Four and a half years to follow-up 1987’s Tunnel Of Love, Bruce Springsteen made up for it with a grand gesture, releasing “Human Touch” and “Lucky Town” on the same day: March 31st, 1992.
As the Tunnel Of Love Express Tour reached Europe in the summer of 1988, it was reported that Springsteen who had mostly been successful at keeping his personal life out of the tabloids was having an affair with vocalist and band member Patti Scialfa and had separated from wife, Julianne Phillips.
A year after participating in Amnesty International’s Human Rights Tour , he fired the E.Street Band, and he and Scialfa left New Jersey for Los Angeles, where they got married less than a year after the birth of their first child. The only music heard from Springsteen during this time was a pair of solo acoustic benefit shows for the Christic Institute, where he debuted six songs over the two nights.
The slick professionalism of Human Touch meant that the best songs had to fight to be heard. “Real World” worked better when performed solo on piano at the Christic concerts, where it and “Roll of the Dice” turned into shouting matches with singer Sam Moore (from R&B greats Sam & Dave). “Man’s Job” and “I Wish I Were Blind,” the former a solid slice of pop-soul and the latter a paranoid ballad, found Springsteen effectively channeling icon Roy Orbison , both in vocals and songwriting, for the first time in years.
But the overall fault of Human Touch lies with Springsteen, who created his most inconsistent batch of songs to date. “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)” worked fine as a silly rockabilly tune at the Christic dates, but faltered when placed third in the album sequence (especially with an over-serious arrangement). “Cross My Heart,” “Gloria’s Eyes” and “The Long Goodbye” are nondescript. And there’s no excuse for the travesty of “Real Man.”
Springsteen fared much better on Lucky Town. As the story goes, he was trying to find one last song to complete Human Touch, and wound up writing an entire new album’s worth of songs that reflected his newfound happiness. But rather than remove Human Touch’s weakest moments and replace them with the best of the new material, Springsteen decided to put out two separate albums.
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Lucky Town succeeded in every place Human Touch had failed. Playing nearly all the instruments himself, except for drums (which were supplied by Gary Mallaber), Springsteen has rarely sounded looser on record, particularly on the opener “Better Days” and “Local Hero,” a surprisingly wry comment on fame. The ballads felt more personal too, with “If I Should Fall Behind,” “My Beautiful Reward” and “Living Proof” reportedly the song that he was originally targeted for Human Touch — serving as moving statements of hard-earned love and domestic bliss. Its prime flaws are the tunes where Springsteen interrupts the mood with social commentary, like on “The Big Muddy” and “Souls of the Departed.”
Even though they arrived on the same day, fans gravitated toward Human Touch because of its title track, a Top 20 hit that included “Better Days” on its B-side.
A world tour, with Bittan and Scialfa on board, followed. Since then, Springsteen has rarely performed the songs from those records, though “If I Should Fall Behind” was played regularly on the 1999-2000 reunion tour with the E Street Band and during the 2006 Seeger Sessions tour.
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Lucky Town also released on March 31st, 1992, a more middling collection of E Street-less tunes that is often considered Springsteen’s worst effort. (Human Touch is often considered the ninth album because it was recorded first; but since they were put out on the same day, it’s fair game to consider one or the other the “ninth.”)
Despite getting mostly positive reviews, Lucky Town is overlooked by Bruce himself, getting barely a mention in his biography Born to Run. Songs from the album have received few live performances since the E Street Band reunited in 1999.
Among the likeliest explanations for Lucky Town’s obscurity among Springsteen fans are that it was his first post-E Street Band record; that the only E Street band members present on the record were Patti Scialfa and keyboardist Roy Bittan; perhaps most of all, that the autobiographical LP was too goddamn happy.
Sure, it may not have the bubbling social and emotional angst or operatics of his classics, but Lucky Town represented a refreshing and momentous change of pace for Springsteen. As a married man now with two kids (and a third one coming a few years later), a more domestic Bruce here demonstrated a truly profound understanding of the double-edged power of love: its life-changing magic and the ever-present fear of losing it.
The album opens with the snare-shot of its best track and lead single “Better Days,” a pristine rock spiritual about Bruce’s own redemption through his love for Patti. (She appears prominently in the song, singing shimmering, gospel-like backup vocals along with Lisa Lowell and future E Street fixture Soozie Tyrell.)
