Roll of the Dice: Linda Let Me Be the One

Born to Run was released on August 25, 1975.

As of July 2nd, “Linda Let Me Be The One” was still on it.

That’s how close to glory it came; instead, “Linda Let Me Be The One” is buried on Tracks, the only outtake from Born to Run to see an official release at all.

And that’s too bad, because “Linda” would have fit perfectly on Born to Run. Even more than the title track, “Linda Let Me Be The One” is an homage to Phil Spector, starting with that “Be My Baby” beat that Bruce loved so much at the time.

(That famous beat shows up again and again in Bruce’s mid-seventies songwriting. See “Gotta Get That Feeling” and “Someday (We’ll Be Together),” for example.)

But it’s more than the beat: “Linda Let Me Be The One” is a perfectly constructed Spectorian girl group song from its lush, romantic backing track to its lyrical melodrama. (I’ve always considered “Linda” to be an answer song of sorts to “Leader of the Pack.”) Even the title and chorus are hat tips to Spector–there’s not a lot of difference between “will you let me be the one” and “won’t you please be my baby.”

The midnight boys are outside scraping tears up off the street
Standing guard beneath the window where only Linda sleeps
The leader is a kid named Eddie walking like an angel in defeat
He trashes her old man’s car, slashes Linda’s name in the seat
Calling out:

Linda, will you let me be the one
Linda, will you let me be the one
Linda, will you let me be the one
Linda, will you let me be the one

Eddie certainly isn’t the first of Bruce’s bad boy protagonists, and he wouldn’t be the last. But geez, someone needs to give poor Eddie some dating tips. I’m no one’s Casanova, but I know that vandalizing a girl’s father’s car probably isn’t the best way to win her affection.

There’s almost certainly some unstated backstory here: we can assume that like Romeo and Juliet, Eddie and Linda do not have parental approval to be together. Bruce implies that Eddie is in a gang, and presumably Linda’s father has forbidden them to date. Eddie acts out his rage and impotence by vandalizing the car, even while pleading for Linda’s love from below her window (another Romeo and Juliet evocation).

That’s a lot of information conveyed in just five lines. It’s a brilliant set-up, but if we’re honest, the rest of the song never quite lives up to either the standard or the premise of that beautiful first verse.

In a room full of contenders… Eddie spars 
‘Til he drops to his bed and surrenders draped in the scarves
He stole from Linda’s bedroom the night he laid at her feet
When the midnight boys were stranded down on Cason Street

There’s something distractingly curious about that first line: the “…Eddie spars” is so disconnected from the rest of the lyric that we can intuitively sense that something else was meant to go in the empty space.

And something was. In an earlier version of “Linda Let Me Be The One” (which reportedly was the version considered for release on Born to Run rather than the Tracks version), we hear the line as Bruce originally wrote it: “In a room full of contenders shadow boxing, Eddie spars.”

Now that is a great line. Like, seriously great. So why did Bruce surgically excise it from the final lyrics? I have absolutely no idea, but this is the sort of thing I obsess about. The verse is weaker without it.

The second line recovers the emotional momentum with an achingly beautiful image of Eddie wrapping himself in Linda’s scarves, the closest he’s able to get to his love–but the third line takes Eddie’s supplication just a bit too far, losing the listener’s (this one, at least) empathy and replacing it with pity.

If the second verse lyrically stumbles, the bridge makes up for it with what could have been my second-favorite sax solo on Born to Run. Oh, how I would have loved to see Clarence perform it in concert.

Bruce’s final verse offers no resolution and only hints at absolution (along with a “Spare Parts” foreshadow in the third line):

In the basement of St. Mary’s, Eddie hides from the rain
In with the stolen sisters ’til the streets are dry again
Talking fast cars and spare parts, empty homes and broken hearts
Distant worlds with strange girls and kneeling with Linda in the dark

Now that was unexpected. We think we’re about to get either a romantic reunion or a tragic break-up, but the die was cast before the song even started. “Linda Let Me Be The One” is a post-breakup song, so poor Eddie looks to the church to provide solace for his heartbreak.

I’ve never quite decided whether I find this last scene touching or funny. I suppose it’s a little of both. The notion of a gang leader so lovesick, so lonely, and so trapped by his own image that he has to talk about his girl troubles with the nuns is a comically sad one, so maybe Bruce was indeed trying to paint Eddie as more of a sad sack than a bad seed.

In any event, it’s probably for the best that “Linda Let Me Be The One” was cast off from Born to Run. While musically a great fit, Bruce’s lyrics were just a tad shy of the bar he’d cleared with every other song on the album. Still, it’s a beautiful outtake that deserves its official release status on Tracks.

It also deserved to be played live. But that didn’t happen until 2014, and even then only once–and that one time was too late for The Big Man to elevate.

The E Street Band pulled it off pretty well regardless. (Well, mostly… there’s a rough patch toward the end, but we’ll forgive them. After all, it had been almost forty years since they’d recorded it.)

But while Bruce may have kept “Linda” in the vault until 1998, he liberated her melody much sooner–an epiphany that Bruce seemed to realize in the moment when he performed “Linda Let Me Be The One” for the first and only time to date, immediately after he performed the song it bears an uncanny resemblance to: “I Wanna Marry You.”

(I have no idea why he thought they were written twenty years apart though. It was five at most.)

Linda Let Me Be The One
Recorded: May-July, 1975
Released: Tracks (1998)
First performed: April 29, 2014 (Sunrise, FL)
Last performed: April 29, 2014 (Sunrise, FL)

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