#1 The River

Well, we finally made it to #1. My two-and-a-half-month journey finally comes to an end. For those closest to me, it was a foregone conclusion as to which would be my favorite Springsteen song. As you can tell from some of my other top 10 favorite songs, like Jersey Girl, Kingdom Of Days, and Queen Of The Supermarket, songs with emotional lyrics make a huge impact on me. Whether the lyrics put me in the shoes of a sympathetic character or they remind me of an experience in my past, Bruce can transport me to another time or another place like no other artist. I have heard people say that “Springsteen’s music serves as the soundtrack of my life” so often that it has become a cliché. But sayings become clichés because they are true.

Many of the tragic characters in Springsteen’s songs are fictional. But the teenage couple in The River were drawn from his real-life experience. Bruce’s sister Ginny became pregnant at the age of 18 and quickly married her child’s father, Mickey, who took a construction job to support his family. Nearly every detail in the song is like a punch to the gut: a joyless wedding, a young man who cannot provide, a woman who “acts like she don’t care.” It gets so bad that they can’t even find joy in their memories of the times when they used to dream about the future. Springsteen took their story of struggle and turned it into a moving working-class lament, a slow ballad with a mournful harmonica part that starts to sound like a funeral requiem as the song ends.

“Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?”

The River became a centerpiece of shows on some of Springsteen’s tours. On the Born In The U.S.A. Tour, it was often preceded by a long, intense story from from Bruce about his battles with his father growing up, that would sometimes conclude positively and sometimes not. The silence after the story would then be interrupted by the start of the harmonica part. One such story and performance, that also touched on the Vietnam War, was included on the Live/1975-85 boxed set. On other tours, Bruce would present slightly different arrangements. Regardless of the arrangement, however, The River has proven to be my great white whale, ever-elusive, having never experienced a performance live in concert. I hope someday soon to be able to break up the shut out and hear the song live and in person…I may just cry… For now, I’ll just have to rely on my buddy Ken to play it on his acoustic guitar.

Here is a video of The River from Paris, France, June 29, 1985:

#2 Thunder Road

“The screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves.”

That is how the iconic Born To Run album begins, with an invitation to sense a larger life, a greater experience, a sense of fun, as Springsteen puts it. He was certain Born To Run would open up with its title track until he wrote Thunder Road. “Thunder Road was just so obviously an opening, due to its intro,” he says. “It just set the scene. There is something about the melody of Thunder Road that suggests a new day, it suggests morning, it suggests something opening up.”

However, the song underwent considerable evolution as it was written before being the leadoff hitter on the album. An early version was titled Wings For Wheels, with the phrase “wings for wheels” eventually being used in the final version of the lyrics. Other early versions of the song also mention a girl named Angelina or Chrissy or Christina before it would be changed to the less-bulky Mary. He would also use entirely different lyrics for some verses. Springsteen took the song’s title from the 1958 Robert Mitchum film Thunder Road after seeing the poster in the lobby of a theater.

Bruce wrote Thunder Road on the piano in his living room. Later, keyboardist Roy Bittan, the Dean of the University of Musical Perversity, would take the challenge of elegantly tweaking the song, giving it a fluidity that instantly showed his worth to his new bandmates he had joined in mid-1974. Springsteen said, “Roy’s attack and formulations of what I showed him really created a very, very unique sound, and, in the end, if people hear that today, they go, ‘That sounds like the E Street Band.’”

Thunder Road is not only one of Springsteen’s most performed songs and an audience favorite, but it is also considered one of the greatest songs of all time. In an interesting piece of trivia, when actress Julia Roberts was asked which song lyric described her most accurately, she chose Thunder Road’s “You ain’t a beauty, but hey, you’re alright.” The song has been performed live many different ways including with the full band, solo with guitar, solo with piano, slowed down, etc. The version on Live/1975-1985 features Springsteen singing over Roy Bittan’s piano.

