Heard Out on Highway 31

It’s my feeling that this blog has become a slight bit too serious as of late (of my own doing, no doubt), and with this in mind I thought it was time for a change of pace.

The single best thing for breaking up the seriousness I know of is rock and roll. Nothing else does better, and nothing else makes you feel quite as good.

I’ve been checking out a lot of good stuff on YouTube, where you can find many excellent bootlegged concert videos, and I was giddy as a schoolgirl (well, as close as I can come to such a thing, anyway) to find a truly top-notch video of “Reason to Believe,” the new, full-band version Bruce Springsteen unleashed during his last tour.

As prep, this song was originally cut purely as a demo for an album Springsteen planned on making with the band in the early 1980’s. It was a slow, soft acoustic track played by Springsteen alone on guitar and harmonica. Eventually, when this song and many of its brethren weren’t working in the studio, Springsteen released an entire album of these demo takes, which make up Nebraska.

On his last acoustic tour, Springsteen reworked “Reason to Believe” into a one-man blues stomp that was a highlight of that tour. But it was on the last tour that he really unveiled, once again, his genius at reworking material.

The song opens with Springsteen on a howling harmonica worked through a reverb-mic, so that the chords come out haunted and ghostly. In the background Max is tapping the cymbals in a soft four-time beat, and Stevie is keeping a looping guitar lick rolling through what sounds like a bluesy, Mississippi-inspired track.

What comes in short order though is Springsteen’s growling shout-outs, and what may have been a mid-tempo blues number becomes an energized, footstomping crowd-shaker.

But it’s the countdown, the classic One-Two-Three-Four that ignites the engine of the mightiest band in the land, and they slam into it in perfect sync. What follows is a swaggering blues-rock killer, a song that will knock you on your ass and run you right over.

I’ve held for a long time that Springsteen’s unique genius is his ability to take a forgotten track that nobody cares for and in concert turn it into one of the greatest songs you ever heard. Not even The Rolling Stones do that.

“Reason to Believe” is a fine example.

Enjoy.