Echoes of Thunder

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

You are sitting in the kitchen of Bruce Springsteen's New Jersey home when you hear a muffled roar outside. The Boss is back. He has pulled up in his driveway astride his Triumph motorcycle, and now he's walking in the front door. His face is ruddy from the wind and the sun, and he's smiling broadly. His new boxed set, Tracks (Columbia), featuring 66 songs, 56 of them previously unreleased, is due in stores this Tuesday, and Springsteen is eager to talk about it. The songs on the four-CD set span his career; a great many of them are strong songs, perhaps even hit songs, but they are songs that were left off Springsteen's albums nonetheless, for space reasons, thematic reasons and sometimes no good reason at all. "One reason I was interested in doing this is I wanted this work to be part of my body of work--an official part," he says. "And I wanted people to see what I was doing all those nights in the studio."

Tracks starts off intimate and direct: Bruce alone, strumming his guitar and crooning Mary Queen of Arkansas. The original version was featured on his 1973 debut, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.; the rendition on Tracks is from Springsteen's 1972 audition for the legendary record producer John Hammond. It's an unguarded performance, brimming with innocence and promise. Later, on Tracks, he delivers a fierce, Delta blues-infused performance of Born in the U.S.A. The arena-rock album version was sometimes misinterpreted as a jingoistic anthem, but there's no mistaking the bitterness and disillusionment in this sparer take. The set is also adorned with such previously unheard gems as the rousing Santa Ana and the sublime ballad Sad Eyes.

Despite Tracks' impressive length, it represents only a portion of the unreleased material Springsteen has stored up over the years. While recording his last studio album, The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995), he also laid down a country album. That unreleased effort, says Springsteen, features "roots country and West Texas swing music," but it didn't fit in with this current boxed set, and he hasn't decided what to do with it.

Then there's his lost hip-hop-influenced record. Not long after he wrote the Oscar-winning song Streets of Philadelphia, Springsteen all but completed a kind of hip-hop album. "I got together a lot of samples and loops and started to put this album together," he says. "It was fun; I enjoyed doing it, but I needed two or three more songs, and for some reason, I never got around to writing them. So I put it away. Eventually, I'm going to find a way to get this music out to people."

Meanwhile, fans are just going to have to make do with brand-new material. Springsteen says he has nearly completed two albums, one acoustic and one electric. He's reluctant to predict a release date but says he'll have new music in stores "sometime before the end of the century."

Near the close of the interview, Springsteen, who says he's a fan of such younger performers as Chris Whitley and Ben Harper, asks what's worth listening to in record stores these days. You recommend the new Seal album (in fact, you give him your only copy), the sound track to the hip-hop movie Slam and rapper/singer Lauryn Hill's debut album (you point out that like him, she's a Garden State resident).

Springsteen turns out to be particularly interested in rap. "That desire to be heard, to have a voice that can be heard, that seems to be at the core of a lot of the music that I wrote," says Springsteen, who recently published Songs (Avon; $50), a compilation of his song lyrics. "More of those issues are dealt with in hip-hop today than in rock music. I don't know exactly why. Maybe those things are felt more in the hip-hop community, those kinds of immediate frustrations. Maybe that's the connection."

Finally it's time for you to drive away from Springsteen's home. He's up for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year, and if he doesn't make it in on his first try, they ought to tear the place down. Listening to the rambling, raggedly compelling Tracks makes you realize why you fell in love with his music in the first place. Springsteen found--and still finds--poetry in ordinary working-class life, in guys who work in car washes, guys doing hard time and guys who finished tours of Vietnam. He sees the raw beauty in the North Jersey skyline, in the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets and in the darkness on the edge of town. Sure, he has faltered at times and made music that seemed overly domesticated, but Tracks vigorously documents Springsteen's struggle to stay committed to his core subject: the postindustrial howl of Everyman. The years haven't muffled that roar.