For all the outtakes that Bruce has released from the River recording sessions, there are still more in the vault waiting for their author to rediscover them.
One of the most intriguing and elusive outcasts is “Under the Gun” — intriguing because it contains lyrics that would migrate to two officially released songs, and elusive because there are so many bootleg recordings of Bruce developing it, from his earliest melodic tinkering at home…
…to acoustic home demos with lyrics that progress from mostly bluffed to halfway complete…
…to almost-ready-for-the-studio band rehearsals.
In all, there are a whopping eleven known work-in-progress bootlegs of “Under the Gun,” but not a single one of the final version, which session logs indicate the E Street Band recorded on June 14, 1979.
Unfortunately, the lyrics are too undeveloped in the acoustic demos for us to get a true sense of the final song, and while it was presumably finished by the time Bruce rehearsed it with the band, his vocals are too distant for us to make them out.
That said, here’s what we do know: like “Thunder Road,” “Badlands,” and “Point Blank,” “Under the Gun” was another in a string of songs with titles ripped from movie posters, in this case the 1951 film noir thriller.
Bruce’s song appears to have nothing in common with the film beyond its name, however. “Under the Gun” appears to be a song about a man who can’t quite earn the kind of living he wants to provide for himself and his wife.
By trade, our hero “works construction like my father did” (a line that would eventually migrate to “The River,” of course), but he feels perennially “under the gun.” The song isn’t finished enough for us to figure out whether there’s a criminal temptation at play here, as in “Atlantic City,” but the narrator struggles with feelings of powerlessness so much that he feels the urge to “go downtown and get me a gun.”
He resists the temptation, lying awake in the middle of the night, holding his girl tight (as in “Wreck on the Highway“). Oh, and her name is Mary, and as he holds her closer, “I feel every breath she takes.”
If the acoustic demos were all we had to go by, we might conclude that Bruce abandoned “Under the Gun” in favor of the two songs that actually did make the record, but those band rehearsals from March 30, 1979 argue otherwise.
Unfortunately, the only thing we can discern from those recordings is Bruce’s obsession with shaving time off the song. In the clip above, the band clocked in at 2:47, and we can hear Bruce say it needs to be shorter.
They did another take, shaving 35 seconds off:
But Bruce still wasn’t satisfied. He led the band through a take so taught it rivals “Held Up Without a Gun,” and we can hear the band’s triumphant satisfaction when they clock in under two minutes.
They had good reason to be jubilant–even from those muddy recordings, we can tell that the song finally gelled during that take. To my ears, at least, “Under the Gun” sounds like it would have been a perfect musical fit for The River and a terrific uptempo rocker in concert.
Less than three months later, Bruce took the band into the studio and recorded a finished take of “Under the Gun,” but to the best of my knowledge that version has never escaped into the wild.
That makes it a great candidate for Tracks 2, so let’s keep our fingers crossed that we get a chance to hear the finished song someday.
Under the Gun
Recorded: June 14, 1979
Never released
Never performed
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