Bruce Springsteen - The Ties That Bind: The River Collection

Pitchfork 87

The River doesn’t flow—it floods. Bruce Springsteen’s fifth album gushes forth with the fury of a burst dam, delivering torrents of despair, inspiration, heartbreak, and joy. Coming after the deliberate twin masterpieces of Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, records epic in scope but precise in execution, The River not only appears to be a mess but embodies the classic definition of a double album: it seems to be a clearinghouse for every song Bruce Springsteen had at the ready in 1980. The Ties That Bind: The River Collection shows just how wrong that assumption is. Expanding the original 20-song double album to a 4xCD set supplemented with video, it laughs at the notion that the original album was much too much by underscoring exactly how Springsteen intended the album to overwhelm.

Initially, Springsteen planned to follow 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town with an album called The Ties That Bind but he withdrew the record in the fall of 1979, believing that it wasn’t "big enough." This claim came from the stage during a 2009 performance of The River at Madison Square Garden, with Bruce going on to say, "I wanted to capture the themes that I’d been writing about on Darkness. I wanted to keep those characters with me and at the same time added the music that made our live shows so much fun and enjoyable for our audience." On this box, the scrapped The Ties That Bind gets an official airing as the third disc on the set—here it’s dubbed The River [Single Album]—and it does indeed play like a truncated, miniature version of The River, containing in its 10 tracks seven of the double-album’s songs, along with two alternate versions of tunes that wound up on the released record. What’s striking is what’s absent: shorn of its party songs, the record feels gloomy and haunted—even "You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)" in a lonesome Sun rockabilly incarnation feels like a transmission from the lonely black of night. It reiterates many of the themes of Darkness, only without aggression, fury, or precision, the very things that give that record a lift that fights against its undercurrents of hopelessness.

Surely recognizing this deficit, Springsteen spent roughly another year in the studio, reviving old songs and writing new ones, arriving at full-blown, completed recordings of most of these tunes, then picking and choosing from his surplus to create the final album. The result was enough material for another double album, presented here as The Ties That Bind, a collection that runs two songs longer the 1980 double-LP but winds up six minutes shorter. This is an absurd amount of shelved material—and, even with this abundance, there are a handful of bootlegged cuts that didn’t make the grade. There’s a lot of unheard music here, even if some tracks are colored with new Bruce vocals, a slightly sour grace-note that is only notable upon close inspection.

Listening through the box, it’s hard not to be struck by Springsteen’s labor-intensive creative method. He knew the broad outline of what he wanted to achieve, so he kept tweaking his material in the studio, rearranging and recording until he found just the right emotion. If The Cutting Edge 1965–1966 proves how Bob Dylan sought to capture the lightning of a live performance, Springsteen always is seduced by the illusion of a record: sure, he’s invigorated by live performance—and the Tempe concert included here is tremendous, the E-Street Band at the peak of their power—but he sculpts his albums out of tracks that are powerful as recordings, not simply songs.

This is especially true of The River, which Bruce loaded up with the purest, hardest, and happiest rock’n’roll the E-Street Band ever cut in the studio. "She’s the One" pulsated to a beat borrowed from Bo Diddley and Darkness surged with desperate passion, but Bruce’s first four records rarely touched on the ecstatic joy that can be had from just making noise. The River is full of these moments ("Sherry Darling", "Crush on You", "I’m a Rocker", "Cadillac Ranch"), and some of the weightier items trade in this same sense of exuberance—a sense of desperation cuts against the grain of the sunny hook on "Hungry Heart", and "Two Hearts" spins headfirst into unfettered romanticism. But this music is so simple, so visceral, that it’s often been tagged as throwaway, the detritus surrounding the haunting "The River", "The Price You Pay", and "Stolen Car".

Thing is, these throwaways give The River its cinematic scope. Some of the newer additions were cut from a familiar forlorn cloth ("Independence Day", the closing pair of "Drive All Night" and "Wreck on the Highway") while "Point Blank" and "Jackson Cage" split the difference between the celebration and sorrow. But the biggest distinction between The River and the original Ties That Bind is this full-on bash, funny and furious and entirely sincere in its worship of the sounds rocking frat houses and AM radio in a '60s that didn’t belong to the Beatles. It’s the Springsteen album that can easily slip onto any show on Little Steven’s Underground Garage, and this party winds up providing an ideal counterpoint to the sweeter, sadder moments on The River.