It’s been an absolute joy to hear this song live in concert as many as eight times. I wasn’t until July 28, 2008, at Giants Stadium, I heard Thunder Road for the first time. However, it wasn’t until I heard it at the Izod Center on May 23, 2009, that it made such a huge impact on me, as I listened to 20,000 or so fans singing along with The Boss. All those voices reverberating off the walls of the indoor arena sent chills up and down my spine that I still vividly remember.

“So Mary climb in, it’s a town full of losers, I’m pulling out of here to win.”

Here is a video of Thunder Road from the Hammersmith Odeon, London, 1975, also featuring Bruce singing over Roy’s piano:

Come back tomorrow as my #1 Favorite Springsteen Song is revealed!

#3 Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out

Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out was the last song recorded for the Born To Run album, and it tells the story of the formation of the E Street Band. The band had been named for only about a year by 1975, but Springsteen was already crafting a mythological narrative about when “Scooter (Springsteen) and the Big Man (Clemons) bust this city in half.” As the story goes, Clarence first met Bruce in Asbury Park, NJ, after playing a gig with Norman Seldin and the Joyful Noize at the Wonder Bar. The Big Man left the venue after his set and walked a couple of blocks over to the Student Prince on nearby Kingsley Avenue, where he hoped to catch Bruce in action. Indeed, Springsteen was onstage for his own gig when Clarence arrived on this stormy night, and as he entered the building, the door flew off its hinges, and a legend and tall tale was born. Springsteen would talk about how he “literally blew the door off the place.” In Clemons’ autobiography Big Man: Real Life and Tall Tales, he explained, “It was one of those nor’easters – cold, raining, lightning and thunder. Now, this is God’s honest truth. I open the door to the club and a gust of wind blew the door right out of my hand and down the street. So here I am, a big black guy, in Asbury Park, with lightning flashing behind me. I said to Bruce, ‘I want to sit in.’ He says, ‘Sure, anything you want.’” Clemons was working as a social worker at the time and playing in a Jersey Shore bar band when he got his big break with Bruce.

The meaning of the phrase “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” is still a mystery. Even Springsteen himself said with a chuckle, “I still have no idea,” in the 2005 Born To Run documentary “Wings for Wheels.” “But it’s important.” Also stated by Springsteen in that same documentary, longtime friend Steve Van Zandt dropped by the studio while the tune was being recorded and helped craft a horn arrangement for it. Springsteen and producer Jon Landau liked what they heard, and the E Street Band had a new guitarist, with Steve officially joining the band for the Born To Run Tour.

Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out has become a concert staple. At many of the E Street Band’s early shows, this was the show opener. Later, it was featured in a regular spot on the Reunion Tour, often used as the band-introduction song. It also went on to be the opening number at the high profile Super Bowl XLIII halftime show after Bruce implored the television-viewing audience to step back from the guacamole dip, put the chicken fingers down and turn the television all the way up. That halftime show continues to be huge highlight for me, satisfactorily showing the world a condensed version of what an E Street Band concert is all about.

In recent years, the song has taken on a deeper significance with the passing of Clarence Clemons. On the Wrecking Ball Tour, the first E Street Band tour without Clemons, Springsteen used the song as a tribute to Clarence at the end of the setlist. During the song’s third verse, Bruce would be deep into the crowd as he sang, “They made that change uptown and the Big Man joined the band.” He would then bring the song to a screeching halt, pausing for about two minutes so the crowd could cheer and honor the memory of The Big Man, before launching back into the song. I have heard Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out about ten times live in concert, but it was the five times I experienced the song during the Wrecking Ball Tour that the song never failed to make an emotional impact on me. Being part of the thousands of cheering fans, ironically during Clarence’s “moment of silence,” while watching photos and videos of The Big Man on the video screen, was about as moving a concert experience I can imagine being part of.

