Member-only story
One Great Hour of Bruce Springsteen in as Few Songs as Possible
Eight great tunes
Over the past few days, several people have jumped on the prompt Walter Bowne never intended as a challenge: list as many songs under 3 minutes in length as you can without exceeding an hour total. Of course I did one myself, and you can find it below:
If you know me, though, you almost had to know that as soon as I finished I started thinking in the other direction: how few songs can I fit in a one-hour limit? Now, I could have cheated, just picked one Rush song, and been done with the whole thing. But it’s August, the anniversary month of the Born to Run album, so I obviously had to put a Springsteen spin on it: one hour of Bruce in as few songs as possible.
Once again, I could have cheated even with this. Bruce is notorious for stretching songs to impossible lengths in concert: he’ll tell stories midway through, introduce the band, or let Nils do a 6-minute solo while he takes a short nap (he is 72, after all). A perfect example is the classic “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” which runs a lean 3:11…