“You’ve gotta be nuts”: the singer Bruce Springsteen said no one can match
The genesis of rock and roll always revolved around music that could get people dancing. It wasn’t clear when Chuck Berry started making the rounds whether the genre was going to be another craze or not, but even if no one could put their finger on what was happening, they didn’t need to worry about much once their feet started moving. But while Bruce Springsteen loved that music, the best rock and roll hit him in the heart first, and whenever he covered a tune, he was walking on hallowed ground.
Then again, every musician has that same kind of passion when it comes to rock and roll. Anyone who has ever picked up a guitar and had their mind warped by the genre can usually pinpoint the exact time that they heard a tune like ‘Satisfaction’ by The Rolling Stones for the first time, but ‘The Boss’ looked at the music almost like a religion unto itself.
After all, there was a spiritual aspect to rock and roll’s big brother, the blues, so it made sense for that to infiltrate the best rock and roll songs ever made. Listening to the way that Springsteen describes a song like ‘Only the Lonely’ by Roy Orbison in the song ‘Thunder Road’, it’s clear he doesn’t see it as a hit. It’s about someone trying to find some kind of catharsis after striking out with his other half too much.
Those songs certainly have their place in rock and roll, but for real heartache songs, most people had to go to the world of R&B. The entire soul genre was built off of the more rhythmic side of rock and roll, but outside of Ray Charles helping invent the genre back in the late 1950s, Motown Records started becoming one of the biggest hit factories in the world, and all roads gravitated towards the Temptations.
“I found the hurt and the centre of human emotion in it.”
bruce springsteen
They may have had the slickest dance moves out of every band in Hitsville, but there may as well have been no other soul on the stage the minute David Ruffin began singing. His high voice was the entire reason why people started fawning over themselves when ‘My Girl’ came on, but for Springsteen, the real magic was hearing him sing tracks like ‘I Wish It Would Rain’ later in their career.
Even when Springsteen tried his hand at singing the song on his covers LP later in life, he knew he was only going to be doing an interpretation rather than trying to match the original, saying, “‘I Wish It Would Rain’, you’ve gotta be nuts to try and sing that song after David Ruffin sang it. But I found my own little part of it, and I found my place in it, and it was such a beautiful, beautiful song. I found the hurt and the centre of human emotion in it. I just felt great. It came out great, so we used it.”
And while nothing is going to take away from the Temptations original, hearing that gruff voice sing Ruffin’s original melody is a nice change of pace. A lot of people forget how operatic Springsteen could sound on some of his classic albums like Born to Run, and this is exactly the kind of song that warrants having that sense of melodrama.
It was never going to be easy to make this kind of tune, and Springsteen may have had a lot of work to do to touch what Ruffin did, but it was all done out of respect. Because as much as Springsteen had his own hits under his belt, was there really any sense in competing with perfection?
