Today’s entry checks all the boxes: it’s a Springsteen original, a cover, and a team-up!
In the summer of 1995, Bruce retreated to his home studio to start recording a new album. We know the album he released later that year: The Ghost of Tom Joad. But that’s not the album he set out to record.
At first, his new compositions trended more toward country and rockabilly, with an appropriate assemblage of backing musicians that included Garry, Danny, Soozie, and Marty Rifkin.
Among the tracks recorded: a wry, country, she-done-me-wrong lament called “Tiger Rose.”
As the album took shape and shifted toward more serious social commentary, “Tiger Rose” was dropped, along with other humorous entries like “I’m Turning into Elvis” and “The Little Things That Count.” (What an album that would have been!)
But Garry must have been particularly taken with “Tiger Rose,” because when he produced an album for the late, great rockabilly icon Sonny Burgess later that year, he convinced Bruce to let Burgess record the song for his album.
The result was the second track on Burgess’ 1996 self-titled release.
The lyrics are clever and straightforward. “Tiger Rose” opens as a simple love song, with a devoted narrator professing his eternal love:
Tiger Rose let me read some prose to you
Just as long as it shows my love any verse will do
Honey, I could make you happy if you’d only let me, heaven knows
My, my Tiger Rose
…but there’s a heck of a curve ball in the second verse:
I went to work this morning on the local commuter train
Stopped back early and I peeked through the window pane
There was a man eating from my refrigerator dressed up in my clothes
Why, why Tiger Rose?
The song heads down a darker path now, but Bruce keeps it more funny than sad:
Called out your name and I kicked down the front door
I grabbed him by my robe and I rassled him across the floor
I told him “you ain’t any better than all those other so-and-sos”
He said I wasn’t any different than a thousand other Joe Blows
Love disappears so quickly, when it goes it goes
Why, why Tiger Rose?
Bye Bye, Tiger Rose
It’s a fun song, but hardly essential listening. But the imagery of the protagonist wrestling his rival (wearing his own robe), the late-breaking revelation that he’s not the first gentleman she’s betrayed him for, and the clever rhyme in the final lines of the verses elevates the song from otherwise-forgettable status to a fun trifle–one we might hope to yet see Bruce perform on stage someday.
He actually did perform it twice, though–with Burgess himself at the Alliance of Neighbors Benefit concerts at the Count Basie Theater in Red Bank in late 2001. It’s not the tightest of performances, but it’s certainly a fun one. Take a look.
Tiger Rose
Recorded: Summer 1995
Never released
First performed: October 18, 2001 (Red Bank, NJ)
Last performed October 19, 2001 (Red Bank, NJ)
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Love that song from a couple of tribute compilation CDs. Sonny/Gary seemed to give it their best Johnny Cash treatment.