E Street Shuffle Archive

On this date: Bruce premieres a new song written for Jann Wenner’s birthday. It hasn’t surfaced to this day.

Bruce has written songs about some colorful characters, but none so much as the true ones in “Sell It and They Will Come,” an ode to The Stimulator, Flowbee, America’s Personal Trainer, and the Psychic Friends Network.

Twenty years before “Born to Run” (the book) and “Springsteen on Broadway,” Bruce started his autobiography as a song.

Dion adds yet another arrangement to the many incarnations of Bruce’s “If I Should Fall Behind.” His doo-wop treatment is such a natural fit, you’d think the song was written that way.

The rocking arrangement and blunt language of “Spare Parts” overwhelms the dilemma at its center its moral of redemptive self-empowerment. Like “Born in the U.S.A.,” its true power emerges when it’s performed quietly.