Here is a video of Tenth Avenue-Freeze Out from September 20, 1978, at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, NJ:

Here is the April 16, 2012, performance of the song from Albany, NY, including the Clarence Video Tribute:

#4 Queen Of The Supermarket

Oh boy, I’m gonna get some flack for this one…

“The worst song Bruce Springsteen has ever written.”
– Detroit News

“Removes this record from consideration as one of the best releases of his career.”
– Chicago Tribune

“Unintentionally ludicrous.”
– San Jose Mercury News

“Unbelievably melodramatic…sounds like someone doing a Springsteen parody.”
– Orlando Sentinel

“Might be the worst song Springsteen has ever released.”
– Philadelphia Inquirer

“May be the worst thing he’s ever written.”
– Pitchfork

“At the 3:00 mark, it accidentally turns into a Meatloaf song.”
– Blender

“No redeeming value whatsoever” (or words to that effect).
– My Buddy Ken

How can a song that is so universally panned by critics and fans alike make any Springsteen Top 75 list, no less be a top 5 pick? Well, this is a list of my favorites, not the best, not the most entertaining, not the greatest road song or love song or live song. Just my favorites. And this song speaks to me, like so many other Bruce songs speak to you. Hear me out.

This track off of Working On A Dream is about a man pining over a supermarket check out girl. In 2009, Springsteen told the Observer Music Monthly this story: “They opened up this big, beautiful supermarket near where we lived. Patti and I would go down, and I remember walking through the aisles – I hadn’t been in one in a while – and I thought this place is spectacular…it’s a fantasy land!” He concludes, “So I came home, said, ‘Wow, the supermarket is fantastic, it’s my new favorite place. And I’m gonna write a song about it!’ If there’s a supermarket and all these things are there, well, there has to be a queen. And if you go there, of course there is. There’s millions of them, so it’s kind of a song about finding beauty where it’s ignored or where it’s passed by.”

Musically, I love the piano and acoustic guitar intro followed by the drums and bass that join the track after the first verse. On the other hand, one reviewer said “the heavy-handed strings” make the song “schmaltzy,” but they also add to its “syrupy romanticism.” As much as the music sets the mood, for me it is the lyrics that bring the song home. Another reviewer characterizes in this way: “There’s an honesty in the writing that sneaks up on you.”

Growing up I was always a rather shy young man…I still am in many ways. But I was especially timid around the girls. It was difficult for me to initiate conversations with them, more so if I had some sort of a romantic interest in them. So, I would often observe from afar, from a safe distance, convinced they were probably too good for me anyway. This sentiment is captured perfectly when Bruce sings, “With guidance from the gods above, at night I pray for the strength to tell the one I love, I love I love I love her so,” and if “for one moment her eyes meet mine,” or she says hello or has a kind word for me, “I’m lifted up, lifted up, lifted up, lifted up.” There is real power in these lyrics, and in many of the lyrics of Bruce and other recording artists. And the first time I heard these lyrics, they immediately and powerfully transported me to another time and place. This type of experience is much more impactful than just liking a song because “it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.”

And what about the F-bomb Bruce throws in at the end of the song? So what? I know whenever a girl I was crazy about smiled at me, it blew my “whole fucking place apart,” too.

Unapologetically, here is the video of the making of Queen Of The Supermarket which also acts as its music video:

#5 Brilliant Disguise

We are in my top 5 favorites, folks! We are almost at the end of this journey!

Brilliant Disguise was the first single released from Springsteen’s 1987 album Tunnel Of Love. Its lyrics represent a confession of self-doubt on the part of the narrator regarding a romantic relationship. The emotions expressed in the song include confusion, jealousy and anxiety about whether the narrator’s wife has become a stranger to him. The song deals with the masks people wear and the bitterness that can ensue when we realize the darkness that may lie behind those masks.

Although Springsteen claims the song is not directly autobiographical, the analogies to his personal life at the time are evident: he had recently married then-model and actress Julianne Phillips, and the two would divorce in 1988. The references to marital problems are quite direct, as in the lyrics, “We stood at the altar, the gypsy swore our future was bright, but come the wee wee hours, well maybe baby the gypsy lied.” However, the narrator and his wife continue to play the roles of “faithful man,” and “loving woman,” even though he is filled with self-doubt.

