Bruce’s early band Steel Mill was known for its heavy sound and epic guitar jams, but even the heaviest of sets need to lighten up from time to time.
From late 1969 through their final show in early 1971, the band used “Sweet Melinda,” an early original Springsteen composition, as a mid-set palate cleanser and reprieve for the audience.
Bruce’s “Sweet Melinda” lyrics are more sly and sassy than sweet, and his vocals are deliberately and delightfully drunken and sloppy. The band follows Bruce’s loose lead, strutting and sashaying their way through a performance that evokes nothing so much as closing time at a local dive bar.
As for our heroine, she’s certainly a crowd-pleaser, with a reputation (“All the gang told me”) she seems to live up to when our narrator finds himself fortunate to have his parents’ house to himself. If Bruce had written it in a more modern time, one suspects his narrator would text “You up?”
Sweet, sweet Melinda
You turn my heart to a cinder
The way you do them things that you do
Oh Melinda
If the Pope knew you were such a sinner
He’d be on his way, flight TWA today
I call my baby on the telephone
Come on, my mama’s gone, I’m all alone
Good ol’ Melinda sure can make a man smile
Oh baby, now you’re drivin’ me wild
Oh sweet, sweet Melinda
You turn my heart to a cinder
The way you do them things that you do
I call my woman on the telephone
Come on, my mama’s gone, and I’m alone”
Good ol’ Melinda never leave a man stuck
All the gang told me the way
Sweet, sweet Melinda
You turn my heart to a cinder
The way you do them things that you do
“Sweet Melinda” isn’t a song you’d turn to when asked to typify the Steel Mill sound (let alone Bruce’s later music), but it was a regular feature of their shows throughout their fourteen-month tenure, a lark that offered glimpses of versatility still to come.
Sweet Melinda
First performed: November 20, 1969 (Richmond, VA)
Last performed: January 23, 1971 (Asbury Park, NJ)
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