Commenter Fresch Fisch left this in the comments section yesterday – one of the latest treasure trove of YouTube vids I’ve started obsessing over.  Only this one – a “Darkness”-era version of “Backstreets”, the best break-up song of all time – is astounding.

I like just about everything Springsteen’s done, from the great stuff (Born to Run, Tunnel of Love) to the not so great stuff (Tom Joad, Greetings from Asbury Park, Human Touch).  But as I’ve written before, Darkness On The Edge Of Town is still my favorite.

And the concert vids from the era – much more raw than from the Born In The USA tour, but just plain better and more polished than the Born To Run-era shows – are just stunning.  This version of “Backstreets” was from the era where Bruce would launch, more or less ad-lib (or so it seemed) into snippets of different songs during the bridges; “Backstreets” swerves through Manfred Mann’s “Pretty Flamingo”, an early version of “Drive All Night” (which’d come out two years later on The River), and something else that, in typical Springsteen form, has probably been part of a couple of different songs during his career.

I may meander around this subject some more in the next week.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, March 16th, 2007 at 9:40 am and is filed under mitch, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.