“I wanna know if it’s you I don’t trust, because I damn sure don’t trust myself.”

As Springsteen said when performing this song on VH1’s Storytellers in 2005, “I guess it sounds like a song of betrayal: who’s that person sleeping next to me, who am I? Do I know enough about myself to be honest with that person?” Indeed, the narrator incriminates himself as much as he does his wayward significant other.

Bruce then goes on to say, “A funny thing happens: songs shift their meanings when you sing them, they shift their meanings in time, they shift their meanings with who you sing them with. When you sing the song with someone you love, it turns into something else.” Brilliant Disguise must have certainly turned into something else whenever Bruce sang this song with his wife Patti Scialfa. The one and only time I experienced this song live was on July 27, 2008, at Giants Stadium, and Bruce and Patti sang it as a duet as they often do.

Springsteen himself wrote about the song, “After ’85 I’d had enough and turned inward to write about men, women, and love, things that have previously been on the periphery of my work.” It reached #5 on the pop charts, helped along by a soaring arrangement featuring Max Weinberg, Dan Federici, and Roy Bittan, that’s reminiscent of classic Roy Orbison.

“God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of.”

Is that one of the best closing lines in rock and roll? You decide.

Here is the official music video of the song, shot in black and white, effectively reflecting its emotions. Bruce sits uncomfortably at the kitchen table on the edge of a chair. He plays his guitar as he sings lyrics about what it means to trust someone, looking straight into the camera, never flinching. As he sings, the camera ever so slowly pushes in until we are left with an extreme, rather creepy, close-up of his face. This very personal performance can make it difficult to watch, but it effectively reflects the themes of the song. The video was a single shot without edits, featuring a live vocal performance of Springsteen, almost unheard of in music videos.

#6 Kingdom Of Days

This track off of Working On A Dream speaks of a man and woman counting their time together and their time left in wrinkles and gray hairs. “Patti and I have been together for 20 years,” Springsteen said in 2009. “Kingdom Of Days is something you write after having a long, long life with somebody, where you see how much you’ve built together. You also see its finiteness, the passing of the day’s light on your partner’s face.” The song “is about taking the fear and terror out of those things.” My wife Aimee and I will have been together for 26 years next month, married for 23, with three beautiful children of whom we are proud. Perhaps this is why this song resonates with me so much. We have been together for more than half our lives. So, like Bruce, it’s easy to look back and see the type of life we have built together and ponder the future.

“I don’t see the summer as it wanes, just the subtle change of light upon your face.”

Regarding this line in the song, Springsteen says, “It’s a line about time…and at certain moments time is obliterated in the presence of somebody you love; there seems to be a transcendence of time in love. Or I believe that there is. I carry a lot of people with me that aren’t here any more. And so love transcends time. The normal markers of the day, the month, the year, as you get older those are fearsome markers…in the presence of love, they lose some of their power.”

“And I count my blessings that you’re mine for always, we laugh beneath the covers and count the wrinkles and the grays.”

This is my favorite line of the song, as it reminds me how thankful I am to have Aimee as my wife “for always,” and how we look forward to growing old together. Throughout the years, I would often dedicate this “Springsteen song of the day” to my wife on our anniversary. Similarly, Bruce would often dedicate this song to Patti during the Working On A Dream Tour, especially on the nights she wasn’t with the band.

Bruce cautions his fans about reading too much into the first-person voice in Kingdom Of Days and some of the other songs from the WOAD album. “I will steal directly from life.” But that life is “things everyone goes through. I’m not interested in the solipsistic approach to songwriting. I don’t want to tell you about me. I want to tell you about you.” Solipsistic, an SAT word I needed to look up, means “extreme preoccupation with one’s own feelings.” So basically, Bruce doesn’t often want to write songs about his own feelings, but about your feelings. Given the personal comments I have included above, it is obvious Bruce succeeded in telling me about me.

