20:00

In addition, host Stevens keep talking

20:02

with former NPR Music director Lauren

20:04

Anke about Bruce Springsteen's Born in

20:06

the USA for NPR's Anthem series,

20:08

again, that conversation originally aired in

20:10

2019. We're going

20:12

to take one more quick break here, but when

20:14

we come back, we'll play a bit of those

20:17

rare Born in the USA remixes and talk with

20:19

writer Karen Rose all about them. And

20:21

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SIPC. It's

21:00

All Songs Considered from NPR Music. I'm Robin

21:02

Hilton, and we are looking back at Bruce

21:04

Springsteen's Born in the USA, which recently turned

21:07

40 years old. So

21:09

one of the things that a lot of people don't

21:11

know is that around the same time the album came

21:13

out, there was a well-known

21:15

and revered producer named Arthur Baker who

21:18

remixed three songs from Born in the USA.

21:20

He did the title cut, a

21:22

version of Dancing in the Dark, and then a

21:24

version of the song Cover Me. In

21:27

some ways, they've kind of been scrubbed from

21:29

history. You can still buy the 12-inch vinyls

21:31

if you can find them at a store

21:33

somewhere. But really, the only

21:35

place you can find them are on YouTube

21:37

from fans uploading them. As I

21:39

said, writer Karen Rose has a piece on

21:41

her website right now all about these remixes.

21:44

But I talked with her about how exactly

21:46

they came to be. And we started

21:48

off by looking at where Bruce Springsteen was at this

21:50

point in his career in 1984. At

21:53

that time, he was

21:56

only two records out from the

21:58

lawsuit that... stopped

22:00

him from being able to record. So

22:03

he was trying to, you know, there were several

22:05

years there. He could not make records. He

22:08

signed in, you know, an agreement without consulting

22:10

a lawyer, and the

22:12

lawsuit permitted his manager to

22:15

decide who could produce his records. And

22:18

he did not want anybody but himself,

22:20

Mike Appel, the manager, producing

22:23

his records, and Roost didn't want that.

22:25

So there were a couple years there. He couldn't do it.

22:27

And then he had Darkness on the Edge of Town came

22:30

out. You know, that's a three-year gap

22:32

between 1975 when Born to

22:34

Run came out, and then the river

22:36

came out. And he was

22:38

writing hits for other people. He

22:41

was not having hits. In

22:43

1980, he released The River, and he

22:45

had the hit with Hungry Heart. But

22:47

that was the first big hit he had, top 10

22:49

hit he had. And he's

22:51

trying to figure out, where do I

22:54

go from here? What's my next step?

22:56

How do I reach the brass ring? How do

22:58

I grab it this time and hang onto it?

23:01

So that's kind of where we are

23:03

when the record company said, maybe

23:05

you'd like to consider doing a remix. We think

23:08

this would be a good idea. Everybody

23:10

was doing that then. Cindy

23:13

Lauper had a big hit with a

23:15

remix of Girls Just Want to Have

23:17

Fun. And

23:19

that is how Arthur Baker got

23:21

picked. So before this moment,

23:24

he wasn't the Bruce Springsteen that so

23:26

many people know and think of now.

23:29

Born in the USA ends up being huge. Seven

23:32

singles. All of them hit the top 10 in

23:34

the pop charts. So

23:37

the first three were Dancing in the Dark, Cover Me,

23:39

Born in the USA. And those

23:41

are the three songs that get these remixes from

23:43

Arthur Baker. We're going to play a little bit

23:45

of them here in a minute. I'd

23:48

love it if you could just tell us how

23:50

they came to be. Take us back to 1984 and how this unfolded. So

23:55

again, the record company wanted

23:58

to do everything they could. to

24:01

make this record be big, have

24:03

Bruce be more successful, to

24:06

reach more of an audience. So

24:09

the record company played some remixes for

24:11

him, here's some names, and

24:13

he really liked Arthur Baker,

24:16

the work that he had done with Cindy Lauper,

24:18

his girls just want to have fun. So

24:21

he said, okay, fine, let's let this guy do

24:23

it. He actually went to the

24:25

studio to watch Arthur Baker work, and

24:29

he never had his tapes

24:31

handed over to somebody else

24:33

to take apart and create

24:35

something adjacent but different. And

24:38

he stayed in there for a couple of hours

24:40

and was like, this is really interesting. He

24:43

told Rolling Stone, he's an

24:45

artist, this was his thing. And

24:48

the Dancing in the Dark remix came out,

24:50

was the first single, it came out around

24:52

the time that the single came out

24:55

and was being sent to, what

24:57

they called urban stations. ["Urban

25:00

Stations"] ["Urban

25:04

Stations"] ["Urban

25:26

Stations"] ["Urban

25:33

Stations"] Also,

26:01

service to DJs, to dance clubs,

26:04

to discos. I

26:10

think I heard it for the first time in

26:12

a record store and I

26:14

was like, what is this? This sounds

26:16

like the most amazing thing. And

26:19

I wasn't sure if it was real. It was a bootleg

26:22

or something and I went over and I

26:24

was like, what is this? And they're like,

26:26

they're doing a 12-inch remix of Dancing in

26:28

the Dark. And I used to

26:30

sit up at night and listen to the two

26:33

stations in New York City, WBLS,

26:35

WKTU, to hope to hear of

26:37

them because they did play them

26:39

on rock radio, but mostly

26:41

to just get people upset about it.

