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Before the Fame

An illicit release of some of Bruce Springsteen's earliest recordings does little to illuminate his most timeless qualities as a songwriter.
By Matt Springer

Bruce Springsteen has a new album out...and he doesn't care. In fact, he wants it off the shelves.

The record in question is Before the Fame, a two-CD collection of very early Springsteen recordings put together by Jim Cretecos and his Pony Express Records. The recordings were made while Springsteen was under the control of Cretecos and former manager Mike Appel, a business relationship that Springsteen spent three years in court during the late seventies attempting to sever. In the nineties, Springsteen has battled against the release of these recordings, and yet they remain easily available--my copy was ordered through CDNow.com for a reasonable $22 and arrived at my home three days later.

A chilling thought to consider, and a massive violation of artists' rights--you can own legitimately released music of Bruce Springsteen against his wishes. At the same time, it's a wonder that Springsteen is devoting such attention to keeping Before the Fame away from his fans. The fact that he seems so obsessed with removing the album speaks just as highly of his advocacy of artists' rights as it does of his ability to meticulously control every aspect of his carefully engineered public image.

Or maybe Bruce doesn't want this album to be heard by his fans because, to be honest, it's just not that good. Most of the tracks are early demos of Bruce's first songwriting efforts, when the words and music poured from his pen at an alarming rate, in the days when Appel would send him into New York on a daily basis just because he knew Bruce would have at least one full song completely written during the train ride from New Jersey. It's Springsteen alone in the studio, armed only with his acoustic guitar and his words, a combination that today makes for a riveting concert experience. Back then, it mostly made for some convoluted songwriting and overwrought performing.

Many die-hard Tramps don't dig too much on Bruce's first record, Greetings from Asbury Park. If you're one of them, try to imagine that record minus the music of the early E Street Band and with less mature songwriting. That's what Before the Fame delivers; it's interesting merely as a document of Springsteen's first steps toward genius. True fans will enjoy exploring the development of a song like "Eloise," whose melody would later arise with drastically altered lyrics as "Growin' Up," or hearing Bruce's first lyrical discussion of his complex familial relationships in "Family Song." But if you're not an aspiring Springsteenian scholar, then this record may very well put you to sleep.

The few tracks that do feature the E Street Band's work are mostly forgettable, mainly because they've already appeared in slightly different incarnations on last fall's exhaustive Springsteen outtakes box set Tracks. There's only one great Bruce moment in the sense that we understand them today, on the song "Evacuation of the West," where he does receive the aid of the E Streeters. It's a cowboy song, with sad piano from David Sancious (presumably--no specific band listings are provided with the CD) and chord changes evocative of Springsteen's The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle era work. It may actually provide a stylistic bridge between Greetings and Shuffle. Though it's not as poetic or heartbreaking as "Incident on 57th Street," it does conjure a similar vibe, and stands out as a worthy addition to the officially released Springsteen canon.

Aside from the few worthy moments and its value as a historical document for Springsteen fans, Before the Fame has little inherent musical value on its own. The songwriting is all over the map--imagery and metaphor bounce off one another with reckless abandon, and throughout it all Bruce sings as though he's already preaching his rock gospel. In hindsight, we know he's really just offering some apochrypha, a few interesting side notes to what we already have, but nothing with nearly the impact of his early records. Those who already know the Bruce canon backwards and forwards might gain insight from Before the Fame, but new fans should avoid the "begats" and skip right to the good stuff. You won't be missing much.