In 2002, Bruce Springsteen released The Rising, an album of songs that sounded like they were written for that post-9/11 moment, even though most of them weren’t. “Nothing Man” was recorded in 1994; “My City of Ruins” debuted in 2000; even “Lonesome Day” probably originated pre-9/11.
By that point in his career, Bruce was so skillful at recontextualizing and rearranging old songs to serve new purposes that most listeners never suspected their origins.
Ten years earlier, though… not so much.
We speak, of course, of “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On),” a song so dated and derided that Bruce hasn’t touched it since 1993.
But the thing is: it’s actually a good song. The problem with “57 Channels” isn’t in its lyrics or music, it’s in the way Bruce (and Little Steven, but more on that later) stretched and distorted the song almost beyond recognition to serve a purpose it wasn’t built for.
Let’s go back to the beginning and take a fresh listen to a song that started out as a lark in a much simpler time.
“I wrote [57 Channels] as a joke one night sitting in front of the TV,” Bruce admitted in a 1993 Irish radio interview. Hardcore fans already knew that, though, because Bruce debuted the song at his famous Christic Institute performances in November 1990, introducing it as “a song about loneliness, how there can be so much going on and nothing happening.”
In that original incarnation, “57 Channels” is a borderline novelty song about a man so consumed by the fruits of his material success that he misses out on more earthly pleasures, until his neglected lover finally gives up and leaves him.
It’s a fun song, a joke perhaps, but one with a bite that would only become sharper as decades passed.
I bought a Hollywood house in the bourgeois hills
For a dump truck of hundred thousand dollar bills
Man came by to hook up my cable TV
We settled in for the night my baby and me
We switched around and round until half-past dawn
But there were fifty-seven channels man and nothing on
Like many of us, Bruce grew up in a time when television offered only a few choices. In a major market, you might be able to count your channel choices on two hands; in minor markets, only one. By 1990, cable television brought with it a proliferation of specialty channels, and Americans marveled at the availability of dozens of channels–so much so that Bruce wrote a song about it, not realizing just how quickly the number he settled on would be rendered quaint.
Quantity, however, didn’t necessarily correlate with quality, as viewers soon discovered. But that didn’t keep them from vainly searching and switching channels in the hopes that something good might be on.
The night after Bruce debuted “57 Channels,” he played it again, this time admitting the song is “more about my actual life.” At best, he was only half-joking: Bruce had indeed purchased a Hollywood home with his success, and two years off the road with an infant (his first) at home, it’s not a stretch to imagine that Bruce and Patti were spending much of their days and nights in front of the television.
Now home entertainment was my baby’s wish
So I hopped into town for a satellite dish
Came home, tied it to my Japanese car
Stuck it in the backyard, aimed it at the stars
A message came back from the great beyond
Son, there’s fifty-seven channels and nothing on
The second verse is probably the song’s cleverest: “home entertainment” is clearly a double entendre. The humor and tragedy of the rest of the song stems from the clueless narrator missing his lover’s cues as he stubbornly quests for something on-screen more interesting than what’s around him.
Well like a wheel of fortune we were spinning that wishing
All night to the morning with our eyes gone fishing
We sat there on that couch ’till just about dawn
Fifty-seven channels and nothing on
The bridge is terrific, too. Sadly, Bruce would excise it from the studio track, but the notion of a TV channel dial as “wheel of fortune” is a brilliant metaphor on two levels. It’s a turn of phrase that deserved to be heard.
Bruce goes on to hammer home the song’s point in the second half of the bridge:
Well we might’a made some friends with some billionaires
We might’a got all hot and horny if we’d made it upstairs
All I got was a note that said “Good-bye John
Our love is fifty-seven channels and nothing on”
In other words, life was already good. They lived in a vibrantly upscale community and they had each other for sexual entertainment. But our hero can’t tear himself away from his screen until his love leaves him a Dear John letter with an apt metaphor: their relationship is free of hardship but devoid of substance. She wants more.
Perhaps John realizes and regrets his mistake, because he destroys his electronic siren:
Well I bought a .44 magnum, it was solid steel cast
In the blessed name of Elvis well I let it blast
‘Til my TV was in pieces there at my feet
And they busted me for disturbing the almighty peace
Judge said “What you got in your defense son?”
