In Defense of Human Touch

Lately I’ve been rocking to the 1991 Bruce Springsteen album Human Touch. No surprise finding me boppin to the Boss, but Touch has long been the album most fans consider his worst. Its reputation sits squarely at the bottom of the Springsteen canon, his first effort (along with the simultaneous release of Lucky Town) after disbanding the E Street Band (yeah, that fiasco remember? These guys were so good they couldn’t have a real breakup over drugs or sleeping with each other’s wives…Springsteen had to disband them). Touch got raked, and raked hard, basically for not being the E Street Band, regardless of what strengths it may have actually possessed.

So why am I going on about it?

Well, cause it’s a damn good album, that’s why. And I like it. And it’s my blog, so I’ll write about whatever junk thrills me…if even for just the moment. So here are some notes on the worst album Springsteen ever released.

Okay. Touch really is Springsteen’s weakest album, but lets remember this is the guy who left songs like Pink Cadillac, The Promise, This Hard Land and Frankie on the cutting room floor because they…uh…weren’t good enough (the only real equivalent in rock history was Dylan’s spectacular misplacement of the cindering track Blind Willie McTell…also left on the floor…imagine). Springsteen’s weakest songs are still better than 90% of everyone else’s best material. So let’s get past that.

The truth is that while the album is no Born to Run, some of his best writing is here. The title track is literally one of his half dozen greatest songs, and to hear it alone is worth spending the $15 bucks.

Girl that feeling of safety you prize
It comes with a hard, hard price
You can’t shut off the risk and the pain
Without losing the love that remains
We’re all riders on this train

Human Touch is as good a track as Born to Run, Brilliant Disguise, Badlands, Backstreets, Born in the USA, and for this single reason the album deserves attention. However, there’s more here than one great track. In fact, the first three tracks are all masterpieces. Soul Driver is one of Springsteen’s coolest lyrics, with a drop-dead brilliant weaving of metaphorical imagery. And the sad and biting irony of 57 Channels, its swift, stinging social commentary makes this little number one of the Boss’s most underrated songs.

No one knows which way love’s wheel turns
Will we hit it rich or crash and burn
Does fortune wait or just the black hand of fate?
This love potion’s all we got
One toast before it’s too late

Then there are the off-the-cuff rockers that Springsteen has always been able to write but has rarely released, songs that would be career makers for other artists, but when Springsteen cuts them his fans are nearly always disappointed. We all expect another Thunder Road, and when he releases a “normal” rock song, we tend to hate him for it. But songs like Roll of the Dice, Gloria’s Eyes, All or Nothin at All, and The Long Goodbye are actually all solid rock songs, and better written than anything you’ll find on the radio today. They’re fast, strong tracks, laced with constant nods to the legacy Springsteen inherited from Motown. This is soul-rock, and the nearly all-black members of the band he brought together to cut this album attests to this heritage.

My soul went walkin but I stayed here
Feel like I been workin for a thousand years
Chippin away at this chain of my own lies
Climbin a wall a hundred thousand miles high
Well I woke up this morning on the other side

And then there’s Real World. The song that almost makes it. This is one of Springsteen’s finest lyrics, and it falls mere inches from being one of his best tracks ever. I’m not entirely sure why it doesn’t stick, why it falls short, though it does. There’s no doubt that it doesn’t attain the level of Human Touch, but it is a damn fine song, and if you ever get a chance to here the live version Springsteen does of this number, himself alone on the piano, that acoustic version will send chills down your spine. By himself, Springsteen strips the song to its bone, and without the soul-rock beat, there is nothing between the listener and the desperation, pain, and eventual belief in hope and love that powers this lyric. It is essential Springsteen, that unique combination of the understanding that life is hard, damn hard, full of suffering, but that the only way to make it through is to believe that life is worth living, that love and decency can and do exist.

Well I run that hard road out of heartbreak city
Built a roadside carnival out of hurt and self-pity
It was all wrong
Now I’m moving on

I built a shrine in my heart
It wasn’t pretty to see
Made out of fool’s gold memory and tears cried
Now I’m headin over the rise
I’m searching for one clear moment of love and truth
I still have a little faith
But what I need is some proof tonight
I’m looking for it in your eyes

So, while Touch certainly ranks low in the canon, and no one would really argue you ought to give it more time than Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town or The River, still, don’t write it off. There’s plenty here worth listening to, and some of it is utterly brilliant. Springsteen has always been THE greatest songwriter of his generation, and he didn’t lose that ability on Touch. He just didn’t have the E Street Band.

Rock on.