Credit: Alamy

Why Manfred Mann “screwed up” the Bruce Springsteen classic ‘Blinded by the Light’

Tue 22 November 2022 15:00, UK

Over five decades and 20 classic albums, Bruce Springsteen has more than earned his seat in the Rock and Roll Hall of fame. During his induction speech, U2’s Bono said of Springsteen: “We call him ‘The Boss’. Well, that’s a bunch of crap. He’s not the Boss. He works for us. More than a boss, he’s the owner. Because more than anyone else, Bruce Springsteen owns America’s heart.”

What sets Springsteen apart from his peers is his unique ability to weave poetic realism into his music, often carrying a tangible narrative. For this, The Boss has forbears from the 1950s and ’60s to thank.

Springsteen became interested in rock and roll music as a child after seeing Elvis Presley perform on television. It was love at first sight, but his clear-cut ambition emerged after catching wind of four rising talents from Liverpool in the mid-60s. “I saw Elvis on TV, and when I first saw Elvis, I was nine, but I was a little young, tried to play the guitar, but it didn’t work out, I put it away,” Springsteen once told Rolling Stone. “The keeper was in 1964, ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ on South Street with my mother driving”.

“I immediately demanded that she let me out; I ran to the bowling alley, ran down a long neon-lit aisle, down the alley into the bowling alley,” he added. “Ran to the phone booth, got in the phone booth and immediately called my girl and asked, ‘Have you heard this band called The Beatles?’ After that, it was nothing but rock ‘n’ roll and guitars.”

As well as these two guiding lights of rockstar inspiration, Springsteen’s approach was also informed by the intensely poetic lyricism of Bob Dylan. The folk-rock legend used beat generation wordplay to reflect the troubles of his time both on a personal and global scale, something Springsteen employed during his climb to success in the 1970s.

“Bob Dylan is the father of my country. Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home were not only great records, but they were the first time I can remember being exposed to a truthful vision of the place I lived,” Springsteen said after Dylan received his Nobel Prize for Literature.

“The darkness and light were all there, the veil of illusion and deception ripped aside. He put his boot on the stultifying politeness and daily routine that covered corruption and decay. The world he described was all on view in my little town and spread out over the television that beamed into our isolated homes, but it went uncommented on and silently tolerated. He inspired me and gave me hope,” he continued.

“He asked the questions everyone else was too frightened to ask, especially to a fifteen-year-old: ‘How does it feel… to be on your own?’ A seismic gap had opened up between generations, and you suddenly felt orphaned, abandoned amid the flow of history, your compass spinning, internally homeless.”

“Bob pointed true north and served as a beacon to assist you in making your way through the new wilderness America had become,” Springsteen concluded. “He planted a flag, wrote the songs, sang the words that were essential to the times, to the emotional and spiritual survival of so many young Americans at that moment.”

After listening to an early draft of Springsteen’s debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park N.J., the president of Columbia Records, Clive Davis, said it lacked a potential single, which would be crucial to the artist’s appeal and development. In response, Springsteen wrote and recorded two more songs, ‘Blinded by the Light’ and ‘Spirit in the Night’, which would become his first two singles released in 1973.

While Springsteen struggled to attain global stardom until the release of 1975’s Born To Run, his debut single, ‘Blinded By the Light’ in particular, is now seen as a timeless classic, and its Dylan-inspired lyrical style was a sign of the greatness to come.

Somehow, Springsteen only has one number-one hit to his name, which is Manfred Mann’s 1977 cover of ‘Blinded by the Light’. Sadly, The Boss wasn’t best pleased with the rendition.

“This song is my only number one song, I’ve never had another number one song,” Springsteen said during his visit to VH1’s Storytellers. “Except this one wasn’t done by me; it was done by Manfred Mann, which I appreciate. But, they changed this line. My line says, ‘cut loose like a deuce’, and theirs said, ‘cut loose like a douche’.”

“I have a feeling that is why the song skyrocketed to number one, but it worked y’know,” Springsteen added sardonically. “Deuce was like Little Deuce Coupe, as in a two-seater hot rod, and a douche is a feminine hygienic procedure. So they are different. What can I say? The public spoke, and they were right y’now.”

Reflecting on the misjudged lyric change in an interview with Record Collector in 2006, Manfred Mann expressed his regrets about the rendition despite its chart success. “I don’t think Springsteen liked our ‘Blinded by the Light’, ‘cos we sang ‘wrapped up like a douche’, and it wasn’t written like that, and I screwed it up completely,” he said. “It sounded like ‘douche’ instead of ‘deuce’, ‘cos of the technical process – a faulty azimuth due to tape-head angles, and it meant we couldn’t remix it”.

“Warners in America said, ‘You’ve got to change ‘douche’, ‘cos the Southern Bible belt radio stations think it’s about a vaginal douche, and they have problems with body parts down there.’ We tried to change it to ‘deuce’, but then the rest of the track sounded horrible, so we had to leave it. We just said, ‘If it’s not a hit, it’s not’”.

“But in the end, it was No.1 in America, and so many people came up to us after and said, ‘You know why it made No. 1?… Everyone was talking about whether it was deuce or douche.’ Apparently, Springsteen thought we’d done it deliberately, which we hadn’t, so if I ever saw him, I’d avoid him and cringe away like a frightened little boy.”

Listen to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Blinded by the Light’ alongside Manfred Mann’s cover below.