Even though the lyrics are tender and introspective, Springsteen sings with a ferocity that sounds at times like a raging shout the guitars and drums growl with intensity and the bass provided by a then-little-known sessions musician named Randy Jackson tosses and turns like it’s about to come off the rails.
And yet, this is unequivocally a love song. “These are better days, baby / There’s better days shining through,” he sings in the irresistible chorus. “These are better days, baby / Better days with a girl like you.”
Following that is the album’s title track and fourth single “Lucky Town,” about the redemptive power of tearing down loose ends to rebuild your life. The song stood as a straight-shooting pop tune about reclamation. “When it comes to luck, you make your own,” he drawls in the final verse. “Tonight I got dirt on my hands but I’m building me a new home.”
“Local Hero,” the third track, churns along like a stadium-shaking heartland rocker, but is, perhaps ironically, a clever commentary on Springsteen’s discomfort with his own celebrity status. He tells the story of seeing a portrait of himself at a local store and the brief alienation from his true self that results. And once again, he sings about being redeemed from that darkness by the humility and grace of those closest to him.
“Now your legs were heaven / Your breasts were the altar / Your body was the holy land,” he croons. “You shouted ‘jump’ but my heart faltered / You laughed and said ‘Baby, don’t you understand?’”
Taking it up a notch in the bridge, Springsteen delivers a slightly provocative metaphor about doing the nasty: “Now you were the Red Sea / I was Moses / I kissed you and slipped into a bed of roses / The waters parted and love rushed inside / I was Jesus’ son, yeah, sanctified.”
While maintaining the up-tempo vibe of the album’s first five tracks, the back half dwells upon the aforementioned flip-side of everlasting love: its fragility.
On “The Big Muddy,” Bruce tackles lust and greed as love’s own Achilles’ heel. “Waist deep in the big muddy,” he howls in the chorus, “How beautiful the river flows and the birds they sing,” he juxtaposes with an admission of imperfection: “But you and I we’re messier things.”
Remove the synth and polished production, and throw in the hiss of a 4-track cassette recorder, and “The Big Muddy” could easily have fit on Nebraska alongside such stark examinations of flawed human nature as “State Trooper” or “Highway Patrolman.”
Similarly, the album’s penultimate track, “Souls of the Departed,” takes on darker subject matter near and dear to Springsteen’s heart: the wars both at home and in the desert abroad. As a spiritual successor to “Born in the U.S.A,” the song is a snarling piece of social commentary that weaves between lamenting the Gulf War and the senseless violence taking place in Compton, just miles from his then-mansion in the Hollywood Hills.
In one of the final verses, Springsteen neatly reflects upon his own life to tie this anti-war song back to the album’s dominant theme of love as a double-edged sword. “Tonight as I tuck my own son in bed,” he intones, “All I can think of is what if it would’ve been him instead / I want to build me a wall so high nothing can burn it down / Right here on my own piece of dirty ground.”
Further contemplating his high-society standing and the innate fear that it could all come crumbling down, Springsteen confesses on “My Beautiful Reward,” the album’s closer, how he “sought gold and diamond rings, my own drug to ease the pain that living brings.” He hints at a feeling of imposter syndrome—that his success and fame belie the truth that he’s really just like “a drunk on a barroom floor”—but is lifted up to the sky, taking on the body of a soaring bird, because of his understanding wife’s love.
But the album’s back half is bolstered the most by “Living Proof,” the song that spawned this entire album. During the Human Touch sessions, Springsteen felt moved to write this song about his first child Evan’s birth
Continuing the stomping rock ‘n’ roll and near-shouted vocals of “Better Days,” the song juxtaposes the angst of knowing deep down he’s a troubled, self-destructive man with the sheer beauty of “this boy sleepin’ in our bed.” He commends Patti for how she “shot through my anger and rage / To show me my prison was just an open cage / There were no keys, no guards / Just one frightened man and some old shadows for bars.”
The truth is, putting aside the fact that most of its songs were perhaps too earnestly autobiographical for his audience at the time, Lucky Town is in some ways no different than many of Bruce’s classic full-lengths.
Shouldn’t Lucky Town be appreciated at least half as much, or have its songs performed live more often?
