Cranky Lesbian

Forty-two years ago tonight, on December 28, 1980 at the Nassau Coliseum, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band recorded a phenomenal rendition of “Because the Night,” a song he began writing in 1977 and never quite managed to finish. Concert footage from the late ’70s plays like a parody of writer’s block in action. Behold the hypnotic intro of this Houston performance and Springsteen’s blistering guitar work throughout the song—and the comically painful repetition with which he shouts “Because the night belongs to lovers” over and over (and over) again.

When nothing became of Springsteen’s unfinished product during the recording of Darkness on the Edge of Town, producer Jimmy Iovine was granted permission to hand the song over to Patti Smith for her own purposes. If the original lyrics were coarse as sandpaper, her reworking was smooth as silken sheets. (In his 2016 memoir, Born to Run, Springsteen calls her his “second-favorite Jersey girl,” the first being his wife, Patti Scialfa.) Smith’s poetic salvage job became her biggest hit, but I’ve never found it to possess 1/10th the muscle, passion or urgency of what the E Street Band typically produces when tackling the song in concert.

For the uninitiated, here’s a standard, dizzying Nils Lofgren solo, but it’s an errant Springsteen lyric that captures, for me, the spirit of a half-sketched song that still defies delineation: “What I’ve got, I have earned/What I’m not, baby, I have learned.” Is it an observation or a threat? A little self-knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and few writers understand that better than Springsteen, whose solo acoustic take on “Born to Run,” for example, turns the euphoric original on its head. His work—including the cuts that Dixie Carter never saw fit to puzzlingly reinterpret—has been my solace-seeking soundtrack as we close the books on 2022 and prepare to put ink to the first blank pages of 2023.

This is a time of year I love and mostly hate, for more reasons than will ever receive a full accounting here. I take little comfort in year-end lists, Auld Lang Syne or New Year’s resolutions. Possibly, having recently watched the wretched death of a mild-mannered grandparent who never made a life’s plan that didn’t go up in flames, I’m in crankier spirits than usual. But while knocking on the door of my 40th birthday, an occasion that has sometimes seemed out of reach and is now mere weeks away, I take some hard-won satisfaction in knowing that what I’ve got, I too have earned. And what I’m not, baby, I have learned.