The Way That I Know Her Style
In May 1979, Bruce Springsteen rolled tape on rehearsal at his property in Holmdel, New Jersey. The location had been dubbed “Telegraph Hill Studios” by band mates and friends, but it wasn’t much of a studio; it was a barn, and at that moment, a place where Springsteen and his band could prepare for live shows and run through new material.
It’s October 2020, and I’m sitting in my car, listening to a recording from that night. It’s a prized, bootlegged full-band rendition of the unreleased song “Janey Needs a Shooter.” It sounds like what it is — someone sticking a microphone in the middle of the room and hitting “record” while the band does their thing. There’s a veil of distance (and the occasional tape wobble) separating the sound from your ears, which oddly enough makes it more intimate than an actual studio recording; it puts you in that room, in that moment, with these guys.
There is mystery here, and magic, and the unexplained. I can understand why an artist wouldn’t want tracks like these to escape their inner circle, but as a fan, it’s impossible not to be drawn into the moment. The E Street band tears into this song with abandon, and Springsteen himself taps into a reservoir of yearning so deep that he sounds lost sometimes, the line between singer and song dissolved into nothing.
It’s a recording that is so perfect in its imperfections that it’s almost hard to imagine an “official” version of the tune. Springsteen has released so much exceptional studio music; this feels too raw, too real, for that. It sounds like it belongs in the hazy mist of time, nearly lost to the past but surviving on the eagerness of fans to discover it and claim it as their own.
***
In November 2019, Springsteen and producer Ron Aniello rolled tape on another recording of “Janey Needs a Shooter.” This time they’re at Springsteen’s fully equipped Thrill Hill Studios on his Colts Neck property in Jersey. The band is there again…well, most of it anyway. We’ve lost Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici, but the rest have stood tall for 45 years of touring, recording, and serving the music of the Boss.
That veil is pulled back, and suddenly “Janey” exists in full modern digital clarity, every instrument carefully mixed together by Aniello. This isn’t a band captured in a private moment of exploration; these are masters of their craft, musicians who have been honed by decades of playing and recording into an impossible machine. It’s an “official” version.
And yet, there it is — that same dark yearning, falling down through the decades into its own fresh moment of creation.
Springsteen’s romantic songs sometimes bring to mind the title of Little Steven’s debut solo album; they’re stories about “men without women.” Like Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter, his characters seem to have “love” carved on one hand and “fear” carved on the other. The two are inseparable. The narrators aren’t charmed by an irresistible object of affection; they’re terrified to be alone, to face themselves in the mirror again.
We meet Janey, but only refracted through the narrator’s point of view, and only in relation to the men who travel through her life. As described in the song, these are menacing figures — the doctor who “tears apart her insides” and “probes with his fingers,” the priest too paralyzed to accept Janey’s invitation inside, and the cop that scares Janey but still “checks on her every night.”
It may be a song about Janey, but only on its surface. Beneath the observations and details lurks something darker and more pure. The narrator wants to be her “shooter,” to find a place in her life; whether he belongs there or not seems beside the point.
As I’ve obsessed over the 2020 version of “Janey,” I’ve connected it in my brain with Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver, and once that association clicked into place, it’s been hard to shake. Yes, “Janey” is a beautiful song, and shot through with the kind of romantic longing that has fueled billions of “love” songs just like it. At the same time, its unreliable narrator can be chilling in his longing; it makes you wonder if that final moment of holding her close isn’t just a figment of his eager imagination.
And if it’s not his imagination, then how is Janey better off with her shooter than she is with her doctor, her priest, her cop? She’s a hollow fantasy fully formed only by the men who control her. It’s a bleak world of exploitation, a story sung by a narrator who watches from the outside but longs to find his way inside, possibly by any means necessary.
It’s not just that he knows Janey’s style; he’s obsessed instead with the way that he knows her style. She is what he knows, what he imagines, and little more.
***
On Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You, past isn’t just prologue; it’s present and future, too. Time bends; we see the finish line just as clearly as the start. There are songs that speak to now, and songs that speak to the weight of years sitting firmly on the shoulders of seventysomething rock and roll singers. “Death is not the end,” Bruce sings on the album’s final cut, “I’ll See You In My Dreams,” and while the band plays, it’s possible to believe that’s true.
With “Janey,” the Springsteen of 1972 collides with the Springsteen of 2019, as seen through the lens of Springsteen in 1978. You can find this song in each of these separate moments, and you can hear its journey from the scaffolding of a bigger idea to its full realization almost 50 years later. In each moment, it’s complete, but not finished. And maybe that’s what makes it so compelling today — regardless of how many times Springsteen and the band have approached this song, there is still meaning to uncover. And all that time, all that meaning, is there in 2020 on track four of Letter to You.
“Janey Needs A Shooter” is an old song, but it exists today, and it feels like this moment — beautiful, yearning, and desperate.
