Bruce Springsteen, guitar hero?<\/p>\n
Bruce doesn’t get nearly enough credit for his skill as a guitarist (Rolling Stone<\/em> ranks him only 96th on their Greatest Guitarists of All Time list), in large part because he always ensures his instruments are in service of the song rather than the musician.<\/p>\n But that wasn’t always the case: set the wayback machine for the turn of the 1970s, and you’ll find a very different Bruce Springsteen fronting a band called Steel Mill.<\/p>\n Bruce wrote plenty of songs for Steel Mill. Few of them hold up lyrically when compared to his later solo material, but that’s because Bruce’s Steel Mill songs were largely framing devices for the band’s epic jams that often stretched songs far further than one would ever imagine based on lyrics alone.<\/p>\n Case in point: “He’s Guilty (The Judge Song),” written in the summer of 1969 and performed steadily throughout the remainder of the Steel Mill era.<\/p>\n “He’s Guilty (The Judge Song)” is one of the very few songs Steel Mill actually recorded in the studio, more than 50 years ago. Bruce finally released that track–46 years after it was recorded–on his 2016 compilation,\u00a0Chapter and Verse.<\/em><\/p>\n Take a listen, and you’ll hear a much showier, cockier Bruce Springsteen tearing it up on guitar (and a pretty darn impressive Danny Federici keyboard solo, too).<\/p>\n