Song 100: “Walk Like a Man”
Album: Tunnel of Love

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We’re halfway home, sports fans, and the second 100 of the Ultimate Bruce Springsteen countdown kicks off with yet another song inspired by the Boss’ often testy relationship with his father Douglas. The difference on “Walk Like A Man” is that there is little rancor or animosity. Springsteen writes from the mature point of view of a man about to be married staring down the long history that brought the two men to the altar together.

Bruce writes with moving perspective about the weddings he saw as a child with his mom and sister, and how incredulous he is to be the one now standing there, the observed instead of the observer. Even in a song that is relatively sentimental, the darker aspects of "Tunnel of Love" creep into his boyish observations of the ritual: “As they stepped into that long black limousine for that mystery ride.”

But the real focus is on the father/son dynamic. Springsteen borrows a bit from Jackson Browne’s eloquent elegy “For A Dancer” for the lines about seeds being sown and how those seeds often have to grow uncultivated. The real grabber is when he accepts his father’s failings as something that were beyond his control: “Well I was young and I didn’t know what to do/When I saw your best steps stolen away from you.”

Springsteen had echoed that feeling somewhat nine years earlier in “Independence Day,” but here it’s expressed in a more even-tempered fashion. He had become a man, wisdom replacing angst.

Bruce bathes the song in keyboards and probably overdoes it by half. It’s a problem that mars several of his 80’s ballads, but that bright, shiny sound was the way of the music world back then. The gentle vocal and heartfelt lyrics are what hit home. They represent a man trying to bridge the generation gap after so many years of railing at the distance between.

Song 99: “Johnny Bye Bye”
Album: Tracks

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Springsteen uses the words of one rock icon to mourn the passing of another in this unreleased gem from the early '80s that eventually made its way onto the "Tracks" compilation. The song takes the first four lines of Chuck Berry’s “Bye Bye Johnny” at its start, but that only sets up a clear-eyed rumination on the death of The King.

Elvis Presley loomed large in the childhood daydreams of Bruce Springsteen, as he did for so many seminal rockers. But even as Springsteen idolized the icon, he sensibly steered clear of many of the pitfalls that befell Presley. The prevalent emotion, therefore, in this quasi-tribute, is disgust at the fact that Elvis’ life turned into such a sideshow and that it ended so soon (“You didn’t have to die.”)

The song also yields a glimpse into Springsteen’s evolving mindset on rock and roll’s true power (or lack thereof.) Berry’s lyrics are now drenched in irony, because never has a “one-way ticket to the promised land” sounded so ominous. And Bruce sees right through the myth to the cold reality of Elvis’ death: “They found him slumped up against the drain/With a whole lot of trouble runnin’ through his veins.”

Adding a proto-rock arrangement that sounds like it could have backed one of Presley’s early hits only drives the point home more (although the "Chariots of Fire" synths at the start are an odd choice.)

“Johnny Bye Bye” is too brief to be a definitive exploration of Elvis Presley, but maybe brevity was Springsteen’s point. No amount of rock and roll was going to bring back The King, nor was it enough to sustain him. It was a sobering lesson, one which Bruce learned at the expense of his grandiose dreams but, thankfully, unlike so many other rock stars before him, not at the expense of anything more severe.

Song 98: “My Hometown”
Album: Born In The U.S.A.

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Little trivia factoid here: “My Hometown” is the lone Bruce song to reach the top of the adult contemporary charts. If you can reconcile yourself to just what it takes to climb that dubious mountain, then you might have this ranked a lot better than me.

I have a hard time with the synthesizers, which are laid on oh-so-thick, especially in the soporific outro. I don’t think I ever stick around to the end when I hear the song on the radio. I realize it makes for a gentle send-off as the last song on "Born In The U.S.A," but it meanders when heard out of that context.

With the negatives out of the way, you still have enough positives to put the song in the top half of this list. Bruce’s lyrics are heartfelt and heartbreaking, a portrait of his hometown of Freehold, New Jersey that doesn’t skimp on the gory details. From racial strife to economic decay, the town is clearly in turmoil in Springsteen’s narrative. Listen to the way he tells you all you need to know about the malaise in one fell swoop in the bridge: “Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows and vacant stores.”

The heart of the town has essentially been gutted.

The character here has stayed on through thick and thin, swayed by loyalty and family bonds. But he finds himself thinking of getting out in the song’s last verse, even while he carries on the tradition of showing his son the town, the pride his father felt now replaced by his own sad futility. The town is now a burden to the younger generation, something they must overcome.

