Massive Music List

For more than 35 years, Bruce Springsteen has set a standard of consistent excellence that few other rock and roll artists could ever hope to match. He has written so many great songs, as both a solo artist and with the E Street Band, that it would seem almost impossible to try and rank those classics one against another. And yet one fan was daring enough, or maybe foolhardy enough, to try. Following up our Beatles and Stones countdowns, JamsBio presents “No Retreat, No Surrender,” a worst-to-first countdown of every album cut in Springsteen history, plus a few choice outtakes, live classics, and soundtrack songs – that’s 200 tunes ranked and defended. Check out JamsBio.com each day as the countdown is gradually revealed, and prepare to hit the message boards to defend your favorites.

The complete list to date.

The Last Five:

145. “Matamoros Banks” (from Devils & Dust)

144. “Real World” (from Human Touch)

143. “Life Itself” (from Working On a Dream)

142. “Galveston Bay” (from The Ghost of Tom Joad)

141. “Gypsy Biker” (from Magic)

140. “What Love Can Do”

From Working On a Dream

LISTEN HERE

A solid piece of mid-tempo rock on Working On a Dream, “What Love Can Do” is played and performed well, solidly written and constructed, just a good effort all around. It might be ultimately forgettable due to its lack of bold strokes, but it makes a good impact while you’re listening.

Bruce has noted that he actually wrote the song while the band was making Magic, but ever the thematic stickler, didn’t feel like it quite fit. Instead he used it as the jumping-off point for the album to come. Personally, I don’t hear it either as a huge departure from the stuff on Magic or a linchpin for Dream, but the albums both worked just fine, so it’s all good.

Springsteen’s lyrics feature some powerful imagery, although some of it is a bit strained. I do like the urgent bridge a lot. The song is about love’s power in the face of all of life’s external pressures, which are rendered by Bruce in almost apocalyptic terms. Even though love isn’t a cure-all, Bruce seems to say, it does offer something. In that way, “What Love Can Do” manages healthy doses of realism and optimism all at once.

139. “Kitty’s Back”

From The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle

LISTEN HERE

A song that has earned quite a reputation as a live warhorse, this long effort from Bruce’s second LP in 1973 doesn’t quite live up to that billing as a recording. It has its moments of brilliance, which make it a fun listen, but there just aren’t enough to sustain the extended running time.

Springsteen probably understood the trade-off with songs like this, that you run the risk of sounding self-indulgent on record to give the song what it needed to be a concert showcase. Still, the playing in the longer instrumental sections is universally fine, from Bruce’s elegiac guitar work at the start, the high-speed organ solo from David Sancious, and a little strut from the Big Man himself, making one of his first spotlight appearances in the group.

Actually, the music carries the song a long way, and Bruce wisely keeps the band sections at a high tempo only to slow it down for the verses so that the attention span never lags. Unfortunately, all of the motley characters in the song only contribute to a meager tale of a spurned lover unable to resist Kitty when she returns. It’s as if Bruce knew all this, hence the hep-cat slurring which makes the lyrics so hard to decipher.

All is forgiven once we get to that adrenaline-rush of a refrain, the whole band chipping in like some rough-and-tumble street doo-wop group. It’s a bumpy ride to get there, but that alone makes “Kitty’s Back” worth the price of admission, even when you’re not surrounded by 35,000 other Bruce fans.

138. “Youngstown”

From The Ghost of Tom Joad

LISTEN HERE

Bruce addresses a topic here that back in the day might have been fodder for one of Robbie Robertson’s topical takes on America. When I hear the song I can almost hear Levon Helm embodying the main character. (The Band actually did do a darn good version of “Atlantic City” in the early 90’s, but I digress.)

Some of The Band’s instrumental virtuosity might have come in handy to spice this one up a bit, as the track, as found on The Ghost of Tom Joad, is a touch dreary. Springsteen has since juiced the song up electrically in concert with the E Street Band; you can check out those results on the Live In New York release. But other than some probing violin from Soosie Tyrell and flashes of pedal steel from session man Marty Rifkin, there’s nothing too exciting going on in the original.

The lyrics, however, are strikingly good, telling what seems like an entire history of the steel industry in amazingly economic fashion. Yet by telling it through the eyes of a disenchanted worker, he never loses sight of the human drama at the heart of the story. In an industry that spanned hundreds of years and numerous wars, the greed of the business owners is eventually what brings it all down, and the hurt that fact engenders registers in Springsteen’s vocal turn.

Bruce subtly adds layers to the story. His narrator reveals the pride he had in his job with florid descriptions of sights that other people might find ugly: “Them smokestacks reachin’ like the arms of God/Into a beautiful sky of soot and clay.” And when he makes his complaint, it’s not to a woman; the “Jenny” in the song is actually the nickname of a blast furnace. Only this machine can possibly know the betrayal he’s been dealt by his bosses: “Once I made you rich enough, rich enough to forget my name.” It’s a credit to Springsteen that he hasn’t forgotten these people, and the disenfranchised workers of the steel industry couldn’t have asked for a more eloquent spokesman.

137. “My Beautiful Reward”

From Lucky Town

LISTEN HERE

A quick look at the title and the song’s placement on Lucky Town might lead you to believe that this was another of the many happy marriage-inspired tunes cropping up around that time from Springsteen. The music, all warm keyboards and perky acoustic guitar, fuels that speculation even further.

But closer inspection reveals unease at the heart of the song, which, considering its placement at the end of the album, sends Lucky Town out on a fascinatingly ambivalent note. All of the contentment that Bruce had displayed up until that time is momentarily set aside. After all, the song says that he’s “searching,” present tense, for his reward.

I would even venture a guess that the song was more inspired by his failed first marriage than his successful second one. The bridge talks about him briefly finding salvation, only to crash back down to reality. It’s as if he was retracing his steps to make sure he didn’t make the same mistakes.

Even more mysterious is the final verse, in which Bruce transforms into a large bird to survey the territory. The music might lead you to believe that he’s already found what he covets, but the words will tell you that the search continues.

136. “Leah”

From Devils & Dust

LISTEN HERE

In past years, when the Springsteen express was an unstoppable force and received airplay for every utterance he made on record, a song like “Leah” would have been swept up by the momentum of it all and possibly found a spot on the charts. It is an expertly constructed and good-hearted to its core, full of touching but never treacly sentiment.

That’s because Springsteen always has a firm hand on the tiller and knows how to balance the gooey stuff like love and redemption with the darker corners you have to navigate to get to those lofty heights. Thus, his narrator here lays his mistakes bare: “With this hand I’ve built/With this hand I’ve burned.” And Bruce also knows that even domestic contentment takes vigilance: “I wanna live in the same house, beneath the same roof/Sleep in the same bed, search for the same proof/As Leah.”

Set to a ringing acoustic guitar and featuring a distant trumpet part by Mark Pender, “Leah” also hits the musical pleasure center much more accurately than some of the less tuneful numbers on Devils & Dust. All but the diehards might have missed it the first time around, but it’s worth searching “Leah” out if you haven’t made her acquaintance.

The complete list to date.

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