The 1978 cover song that blew Bruce Springsteen away: “Ancient and revolutionary”
In 1977, Bruce Springsteen faced some of his toughest challenges yet.
Following up on his 1975 magnum opus, Born to Run, he was under pressure, along with the strain of proving his success was justified – at the same time, intense disagreements with his manager, Mike Appel, added to the stress: he wanted to release a live album to make the most of the record’s success, while Springsteen wanted to move on and return to the studio to record new material.
Still, Springsteen went out on the road with the E Street Band amid a lawsuit for ownership of his music, during which he wrote a bunch of new songs, before returning to a studio in New York to start work on Darkness on the Edge of Town, just a few days after the lawsuit was settled and he received a share of the royalties from his first three records.
The challenges didn’t stop there, though, and Springsteen was soon faced with other issues he was forced to address, like the poor sound systems at Atlantic Studios, which led to him completely moving to the Record Plant, where he’d recorded most of Born to Run. He also seemingly forgot how to operate as a team, with E Street drummer Max Weinberg claiming the stakes were high, but direction from Springsteen was pretty much nonexistent.
He also reportedly agonised over every single detail, taking much longer to finish certain songs and struggling to achieve the exact sort of sound he wanted. ‘Because the Night’ was recorded on their first day in the studio, but at the time, it had barely any lyrics, and Springsteen dragged it along for another four months before it started to take better shape. But even then, it never made it onto the record.
Mainly, he didn’t like the way it sounded, wanting to shelve it entirely because it felt like just another throwaway love song that nobody would care about. It appeared, however, that Springsteen was merely missing the ideal vocalist to carry the track forward, because Jimmy Iovine then showed it to Patti Smith (he was also producing Easter at the time), who went away and sprinkled her poetic magic over it.
Somehow, Smith stepping in felt to Springsteen like the closest thing to divine intervention. He’d always admired Smith, particularly with how she took music to places it hadn’t been before, fusing together art and poetry and pure rock ‘n’ roll in a way that felt “ancient and revolutionary”. In his view, Smith reminded him that music can still be “dangerous”, but also “sacred” and “free”.
This was precisely how he felt when he heard what Smith did with ‘Because the Night’ – instead of letting it drift away into the forgotten abyss of castaway song ideas, Smith made it feel like something revolutionary, spinning a subpar composition into an anthem for the masses and unknowingly scoring her best and biggest hit in the process.
The Darkness sessions might have been defined by circumstance and Springsteen’s erraticism, but ‘Because the Night’ proved that all it took to score greatness was a change in perspective, from which blossomed a blistering anthem that quashed all previous despair he felt towards it.
As he later reflected to Mojo, concluding, “I could not have finished it as good as she did. She was in the midst of her love affair with Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, and she had it all right there on her sleeve. She put it down in a way that was just quite wonderful.”
