as “the alternate route to some of the destinations I travelled to on my records.” That’s a fair assessment of much, but not all, of the music contained on this sprawling, four-CD set, which up to now had been mere daydream fodder for hard-core Bruce fans.

Like his equally prolific peer, Prince, Springsteen earned a reputation for recording three, four or five songs for every one that made its way onto a record. Entire lost albums were rumored to be buried in the vaults, and, as is also the case with Prince, a remarkable amount of Springsteen’s unreleased output leaked out to the Boss-obsessed via bootlegs. We’re talking hours and hours of material from the sessions for Darkness On The Edge Of Town, The River, and Born In The U.S.A.

As such, over half of the songs on Tracks are already familiar to collectors, though the versions, mixes and sound quality here are different and often better. Among these tracks are such longtime fan favorites as “Zero And Blind Terry” (1973), “Don’t Look Back” (1978), “Loose Ends” (1979) and “Frankie” (1983), as well as radically different takes of “Stolen Car” (1979) and “Born In The U.S.A.” (1982). Add to that ten previously released B-sides and sixteen cuts recorded by Bruce alone and with musicians other than the E Street Band between 1987-1998 (a period that saw the vaults closed tight) for a whopping 66 total tracks.

That’s an audacious number, comparable to the 58 “lost” songs released on Bob Dylan’s The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3 in 1991, the blueprint for this set. What’s remarkable about Tracks is how many completely new, fully finished songs it contains, master recordings that could and should have been included on the albums for which they were recorded. Why a particular song wasn’t released usually speaks more to its style than its quality, plus a bit about how Springsteen wanted himself and his music to be viewed.

But behind the songs themselves is the songwriting process, and that’s what Tracks so fascinatingly explores — cynics might even say, exposes. Anyone well-versed in Springsteen’s eleven studio albums will attempt to reconcile the many lines and phrases scattered across these songs that turned up again in released tracks. Or, in the case of “Bring On The Night”, even later on Tracks itself (“My Love Will Not Let You Down”). The fact that he took the words “the highway is alive tonight” from the 1973 ditty “Seaside Bar Song” and made them the defining line of 1995’s “The Ghost Of Tom Joad” suggests he’s a masterful recycler.

But what of a song like 1991’s “Goin’ Cali” on disc four? The music and singing style make it a too-close cousin to “57 Channels” from 1992’s Human Touch, while lyrically it shares several lines and images with Lucky Town’s “Living Proof” (also released in 1992), not to mention a key paraphrase (“a little while later a son come along”) from 1987’s “Spare Parts”. It hardly seems accurate to call this a finished master; it’s an inferior, underdeveloped attempt compared to the powerfully moving “Living Proof”, one of the two or three best songs Springsteen has recorded this decade.

So why include it at all? Alas, Tracks inexplicably omits any liner notes beyond musician credits, lyrics, and the aforementioned brief introductory note. Springsteen doesn’t explain his choices, and many beg for elucidation. His “alternate route” idea may apply to the songs on discs one, two and part of three, spanning the early-’70s to the early-’80s, but it doesn’t do much to explain the rest of the set, which carries us from the late Born In The U.S.A. sessions up through the present.

Beyond the four original John Hammond audition tracks, which neatly capture Springsteen in acoustic troubadour mode (Hammond actually wanted his new discovery to be a solo artist; it was Bruce who insisted he needed his band), disc one showcases the early E Street Band sound of the Wild & Innocent era through youthful romantic epics such as “Santa Ana” and “Zero And Blind Terry” and expansive party tracks such as “Seaside Bar Song” and the “Rosalita” set-closing precursor “Thundercrack”. There isn’t much of an alternate perspective gained through this material, but it’s quite appealing just the same.

Recordings from early in the Born In The U.S.A. period included on Tracks find Springsteen giving the E Street Band the opportunity to show considerable range, from the pounding urgency of “My Love Won’t Let You Down” to the ominous and insidiously brooding contemplation of “Wages Of Sin”, the rootsy swing of “This Hard Land” to a return to the sweeping romantic tales of his past in “Frankie”. On songs from later in the sessions — “TV Movie”, “Car Wash”, “Brothers Under The Bridge” — the E Streeters are working from a limited palette, which helps explain why, even though you likely haven’t listened to these songs before, they sound familiar. Too familiar. If you’ve heard a couple of generic Born In The U.S.A. rockers, you’ve heard them all.

Instant familiarity is common in the ’90s work chronicled on disc four as well. “Loose Change”, “My Lover Man” and “Over The Rise” also sound a bit too much like tunes we already know, sharing keyboard sounds and rhythms. “Gave It A Name”, recorded this earlier year, incorporates the line from Pete Dexter’s Paris Trout (“Poison snake bites you, you’re poison too”) also quoted in “The Big Muddy” on Lucky Town.

These relatively recent songs don’t chart an alternate route, but a parallel one. The Born In The U.S.A. outtake “Brothers Under The Bridge” could just as easily have taken the place of that album’s “No Surrender”; “Leavin’ Train” deserves a spot on Human Touch as much as “Gloria’s Eyes” did. Or didn’t, because these outtakes, and their kindred released counterparts, aren’t particularly memorable efforts. They will never be considered Springsteen classics; too many are musically mundane.

There are a few good songs in the bunch. “Seven Angels”, “Sad Eyes” and “Happy” sound fresh and show range, while leftovers from 1987’s Tunnel Of Love sessions are as good (and in the case of “The Wish”, Bruce’s first song about his mother, even more confessional) as the rest of the album, Springsteen’s last masterpiece. And yet it’s still disappointing that material on Tracks from the last ten years, new even to the most ardent bootleg collector, doesn’t reveal a greater sense of experimentation.

The reason for this may be one of the limitations Springsteen imposed on Tracks himself when he trimmed it from its proposed six CDs to four late in the game. He elected to include only those songs associated with specific albums, setting aside, presumably (and this is pure speculation), adventurous forays such as the solo recordings done in L.A. in 1983 away from the E Street Band, 1987 sessions with country musicians, and 1994 recordings with the band from his 1992-93 tour.

Without these fresh perspectives, if you haven’t liked Springsteen’s music this decade, it’s unlikely Tracks will change that opinion. But if you were once a fan in the E Street Band era, Tracks offers a wealth of wonderful material to remind you why you were, and largely accomplishes its stated mission of revealing what the albums might have been like had Bruce made different choices.

All quibbles aside — and there are both major and minor ones, to be sure — Springsteen’s decision to release Tracks must be applauded. For fans, it is a dream come true to have many of these great songs finally made available. And clearly, that’s who this box was made for. It’s not a career anthology, and those who don’t know Bruce’s albums won’t take away nearly as much from Tracks as those who do. I only hope that he finds the wherewithal to eventually let us hear the music he recorded without a map as well — when he followed not just an alternate route, but an entirely new one.