Ask Sammy #1: A Brilliant Disguise
on the Essence of Bruce
Welcome to “Ask Sammy,” a recurring feature in this newsletter where I respond to questions from subscribers. Send any inquiries to asksamsodomsky@gmail.com. (They don’t all have to be about Bruce Springsteen.)
Question: I wonder if you wouldn't mind making a short guide for your listeners of the best "Fake Bruce"; maybe a top 5 or top 10. By this I mean: A list of the best songs that are trying to be Bruce songs, but aren't. That might draw songs from artists whose indebtedness to the Boss has long been noted, for example the War on Drugs, or it might be songs that strike you as obvious homages from unexpected sources. The ranking criteria is just how good you feel they are, and why.
Hello, and thank you for this question. I am not going to make a list. But I do like the prompt. I think in order to address the subject fully, we must take a journey through the Essence of Bruce, the essential qualities we are considering as we scour the depths for his influence. A simple crash course can be found in John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band’s “On the Dark Side,” the theme from the 1983 film Eddie and the Cruisers. Here we have a song that sounds so much like Springsteen that people at the time heard it on the radio and genuinely thought it was his new single.
This one really has it all. The twinkly piano intro, the bellowing vocals, the sax solo, the handclaps. He’s singin about shadows and darkness, love and dreams. The verse melody is nicked right from an old-timey rock’n’roll song and that production sounds just like the party tracks on The River. Just from listening to this song, you get a good survey of Bruce’s contributions to the larger rock idiom.
Plenty of people have built from this basic template and found success, fans, and occasionally their own voice. When it was announced that Bruce would be paying tribute to Bon Jovi at the MusiCares event earlier this year, I had a fantasy of him covering “Blood on Blood” and showing the direct line you could draw from his music to Jovi’s hits in the ’80s. There are plenty of other bubbles in the following decades: the influence of Nebraska on ’90s alt-country, Born to Run on theatrical ’00s indie rock, Tunnel of Love on synthy Antonoff-helmed 2010s pop. And that’s not to mention his massive enduring impact on mainstream country, culminating in Y2K covers from Kenny Chesney, Trisha Yearwood, and Faith Hill.
It was around this time in the late ’90s when I became a Springsteen fan. This was the period when the reunion tour happened, between The Ghost of Tom Joad and The Rising, when it sort of seemed like he might not release a new record again. Because of this relative drought of new material (although I probably would have done this anyway), I became desperate for anything tangentially related to Bruce, which is what led me to explore the larger E Street Family. These releases have plenty of great music that spans from the overtly Brucey (and frequently Bruce-assisted) material on Little Steven’s Men Without Women, Gary U.S. Bonds’ Dedication, Southside Johnny’s Hearts of Stone, and Nils Lofgren’s Acoustic Live, all of which got a ton of play on my boyhood walkman. It also led me to expand the boundaries of my own taste with stuff like Clarence Clemons’ spiritual jazz album Peacemaker and the Japan-only import A Night With Mr. C (which I found at the late Colony Records in New York!). The joy of going to a record store and finding an album I didn’t know existed, bearing the name of a Springsteen associate, was a thrill unlike any other—and still the basic premise for a ton of dreams I have.
A lot of this music became the bedrock of my taste, and tracing the different releases and formats and lineups really accelerated my obsessive music fandom. Accordingly, it’s also why the people I talk to most frequently about music tend to roll their eyes whenever I start comparing everything to Bruce. As a writer, I have been known to find ways to work his name into all sorts of pieces on seemingly unrelated subjects. (In my defense, sometimes Payson from Tomb Mold wears a Nebraska shirt at the release show and I’m not not going to mention it in my story.) Still I have tried to resist overstating his presence where it’s not warranted. I don’t want to repeat myself—or worse, become a writer with a “brand.” Yuck.
Sometimes the connection really is there. There’s the War on Drugs, like you mentioned, who tap into the hypnotic quality I associate with the fadeouts of Bruce songs like “One Step Up,” and singer-songwriters who find their own spin on his style. (I loved the recent interview where Will Oldham talked about drawing inspiration from the “upliftingly bleak” Darkness on the Edge of Town.) Overall, the “Fake Bruce” songs that move me the most aren’t the ones that bear his mark so clearly, but rather the ones that feel in conversation with specific qualities of his songbook, doing things he never would have done. This is also probably why so much music reminds me of Springsteen, and why it extends far beyond car talk and blue jeans and “one-two-three-four.” Anyone can wear the costume. To embody the influence, you are not just showing us your awareness of the art. You are showing us how it makes you feel.
All of this is to say, the song that feels the most Bruce-like to me, in its sense of personal stakes and spiritual transcendence, enduring the same way his songs do, hearing it both live and on the record, is “This Year” by the Mountain Goats.
Keep pushin’ ‘til it’s understood,
Sammy
Bonus Image
Here is a photograph of me and my dad outside a used record store on the day I found a copy of Patti Scialfa’s great solo album Rumble Doll.
To send a question, please email asksamsodomsky@gmail.com.
I can also hear Springsteen in some David Bowie
This bonus photo is sooo sweet!
Thanx!