Roll of the Dice: You Gotta Be Kind

“You Gotta Be Kind” is an unfinished demo, recorded by Bruce at home in early 1980.

The song features a reggae beat paired with roughed-in lyrics that dance around the need to go out of your way to help someone in need. To be kind, in other words.

If you see a man lying by the roadside
Would you stop and give him a helping hand
Or would you drive home leavin’ him to cry 
<unintelligible>

You gotta be a kind to your brother
You gotta be kind, baby, understand
You gotta be, You gotta be kind
You gotta be kind

The second verse doesn’t really fit with the first:

Now some boys, they come out on Stockton
And they’re acting mighty rough and tough
They hurt the others
And they don’t live on blood

The reference to “Stockton” and acting “rough and tough” leads me to believe that this verse is borrowed from “Stockton Boys” (which was recorded around the same time)  for the purpose of working out the song (if one can borrow lines from a song that doesn’t exist yet). It was probably never intended for the final product at all.

Bruce is known to fiddle around with lyrics, melodies and arrangements independently of each other. In the process, songs cross-pollinate, evolve, and sometimes are abandoned. This is one of the abandoned–I don’t believe I’ve seen traces of either lyrics or melody pop up anywhere else in Bruce’s work (other than an early version of “Whitetown” that never saw the light of day either), so we may never know what this song would have become if it had made it to vinyl.

You Gotta Be Kind
Recorded: 1980 (demo)
Never released
Never performed

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