There’s something to be said for teleprompters.
Bruce Springsteen is far from the only artist who relies on the device, but for some reason he’s frequently called out for it.
To which I respond: I’ve now written about 800 profiles of songs Bruce has written, performed, or covered, with about 450 still to come. Do you know the words to 1200+ songs by heart?
(If you answered yes, check back with me when you’re in your mid-forties.)
It’s surprisingly hard to remember all the words to a song, even one you sing frequently. But when you cover a song you’ve hardly ever performed before, even if it’s one you’ve known your whole life and think you know by heart… well, you might find yourself out on a tightrope without a net.
It doesn’t help when the song doesn’t exactly follow a narrative structure. Take Little Richard’s “Bama Lama Bama Loo,” for example. A late career entry, it only notched as high as #82 on the Billboard Top 100 in the summer of 1964.
There aren’t a whole lot of lyrics in “Bama Lama Bama Loo,” but when Bruce took lead vocals with Joe Grushecky and The Houserockers on an impromptu cover of it in the summer of ’94, Bruce couldn’t remember any of them.
We can tell pretty quickly that Bruce is flying by the seat of his pants: he starts with the chorus and doesn’t budge from it for almost a full minute. And he doesn’t even get that right–he sings it as “bama lama lama loo.”
And when he finally attempts a verse, he confuses “Bama Lama Bama Loo” with “Tutti Frutti,” mashing up verses from the latter with the chorus from the former, stitching them as best he can. (To be fair, the two songs are very similar–Little Richard was almost certainly trying to recreate his earlier success.)
For a less secure artist, it could have been a train wreck moment, but Bruce can improvise with the best of them. And with Joe at his side and the well-oiled Houserockers behind him, if you weren’t paying attention you’d never know anything was amiss.
I bet he wished he had a teleprompter that night, though.
Bama Lama Bama Loo
First performed: September 18, 1982 (Red Bank, NJ)
Last performed: August 20, 1994 (Long Branch, NJ)
