Cover Me: Pretty Flamingo

If he just could… If she just would…

There’s a brief moment at the 1:50 mark of Manfred Mann’s “Pretty Flamingo” where Paul Jones breaks with the lyrics for a moment and allows himself a wry, wistful “Ha!”

It’s almost certainly an unscripted moment, and yet the entire song is packed in that “Ha!”

Because who among us hasn’t had that moment–that unexpected, out-of-nowhere, transcendent moment where a beautiful cipher walks by, pulchritudinous but mysterious, and in the span of that moment we invest in them every wish, every desire, every fantasy of The One?

The narrator of “Pretty Flamingo” knows not a thing about the object of his infatuation, not even her name. He’s left only with how she looks, what she wears, how she walks. And yet, somehow…

If he just could… if she just would…

We’ve all been in that moment at least once, and we can tell that Paul Jones has, too. Because that “Ha!” is the giveaway, that moment when we recognize our ridiculousness and wake ourselves from our reverie. And yet…

If he just could… if she just would…

The universality of that feeling helped carry Manfred Mann’s single all the way to #1 in the U.K. in the spring of 1966. (It notched only as high as #29 in the U.S.) But it was that “Ha!” that Bruce Springsteen dialed into when he started covering it on the Born to Run Tour in 1975.

From that very first performance in Houston, Bruce prefaced his cover of “Pretty Flamingo” with a shaggy dog story that would only grow in length, cast, color, and detail with every telling, eventually outsizing the song itself.

But no matter how ridiculously charming the detail–Clarence playing the saxophone while riding a bike in short pants, Bruce shaking his maracas on a street corner as the girl walks by–the entire story is just Bruce’s equivalent of Paul Jones’ fleeting “Ha!”, and Bruce milks it for minutes in order to allow himself a few minutes of pure, unbridled, unapologetic romance with the song itself.

You can’t listen to Bruce Springsteen sing “Pretty Flamingo” and not instantly recall that glorious moment of instant infatuation, no matter how long ago it might have been. (His 2008 single, “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” features essentially the same narrator from “Pretty Flamingo” forty years on.)

As Bruce admitted during what is probably my favorite single “Pretty Flamingo” performance (from his 2014 High Hopes Tour), we’ve all lived that story at some point, and in that moment it’s the only story.

Bruce’s performance that night was almost a capella, with warm vocals imbued with nostalgia and emotional memory. And then he makes eye contact with his wife, and the band finally enters as he and we remember that the real thing is so much richer, more complex, more beautiful, and more rewarding than that first moment of infatuation.

It’s a beautiful moment, and for anyone familiar with their story, it’s a reminder that in rare and right circumstances it’s possible to connect the dots from that moment to this one.

Because maybe he can’t. And maybe she won’t.

But what if they did?

Pretty Flamingo
First performed: September 13, 1975 (Houston, TX)
Last performed: August 30, 2016 (East Rutherford, NJ)