A promise fulfilled

Bruce Springsteen's box of Tracks
slowly yields its treasures

by Jim MacNie

The Boss back home on the Asbury Park boardwalk. The E Street Band up and running again. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction certifying Bruce's stature. VH1's Legends program applauding his career. A pricey coffee-table book of his lyrics sitting

in store windows. Global tour dates greeting you when you log onto AOL. A hat-tip to Johnny Cash on the recent TNT special. The fact that my kid just came home with a Springsteen action figure. (Oh, no, sorry -- that's a Jesse Ventura doll with some mud on its face.) Now 49 years old, Springsteen's everywhere again, and rather than cynically viewing the ubiquity as part of a career-resuscitating marketing ploy, his omnipresence makes me feel oddly reassured, as if a pact made a long time ago was being fulfilled.

The essence of this agreement is that the celebrated pop singer would always do his damnedest to remind us of our potential. Springsteen's prominent themes have been the rigors of achievement and the duty we have to ourselves to steer clear of buying someone else's dream. His music, a mix of bravado and melancholy, and his lyrics, which are chillingly simpatico with lost souls given his superstar status, often sound like the prayers of an advocate. He's long maintained that some things are worth striving for, even if you never get your hands on them.

Maybe I'm drawing these conclusions because I've become fascinated with a song called "The Promise" from the singer's new collection of career outtakes, 18 Tracks (Columbia). One of Springsteen's most famous unreleased tunes, it's been in the hearts of his diehard fans for about a quarter- century now. In it, three pals follow life down three separate trails, with varying results. Their youthful bond, somewhat fetishized over the years, was based on the pursuit of their dreams. But the singer finds himself with a measly job and fighting "a fight no man can ever win." Oddly, instead of simply being a loser's opus, it's also a commentary on the power of the trio's initial optimism. It's important to digest middle-aged regrets, Springsteen offers, but it's just as crucial to acknowledge the significance of youthful ardor.

That's a substantial message, and Springsteen's art deserves a substantial forum. The question is, now that he and his E Street cronies are again preaching to overflowing stadiums, will his longstanding principles sustain their noble resonance? Assessing the kickoff of his tour's European swing, the New York Times called him "rock's living symbol of indefatigable American spirit." Given his unflagging commitment to use rock and roll as a caucus for our most salient existential issues, it's hard to disagree.

The songs on 18 Tracks are distilled from Tracks, a four-CD set which came out at the tail end of last year. "The Promise," one of three tunes available only on the single disc, sent me moseying back to the initially daunting compilation, and it further revitalized my interest in Springsteen. When it comes to the presentation of previously unreleased material, Tracks is at odds with last Christmas' other gargantuan boxed-set, John Lennon's Anthology (Capitol). Anthology is a scrapbook that places the emphasis on scrap, mixing trivia, trash and studio silliness with a cluster of cogent tunes. But like Springsteen himself, Tracks takes a more serious stance -- there are no snippets or half-assed shots at a tune's completion here. This illuminating 66-song package is comprised of fully intact pieces which, according to their creator, once had a shot at being included on his records. The general level of quality supports such a statement, and makes the four-plus hours of music a great ride for those interested in the writer's work.

Springsteen sounded wonderfully original when he arrived in the early '70s, but didn't come out of a vacuum, and the dual processes of milking and shedding influences can be heard throughout the album. From Mitch Ryder to Woody Guthrie, the singer has never been shy about respinning the work of his forebears, and perhaps some of the tunes on Tracks were shelved because their debts were a bit too obvious.

Various icons make their presence felt during several of the singer's creative epochs. Bob Dylan and the runaway imagery of Bringing It All Back Home is most obvious in the set's earliest music, which is culled from the singer's 1972 audition tapes for Columbia. Sometimes the florid verse works, as on "Growin' Up." Sometimes it sounds overblown: a joyous delivery still doesn't make the swollen lyrics of "It's Hard To Be a Saint In the City" any more impressive. In hindsight, it's also easy to see that a combination of Leonard Bernstein and Phil Spector helped engender the West Side Story approach to the melodramatic Born To Run. Here, that era's work is represented by the poignant "Linda, Let Me Be The One" and the flawed opus, "Thundercrack."

One hero not usually associated with the singer is John Fogerty, but both writers have spent time analyzing the plight of unfortunates. "TV Movie," written right after The River, is more frivolous than grim: it's a flat-out rocker with a giddy text paralleling Creedence's "It Came Out of the Sky." Springsteen has often been earnest, but seldom pompous. Nonetheless, "My Love Will Not Let You Down," also cut in the early '80s, sounds like it might have been hatched after Bruce spent the summer bumping into U2's "I Will Follow" on the radio.

