Essential Bruce: How to be choosey well
The two-disc Springsteen extension to Sony's "Essential" line releases in stores in two weeks, offering a solid retrospective and, unlike the rest of the line, throwing in a third bonus disc with B-sides, soundtrack songs and — wonderful to see — previously unreleased material.
I'll address the third disc in a post later today, but right now I want to focus on the first two. After all, dedicated Springsteen fans will take any and all new tracks. But get selective with the existing material and you've got yourself a fight.
At least the Essential title does away with any pretense of Greatest Hits. His GH release of 1995 was more a sampler than anything else. If you want Springsteen's real greatest hits, buy Born in the USA and download Hungry Heart, Streets of Philadelphia and Secret Garden off the Internet. That's all the hits right there.
But with Essentials, the record company is saying, "It's a sampler, only cooler." While any compilation is strange for an album artist like Springsteen, I can stand that admission. The track listing works through the material in efficient fashion, drawing on song that have typically receive the best reception on the tours of the last few years. There are some exceptions made for space reasons — all of Born to Run can't fit — but any attempt at variety must be welcomed after 1995's overreliance on 1984 (four songs from Born in the USA while only two from Born to Run and one from Darkness on the Edge of Town).
Still, satisfying everyone will be as impossible as P.T. Barnum famously said it was. Of the Sony Essentials line, I only have the Sly and the Family Stone discs so far. Although the album works well for me, it works for reasons the Springsteen discs won't be able to.
With Sly's limited output — a CCR-like hits stretch plus a healthy number of outliers — the album can be deep instead of wide. Stand and There's a Riot Going On make it to the compilation almost in their entirety and to very good effect. On these albums "the Family Stone nailed both sides of the countercultural coin — euphoria and bummer churned out in a blast of undulating, groundbreaking groove," writes Amazon reviewer stolenmoment. Not bad to fit that kind of narrative onto a compilation.
Fortunately and unfortunately, Springsteen has had 30 years of output without tremendous disparity in quality. Even the 1992 replacement band albums have their redeeming spots. With this history, the wide vs. deep equation gets drilled down to more minute levels. Forced to broaden, Springsteen's narrative choices drop down to the likes of those seen on Blood Brothers, the 1995 documentary of the GH compiling and brief E Street Band reunion.
The decisions were only on the margins: Should the then never-released Frankie make the disc? Should the rerecorded Secret Garden have strings? No and no were the answers. Despite holding a vote that went in favor of the strings, Springsteen eventually decided they "distracted from the narrative" and threw out his own poll.
With Essentials, the two-disc length extends the margins some but not much. Essentials may be able to capture the albums' flavors more than GH, but I think it will take a few spins to determine how well. How do you use the two-disc depth to do the albums justice without making buyers wish they had the albums instead? Halfway into the darkness is a difficult place to stop running.
The third disc and its previously unreleased tracks could be the final weight in the compromise. Album fans on this set won't get the second side of the Wild and the Innocent, and they'll only get a tenth of The River. But fans of albums are also suckers for what never made the albums. You know the old joke about digging half a hole? The task's impossible, no doubt about it. But if the digging's good, why would you mind?