Springsteen never mentions Freehold by name, because he knew that the situation was replaying itself all over the country. And the song has become strikingly relevant yet again in the past few months. All of that makes those dated, sleepy sounds that rocked the adult contempo chart even more frustrating. These lyrics deserved a better home, but they still carry this song a long way.

Song 97: “Reason to Believe”
Album: Nebraska

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You can read the chorus to this closing track on "Nebraska" two ways. After each downtrodden scene Bruce describes, from a woman jilted by her lover to a groom stood up at the altar to a dead dog in a ditch, he finds it “funny” that “at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe.”

Is Bruce seeing a ray of hope here? After all, the song does have a bouncy, almost upbeat feel to it, with the Boss pumping out funky low notes on his harp. Maybe Springsteen is marveling at the resiliency of the human race, their ability to find faith in even the direst of circumstances.

Or maybe he’s saying they’re all foolish. Coming on the heels of all the disturbing narratives that pepper "Nebraska," that would be the reading I choose. Granted, it’s not the approach that Springsteen usually takes; his songwriting overall hews toward the optimistic. But the negativity feels earned here, a stark wake-up call to all of those who may have been snowed in by the flash and dash of the early '80s. Springsteen was having none of it.

Song 96: “The Fever”
Album: Tracks

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Bruce apparently never thought too much of this interstitial song recorded between "The Wild, The Innocent, & The E Street Shuffle" and "Born To Run," but it became something of a cult item after his manager Mike Appel fed it on the sly to some progressive rock stations to build a buzz for the upcoming album. You can see why Springsteen might be dismissive, as the lyrics are some of the laziest of his career and the Van Morrison-flavored soul-jazz mélange of the music was nothing like what his new sound would be.

But his skill as a record-maker was intact even at that early period. He manages to put across the theme of obsession brilliantly in numerous ways without ever having to rely on the words. The music stops and starts, simmers and then lurches forward, raising the drama to a fever pitch. The band, still in transition at that point, handles everything their leader can throw at them and even tosses in some soulful background vocals (with Clarence getting a brief solo vocal as well as a killer turn on sax). They pump the meandering narrative up and create a potent track.

Springsteen would take this kind of free-wheeling construction and add rock thunder to eventually create his masterpiece. “The Fever” might not have seemed like much to its creator, but Springsteen fans can hear it as an almost effortless epic that augured the glory to come.

Song 95: “Into the Fire”
Album: The Rising

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Considering its harrowing topic, you might expect “Into The Fire” to get bogged down in sorrow. But Springsteen manages to wring some uplift out of the situation by concentrating on the enormous sacrifice made by responders to 9/11 who gave their lives to save others, and how that sacrifice still inspires those they left behind even while their absence causes an almost unbearable grief.

That complex web of emotions is rendered brilliantly by Springsteen. The horrible details of the day are inescapable, as evidenced by the opening lines: “The sky was falling and streaked with blood/I heard you calling me and then you disappeared into dust.” But Springsteen balances those horrors with the grace and redemptive powers of indestructible love (“You held me in the light you gave”). Through it all runs a gentle prayer that says it all: “May your strength give us strength/May your faith give us faith/May your hope give us hope/My your love give us love.”

The music finds some light as well once it escapes from the dusky blues of the slide-guitar open. The melody of the refrain is buoyant, pushed skyward by the lovely female backing vocals. And the violin of Soosie Tyrell never gets somber; instead it subtly elevates the proceedings into a moving catharsis. While other songs on "The Rising" deal quite soberly with the utter tragedy of 9/11, “Into The Fire,” by depicting the path of the fallen, shows the way to recovery for the rest of us.

Song 94: “Devil's Arcade”
Album: Magic

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This song, the closing track off Magic (not counting the “hidden” track “Terry’s Song”), shows some signs of strain as it attempts to be the all-encompassing anthem to sum up the disparate themes of that standout album. But it swings for the fences with such gusto that it’s still quite powerful, a damn impressive track that hits far more than it misses.

Where it does miss is in the fact that the hugeness of it can be a bit overbearing. From the atmospheric opening to the slow build-up to the thunderous climax, it groans with the weight of all of the effort that was clearly put into it, even as it feels like a by-the-numbers attempt to create a memorable album closer.

Compare it to the simple but unsettling “Wreck On The Highway” off The River, or the desperately romantic “Valentine’s Day” off Tunnel Of Love, those songs closed out their respective albums powerfully and appropriately without resorting to the big statement theatrics of “Devil’s Arcade.”

And yet there are moments of undeniably stunning brilliance in the track.

Springsteen has always understood that the way to tackle some great topic, which in this case is the war in Iraq, is to tell an affecting, small-scale tale of the individuals involved. In this song, it’s a wounded vet and his wife waiting at his bedside who recounts the story in fragments that jump through time as the memories flow through her.