26:44

Yeah, so you're saying that the stations

26:46

were playing it because they knew hardcore

26:48

fans, Bruce fans would hate him and

26:50

they were trying to whatever, stoke that

26:52

fire? It was less that they were

26:54

trying to stoke the fire, that they

26:56

were just like, can you believe that

26:59

this has happened? Oh my God, does

27:01

Bruce know about this? There's no way

27:03

Bruce would have let this happen. Arthur

27:05

Baker got death threats from like some

27:07

DJ on the station. He woke up

27:09

one morning and he heard them saying,

27:12

this is an outrage. Bruce can't possibly

27:14

know about this. And

27:18

that was the reaction

27:20

in the sort of core fan

27:22

base. This was the sort of

27:24

the tail end of disco and

27:27

the quote unquote disco sucks movement.

27:29

And, you know, again, Bruce was in the

27:31

studio. Bruce signed off on this. Like there's

27:34

not evil villains at the record company that

27:36

there are some evil villains at some record

27:38

companies, but in this case, it wasn't that

27:40

somebody was making a decision for Bruce. This

27:43

was Bruce's decision. He was all

27:45

for it. Do

27:47

we know that he

27:49

was happy?

28:00

with how they turned out? You know,

28:02

I take it as it was released, so

28:04

he was happy with it or it wouldn't

28:06

have come out. But he also gave a

28:08

quote to, again, to Kurt Loder in Rolling

28:11

Stone. Here's the quote. He was fun to

28:13

just give him a song and see what

28:15

his interpretation of it would be. I was

28:18

always so protective of my music that I

28:20

was hesitant to do much with it at

28:22

all. Now I feel my stuff isn't as

28:24

fragile as I thought. And there

28:27

was a book that came out of all of the

28:29

lyrics of his songs called Songs. And

28:32

he talks about how he'd written Cover Me for Donna

28:34

Summer, and he said, and

28:36

I disliked the veiled racism

28:38

of the Disco Sucks movement.

28:42

So he saw it for

28:44

what it was. Well, if some

28:46

fans didn't like it, they

28:48

were, I mean, successful, right? All

28:51

three of them charted, right? The

28:53

Dancing in the Dark 12-inch was the

28:55

biggest selling 12-inch of the year. And

28:58

you can't attribute that to fans

29:02

who have to have everything that comes out with Bruce's

29:04

name. That's 1% of the fan base. Maybe

29:08

at most. It sold. People

29:10

bought it. People wanted to own it. And

29:13

I mean, like Cover Me, the

29:16

thing about Cover Me is it wasn't

29:18

just that Baker did a remix. It

29:20

was that the

29:22

assignment was given to him. This

29:25

is going to be a single. Bruce

29:27

doesn't know how to

29:29

rearrange it, to play it live.

29:31

Do you have any ideas? And

29:34

if you listen to the live versions

29:36

of Cover Me from that tour, it

29:40

borrows pieces of the remix.

29:44

It's not a carbon copy of the

29:46

record. He definitely tried to do something

29:48

different with it. And

29:50

that one also charted. It was

29:53

at number 11 on the Billboard

29:55

club play. The

30:03

town's

30:06

a

30:13

tough man,

30:16

his whole

30:19

world is

30:22

rough it's

30:25

just getting rough, we'll cover it all.

30:30

So how did we get to this point

30:32

where these cuts have largely disappeared? You know

30:34

you can't really buy them, they're not on

30:36

any of the streaming services. How

30:39

did we get to this point?

30:41

I think that this is a

30:43

place where we're letting the loudest

30:45

people make the decision. You know

30:47

I feel like if you played

30:49

them for people, people would

30:51

have a reaction of this is

30:54

cool. People don't even know

30:56

that they exist. If you

30:58

weren't there and you weren't paying

31:00

attention, really close attention, I

31:02

think the rank and file average

31:05

fan has no idea that these were even

31:07

out there. I spent a

31:09

lot of time going through a lot

31:12

of archives and websites that talked

31:15

about this and most

31:17

people were like wait, Arthur Baker

31:19

did a Bruce Springsteen remix? But

31:22

I spent a weekend listening, thank

31:25

God for these dance music fans

31:27

who take the original 12 inches

31:29

and digitize them and put

31:31

them on YouTube so you can listen

31:33

to all of them again. Sony

31:55

has no plans to release these. I'm

31:58

hoping this story will make them.

32:00

somebody at the label to consider

32:02

because they're an important part of

32:05

the story of Boarding the USA,

32:07

which was Bruce became this international

32:09

superstar and this was part

32:12

of it. This was absolutely part of

32:14

that story. There can't be

32:16

an appraisal of a thing that

32:18

people don't know exists, so hopefully

32:20

now people will know they exist

32:23

and there will be reappraisal and

32:25

I hope that newer generations of

32:27

fans, which there are everywhere, might

32:29

give these a boost again. That's

32:37

writer Karen Rose talking about the little-known

32:39

remixes producer Arthur Baker did for Bruce

32:41

Springsteen's Born in the USA, the album

32:44

recently turned 40 years old.

32:46

And for NPR Music, I'm Robin Hilton. It's

32:49

All Songs Considered. The

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