Song of the Day 7/22: Bruce Springsteen, “Wings for Wheels”

An odd story about a Bruce Springsteen composition popped up recently — an argument about the lyrics to his iconic song “Thunder Road.” Since the release of his “Born to Run” album in August 1975, everyone has sung the first line of the song as “The screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves,” with good reason: That’s how it was printed on the lyric sheet on the LP’s inside cover and on Springsteen’s web site.

So when Maggie Haberman of the New York Times quoted the line recently as “Mary’s dress sways,” fans were quick to correct her. Only it turns out all those fans, myself included, were wrong. Jon Landau, Springsteen’s manager, settled the controversy by emailing this to David Remnick of the New Yorker:

“The word is ‘sways.’ That’s the way he wrote it in his original notebooks, that’s the way he sang it on ‘Born to Run,’ in 1975, that’s the way he has always sung it at thousands of shows, and that’s the way he sings it right now on Broadway. Any typos in official Bruce material will be corrected. And, by the way, ‘dresses’ do not know how to ‘wave.’ ”

You can’t really make out the word on the album release, because “dress sways” doesn’t scan well — the S that starts “sways” blends with the one that ends “dress,” making it sound like the first sound of the next word is W. It could be either word.

Luckily for the debate, Springsteen is one of the most bootlegged musicians of all time. He first performed an early version of the song, dubbed “Wings for Wheels” by fans, at his concert at the Main Point in Bryn Mawr, Pa., in February 1975, and the radio broadcast of the show was soon on vinyl. In this version, it isn’t even Mary’s dress, it’s Angelina’s, but Bruce enunciates it clearly — it most definitely sways. From there the lyrics sort of degenerate (he later rewrote a lot of them), and the song’s structure also differs from the final version he recorded just a few months later.

That said, Jon Landau is being a disingenuous dick — prove me wrong. He apparently thinks a dress can’t wave. Quick, somebody tell Francis Scott Key — that flag wasn’t capable of waving, it must have been swaying. Landau also neatly absolves himself of letting the error stand for 46 years in official materials by calling it a “typo.” I’m not swayed by that explanation — and I’m not waved, either.