Welcome to Season 3 of Drumming Upstream! I’m learning how to play every song I’ve ever Liked on Spotify on drums and writing about each song as I go. When I’ve learned them all I will delete my Spotify account in a blaze of glory. Only 439 songs to go!
This week I learned “Backstreets” by Bruce Springsteen from his career-making third album, 1975’s Born to Run. Appropriately, this is the third song of Springsteen’s to appear in Drumming Upstream, following “Bobby Jean” (DU#1) and “The River” (DU#24). If you haven’t read those prior entries, I’d recommend catching up before jumping into this one.
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Side A
“Backstreets”
By Bruce Springsteen
Born To Run
Released on August 25th, 1975
Liked on January 23rd, 2016
Astute readers may have noticed that my writing thus far on Bruce Springsteen has lacked a crucial phrase. Only once in the last two entries did I write the words “E Street Band”. To long-time Springsteen fans and rock history sticklers this omission is a grave one. Baring the decade between 1989-1999 that Springsteen spent as a genuine solo artist the Boss’s employees have been an essential part of his recording and touring career. One need only look at the full gatefold cover for Born to Run or graze the slimmest selection of live footage to see how important the E Street Band is to the Bruce Springsteen experience and its attendant iconography. I can’t claim to have ignored the band out of ignorance since my exposure to Springsteen came long after he reunited with the group in 1999. Nor can I claim to have left them out of the picture deliberately. They’ve simply been crowded out by the sheer magnitude of Springsteen himself. Bruce Springsteen is, without question, among the most famous, commercially successful, and critically lauded artists that I’ve covered in this series. As I described in my first two entries, he is an artist ubiquitous enough to soundtrack the waiting rooms of doctors’ offices, and respected enough to be assigned as high school English homework. Heck, by the end of this entry I’ll have written 8,510 words about him, a significant leg up over any other artist thus far. His celebrity and the force of his on-record and on-stage persona are larger enough than the lives of his bandmates as to render them invisible.
This was not always the case. Rock stardom has a way of seeming inevitable in the rearview mirror. Of course they were going to be huge, how could they not be if they are huge now? And yet, prior to the release of Born To Run, Springsteen’s legendary status would have been inconceivable to anyone but the most evangelical of supporters. His first two albums, Greetings From Asbury Park and The Wild, The Innocent, & The E Street Shuffle both released in 1973, were commercial flops and his live audience was limited to clubs along the Northeastern coastal states. Springsteen did have one advantage however. As small as his audience was, it happened to include a grip of rock critics willing to extol his virtues in the pages of magazines and local newspapers. One critic, Jon Landau, went so far as to declare Springsteen “the future of rock and roll” in The Real Paper before hopping the fence and joining the Born to Run sessions as a producer.
Still, effusive praise from journos and a reputation for killing it live do not guarantee a career by themselves. If they did, Krill would be suing Joe Biden for using one of their songs in a campaign ad by now. No, if Springsteen was going to fill the prophetic shoes Landau had picked out for him he’d first have to deliver some real hits. Written and recorded with the desperation of a final shot at glory, Born to Run fit the bill. The album’s eight songs packed enough of a punch to translate the potential energy Springsteen’s critical supporters had promised into enough kinetic force to crack him into the international market. From there he and the E Street Band never stopped running.
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