97. Kitty's Back by Bruce Springsteen

"Kitty's Back" by Bruce Springsteen

Written by Bruce Springsteen
Produced by Mike Appel and Jim Cretecos
Released on The Wild, the Innocent & The E Street Shuffle (November 11, 1973)
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Growing up in the 1980's it seemed impossible to ignore Bruce Springsteen. Born in the USA was a mammoth album. I don't know if every song on that album was a Top 10 hit, but it sure felt that way at the time. It helped that I lived in New Jersey for about 5 years when I was younger, so I was raised to feel an unmerited kinship towards Bruce, Bon Jovi, and Whitney Houston.

As I grew older, I started listening to more Bruce, specifically his Born to Run era stuff that got played on classic rock radio stations.

I really took a deep dive into all things Bruce Springsteen after college. College had been both easy  and hard for me: Easy because I did not put nearly as much effort as I could have or should have into my school work or extra-curriculars; and hard because I was learning a ton about myself and the world but was really burnt out on school. So after college, rather than trying to make it work as a classroom teacher, I tried to live the dream of being a year round camp counselor. I eventually moved to Michigan where I worked at an outdoor center near the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. For a time it was pretty glorious.

While we had programs going on at the outdoor center, the staff would stay in a bunkhouse that had a couple bunk rooms and a communal area in the middle. We'd work long hours during the week and crash during the weekends. Often we would make big plans for the weekend, only to find ourselves sleeping in, watching movies, trying to use our one computer with dial-up internet, and scrounging around in the kitchen for food. I had a Netflix account at that time, so often I'd use those lazy weekends as an opportunity to try to watch one or more of the DVDs that had been delivered to me. In 2005 Bruce Springsteen released a concert video: Hammersmith Odeon, London '75. I was already starting my deep dive into all things Bruce, so I moved it up my queue and forced some of the other staff members to watch some live Bruce with me.

When the DVD got to "Kitty's Back" for the first time, I was enamored. It was such a cool song, and just different enough from what I knew of Bruce's music at the time to get me hooked. What really got me was the end of the song, when the titular Kitty actually comes back. The E Street Band starts whispering "here she comes, here she comes..." until finally the song explodes into jubilant glee. Then the joy fades and reality sets in as Bruce wonders aloud, "Ooh what can I do?" I just wanted to hear it again and again. So when the song finished, I skipped back and played it again. I didn't realize that it was 17 minutes long (they do an extended solo section in the middle). Three hours after I had begun watching the DVD, and my colleagues were a bit surprised to find me still watching Bruce. I was in love.

Soon after I found the CD for the Hammersmith Odeon Live '75 show and bought it, followed pretty quickly by purchases of more of his albums. I still love Bruce, but not as much as I did in 2005. Bruce was a brilliant songwriter, who didn't seem to know how to take those songs and make them into great records in the studio.

The studio version for "Kitty's Back" is actually good, which is kind of the exception to the rule for his early work. His first album is full of fantastic songs that were very poorly produced. So many songs that I loved live, or that other musicians covered successfully, were wildly disappointing on the album. My second favorite song of his is his live version of "Lost in the Flood." The problem is that while the live version in London was visceral and powerful, in studio it falls flat. It's almost boring. The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle was a better album than his first, but still couldn't completely capture the electricity and verve of live Bruce. He managed to catch lightning in a bottle when he recorded the studio version of "Born to Run" in 1974, but it also apparently took six months to do. Bruce is great. Live Bruce is legendary.

Right now "Kitty's Back" by Bruce Springsteen is (probably) my 97th favorite song of all time.