Bells of San Salvador

Here’s a fascinating one for fans of the obscure (with apologies to anyone who’s not).

In the spring of 1981, Bruce and the E Street Band performed a cover of John Fogerty’s “Run Through the Jungle” at three European River Tour shows–the only times Bruce would ever play the Creedence Clearwater Revival classic.

There was something odd about those performances, though, something fans of the original song almost certainly noticed: Bruce added verses that weren’t in the original song. You’ll hear them shortly after the 2:30 mark in the video below.

The new verses begin with the lines:

Now me and Robert Williams
We were out on Route Line 3
Well last night they pulled him out of his house
And shot him in the street

Bruce gave no explanation for the new lyrics, but they certainly fit the anti-gun theme of the original song. In any event, after those three performances, those lyrics were never heard from again.

Officially, anyway.

Because shortly after the River Tour ended later that year, Bruce started working on a song about the May 9, 1979 massacre on the steps of the San Salvador Metropolitan Cathedral. More than eighteen protesters were killed or wounded that day, after police opened fire on them.

Bruce called his song “Bells of San Salvador,” and the only traces of it that circulate widely are his (very) early home acoustic demos where he works on the song.

Now the interesting thing about those nine minutes of tinkering in the clip above is that Bruce has his title (he says it at one point), and he has a melody (clearly intended as a full-band track, as he vocalizes the percussion).

But he doesn’t have lyrics yet. The lyrics he sings are clearly placeholders, because they have nothing to do with the events in El Salvador.

It’s not at all unusual for Bruce to do this; there are many such known instances where Bruce borrows lyrics from another song to sing while he works on a new song’s music. What’s interesting here is that the lyrics Bruce borrows don’t belong to any of his known songs.

But they do closely resemble those new verses for “Run Through the Jungle” that Bruce sang just a few months before he sat down to work on “Bells of San Salvador.”

Listen carefully to the clip above, and shortly after the three-minute mark you’ll hear:

They took him from his house and killed him in the street

The lyrics that follow expand a bit on what Bruce sang in “Run Through the Jungle,” so it’s quite possible (even likely) that Bruce was developing them for yet another song that we have yet to discover.

And nobody knows the numbers
Nobody knows the name

And they left him lying in his room
They took all of his things
Lying on the jailhouse floor, sir
There’s the one who killed my friend and left him in the sun

They almost certainly were never intended for “Bells of San Salvador,” but the dark violent imagery fit the tone of the music he was developing, so they made for great placeholders.

Bruce eventually took the song to the E Street Band, and toward the end of the year they rehearsed it together. In the recording below, you can hear the band do a complete run through of the song. While the lyrics are just as muddy as in the acoustic demo (if not worse), the new arrangement is remarkable: sinister and foreboding and very much unlike any other track Bruce is known to have recorded to date.

At least one verse (or more likely the chorus) seems to be clear and distinct, though, and it’s enough to reveal that Bruce had indeed focused his song on those recent historical events:

And nobody hears the clang of the swinging jailhouse door
And nobody knows there’re people looking on
And nobody knows the number and nobody knows the one
With the bells of San Salvador ringing in the sun

Whether Bruce ever finished the song and recorded it has yet to be revealed, but for hardcore Springsteen fans who enjoy tracing the development of Bruce’s songwriting, these early demos of “Bells of San Salvador” provide a fascinating glimpse in to the days immediately following the River Tour.

Bells of San Salvador
Recorded: September – December 1981 (acoustic), April 15, 1982 (electric)
Never released
Never performed