Today’s classic song of the day was written by Bruce Springsteen, released by him as a single that went pretty much nowhere, then made a hit by Manfred Mann. The song is “Blinded by the Light,” and I’m pretty sure you know it.
Bruce Springsteen wrote “Blinded by the Light” back when he was still in his Bob Dylan phase. He wrote it at the request of Columbia Records chief Clive Davis, who asked the Boss to write a potential single for his debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. Columbia actually did release the song as a single, in February of 1973, but it went nowhere fast.
Springsteen says he wrote the song using a rhyming dictionary to help come up with the song’s flurry of words. The lyrics reference real people and events, such as:
- “Madman drummers” refers to the E Street Band’s original drummer, “Mad Dog” (then known as “Mad Man”) Vinnie Lopez
- “Indians in the summer” refers to the Little League baseball team Springsteen played on as a kid, the Indians
- “Teenage diplomat” refers to Springsteen himself
- “In the dumps with the mumps” recalls Bruce’s bout with the mumps when he was a kid
- “As the adolescent pumps his way into his hat” is, as Bruce later noted, “self explanatory”
- “Tripped the merry-go-round” refers to Bruce spending his youthful days on the boardwalk
- “Cut loose like a deuce” (not douche!) refers to a deuce coupe, a 1932 V8 Ford Coupe popular with hot rodders in the ’50s and early ’60s (Bruce was also a fan of classic hot rods when he was younger)
For your further edification, here’s Mr. Springsteen himself explaining the song line-by-line on an episode of VH1 Storytellers in 2005:
Manfred Mann, who’d had previous hits with “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” (1964) and “Mighty Quinn” (1968), heard “Blinded by the Light” and decided to cover it with his Earth Band. He changed the “cut loose like a deuce” line to “revved up like a deuce,” which makes sense, but so slurred the words on the recording that many listeners thought he sang “wrapped up like a douche.” I bet you did, too.
Here’s what Mr. Mann remembers about the song—and the lyric confusion:
“I don’t think Springsteen liked our ‘Blinded by the Light,’ ‘cos we sang ‘wrapped up like a douche,’ and it wasn’t written like that and I screwed it up completely. It sounded like ‘douche’ instead of ‘deuce’, ‘cos of the technical process—a faulty azimuth due to tape-head angles, and it meant we couldn’t remix it…
“But in the end, it was No.1 in America, and so many people came up to us after and said, ‘You know why it made No. 1?… Everyone was talking about whether it was deuce or douche.’ Apparently Springsteen thought we’d done it deliberately, which we hadn’t, so if I ever saw him I’d avoid him and cringe away like a frightened little boy.”
Whatever the reason, the single of “Blinded by the Light” by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, released in August of 1976, was a major hit. It went all the way to #1 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and Cash Box Top 100, and in Canada, too. That’s the power of a good song, no matter who performs it—or how they mangle the words.
And here’s your daily bonus video of the day, Manfred Mann and his Earth Band playing “Blinded by the Light” live on the March 18, 1977 episode of The Midnight Special. You can definitely hear Mr. Mann overenunciate the word “deuce” when he sang it live.
