After the Darkness Tour ended, Bruce spent much of 1979 and the early days of 1980 writing and recording home demos for his next album. Some ended up on The River, others would be released years later on Tracks and The Ties That Bind: The River Collection, and some were just scraps, ideas that never developed into a full-blown composition.
And then there are the genuine lost gems, songs that were far enough along that even when listening to a bootleg demo escapee, we can get a solid sense of what Bruce was reaching for musically and lyrically.
Case in point: “Everybody Wants My Baby.”
Lyrically, this is not new ground for Bruce: The out-of-her-league guy paired with the ain’t-a-beauty-but-hey-she’s-alright girl is kind of his stock in trade.
And in fact, from the second verse forward, the lyrics are substantively very similar to “I Wanna Be With You,” written and recorded around the same time:
Everybody, everybody starts talking
Late at night my baby goes out walking
Everywhere I go I gotta keep my eyes on her
Better look away or buddy you’re a gonna
Everybody wants my baby
Everybody wants my baby
Now it ain’t that she’s the finest little girl around
There’s a lot of other pretty girls here in town
There’s just something about her I can’t tell it
But if I knew what it was I’d bottle it and sell it
But while “I Wanna Be With You” is pure pop, “Everybody Wants My Baby” has an edge; it’s not hard to imagine a full-band arrangement that veers much closer to punk than to pop.
Unfortunately, this early version is the only one that’s escaped into the wild, and in the back half, Bruce is still struggling with the lyrics, trying to find the right phrasing to match his desired cadence. But even though the song starts to lose cohesion a bit, we still hear the themes of “I Wanna Be With You” loud and clear–although in this song, they are more generalized than personal.
Just one glance….her old man tells everybody…talk
Just one glance and everybody rip their hearts out
Sure what I got helps you keep everybody lookin’ sharp
Fighting in the alley or rumble out in the dark
An interesting line comes next, teasing a bridge that never develops, but that sounds awfully similar to the one in “Give the Girl a Kiss.”
Now what I wanna do…
Up until this point, we’re listening to a guy crow about his girl. He knows she may not be considered the finest catch in town, but he’s crazy about her nonetheless. He claims that everybody wants his baby, but we suspect it’s more affectionate boastfulness than true fact.
But then the song bends into a curve:
Gotta watch it when at midnight I creep in
I gotta stay awake and watch it now when she’s sleeping
I don’t know I gotta chance it
I don’t know what kind of mischief I’m in
I’d give her all my money I’d give her my best shirt
“Thank you honey” and she’d pull right off and she’d flirt
I don’t know what I’m gonna do
It’s gonna make me crazy keep a thinking ’bout you
Everybody wants my baby
Everybody wants my baby
And I don’t know what I’m gonna do
Yeah, he’s hooked, that’s for sure–but he’s also starting to show signs of paranoia. Perhaps everybody does want his baby, and his baby seems to be encouraging it–at least as seen through his lens. The narrator doesn’t know what he’s going to do about it, and because Bruce never developed “Everybody Wants My Baby” into a finished song, we never find out either.
Bruce may have abandoned the song, but he didn’t abandon its themes: He would contemporaneously explore devotion to the girl next door in “I Wanna Be With You,” and many years later he would revisit the consequence of fishing out of one’s league in “With Every Wish.”
“Everybody Wants My Baby,” however, remains an unfinished work.
Everybody Wants My Baby
Never released
Never performed
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