Consider this week’s post, “I Wanna Marry You,” part two of my E Street Band study project, part one being last week’s track, “Big Schools.” While “Big Schools” was an original in the style of Springsteen, this song is fully a cover, one of my favorite songs from one of my favorite albums, The River.
I loaded the original version onto ProTools as its own track, and then I set about trying to make as close to a note-for-note cover as possible, time and budget permitting. (Clarence Clemons not being available, the saxophone was spelled by an organ.) One illuminating exercise was making a tempo grid that followed the tempo of Max Weinberg’s drum take. Now here’s Max Weinberg, the ultimate pro. You listen to the original and you think, “That Max Weinberg, he never misses a beat… he’s a machine.” But when you set out to map the tempo of the entire song, it turns out that he’s making subtle changes all the time — from verse to chorus, from before a break to after a break, etc. — and surely in the end it sounds better than it would have had he been truly “perfect.” Something to keep in mind in our age of digital perfection.
Other than that, I just really appreciated the pianistics of Roy Bittan as always, and how amazingly the arrangement works as a whole, with the notes of one instrument lending complexity to the chords of another. Indie rock is all well and good, but sometimes the big boys get big for a reason (see also: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers). Finally, it’s fun hearing Springsteen lift from the Phil Spector girl-group sensibility (by chance, I was listening to “Little Boy” by the Crystals earlier today, and I’d swear that song was at least subconsciously running through the Boss’s head while he penned this one). As I was doing my vocal take, I noticed that my Ronnie Spector imitation is strikingly similar to my Springsteen imitation, which must mean that he got his sense of epic drama straight from the source!
I’m going on and on here, but in closing I wanted to quote from a Springsteen profile that ran in the late great Creem magazine in January 1981, the month that The River was released. He was responding to criticism that he had taken too long to record the album (never mind that is now regarded as one of the greatest albums in the history of rock and roll!!!):
“I don’t want to just take up space on the shelf, ya know? Or worry that if you don’t have something out every six months, or even a year, that people are going to forget about you. I was never interested in approaching it that way. I’ve never been, from the beginning. I just have a feeling about the best I can do at a particular time, ya know? And that’s what I wanted to do. And I don’t come out until I feel that that’s what I’ve done. Becasuse there’s so many records coming out, and there’s so much stuff on the shelves. Why put out something that you don’t feel is what it should be? And I don’t believe in tomorrows, that ‘Oh, I’ll put the other half out six months from now.’ You may be dead, you just don’t know. You make your record like it’s the last record you’ll ever make.”
Preach it, Boss.
