Bruce Springsteen - Dream Baby Dream

"Hardly the sort of cover you'd expect from the great man, but Bruce Springsteen's take on Suicide's 'Dream Baby Dream' is something very special. He'd close every night on his Devils & Dust tour with a version of this song – a repetitive and mesmeric lullaby of a thing, far away from the wordy, narrative pieces you'd associate with pared down Springsteen sets. If you look a little further back into his career, outside of the E Street Band, there are further traces of the Rev/Vega influence, chiefly in that Nebraska's 'State Trooper' owes much to 'Frankie Teardrop' in its oddly motorik, minimal rock & roll assemblage. Using only a looping organ figure with a little synthesizer to fill in the cracks, Springsteen keeps his arrangement of 'Dream Baby Dream' true to the spirit of the original, channeling vocals into the Roy Orbison-like shape that had characterized his delivery circa twenty years ago…To make a fair comparison between this and the original, the B-side begins with a previously unreleased Suicide performance, recorded for an NBC TV broadcast in 1979. Vega is in fine voice and the strange, snarling aloofness of it all is very much at odds with what goes down on the A. Finally, disbanded New York outfit Beat The Devil complete the EP with a hard rocking version of 'Mr Ray,' which is all good and well, but is inevitably overshadowed by the two tracks that came before it. Extremely limited. Don't miss out." – Bookmat