It’s time for another visit to eighteen-year-old Bruce Springsteen’s 1968 Notebook.
The 1968 Notebook was unveiled at an auction in 2006. where it was snapped up for more than $57,000 by a lucky bidder with some very deep pockets. It contains some of Bruce’s earliest songwriting exercises.
While we don’t have any music to pair with the lyrics, the lyrics themselves give us fascinating insight into the issues and themes that fascinated young Bruce.
Today’s entry is the very first song transcribed in that notebook, entitled simply “Clouds.”
“Clouds” is very much of its time, an anti-war song from the point of view of a young soldier in Vietnam, trying desperately to hang on to his life, his love, and his sanity. He’s on the battlefield, and the clouds above offer temporary refuge from the chaos below. They seduce him and endanger him at the same time. He’s not sure why he’s there or what he’s fighting for, and he’s beginning to doubt whether he’ll ever know or make it back to his home and his sweetheart.
It can be a bit tough to decipher Bruce’s handwritten lyrics above, so here they are transcribed below (thanks to the folks at springsteenlyrics.com — I’ve made a few small corrections, but they did all the hard work!)
Keep in mind as you read them that Bruce was eighteen at the time–and that’s at the time he copied the lyrics into the notebook. Because many of the songs were transcribed on the same date, it’s extremely likely that the songs were written earlier, and that Bruce copied them into the notebook for safekeeping. Given the date of transcription (April 26, 1968), it’s not at all out of the question that Bruce might have written the songs months earlier, perhaps even at seventeen.
Regardless: he was young, and he still had a long way to go toward refining his craft. He’s not very adventurous with metaphor, and the rhyme scheme of the verses are consistent (although whether intentional or not (I’m inclined to credit it), there’s a clever almost rhyme between the third lines for the first two verses.)
As my mind bends clouds into dreams that I like
As the sun disappears into the night
I look and you have gone
Then I hear you calling to me in the distance
Yet can’t you see I’m resisting the whisperings of your mind
And as the cry of war racks my brain
I realize men don’t love the same
Maybe I’ll make it to the summer rain
Or maybe I’ll lose my mind insane trying
The paper flag flies high over the soldiers grave
Let’s see what mistake the young boy made
Was his life really done
In another land a flower drips in the morning dew
It’s been thousands of years since I’ve seen you, you know that it’s true
And as the cry of war racks my brain
I realize men don’t love the same
Maybe I’ll make it to the summer rain
Or maybe I’ll lose my mind insane trying
I’m walking down by the banks of the river
My heart is lonely, she flows by you to whisper
Then I see you standing there
The gypsy tells the future of a dying man
Yet he’ll never understand what he’s dying for
And as the cry of war racks my brain
I realize men don’t love the same
Maybe I’ll make it to the summer rain
Or maybe I’ll lose my mind insane trying
Bruce is believed to have played “Clouds” during some of his acoustic shows in 1968, but we don’t have any definitive recording or setlist to testify to it. Still, the fact that his solo shows started in May of that year–mere days after he transcribed this notebook–suggests that the songs in the notebook were complete enough to have been intended for performance.
Perhaps someday a recording will surface and we’ll find out for sure.
Clouds
Never recorded
First performed: unknown
Last performed: unknown
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