The sweet remembrance of their first sexual fumblings is shattered by the explosion that caused his injuries. It all ends in a hospital ward (“A sea with no name/Where you lie adrift with the heroes of the devil’s arcade”). Along the way, Bruce throws in some subtly stinging barbs about how a soldier ultimately pays for the decisions of those in power (“Somebody made a bet/Somebody paid”).

The final verse is heartbreaking and potent, as the wife imagines a future life for the pair that likely will never be: “A house on a quiet street, a home for the brave/The glorious kingdom of the sun on your face.”

The band starts crashing in all around Bruce as he gets to the line “the beat of your heart,” repeating it over and over as if trying to will this fallen hero back to life. It’s at this point when “Devil’s Arcade” achieves those lofty heights, and you can forgive it for the times it comes up short.

Song 93: “Lucky Town”
Album: Lucky Town

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The title track off the more effective album of Bruce’s double-release in 1992, Lucky Town is a solid grinder that benefits from an excellent driving chorus and an overall tight performance. Not a lot of wasted energy here, and it’s also one of Springsteen’s strongest vocals of that time period.

He really sounds like a man who has followed the hard road the lyrics depict, but a grizzled optimism still shines through.

Springsteen also pulls off the neat trick of making what is essentially a one-man performance (with the exception of Gary Mallabar on drums) sound like the work of a cohesive combo. His guitar work is fine, restrained but still clearly expressing powerful emotions.

The lyrics actually travel a similar path as “Better Days” off the same album, but the darker aspects of the music and some solid one-liners (“I had some victory, it was just failure in deceit”) make the hopefulness of the chorus seem more hard-earned and realistic. Bruce admits to self-destructive tendencies (“Here’s to the loaded places that we take ourselves”) but ultimately finds, in “Lucky Town,” a welcoming, forgiving home.

Song 92: “Two Hearts”
Album: The River

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It rips by at such a hyperspeed pace, goosed by Max Weinberg’s rapid beat and the fast-fingered keyboard work of Roy Bittan and Danny Federici, that it’s easy to miss the depth of this peppy number off The River. Springsteen was taking a page from the Lennon/McCartney playbook by couching some of his deeply personal lyrics in a high-tempo number.

In fact, if this song has a drawback, it’s that it takes that strategy too far to the extreme. If your ears pop, you could miss the message.

The second verse ranks with one of Springsteen’s all-time best, as he was beginning at that time to explore what it meant to be a man and what was really important in life. He sings: “Once I spent my time playing tough guy scenes/But I was living in a world of childish dreams/Someday these childish dreams must end/To become a man and grow up to dream again.”

The meaning isn’t hard to parse. Bruce was finding out that not even his success at doing the thing he loved to do since he was a kid was completely fulfilling, and his fantastical earlier songs full of charismatic characters roaming the night had little to do with the life he was now living. Putting away childish things for him didn’t mean laying down his guitar.

It meant finding the intangibles that proved elusive even to rock stars: Companionship, togetherness, love. Hence, the chorus: “Two hearts are better than one.”

The great thing about being in a band is that there are built-in friendships that can provide a bond as tight, in its way, as familial or romantic bonds. So it’s no surprise that Springsteen sings that second verse and the choruses in charming harmony with his right-hand man, Steven Van Zandt. In this way at least, Bruce can reconcile his childish dreams with the necessities of an ordinary man.

Song 91: “Mary Lou”
Album: Tracks

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Bruce never found a home for this song, though the fact that some lyrics show up in different incarnations elsewhere leads me to believe he gave it a good try. Eventually released on Tracks, "Mary Lou” might have been a tough fit for any album because of its very specific metaphor of a girl who’s mesmerized by movie stars and transfers that fascination to her real life by dating guys who are only out for good times that last about as long as your average motion picture.

But it’s still a fun romp that lingers in the memory long after “the credits roll.”

Unlike some of the stuff on Tracks which feels half-finished, “Mary Lou” is a fully realized band performance. Many of the elements were later borrowed for “Bobby Jean,” including the staccato double-shots of piano and Clarence’s nostalgic sax solo. Throw in some Byrds-y guitar licks and Max’s rolling-thunder snares and you’ve got a track that seems tailor-made for radio consumption, even though it never made it there.

If you look past the surface of Bruce’s silver-screen references, you’ll find a pretty affecting portrait of a man who’s trying to get through to this girl before it’s too late. The movie stuff is a way for him to make her understand, but his message is a serious one: You can only go down so many romantic wrong turns; at some point, you can’t turn back.

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