Alternate History: Bruce Springsteen, 'The Ties That Bind' And 'The River'

We love a myth, just as we adore an underdog hero. Bruce Springsteen has created his share of the former and been the latter to a lot of people. In 1979 - call it a Sliding Doors moment, or Jeff Winger throwing a die - his timeline split. On one side, the Boss returned a year later and scattered recession-hit laments, ruminations on ageing and free-spirited rock ‘n’ roll throughout a sprawling double album, ‘The River’. On the other he stuck to the original plan and the follow up to ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ was a clipped 10 song set called ‘The Ties That Bind’.

‘The River’ is divisive. Springsteen’s first number one in the US and home to his first hit single in Hungry Heart, or the Ramones song that wasn’t, it nevertheless has absorbed the same blows that most double albums are forced to. The word remains that it’s too long and that it tails off.

After its scrapping and the subsequent repurposing of several of its songs as part of ‘The River’, ‘The Ties That Bind’ became an oft-exchanged bootleg, solidifying the belief that maybe plan A should have been followed. Given new prominence as part of a massive box set of the same name, which has been spewing gilt-edged rarities and stunning live clips into the world of late, the pared down collection is a very different proposition.

That’s not to say that it’s better. In fact, even with its faults, ‘The River’ is an album of extremes capable of greater insight than its forerunner. With both in front of you, though, it’s easier to see them as part of a process rather than separate things. ‘The Ties That Bind’, had it hit shelves, would doubtless have been favourably reviewed and would now be fondly remembered. It’s a great record. It has Hungry Heart, The River, Stolen Car and a roughneck title track, all later vital components of ‘The River’, but it also has a rip-roaring Be True and the gorgeous Cindy, a song so good that it’ll warp your quality control standards.

What it doesn’t have is the bitter edge that would eventually help ‘The River’ bridge the water between ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ and ‘Nebraska’. It possesses elements of it in certain beats - The River, naturally, and Stolen Car - but can’t deliver the see-sawing emotional heft that comes with running The Ties That Bind, Sherry Darling, Jackson Cage and Two Hearts into the heartbreaking Independence Day: ‘“Cause the darkness of this house has got the best of us. There's a darkness in this town that's got us too.”

“Rock ‘n’ roll has always been this joy, this certain happiness that is, in its way, the most beautiful thing in life,” Springsteen told the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Hilburn as ‘The River’ arrived. “But rock is also about hardness and coldness and being alone. With ‘Darkness…’ it was hard for me to make those things coexist. How could a happy song like Sherry Darling coexist with Point Blank or Darkness on the Edge of Town? I could not face that. I wasn’t ready for some reason, within myself, to feel those things. It was too confusing. Too paradoxical. But I finally got to the place where I realised life had paradoxes, a lot of them, and you’ve got to live with them.”

‘The River’ is Springsteen figuring stuff out. That’s a process that leaves a lot of debris and confusion. Surrounded by economic hardship and uncertainty - at recently turning 30 and questioning his place, or following up two classic albums - he attempts to reconcile the two. The title track is perhaps the finest example of that balancing act. A retelling of his sister’s early life with her husband, it’s a song that conflates personal circumstance with socio-political analysis.

It’s a tale of stunted dreams and practicality over sentiment. “No wedding day smiles, no walk down the aisle,” Springsteen sings, striking romance from the record. By the time the song closes side two, the darkness on the edge of town has set up shop on main street.

Side three picks up the trail with the bleak Point Blank, another song that veers away from hope by taking a bankable image - the star-crossed lovers - and kicking it to the kerb. “I was gonna be your Romeo you were gonna be my Juliet,” Springsteen sings. “These days you don't wait on Romeos, you wait on that welfare check. And on all the pretty little things that you can't ever have. And on all the promises...”

Springsteen might initially have struggled to combine the competing elements of ‘The River’ - as he said himself, Sherry Darling v Point Blank - on record, but eventually there came a sort of cathartic turning point where it seemed to work and, more importantly, come across like a reflection of reality.

Greil Marcus, writing in New West, once sketched a sparkling moment from an Oakland arena show in his The Next President of the United States report, but immediately followed it with a retelling of Springsteen’s fear at the November 1980 election of Ronald Reagan in a landslide.

“The best seat in the house - front row on the center aisle - was the prize of a small blond woman, a 33-year-old attorney from San Francisco named Louisa Jaskulski,” he wrote. “She spent the first hour and a half of the concert dancing in front of her chair - nothing fancy, just the sweetest, most private sort of movements, the kind of dance one might do in front of a mirror. She was so expressive she seemed to add dimension to every song, and early in the second half of the concert Springsteen responded in kind.

“He leaped from the stage and, with a gesture of gleeful courtliness, offered Jaskulski his arm, whereupon the two cakewalked up the aisle to the astonishment of everyone in the arena. This wasn’t Elvis bestowing a kiss on a lucky female, who then, according to the inescapable script, collapsed in tears like a successful supplicant at Lourdes; prancing down that aisle, Springsteen was not a star and Jaskulski was not a fan. They were a couple. He’d picked up a hint, asked for a dance, and she had said yes.”

The flecks of optimism present on ‘The River’ were balanced out further in 1982 by the sparse ‘Nebraska’, a record that remains hyper-personal thanks to its bedroom recording and also one of music’s great sore thumbs; the Tascam masterpiece that provided a full stop to a run of some of the most bullish, ebullient rock albums in history. Where the Boss had dipped his toes in cynical waters previously, ‘Nebraska’ was desolate.

It’s hard to see that record happening at all had ‘The Ties That Bind’ won the day. To that point, there had always been an avenue of escape for Springsteen’s protagonists. But by the time we get to Wreck on the Highway at the tail end of ‘The River’ the open road - never mind pulling out of here to win - is an option fraught with anxiety and despair. Stolen Car, like the album it was initially intended for, feels like an important starting point in this context. The train of thought had to be followed through.

“An ambulance finally came and took him to Riverside,” Springsteen sings. “I watched as they drove him away and I thought of a girlfriend or a young wife and a state trooper knocking in the middle of the night to say: ‘Your baby died in a wreck on the highway.’”

‘The River’ is now older than Springsteen was when he wrote it, but much of it still rings true. Part of that isn’t anything to do with him, rather the shitstorm that’s currently blowing outside our windows. “Baby, I’ve been down, but never this down,” he sang on This Depression. “I’ve been lost, but never this lost.” It sounds like a lyric from ‘The River’, but it was penned for ‘Wrecking Ball’ and released over 30 years later.

With ‘The Ties That Bind’ clutched in our grubby mitts, it’s have-cake-and-eat-it season. We can speculate and pontificate about it, enjoy its economical brilliance and still be thankful that it wasn’t released. ‘The River’ might not be perfect, but it’s an instrumental part of Springsteen’s evolution. It’s a classic, but one that is a relay throw to cut off a runner at the plate rather than a home run.

‘The Ties That Bind - The River Collection’ is out on December 4.

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