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Racin' Down the Tracks

Springsteen's four-CD box set of 1998 traced an alternate route to the thematic locales the Boss has toured in his career.
By Matt Springer

It's not easy being Bruce. For most artists, a box set covering 25 years of music should take about a month to put together. You pick out all the singles, select some unheralded classics from your albums that never reached the status of your best-known hits, dredge up some demos or live material to appeal to the die-hards, and maybe call the band back together to toss off a few new tracks that will leave the fans salivating for more. Slap it all into some glitzy packaging and you've got a career summation!

That's just too simple for the Boss. Springsteen has chosen to capture his history as a recording artist and social critic by focusing on music that most fans have never heard. His four-CD box set Tracks starts with four early versions of songs from his 1972 debut, Greetings from Asbury Park and ends with an outtake similar to the tunes found on his 1995 folk record The Ghost of Tom Joad. In between those two chronological bookends rest 64 other tracks that detail a fascinating--if often frustrating--alternate road through the same themes and styles which Springsteen has explored over the course of his eleven studio albums.

Of the 66 songs on Tracks, only ten have been previously released as B-sides. And of the other 56 tunes, it's estimated that nearly thirty percent have never been heard by even the most die-hard Springsteen bootleg collector. Each song is recreated in stunning sonic quality; even the earliest songs sound as though they could have been recorded yesterday. As befits a four-CD set priced at almost seventy dollars, no expense has been spared to present the material in its best possible form.

Aside from the excellent remastering job, there's also the matter of the music itself, some of the finest Springsteen has ever released. As an artistic effort, Tracks just might be the most convincing argument yet produced for Springsteen's status as the greatest American songwriter of the late twentieth century. The clarity of the story arc that emerges through the music is breathtaking. It not only traces Springsteen's changes and growing maturity as a songwriter, but also manages to outline the themes that have moved through his work since his earliest efforts: a progress from innocence and hope, through darkness and isolation, and ending in redemption and fulfillment. It's the dirty reality that has always sat at the heart of the true American dream, and Springsteen has constantly sought to uncover it, to drag it out screaming and expose it to the world through the power of his guitar.

For what's essentially a collection of outtakes, there's a lot of unity on Tracks, which makes it easy to forget that the songs weren't originally concieved to be released in 1998 as a massive artistic statement. The box consists of what Springsteen calls "the ones that got away," tunes that never made it onto his records because they didn't fit into the statement he was trying to make through his albums. In the liner notes, he admits that while he has few regrets about leaving these songs hidden in his "vaults" for years, on some of his records, "the reasons I had for choosing one song over another...feel a good deal less significant." After hearing the hypnotic fragility of "Iceman," the bone-crushing intensity of "Roulette," or even the driving crunch of the 1990 outtake "Seven Angels," it's hard not to agree with the man.

That's where the frustration comes in. At some point, Tracks has to be recognized not just as a remarkable collection of unheard material from a rock icon, but as a tantalizing glimpse of albums that might have been. Stylistically, there are few surprises on the box set; the songs that originate from each era are indicative of the music Springsteen was creating during those portions of his life. In other words, the Born to Run outtakes would have fit on that album, the Tunnel of Love outtakes would have fit on that record, and so on. This provides the Springsteen fan with the chance to play "armchair Boss" and to reconcieve some of his records keeping these new songs in mind.

In that sense, releasing Tracks has to be considered a risk for Springsteen, and he doesn't emerge unscathed from comparisons between the songs on the box set and the albums released throughout his career. The heavy R&B flavor of the later songs on disc 1--"Give the Girl A Kiss," "Hearts of Stone" and "So Young and In Love"--suggest a brilliant soul record that could have been, especially when coupled with the album track "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" from Born to Run and the outtake "The Fever," left off the box set. Other tracks on the set suggest improvements on existing records, especially The River ("Loose Ends" and "Restless Nights" could easily add much-needed focus to the album, especially as replacements to the frivolous "Crush On You" and "I'm A Rocker") and Born in the U.S.A.. The exclusion of "Frankie" and "This Hard Land" from that seminal eighties record is as close to a mortal pop sin as one can imagine. It's hard not to feel twinges of disappointment while listening to Tracks, both because it's inexplicable that these songs have been languishing in vaults for so long and because there are treasures on the set that could have improved Springsteen's already exceptional sequence of albums.

Clearly, this direction of analysis is not the kind of speculation Springsteen would like to hear in the wake of this unprecendented emptying of his recording vaults. Liner notes are conspicuously absent from the booklet contained with Tracks, a move that seems calculated to force the listener to accept the box set not as outtakes but as an album of its own. While it's annoying to hear these songs without any commentary from their writer about why they weren't worthy of release until now, Tracks still manages to succeed magnificenlty as a cohesive record, retelling Springsteen's brilliant American fables through 66 "new" tunes and lyrics that ring familiar even as they evoke new emotion. It's rare that music fans get the chance to relive the magical experiences they've had in following an artist's career, but that's exactly what fans of Springsteen's albums can now do. These songs might not have made the cut the first time, but combined as a fresh and luminescent whole, Tracks just might be the finest album of Springsteen's career.