The PERFECT SONG cover! A song that whenever I hear it, either version, it just makes me so, so intoxicated! 

Way before I ever heard of Bruce Springsteen I remember hearing Blinded by the Light by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band when I was a kid.  I didn’t discover Bruce until I was probably in 8th or 9th grade.  

Manfred Mann’s version was released in that stellar music year 1976.  It was a single from the album Roaring Silence. But I want to go back a little further to the Manfred Mann of the 60’s. My friends and I loved another cover they sang,  Bob Dylan’s  Mighty Quinn, and a cover of The Exciters Do Wah Diddy– which we sang when we were teenagers galavanting through the streets of my little village on our nightly rounds, usually in search of shenanigans and beer.  And of course who can forget Bill Murray singing his version of the song in Stripes? Lol

Manfred Mann was successful in the UK primarily with covers. He founded his eponymous band in 1962 in  London, scored hits with those plus the song  Pretty Flamingo and Sha -La -La, a Shirelles song, and some others. Personnel changes, band name changes and by 1971 it became Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, at the suggestion of band member Chris Slade. The interesting history of this band could take up an entire video, but I’m going to skip to the mid 70s.

Their US breakthrough came with their cover of Bruce Springsteen’s Blinded by The Light from his  1973 album Greetings From Asbury Park album, my personal fave Springsteen LP.   I absolutely love, love, love both versions.  I dig how they are so different and so distinctive in their sound. Mann’s version reached number 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 1977.

Springsteen wrote Blinded by the Light for Asbury Park when Clive Davis suggested the album needed a potential single. Springsteen supposedly read through a rhyming dictionary and came up with some of the nonsensical sounding lyrics, but the song was auto-biographical too, with references to his Little League baseball team, like Indians in the Summer, a “merry-go-round” is slang for when a pitcher continuously walks batters.  The “deuce” in “cut loose like a deuce, another runner in the night” is a Deuce Coupe.

Of course every kid who ever heard Manfred Mann’s version thought the lyric was douche, as they changed the verse slightly to revved up like a deuce, and Mann’s accent and some technical problems changed the way the word sounded. Yeah, right. 

So let’s get to what makes each of these songs spectacular and perfect in their own way.

Manfred Mann’s version with that characteristic mid-70s aura, mini-moog heavy, the chorus of AAAAAAAA in the background is sooooooooo tasty and definitely trippy. 

It literally lifts you up and sends you off into an entirely different cosmic stratosphere. It gives me chills and goosebumps.  And about those “chopsticks” chords in the transition? Right? I mean, what a freaking bizarre yet perfect vehicle to get over that bridge? I mean it just flows so well, 

The Springsteen version is bluesier, funkier, jazzier.  I mean Clarence Clemmons, am I right?  That saxophone takes this song to a higher level of a different sort. Greasier and sweatier, and definitely more Jersey that Manfredd Mann’s version. 

Even though someone I know who’s music knowledge I am in awe of,  is incredibly deep and wide, would vehemently disagree, I think Springsteen’s writing here, these lyrics, are just so, so freaking scrumptious.  

With a boulder on my shoulder, feeling kinda older I tripped the merry go round

With this very unpleasin, sneezin and wheezin, the calliope crashed to the ground.

Mama always told me not to look into the sights of the sun, but mama, that’s where the fun is! 

Ok, so this is my personal idea about lyrics.  Sometimes you want a song to spell out, clearly and plainly a message.  And other times, like in Blinded by the Light, the lyrics are bizarre, obscure, nonsensical, yet somehow you know exactly what they are saying.  Do you know what I mean? I think that’s pure lyrical genius.

As much as I am enamored with all things 1960s, the most influential decade, and the bulk of my childhood, was the 1970s so I will always reminisce with rose colored glasses about anything and everything from the “ME” decade: clothes, television, and especially the music.  It was really the hey-day, the height of the most spectacular amalgamation of musical styles, genres, sounds ever.  How the same song, from the same decade, but performed by two very different bands, can equally be spectacular is just divine magic.  Blinded by The Light, both versions, it’s THE perfect song!