Guest post by Nathan Arizona
Is “Blinded by the Light” a Bruce Springsteen song or a Manfred Mann song?
Bruce wrote it in 1973 but people didn’t buy it. The song was an afterthought. He put it on his debut album only after the record company insisted.
The British group Manfred Mann’s Earth Band recorded it three years later and it topped the Billboard Hot 100. That’s the one most people know. It’s the only No. 1 Bruce has ever written.
Columbia Records president Clive Davis didn’t see any hit singles on “Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.” when Springsteen turned it in so he asked him to go back and write one. Bruce found a rhyming dictionary and came up “Blinded by the Light” (as well as “Spirit in the Night,” also not a hit). “Blinded by the Light” stayed close to home with lyrics about his friends and himself. “Indians in the summer” referred to Bruce’s Little League baseball team, the Indians. “Cut loose like a deuce” referred to the 1932 Ford “deuce coupe” hot rod.
Songwriting was not Mann’s strong point. He had already scored a No. 1 hit with Bob Dylan’s ”The Mighty Quinn” when Philadelphia FM disc jockey Ed Sciaky handed him the Springsteen album and suggested he might want to cover one of the songs. This is the kind of thing that made the WMMR fixture a near legend in the music world.
Mann’s version has a harder edge than Springsteen’s and slicker production with a lot of synth and guitar. But there were other differences he hadn’t counted on. There was a place in the song where Mann couldn’t find the transition he needed. His drummer suggested a bit of “Chopsticks” and in it went.
A more significant change came when vocalist Chris Thompson (Mann didn’t sing, either) had trouble pronouncing “deuce.” (In other versions of the story technical problems get blamed, or maybe it was both.) Anyway, it sounded like “douche” when he sang it. Mann tried to set things straight on a radio promotional tour, but it didn’t work. As Thompson recalled, “they’d say ‘play that douche song.’ ”
Maybe this made Bruce feel better about the failure of his own version. “I have a feeling that that change is the reason why the song made it to number one,” he said.
This is Manfred Mann’s full seven-minute album version. It was cut down to 3:48 for the single.
Here’s the Springsteen original, the first track on his debut album.
