It’s not hard to see why Springsteen saw these sessions as a failure. There is something slightly generic about the renditions of “Open All Night” and “Johnny 99,” songs I’ve always associated with desperate, sleep-deprived adrenaline. Here they sound like the kind of things a band could count off and launch into unrehearsed with playful bar-band chords and rockabilly rhythms. On one hand, it shows you just how much Springsteen’s writing—so open to interpretation, so archetypal in its structure—gains from his delivery. (For another example, compare this bleak, early acoustic take on “Thunder Road” to the triumphant album version.) On the other hand, this type of costuming was crucial to his songwriting during this period: a fascination that could turn a romp like “Pink Cadillac” into something pained and moaning, like the narrator has returned to earth, zombified and broken, with only one thing on his mind.
For hardcore fans, transformations like these will be the draw of the collection: hearing the journey of tracks like Born in the U.S.A.’s “Working on a Highway” from a genuinely creepy ballad called “Child Bride” into a ditty so raucous that Springsteen himself can’t get through the demo without laughing. Some outtakes, like “Losin’ Kind,” a country ballad that’s all the more powerful for its lack of resolution, have circulated unofficially for years, but two compositions are entirely new to this box set: “On the Prowl” and “Gun in Every Home.” In the former, he closes with a disorienting repetition of the word “searching,” slathered in Sun Studios slapback delay to conjure the clatter of a live band behind him. In the latter, he offers a nightmarish portrait of suburban life and closes with a dejected confession: “I don’t know what to do.”
In any given song, Springsteen may be adopting the perspective of a serial killer in the shadows or a fugitive on the lam; he may be speeding away from the scene or wondering, upon getting caught, whether he is actually lucky to be alive. The whole point of enduring a dark night of the soul is that you can’t see your way out. But sometimes, he caught glimpses of where it would lead. Along with the original demo tape, Springsteen wrote an accompanying letter to his manager, Jon Landau. Here, he goes song by song, elaborating on the bleak subject matter, suggesting ways to spice up the arrangements, and, once in a while, acknowledging his cautious optimism.
He leaves a particularly prescient note beside the scrawled title of “Born in the U.S.A.,” a song that appears here in two nascent forms: a menacing acoustic blues about Vietnam and a full-band rocker that, without its chiming synth part, leaves little doubt how the narrator feels about his birthright. “Might have potential,” he writes in the margins, an instinct that sustained him through the sessions. He knew it would take work to deliver songs like these, and it would take time to understand them. But he kept his faith that at the end of every hard-earned day, there’s magic in the night.
All products featured on Pitchfork are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