Most singer-songwriters -- and no matter how hard he and the E Street Band rock out, on many levels Springsteen's work warrants that tag -- have their great subjects. Paul Westerberg is most devastating when addressing a confused teen's coming of age. Loudon Wainwright's scrutiny of crumbled family interactions has earned him critical props. Springsteen's continuous probing of the big questions faced by the underclass has proven extraordinarily fertile. There's pressure on the citizens he chooses to investigate; in his world, a dreary Wednesday evening can be the most decisive moment in someone's life. "My baby, she has restless nights," he moans at one point. It sounds like a life sentence being pronounced.

"I remember a lot of rock and roll music was concerned with the outlaw," Springsteen told a reporter back in '95. "But I liked the idea of High Noon and the ambivalent sheriff. My characters were people who had something to be gained and lost by stepping in either direction. They were more misfits than outlaws."

Around the time of The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, those misfits were at least enjoying themselves. A night full of carousing and song -- always, always song -- could assuage all strains of boardwalk ennui. "Santa Ana" and "Seaside Bar Song" document such gritty kicks. But by the time The River came around in 1980, Nowheresville was a place to be dreaded, not enjoyed. Big fish in small ponds were cast as a luckless lot, and those beleaguered by bad choices had taken on a much more desperate complexion. The guy who tools around the shadowed streets in Tracks's piano-driven take of "Stolen Car" doesn't want to be a thief or kingpin. He just wants to be noticed.

With his leftist-humanist world view, Springsteen's depiction of the disenfranchised has its overly romantic moments. But despair is a growth industry according to modern medicine's latest reports, and few current rockers write about it with such acuity. One of capitalism's biggest crimes is making the working poor feel inconsequential, and one of Springsteen's greatest gifts is giving voice to this abasement. Much has been made of the distance in character between the Tracks demo of "Born In the U.S.A." and its official release. Initially cut around the time of Nebraska, the Tracks take is filled with a kind of venom that was muted by the album cut's big, bold façade. Springteen recently told Bob Costas that rock and roll is an art that has plenty of room for political views, and on this version of the song, with the reverb jacked-up high enough to suggest a pitiless howling wind, the singer is waving a fist, not saluting the flag. Many, including Nancy Reagan's pre-Alzheimer's hubby, missed that point when the album broke all sorts of sales records and launched Springsteen to another level of red, white and blue superstardom.

Finding parallels, links and analogs between the songs that fell by the wayside and their heartier kin is a fun game to play with Tracks. "Bishop Danced," cut live at Max's Kansas City in '73, is a bent mirror image of "Wild Billy's Circus Story," and "Santa Ana" is full of bits that found their way into "Rosalita" and "4th of July, Asbury Park." Ditto for early '90s stuff like "Sad Eyes" and "My Lover Man." Snips of melody and mood were applied, often much more articulately, to the cuts that became the Tunnel of Love and Lucky Town albums.

One thing Tracks proves is that Springsteen and his brain trust of Jon Landau and Chuck Plotkin are highly discerning in their choice of the singer's best material. Many of the pieces on the compilation are intriguing on some level or another, but compared to the the songs that reached the public, each of them is secondary. In other words, there's nothing on Tracks that's better than the first tier stuff. So the notion that these discarded tunes are an "alternate route to some of the destinations I traveled to on my records," as the singer says in his curt liner notes, is a bit of an overstatement. They're leftovers because they deserve to be, because some other tune beat them out when it came to capturing a moment or defining a feel.

One thing that could have enhanced the package is some commentary on the songs' origins by the guy who created them. This is commonplace for archival material these days; Warren Zevon's wry quips certainly helped clarify the tunes on Rhino's I'll Sleep When I'm Dead collection. But we'll have to head to Barnes & Noble to be graced with Springteen's feelings regarding specific tunes. In a nifty bit of cross-marketing, the arrival of Songs (Avon), a massive collection of lyrics and photos, contains some insightful observations on tunes by the Boss himself.

Maybe a first-person commentary is superfluous. In a pithy way, the four images on Tracks's disc-holders -- a gleaming carousel, junkyard hubcaps, Old Glory, and a desert highway terrain so horribly vacant it should spook anyone who feels a part of humanity -- do a reasonable job of signifying the contours of Springsteen's esthetic. Somewhere in these symbols, a map is drawn. Tracks depicts the evolution of a flashy kid-man to a bloodied but unbowed citizen who understands that, a lot more often than we care to admit, we all feel ill at ease in our own heads.