I got to experience this song live in concert twice during the Working On A Dream Tour, once at Hersheypark Stadium in Hershey, PA, and eight days later at the Izod Center in East Rutherford, NJ. Here is a video of Kingdom Of Days as performed a couple of weeks earlier on April 29, 2009, at the Wachovia Spectrum in Philadelphia, PA:

Here is the official music video of the song:

#7 Jersey Girl

Because the Springsteen version of this 1980 Tom Waits song was played more on the radio and because Springsteen was often associated with New Jersey, it was not unusual for people to mistakenly think Bruce had written it. Springsteen introduced the song, with slightly reworked lyrics, in July of 1981 during encores of a special River Tour homecoming stand that opened the Brendan Byrne Arena (Meadowlands Arena) in New Jersey, saying “I just want to say that you guys made tonight for us…this is something special that we learned for ya.” The July 9th performance from this stand was used as the B-side on the Cover Me release. This same performance of Jersey Girl was used as the closing track of the Live/1975-85 boxed set, as Springsteen and producer Jon Landau felt it accurately represented the final phase of the loose story arc that connected the songs on the album together. Springsteen said, “When I first heard this song, I could’t believe that I didn’t write it.” He feels the character is the same guy from his earlier songs Sandy and Rosalita, who has now grown up and landed the Jersey Girl.

Jersey Girl became a Springsteen fan favorite, played often in New Jersey and Philadelphia shows in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. Then the songs became somewhat of a rarity. It has always been one of my favorite Springsteen songs as it perfectly captures the feeling of romantic longing Tom Waits wrote about. I have had the pleasure of hearing Jersey Girl played in concert twice. The first time was when it closed the last of 10 shows at New Jersey’s Giants Stadium on August 31, 2003, on The Rising Tour. Throughout that leg of the tour, Bruce would usually close out the concert with Dancing In The Dark. On August 31, as the band was playing Dancing In The Dark, many of the fans, believing the concert was coming to an end, started filing out of the stadium to make a quick getaway before getting trapped in parking lot traffic. But then Bruce waved his index finger back and forth, as if to say, “No, no, no,” and then started playing Jersey Girl to finish off the concert and 10-show stand at Giant Stadium.

Giants Stadium was also the setting of the next time I had heard Jersey Girl live. On October 9, 2009, Bruce and the band closed out a 5-show stand that celebrated the final concerts ever to be played at Giants Stadium before the big wrecking ball would tear it down. At the end of American Land, fireworks exploded over the stadium. After the band took their bows, the band returned for one last song, Jersey Girl, of course. Cheers erupted after every reference to New Jersey, just like every time Bruce plays the song in his home state, and the entire stadium was swaying in unison as they sang “Sha la la la la la.” After the band walked off, Bruce briefly turned around and held up his guitar with a huge grin on his face, savoring one final moment onstage at Giants Stadium. Little did I know that would be the final time I would ever see Clarence play.

“‘Cause down the shore everything’s all right, you and your baby on a Saturday night.”

Here is a video of the final song ever to be played at Giants Stadium:

#8 No Surrender

This high-tempo pop-inflenced rocker from the Born In The U.S.A. album was only included at the insistence of Steve Van Zandt, but it has since become a concert staple for Springsteen. He recorded this anthem at the end of the BITUSA sessions, but the reason Bruce was hesitant to include it on the album was he felt the lyrics were misleadingly romantic. “You don’t hold out and triumph all the time in life,” he said. “You compromise, you suffer defeat.” He also felt the track had a Born To Run swagger and thought he was being a little redundant with that theme. Steve told Bruce, “Look, there are certain things, certain themes, certain emotions that it’s OK to be redundant with…Rock & roll is redundant by definition, to be honest.”

“We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than we every learned in school.”

