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:

50. “None But the Brave” (from The Essential Bruce Springsteen)

49. “Streets of Philadelphia” (from The Essential Bruce Springsteen)

48. “Devils & Dust” (from Devils & Dust)

47. “Shut Out the Light” (from Tracks)

46. “The Last Carnival” (from Working On a Dream)

45. “Glory Days”

From Born In The U.S.A.

LISTEN HERE

It’s become such a party song over the years that it’s easy to miss just how much Bruce Springsteen gets right in “Glory Days.” As the resident of a small town for just about all of my 37 years on this earth, I know the people in this song. The characterizations are so spot-on that I recognize the faded athlete who still commands respect (and free drinks) even after he’s long since lost his mojo. I recognize the former queen of the high school hallways who married too soon and thought too late.

And, like Springsteen, I have affection for these characters. I’d say something like, “There but for the grace of his guitar goes Bruce,” but I would guess that Bruce doesn’t think himself above these people in any way. After all, the third verse is a portrait of the narrator, realizing that he can blabber on about the glory days just like anybody else. No condescension at all, or else the song wouldn’t have worked.

All of that lyrical dexterity gets lost a bit in the ramshackle brilliance of the music and that thrilling chorus. The opening guitar riff immediately places you in a small-town bar, although the E Streeters are a notch or two above your average bar-band. The keyboards are typically on-point, Max Weinberg clobbers the skins, and Steven Van Zandt, usually behind-the-scenes musically even as he steps out front on stage, takes a mandolin solo that finds the melancholy in the lyric. And their call-and-response vocals in the run-out is one of the singular moments in E Street Band history.

At the end of the night in a small town, people are either dancing at the jukebox or crying in their beer. With “Glory Days,” Bruce was able to give each of those constituencies something they could call their own.

44. “My Father’s House”

From Nebraska

LISTEN HERE

I think it’s fair to say that no one in the history of rock has ever written about fathers and sons as well as Bruce Springsteen. Most just avoid the topic altogether, and when they do it’s often the knee-jerk, generational-divide hostility. But Bruce always writes with nuance and perspective and sees both sides of the picture, which is doubly impressive considering the fractious relationship he had with his own dad during his formative years.

“My Father’s House” may very well be the definitive Springsteen father-son song, which is saying something because he certainly wrote some great ones. It’s a testament to the song that it works no matter what your relationship with your dad was. For example, my dad was all I could have asked for in a father, but he passed way when I was just 10. This song brings me close to tears each time I listen to it.

Sung with a Johnny Cash-inspired drawl over a melody that sounds a thousand years old, the song starts with one of Springsteen’s momentous dreams. The narrator dreams of himself as a child in a foreboding forest, trying to find his way home. His journey is perilous, torn apart as he is by the obstacles in his path. But he eventually makes it into his father’s waiting arms.

When he awakens, the squabbles that had separated the two have dissipated, and he immediately heads for the very same house from his dream. That’s when the gut-punch comes, as the child discovers the father is gone.

This towering achievement ends with Springsteen still dreaming of that symbolic house, that sanctuary of redemption, which lies unreachable over the vast expanse of years and miles and disagreements that stand between the two men, “where our sins lie unatoned.” I wish from my heart for any of you facing a similar expanse, be you a father or a son, that you try to bridge that gap as soon as possible.

43. “Kingdom of Days”

From Working On a Dream

LISTEN HERE

For someone who seems like the essence of eternal youth, both in terms of appearance and energy, it’s quite bracing to hear Bruce Springsteen sing about getting older. Yet he does so with such honesty and grace on this gorgeous love song from Working On a Dream that the song doesn’t seem out of place in his catalog at all; it actually feels like a winning addition.

One of the most heartening aspects of Springsteen’s last two studio albums has been his willingness to embrace melody once again. Songs like this come at you with hooks and don’t stop, from the Orbisonian majesty of the main verses to the “walk away” refrains to the breathtaking layered backing vocals. It’s a song that grabs you immediately and just keeps bringing warm feelings about warm feelings.

Love triumphs over time in Bruce’s narrative. The couple here maybe getting on a bit but they’re still pretty groovy; notice the 60’s inspired pet-name she had for him, “Baby blue.” Nothing matters but their bond, and the signs of aging only provide amusement: “And I’ll count my blessing that you’re mine for always/We’ll laugh beneath the covers and count the wrinkles and the grays.” Autumn might be closing in, as Bob Seger once sang, but “Kingdom Of Days” is the evidence of an everlasting summer for those who have found true love.

42. “The Ghost of Tom Joad”

From The Ghost of Tom Joad

LISTEN HERE

For those of you who slept through English senior year, Tom Joad was the rabble-rousing anti-hero of The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s colossal novel about displaced Americans during the Great Depression. Forced to leave his family after a scrape with the law, Tom gave an unforgettable good-bye speech that Bruce paraphrases in the final verse.

Bruce spends the first two verses recounting why he clearly felt Tom Joad was still needed as a protector of the downtrodden when he wrote this title track to his 1995 album. The descriptions of men sleeping in cars or in cardboard boxes, bathing in city aqueducts, and finally resorting to violence to feed their families, seem like they were pulled from the late 20’s. But Bruce makes it clear just when this is all taking place with the line “Welcome to the new world order,” a shot at one of the rallying cries of the first President Bush.

This is another Springsteen song in which the highway offers no solace: “The highway is alive tonight/But nobody’s kiddin’ nobody about where it goes.” Bruce sings in hushed, minor-key tones in the quiet arrangement, only his harmonica raising its voice to be heard in the desolate night.

Rage Against The Machine’s blistering cover version brought out all the anger and disgust in Springsteen’s lyrics, but I think Bruce’s quiet reading is more on the mark to the plight of the crushed souls he portrays. They are defeated by their circumstances, so desperate for help that they turn to the ghost of someone who never existed in the first place.

41. “Girls In Their Summer Clothes”

From Magic

LISTEN HERE

A cutting portrait of a middle-age wannabe dressed up in some of the most Spectorian music the E Street band had recorded in 30 years, “Girls In Their Summer Clothes” is a little slice of pop majesty found on Magic. Unabashedly, it goes for the cheap seats musically, even while it tells the tale of a guy who can’t seem to get out of his own way.

Springsteen creates a painterly vision of the suburbs, all porches and streetlights and diners. Sprinkled among the idyllic descriptions, the narrator reveals that he’s a bit down on his luck, but he hasn’t lost his optimism. “Love’s such a fool’s dance,” he sings. “I ain’t got much sense/But I still got my feet.”

It all leads up to a breathtaking chorus, which soars higher and higher until the kicker hits, the little bit of melancholy that deepens the song immensely: “The girls in their summer clothes/In the cool of the evening light/The girls in their summer clothes/Pass me by.”

We leave this guy strolling down the street, singing to himself as the swirling orchestration envelops him. This guy may have seen better days, but he sure has a wonderful soundtrack for his travels.

The complete list to date.

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