Three Minute Record: The Crystals, "Then He Kissed Me"
All the stars were shining bright, and
Welcome to Three Minute Record, the edition of this newsletter where we dive into Bruce Springsteen’s best cover versions. You can read more about the purpose of this exercise here and see other volumes here.
In this edition, we discuss the Crystals "Then He Kissed Me," performed as "Then She Kissed Me" on E Street.
In the intro to the Born to Run section of Songs, Bruce writes, “I was living in a small house in West Long Branch, up the coast from Asbury. I had a record player by the side of my bed. At night I’d lie back and listen to records by Roy Orbison, the Ronettes, the Beach Boys, and other great 60’s artists. These were records whose full depth I’d missed the first time around. But now I was appreciating their craft and power.”
“Then She Kissed Me” had its debut at the August 8 performance at the Akron Civic Theater, the week before the Bottom Line shows, and it kind of feels like a road test. There’s no way that Bruce and the band weren’t already thinking about the Bottom Line gig as soon as they walked out of the studio at the end of July. In New York City in the 1970s (and even into the 80s to a certain extent), getting booked into that club to play a series of shows around the release of your record was a very big deal from an industry perspective. Especially in New York City, where the radio stations had not embraced him as strongly as they had in other markets like Philadelphia or Cleveland, and there were still people at his own label that thought he should have been dropped already.
Bruce hadn’t had a ton of time to think about the setlist because they’d been in the studio for so long and as we all know, it was a very intense period of time. He was still trying to finish the record – he would commute back to the studio between gigs to supervise the final elements! – and probably wasn’t yet thinking about how he wanted to present the new songs live. This is probably why that first show in Providence only featured three BTR songs. And if you look at the documented setlists from early August, the sets on those initial dates are still using much of what he had been doing on the previous tour, and it takes a while for the Born To Run songs to find their places.
The covers always had their role in an E Street Band show and that hadn’t changed, especially with the inspiration Bruce drew from them for this new record. He had 10 shows he had to fill out at the Bottom Line, with the trendiest tastemakers and industry machers in attendance, 2 shows a night for a week, early and late. This was, still, only the third album, back when records were 10-12 songs tops – covers let you extend your repertoire, let you take a little bit of a breath, let you showcase your great taste in music, let you advertise your influences, and also, let you as an artist stake your place in rock and roll’s lineage.
Remember, this is before there was any resurgent movement to appreciate the early 60’s Brill Building hits as the masterpieces that they are. It was music for kids when they first came out and now, 10 years later, coming out of the late 60’s and the counterculture of “don’t trust anyone over 35,” might as well have been Mantovani. It was your parents’ music. You were not hearing any of these great songs on FM radio. You heard them on WCBS 101, which had just switched to an oldies format a few years earlier.
There were musicians and other music fans who were still listening to those songs, or more likely, never stopped. Lou Reed never stopped talking about his love of doo-wop. Patti Smith wrote a letter to Lenny Kaye because she liked an article he had written about the doo-wop scene and they’d dance to 50’s singles at Village Oldies when things were slow. Joey Ramone worshipped Ronnie Spector. None of those artists made music that sounded like those songs. But they were all influenced by it and carried it in their hearts. In the case of Bruce Springsteen, he wanted to go back to the roots of rock and roll and see what elements from that time could serve him right here and now.
