Bruce Springsteen - 'Human Touch' / 'Lucky Town'

This week in 1992, The Boss took a leap of faith and released two albums on the same day.

Springsteen continued his exile from E Street with a pair of albums that offered quite a few highlights but ultimately overstayed their welcome.

By 1992, the CD era allowed artists the freedom to make Big Statements. The more space available meant an album’s average runtime increased from 35 to 45 minutes to 50 to 60 minutes and beyond. It was also the era of big budgets. Major labels had money to burn and they invested in big projects for their biggest sellers. As a result, many acts decided to throw everything they had onto their albums. Editing was no longer a top priority.

In September of 1991, Guns n’ Roses finally followed up their multiplatinum debut, Appetite for Destruction, with the ambitious Use Your Illusion project. (Gn’R Lies acted as a stopgap between the releases, rush-released in 1988 to pacify an audience hungry for the temperamental Axl Rose to decide his next move.) It was two CDs (or two double albums) of, at most, one album of good material.

It’s unknown if he was inspired by this model but on March 31, 1992, Bruce Springsteen unleashed two albums of his own into the marketplace. Instead of releasing them under the same name followed by a pair of Roman numerals, however, he opted for two different titles, Human Touch and Lucky Town. Such a distinction matters, because these act as two entirely separate sonic experiences.

You should know the drill by now. In 1987, Springsteen followed up the mammoth Born in the U.S.A. with the deeply personal Tunnel of Love; so personal that various members of the E Street Band only appeared individually on a handful of tracks. For Human Touch, he brought in studio aces Randy Jackson on bass and Jeff Porcaro on drums while the ever-present Roy Bittan handled most of the keys (except for the Hammond on two tracks, which featured the return of early E Streeter David Sancious). Backing vocals were handled here and there by Patti Scialfa, Sam Moore, Bobby King, and Bobby Hatfield.

Human Touch is anchored by its title track, a leftover sentiment from Tunnel of Love. “Tell me in a world without pity / Do you think what I’m asking’s too much?” You may have to learn to live with what you can’t rise above but that doesn’t mean you stop living. Everyone needs a little human touch. Pretty universal subject matter. It’s a great start to the album - even if Bittan’s keyboard patches scream 1992 - but it’s also the album’s best moment.

Then there’s “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)”, a track that played upon our constant need to consume in the early days of the 24-hour news cycle. Of course, it unwittingly predicted the hellscape to come. Bruce’s bass riff conjured thoughts of Megadeth’s “Peace Sells” from six years earlier, possibly on purpose, as MTV had by the ‘90s repurposed it as the bumper music for their MTV News segments.

In anyone else’s hands, “57 Channels” would’ve been a campy critique of the modern world. But this is Bruce, so it’s a treatise on the coming isolation felt nationwide as we are glued to our phones and shun real-life interaction. Too much information begets paranoia. Fake news is afoot. In the blessed name of Elvis, make it stop.

Speaking of repurposing, Springsteen reached back to Sonny Boy Williamson II for “Cross My Heart”. Reworking some of the lyrics, adding his own, and changing the music from a straight blues to an ominous plea (complete with a reference in his guitar solo to the riff of the Raspberries’ “I’m A Rocker”, of which he also shared its title on a standout track from The River), Springsteen crafted an eerie, barren landscape that could be the offspring of “State Trooper”. The narrator may not be riding alone late at night, as far as we know, but someone needs to check in on him.

There were other highlights on Human Touch: “Man’s Job” was a fun jolt of soft, sunny soul with Sam Moore’s unmistakable backing; “Roll of the Dice” has become an E Street Band concert favorite over the years; and “With Every Wish” is one of Springsteen’s stripped down ambiguous tunes that portends events as they unfold. He worked up a few of these during these sessions that would later end up on Tracks (“Loose Change”, “Gave It A Name”, “When the Lights Go Out”). In fact, with the album already an hour long, he’d recorded these and plenty more (that would be spread across Tracks, The Essential Bruce Springsteen, and B-sides).

Either way, it was not a bad group of songs by any means, and, as the cliche goes, it would be many artist’s best album. But this was Bruce Springsteen. It just didn’t rise to the level of his previous work. And at 14 songs, it was just too damn long. Aside from Bittan and Scialfa, there’s no E Street Band to lean on, bounce off, and get lost with. I mean, this wasn’t The River.

Lucky Town, on the other hand, was a tight ten songs of focused rock’n’roll, thoughtful ballads, and nods to folk blues. There was the joyous “Better Days” to kick it off, one of the happiest songs of Springsteen’s career. It’s not too saccharine, mind you. You still get priceless Bruce-isms: “It’s a sad man my friend who’s living in his own skin / And can’t stand the company”. What’s different this time is the (mostly) absence of doubt. Throughout his career, even when he was asking Mary to climb in, Springsteen has allowed doubt to dance around the edges - it’s that darkness on the edge of town - but Lucky Town begins in a place of comfort. The narrator of “Better Days” appears to have a satisfied mind for once. He may be just a mile out of hell, but he’s halfway to heaven, by God.

“Better Days” is not just the flipside to “Tunnel of Love”, it’s the antidote. Throughout Lucky Town, love is no longer a place of uncertainty and cautiousness. He’s taking that leap of faith. He’s found living proof. He’s looking for his beautiful reward. It’s only in “The Big Muddy” that we feel the old Bruce - the Bruce of Nebraska, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and half of The River - return. He’s making a deal or doing a favor for someone again, anticipating a big payday, getting waist-deep in the big muddy. As he did on Human Touch, Springsteen borrows a title and an idea while adding his own lyrics. This time it’s Pete Seeger’s “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy”. Yet musically and performance-wise, it sounded as if Springsteen had spent some time with Living with the Law, the debut album of then-label-mate Chris Whitley, especially on the bridge of “Big Muddy”.

Lucky Town celebrates life in all its complications and paradoxes. Joy, happiness, love - emotions usually fleeting in Springsteen’s world - are laid bare, have a strong foundation for once and, more importantly, are allowed to be trusted.

Yet its joy would be short-lived, as Springsteen later said in his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame acceptance speech, he tried to write happy songs “in the early ‘90s, but it didn’t work. The public didn’t like it.”

That may be so, and he did indeed overcorrect by the middle of the decade with the loneliness, hopelessness, and soft nihilistic murk of The Ghost of Tom Joad, but as he also showed with the E Street Band’s resurrection for The Rising, when we need reassurance in the face of uncertainty, we can turn to Bruce to find solace, to find empathy, and to rock mightily.

The rest of the ‘90s, other than Tom Joad, were spent looking back. His 1995 Greatest Hits package was a hit and acted as a summation of his career along with a few well-chosen outtakes that hinted at what was to come with 1998’s box set of previously unreleased Tracks.

As for Human Touch and Lucky Town: Looking back 32 years later, one was a bloated, somewhat unfocused ramble through some almost-good ideas with the occasional brilliant track; the other a sparse, down-and-dirty assault of roots-rock, finely tuned with some powerful observations on aging, contentment, and the human condition - an exhale following the uncertainty that was Tunnel of Love. The best tracks on both rate as Bruce’s best of the ‘90s and can proudly stand not too many steps behind his career high points. They may be too weighed down by ambition to be front-to-back classics, but they remind us that we’re all human, and humans still need love, hope, faith, and luck. And the joy of human touch, of course.

As for that horrendous cover art…