Springsteen Covers Crystals' "Then He Kissed Me" and Berry's "Little Queenie"

This past weekend, Springsteen released a concert he performed in St. Louis in 2008 on his website.  This concert from the Magic tour includes covers of the Crystals' "Then He Kissed Me" and Chuck Berry's "Little Queenie".  You can download the concert on his website, but here's "Then He Kissed Me" and "Little Queenie" for you now!

Song Spotlight - "My Hometown"

Key Live Performance



This performance is taken from Bruce’s visit to the TODAY Show while promoting the Magic tour. It’s always fun to watch videos from Rockefeller Center and marvel over those lucky attendees getting to see such an intimate show. This video includes several inadvertently funny shots of crowd members singing along soulfully to the lyrics. I can only imagine that I look as silly as they do when I’m doing the same thing at a concert. It also features Bruce blatantly reading from the teleprompter around the 3:00 minute mark. But hey, he’s only human after all (even if it usually doesn’t seem so!). What I like most about this live performance is the way it conveys the solemnity of the song and then builds into an audience sing-a-long where Bruce compels the crowd to claim their own hometown ownership.

Key Lyrics

“I'm thirty-five, we got a boy of our own now
Last night I sat him up behind the wheel
and said son take a good look around,
this is your hometown”

The final lyrics of the song position it as one about ownership and loyalty, as the possessive attached to the hometown changes between the choruses. Prior to writing this post, I’d always associated the song with the third verse, never giving much consideration to the others. The third verse describes shuttered stores and lost jobs. It’s the verse you expect from Springsteen: an elegy for a small town that’s rotted away and the lament over a lost way of life. But that’s a reductive look at this song. “My Hometown” actually progresses smoothly through four distinct chapters. It begins with the narrator’s rose-tinted recollection of an idyllic small town. It then takes a turn into the socially conscious when racial turmoil arises in the mid-60s, leading to violence. In the third section, the hometown appears broken, and beyond repair. In the end, the narrator contemplates giving up on the town and moving away. But ultimately, he takes his son on the same drive that his father took him on, and tells his son, “this is your hometown.” For better or for worse, this is your hometown.

Overall

“My Hometown” may be the Born in the U.S.A. song I’ve listened to the least over the years. I frequently skip it when it comes on at random, and have never given it much attention. This has been my great discovery from revisiting the Born in the U.S.A. album for its anniversary. I can’t say “My Hometown” will make my must-listen list, but it will make it into rotation more frequently than it had before.

Which Bruce Song Do You Wish You Could Hear Acoustic?

As Rory mentioned recently in relation to "The Promised Land," we’re always susceptible to Bruce’s slowed-down acoustic versions of his hard rock singles. This got me thinking, which hard rocking song would I most like to hear performed acoustic but never have? For me, the answer is “Lucky Town.”

Of course, Bruce being a prolific experimenter and the Internet being a never-ending cache of live performance footage, I was able to find this pretty quickly. Bruce performed “Lucky Town” a few times during the Devils & Dust tour in 2005. Like so many of his acoustic versions, the lyrics take on a new sense of poignancy when delivered slower and unencumbered by a mass of instruments. In particular, I enjoyed hearing my favorite lyrics in this version: “I got dirt on my hands but I’m building me a new home.”



Are there any of Bruce’s classic rock songs that haven’t received the acoustic treatment yet? I’d be interested in hearing “Livin’ in the Future” acoustic but I feel that we get a good taste of that from the slower version he performed live during the Magic tour.



What is your favorite acoustic version of a Bruce classic? Which song hasn’t received the treatment yet but deserves it the most?