This is one of Springsteen’s most recognizable lyrics in his entire song catalog, and it is the main message of No Surrender: the inspirational power of rock and roll. The song also serves as a tribute to his band and the friendships he has formed with each member. Perhaps “blood brothers in a stormy night with a vow to defend” later inspired the E Street Band tribute song Blood Brothers. After releasing the Born In The U.S.A. album, Bruce replaced the uptempo album version during the concert tour with a low-key acoustic arrangement. This is the version which appears on the Live 1975-1985 boxed set, recorded on August 6, 1984, at the Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford, NJ. It wasn’t until years later Springsteen fans were treated live to Max Weinberg’s furious drum intro and full band version of the song.

I’ve been fortunate to enjoy this song live in concert eight times since 2003. As a matter of fact, it was played at my very first Bruce concert. Being a Springsteen neophyte, I wasn’t overly familiar with some of his songs. I remember specifically leaning over and asking my buddy Ken if the name of this song was Surrender. “No Surrender!” was the response. I have loved this song, and it has gotten my blood pumping, ever since.

My very favorite version of this song took place on October 13, 2004, at the Continental Airlines Arena during the Vote For Change Tour. That tour was a politically motivated American popular music concert tour that took place September and October of 2004. The tour was designed to encourage people to register and vote, and although the tour was officially non-partisan, many of the performers urged people to vote against then President George W. Bush and for John Kerry in the 2004 Presidential election. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band headlined many of the shows, and on that night in October in East Rutherford, the final night of the tour, Bruce invited special guest Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam to the stage. This would be Eddie’s only appearance on the Vote For Change Tour. I’m not much of a Pearl Jam fan at all, but there was something magical about watching and listening Bruce and Eddie trade verses on No Surrender, Darkness On The Edge Of Town, and Pearl Jam’s Betterman. Eddie told the New Jersey crowd that night Bruce asked him to play Betterman, and “since he’s The Boss and I’m the employee, here it is.”

Here is my very favorite version of No Surrender as played on that final night of the Vote For Change Tour:

#9 Badlands

According to BruceSpringsteen.net, if Born To Run was epic cinema, Darkness On The Edge Of Town was brutal reality, its characters not dreaming of idealized escape as much as struggling against their circumstances. Badlands was the leadoff track on Darkness and its second single. The song tells the story of a man down on his luck and angry at the world, who wants a better lot in life.

“Baby, I got my facts learned real good right now, you better get it straight, darling, poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king, and a king ain’t satisfied ’til he rules everything, I wanna go out tonight, I wanna find out what I got.”

”I came up with titles, and I went in search of songs that would deserve the title,” Springsteen said, describing the writing of the Darkness album. The title of this song in particular came from a 1973 movie of the same name starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. Springsteen got the idea from a poster in the theater lobby. “Badlands – that’s a great title, but it would be easy to blow it! But I kept writing, and I kept writing, and I kept writing and writing until I had a song that I felt deserved that title,” Bruce added.

Springsteen “borrowed” a riff from the Animals’ Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood and, according to Rolling Stone, tapped the ferocity of the punk singles he’d been listening to at the time. If you haven’t heard Bruce’s keynote speech to an audience at the 2012 South by Southwest music festival, find it…it’s definitely worth a listen. In that speech he discussed the Animals’ influence on his music at length, praising their harsh, propulsive sound and lyrical content. Saying that his Darkness album was “filled with Animals,” Springsteen played the opening riffs to Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood and his own Badlands back to back, then said, “Listen up, youngsters! This is how successful theft is accomplished!” Springsteen ended up with a song that perfectly fits Pete Townsend’s definition of a rock anthem: “praying onstage.” “I believe in the faith that can save me, I believe and I hope and I pray that someday it will raise me above these Badlands,” Bruce sings.

One of the most popular concert songs, Badlands showcases the classic E Street Band in all its power and glory, beginning with Max Weinberg’s thunderous back beat. Before Clarence Clemons’ passing, Bruce would hand off the spotlight to his horn-blowing friend before rejoining him at the song’s conclusion to bask in the vocal embrace of the crowd. There’s a good reason this cut has often served as Springsteen’s concert opener, always giving any unsuspecting audience their first full glimpse of the Big Man in full effect.

