During Howard Stern’s masterful interview of Bruce Springsteen on Sirius XM radio, Bruce describes how classics Blinded By The Light and Spirt in the Night were written.
He was living by the beach and one afternoon he walked down to the shore and sat down with a rhyming dictionary. From that short session, these two iconic tracks were born. He conceded that he was under pressure to come up with a hit song and that he “made a record, handed it in and Clive Davis said, man there is nothing on this record that they can play on the radio”. This bothered Bruce who considers himself a “creation of Top 40 Radio”. As he recalls, “ I was living in Loch Arbor, the town next to Asbury Park. I was surfing at Loch Arbor beach. I went down one afternoon; I brought my notebook with me and I wrote Spirit in the Night and then I wrote Blinded By The Light with a rhyming dictionary. It wasn’t any brilliant strike of (genius), I just was using a rhyming dictionary and using all the words that rhyme.” He mentioned on his early records, he would write the lyrics first as he wanted to style himself as a poet.
He shares that the lyric, madman drummer, is about a drummer that he knew named Mad Dog Lopez. Indians in the summer is about his little league baseball team. Bruce concedes, “It’s nonsense, total nonsense.” Boulder on my shoulder, feeling kinda older, are just selections from the rhyming dictionary.
Howard astutely asks about how Bruce felt when Manfred Mann’s Earth Band scored a hit with Blinded by the Light. A pragmatic and self-aware Bruce replies “this is kinda my story here because, Blinded by the Light Manfred Mann had a hit, Fire Pointer Sisters had a hit, Because the Night, Patti Smith had a hit. A lot of people had hits with my music that I did not, couldn’t not and would not have had hits with, unfortunately.”
I would expect that as a young, unknown songwriter, having other artists record hits with your songs would be a massive confidence boost and serve as validation and motivation to further hone their craft. I am sure the cash came in handy as well.
You can catch repeats of this interview on Sirius XM Channel, Howard 100 and in the Sirius XM app.