I shouted “Fifty-seven channels
There was fifty-seven channels
There’s fifty-seven channels and nothing on”
The final lines of the song reveal one last joke: does John obliterate his television because it ended his relationship? Or is it simply frustration at not finding anything worthwhile to watch? The song ends unresolved, leaving us to decide for ourselves, with a few dark lines that suggest John may be heading down a path of darkness.
Whoa I keep switching
My mind’s twitching
My finger trigger’s itching
(yeah, Bruce screwed that line up–he was clearly nervous all night long, but he trips over his lyrics several times on this song.)
I can see by your eyes friend you’re just about gone
You’re fifty-seven channels and nothing on
It’s those final lines that point the way to the version that ended up on Human Touch a year and a half later. Bruce actually recorded “57 Channels” in the studio just a few weeks after those Christic shows, but in those intervening weeks he completely recast the song into an ominous-sounding bass-driven arrangement, with Roy Bittan’s spectral keyboards providing an eerie, alien sonic landscape.
The result was a track that dialed down the humor and turned up the social disconnection. If not for the fact that it was electric, the studio version of “57 Channels” would sound right at home on Nebraska.
So far so good, musically at least. (Let’s agree not to discuss that video, though, because it’s pretty bad. Bruce himself would remark in 2014, “I have no idea what we were aiming for in this one outside of some vague sense of ‘hipness’ and an attempt at irony. Never my strong suit, it reads now to me as a break from our usual approach and kind of a playful misfire.”)
But then a few months later, Bruce took “57 Channels” on tour, and our first hint at what we were going to experience came a month before the tour opener when Bruce made his first-ever appearance on Saturday Night Live. Watch him perform a dramatically different version of “57 Channels” around the five-minute mark.
By the time the tour started, the song had evolved even more.
That tour arrangement is miles from where “57 Channels” started. So what happened between the time Bruce recorded “57 Channels” and the time he hit the road that prompted such a shocking evolution?
Los Angeles burned.
On April 30, 1992, while Bruce and his band were rehearsing for their upcoming tour mere blocks away, days-long riots broke out in Los Angeles following the acquittal of four police officers who were captured on video beating Rodney King.
When Bruce made his first SNL appearance a week later, the riots had only been over for 48 hours. Performing the album’s second single as written risked Bruce coming across as tone deaf, an out of touch millionaire whose worst problem was not finding anything to watch on TV.
So Bruce re-arranged “57 Channels” in a way that emphasized its hidden theme of social disconnection and overlaid TV soundbites of anchors and politicians commenting on the social injustice that had played out on the streets earlier in the week.
Bruce leaned all the way in to TV sampling when he released his single for “57 Channels” that summer. Besides the airtight 2:20 studio track (Bruce dropped a bridge and cleaned up the “hot and horny” lyric), the CD single included three Little Steven-produced remixes (including one that was more then eight minutes long) that employed the protesters’ famous “No Justice, No Peace!” chant as percussion throughout, interweaving Gulf War commentary with vapid TV soundbites to illustrate the meaningless debates that preoccupied white-privileged viewers while across the world and in their own cities, their fellow citizens were dying.
Bruce took those remix samples and used them on stage, and as is typically the case on tour, Bruce’s performances of “57 Channels” continued to grow in length and power with each passing month.
There was only one problem: while fans could (and did) argue about the artistic merit and effectiveness of the arrangement and production, lyrically it was still the same song he wrote as a joke on his couch in front of the TV.
It seems Bruce recognized that on stage: he couldn’t help but slip into old habits, employing on-stage theatrics, yelps, and audience call-and-response to avoid appearing stiff during his performance. (Compare the clip above with his earlier MTV Unplugged performance.)
Bruce played “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)” nightly throughout his 1992 and 1993 World Tours, but never again since.
When he took to the road again in 1995, it was a solo acoustic tour. Without the electronic enhancement, “57 Channels” would have revealed its original theme, and so Bruce wisely avoided it (although he would debut another song about the TV wasteland.)
Bruce’s next tour was his Reunion Tour with the E Street Band, but by then the world had changed too much for “57 Channels” to work in either context. Consumers had a lot more than 57 channels to choose from, and the permanent 24-hour news cycle had inured viewers to the disconnection between on-screen and off-screen life.
TV was now a part of life rather than apart from it, and Bruce would shortly have more pressing concerns to write about.
57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)
Recorded: Early December 1990
Released: Human Touch (1992)
First performed: November 16, 1990 (Los Angeles, CA)
Last performed: June 26, 1993 (New York City, NY)
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