The Boss Recovery™ Dept.

In the publishing world - you know, books - it's standard practice for a work to get a new cover when it's republished. Nobody expects the cover of the first edition to be carried through the printed life of the work. Strangely, this is not the case in business we're calling "the music"

Why? Or rather, why not? Why, in the overwhelming majority of cases, is an album identified with its cover? Why, f'rinstance, does Springsteen's Tunnel Of Love have to be weighed down by its shabbily generic cover design (yes, I know, you like it, it's iconic) through all eternity? Isn't there a marketing opportunity here? Huh? Hoo-hah?

In the first of our Grammy-nod Boss Recovery™ series, we're imagining a world where Springsteen albums get a bold new look, like which they wus a book. Which is very appropriate in Bruce's case, because under that rock n' rowdy persona he is quite the literary gent. He's smart enough to know The Working Stiff mistrusts someone who cuts his own quills from peacock feathers, so he comes across like a grease-monkey. It's a necessary camouflage. This man does more hard thinking than that one statue of some guy bustin' his brains what that French guy done [Michaelangelo - Ed.]. He weighs his words with academic precision, and frequently adjusts the meter to make it out of step, like natural speech. His lyrics - sometimes honed to bluntness - achieve the very subtle quality of appearing artless and uncontrived - the affectless expression of an inarticulate man, the simple yet troubled soul searching for meaning in a world of shit. Springsteen's pumped intellectual muscle, rather than being denied, could be reflected by a new creative approach [e.g. above - Ed.] with a more authorial, literary tone. Why his albums - with a very few iconic exceptions - look like gas station cutouts is probably down to what I suspect is his chronic lack of visual suss. Man can't have it all.

But wait! It's not just a salon make-over exercise. This is the whole nine yards version of the album. Springsteen is the most prolific of rock writers, and records way more songs than get onto the wax. The world (or at least the record label) doesn't want a triple album every time he goes into the studio, but choosing the songs that make the cut is mostly guesswork - how could it be anything else? So here you'll find the full hour-and-change, with all the swell unused material he later slipped onto the four-disc Tracks box set nobody listens to (except you - *rolls eyes*). I'm sure he recorded even more during the sessions, available on bootlegs, but these are the songs he thought merited release, which should be enough for anybody. And they won't get dumped at the end, in the clueless I'll-just-leave-these-here way of "bonus" tracks. Springsteen didn't write or record "bonus" tracks - they're the album. So the running order will be cunningly reconfigured into what should be a fresh way of appreciating a fine, if somber, work of art. A new product we'd be pleased to add to our squeaky-wheeled consumer cart if it ever manifested itself into the glittering world of tactile thinginess we find so alluring.

Look for the light at the end of the Tunnel Of Love. It's what gets us through.

 

Next up - Human Touch. Which I love, incidentally, an' I'll tell you fer why on the day. Not that you should care.