I have heard Badlands live in concert no less than 14 times, and whether it is slotted as the concert opener, the main set closer, an encore number, or anywhere else on the setlist, it is always gladly received and energizes me and the rest of the concert-goers. Who doesn’t love the audience “whoa, whoa whoa whoa, whoa””sing-along” after the sax solo?!?

Here is a video of Badlands as performed at the 2009 Glastonbury Festival, June 27, 2009, with a hot Glastonbury crowd:

#10 Mary’s Place

“Are you ready? Are you ready?”

Much of the material heard on Springsteen’s 2002 album The Rising is somber and reflective. Mary’s Place, on the other hand, is a joyous song that celebrates the creation and maintenance of close ties with other people in response to evil in this world. It is an enthusiastic invitation to join a bunch of friends and neighbors for a party. Even though there is a festive feel to the song, the narrator speaks of a lost loved one with fondness: “I got a picture of you in my locket, I keep it close to my heart.” Some liken this song to an Irish wake. Bruce seems to be reminding us that during times of crisis, we return to what is most important: community with family, friends, and neighbors.

I remember during one particular concert, Springsteen spoke of an end-of-the-summer tradition, when he was a kid, where all the neighbors would bring their furniture out onto someone’s lawn to have a big party to celebrate the ending season. I am reminded of this story during Mary’s Place when he says ”Everybody’s here, furniture’s out on the front porch, music’s up loud.”

“Are you ready for that end-of-the-summer New Jersey house party? To have a house party, three conditions got to be met…one, the music got to be righteous…two, you gotta get your ass out of your seat…three, you gotta have half a million New Jerseyans ready to do whatever is necessary…and you gotta have the greatest little houseband in all the land at your service.”

I have heard Mary’s Place live in concert seven times, but my most vivid memory of the song was from my very first concert, on July 21, 2003, at Giants Stadium. There are three things in particular I remember about that performance. Firstly, Springsteen did a knee slide during the song…quite impressive for a 58-year old. Secondly, Mary’s Place was the song during which he introduced the band members, as his did throughout The Rising Tour. Lastly, it was raining for most of the concert, something I was not prepared for as I stood there in my shorts and T-shirt while my buddy Ken was ready for the elements and was decked out in rain gear. His decades of attending Jets games (and simply knowing the weather forecast for the evening) prepared him for such a contingency. Anyway, every time Bruce sang “Let it rain, let it rain…,” the rain would come down harder and harder. I was soaked down to my underpants in no time, and Ken exclaimed, “Holy crap! Bruce can even control the weather!”

“I want to introduce to you on this side of the stage, the pathological piano pounder, Professor Roy Bittan…on the violin and vocals, out of New York City, Sister Soozie Tyrell…on the guitar, the star of the Sopranos television show, the one and only, Little Steven…on the bass guitar, Mr. Garry W. Tallent…on the drums, the man that brings the power hour after hour, night after night, star of Late Night Television, Mighty Max Weinberg…on the guitar, Brother Nils Lofgren…on the organ, hailing from Flemington, New Jersey, Phantom Dan Federici…on the other side of the stage, the First Lady of Love, on guitar and vocals, Miss Patti Scialfa…and last but not least…Minister of Soul, Secretary of the Brotherhood, on the saxophone, you wish you could be like him, ladies and gentlemen, but I’m sorry you can’t because under the sun there’s only one Clarence Big Man Clemons…I want you to put your hands together for the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, house-rocking, earth-quaking, booty-shaking, Viagra-taking, love-making, death-defying, sexifying, Legendary E Street Band!”

I know some Springsteen diehards are not huge fans of Mary’s Place, but for me, I love the joyful nature of the song, and it makes me happy whenever it appears on the setlist.

Here is a video of a 2003 performance of Mary’s Place from the Skydome in Toronto, ON, Canada:

Mary’s Place is directly inspired by Sam Cooke’s Meet Me At Mary’s Place. Here is a recording of that record: