Song of the Day 10/22: Jimmy Cliff, “Trapped”

For Gaza.

Jimmy Cliff released this song as a single in 1972, the same year he starred in “The Harder They Come,” the movie and soundtrack that made Jamaican music mainstream, but it got surprisingly little attention at the time. Produced by Cat Stevens, whose “Wild World” was a big hit for Cliff in the UK, the single didn’t chart in Britain and wasn’t even released in the U.S. Its only other appearance was on a mid-’70s Cliff compilation LP, “Goodbye Yesterday.”

The song might have disappeared, except that Bruce Springsteen came across a cassette of “Goodbye Yesterday” in the Amsterdam airport while he was on tour in 1981 after the release of “The River.” He started playing his cover on that tour, and it stayed in the set list for the “Born in the USA” tour that followed. Given a synth background and the full E Street arena treatment, it sounded moodier and more menacing than Cliff’s version, and a lot of people thought it was a Springsteen original.

A 1984 performance at the Meadowlands, included on the charity “We Are the World” LP in 1985, introduced the tune to a wider audience. It wasn’t released as a single but got such heavy airplay it reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Rock Tracks.