Take the second side, which opens with "Hungry Heart"—Bruce’s first genuine hit single, reaching number five on a combination of its hook and Springsteen’s general momentum—then dwells upon the cinematic escape "Out in the Street" and serves up two breakneck rockers before settling into the dreaminess of "I Wanna Marry You" and the stark "The River", the latter two hitting harder due to the companions. Each side is structured similarly, with the last song tipping slightly toward melancholy, the cumulative effect suggesting there’s no separating pleasure from the pain. It all comes at once and, depending on mood, The River either seems like the happiest or saddest of Bruce’s records: in its mess lies a mirror that reflects the listener’s state of mind.

The Ties That Bind illustrates this sprawl was no accident. Within these 22 rejects—some of them sneaking out as B-sides or on previous reissues, including the 1998 box Tracks and the bonus disc on 2003’s The Essential Bruce Springsteen—Springsteen explores the same terrain as he does on The River: urban romance, accidental violence, working-man’s blues, and restless nights. Like its parent, The Ties That Bind achieves a delicate balance between adult despair and adolescent freedom: he may dwell upon "Little White Lies" and "The Time That Never Was", but he also borrows a song title from Claudine Clark ("Party Lights") and tips a hat to Connie Francis’ beach classic Where the Boys Are ("Where the Bands Are"). Enough great songs didn’t make a cut that it’s possible to cobble together a killer single album from the outtakes—one that would open with the breathless "Meet Me in the City" and contain the cloistered paranoia of "The Man Who Got Away", the blank desperation of "Roulette", the open-hearted "Ricky Wants a Man of Her Own" and "From Small (Big Things One Day Come)", a heightened Chuck Berry story song Bruce turned over to Dave Edmunds. But like the completed album, what resonates is the magnitude of the sprawl itself.

As they spill out, the songs play off each other, accentuating the sorrow or celebration heard in their predecessors. Combing through these outtakes, it quickly becomes clear how Springsteen, Van Zandt, and Jon Landau constructed each track to deliver its own specific visceral thrill and then culled through their finished product to find the cuts that fit their intended design. Some of these rejects rely on that headstrong old time rock’n’roll—"Living on the Edge of the World" bops along to its syncopated swing, "Paradise by the C" is a roadhouse jam highlighting Clarence Clemons—but others play like ripostes to the E-Street Band’s peers: the live "Held Up Without a Gun" (which would later morph into the finished "You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)") careens like Elvis Costello & the Attractions, the chiming guitars of "Take ’Em As They Come" seem like an answer to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, while "I Wanna Be With You" pulses to the Iron City rush of Joe Grushecky & the Houserockers.

Thirty-five years after the release of The River, it’s easy to think of Bruce Springsteen as existing on a separate plane from such contemporary kindred spirits or perhaps as somebody who only belongs to part of a self-styled lineage that runs through Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. By adding The Times That Bind, both the scrapped '79 LP and this new double-disc collection of outtakes, to The River, this box highlights the plain, prosaic ways he belonged to his time. On these 52 songs, Springsteen sings about gas shortages, cold beer, unemployment agencies, busted dreams, and Burt Reynolds, fleeting images of a blue collar America that unknowingly was entering its decay but these words are married to the sound of a working band that knows it has to work, aware that it has to have songs to fuel those marathon three hour shows.

Springsteen never really let these straight-up rockers be part of his records again—maybe on Born in the U.S.A., but both "Darlington County" and "Working on the Highway" end in tears—but he also never quite worked the same way again, producing such a ridiculous surplus of finished material as he set out on his quest for bigger, greater things. The River brought Bruce to those heights, giving him his first number one album and Top 10 single, but it’s hard not to think of it as not a beginning but an end, the last record where he and the E-Street Band were not the biggest band in the land but merely the best. In that light, piling on a ton of unreleased music, all in the same spirit and feel as the final album and nearly as good as what made the cut, feels like a gift. And for those who may think four CDs and three DVDs are too much, consider this: for an album that is all about contradictions, excess and mess, more of everything is most certainly a good thing.