Take Em As They Come: Bruce Springsteen's "Any Other Way" and Other Conversations

Sunday, January 01, 2023

Bruce Springsteen's "Any Other Way" and Other Conversations

People argue over which version of William Bell’s “Any Other Way” Springsteen is covering on his new record (as Greil Marcus put it “a fan’s record”). I have half a dozen reasons for suspecting it starts with Chuck Jackson, not least of which is that he substitutes Jackson’s “you might see a big man cry” for “you might see a grown man cry.” The other singers simply say “you might see me cry.”

Bell’s 1962 single charted at 131 on the Hot 100, meaning most stations 12-year-old Bruce Springsteen might have listened to never played it. Released soon after, Shane’s version only charted in Toronto but hit #68 in Canada with a 1967 reissue. Jackson’s version charted #81 pop and #47 R&B, but, most importantly, was a track on Chuck Jackson’s 1967 Greatest Hits collection, a record an R&B-loving Jersey Shore musician with a band may well have picked up at the time. If nothing else, that collection’s a record Springsteen likely would have known by the time he worked with Jackson on the 1982 Gary U.S. Bonds record, On the Line.

Of course, a crate digger since his early days, Springsteen has mentioned that several of the songs here were, for him, recent discoveries, recent discoveries that play like more than a fair share of the DNA for his entire career. When Springsteen heard anything doesn’t much matter. It’s the dialogue that went on because of the music that matters. What Springsteen heard whenever he heard it was filtered through all sorts of musical dialogue, including the Beatles “She Loves You,” a similar discussion between two friends about a girl, and a single released about a month before the Jackson version. I enjoy pondering the whole arc of a teenage romance occurring over the course of that month.

But that’s just musing. All four versions add something to the discussion I would like to hope records like this may still start. The build certainly illustrates Steve Van Zandt’s notion that rock and roll, at least in its origins, is white kids trying to make Black records and “failing gloriously.”

William Bell’s record conjures the sort of pre-Beatles (and Beatle-fueling) grandeur of, say, the Drifters, the backing singers even evoking the great girl groups. Without either we don’t have Born to Run—

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Msa5LRtIJ-k

Jackie Shane’s sultry version, substituting the word “gay” for happy, is at once the saddest sounding version of the record and the most defiantly certain of itself, dispensing with the fragile male bravado central to the other versions. While the sexual ambiguity no doubt resonates with any number of Springsteen’s decisions (the names of partners in song after song, the nightly Big Man stage kisses, the decision to cancel a 2016 North Carolina concert to protest transgender discrimination), I would argue that lack of a certain front-to-keep-from-crying aesthetic is precisely why Springsteen's record doesn’t move this direction—

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZnwLamCia4

Chuck Jackson’s comes closest, with its emphasis on horns and its celebration of freedom, though Springsteen stops short of the gospel outro—

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FELQMDkkxt4

Bruce plays it as the Jersey Shore party song where the singer fights to live brokenhearted—

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcvxp5E-ROw