Update 5/15/20: Friend of the blog Mike Nichols has unbelievably sharp hearing. He cracked the case: “Slow Fade” appears to be an early version of “Point Blank,” because those are the lyrics we hear at a distance. We already know that Bruce experimented with alternative melodies for “Point Blank;” this appears to be one of them. (Or at the very least, it’s Bruce working on an instrumental track using “Point Blank” lyrics as a place holder.) Great detective work, Mike!
For your listening pleasure or maddening auditory test, I present to you almost 40 minutes of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band working on a new song in February 1980.
This song represents one of the biggest mysteries from the River Sessions. Clearly, Bruce was serious enough about the song to spend so much time with the band working on it at Bruce’s house (which is where these recordings hail from). But there are no definitive records that indicate they ever took the song into the recording studio.
All we have to even hint at the song’s title is a written card “Slow Fade” that accompanied the escaped bootleg tape. But whether that represents the name of this song, a different song, or simply a recording instruction is unknown.
Some sources believe that these “Slow Fade” rehearsals might actually belong to a song called “I Will Be the One,” which Bruce and the band are known to have recorded on February 16th, not that long after these February 5th recordings. But when Bruce released his anniversary box set for The River in 2016, neither “Slow Fade” or “I Will Be the One” were anywhere to be found amongst the outtakes.
I’ve spent way too much time listening intently to Bruce’s “Slow Fade” vocals, and I’ll be darned if I can make out much if anything in the way of lyrics thanks to the poor recording setup. (Bruce apparently didn’t care about capturing the vocals–these sessions were band workouts, so he focused on capturing the instruments rather than his voice.)
If you care to take a run at it yourself and can pick out any lyrics, you’d be doing the Springsteen fan community a service if you’d share your transcriptions. I’d be seriously impressed: I consider myself fairly adept at picking out Bruce’s lyrics from less-than-optimal recordings, but this one is beyond my abilities.
It’s hard to believe there might still be unreleased tracks left over from the River sessions, but it’s equally hard to imagine Bruce and the band never memorialized their great performance in these rehearsal glimpses.
Fingers crossed for a welcome surprise in that long-awaited Tracks 2…
Slow Fade
Recorded: February 5, 1980 (rehearsals only)
Never released
Never performed
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