(Credits: Far Out / Carl Lender)
Sat 17 January 2026 17:01, UK
From the minute that Bruce Springsteen played his first gig, he wanted to be more than a traditional rock and roll singer.
He could have blown the house down at any club in New Jersey when he started, but when he took his gig to the world’s stages with the E Street Band, he wanted to create a rock and roll church every time he tore through ‘Born to Run’. No matter how many times he played the song, he felt that every one of those words meant something, so people were going to need to be extremely careful if they were to start messing with any of his tunes.
Then again, it’s not like ‘The Boss’ doesn’t have great songs that can be played in a lot of different ways. Nebraska is the kind of record that any singer-songwriter could bring their own spin to, and even when listening to some of the greatest covers of his work, people like Patti Smith were able to bring a certain power to ‘Because the Night’ he would have never been able to do on his own.
But the one common thing all great Springsteen covers had is a certain reverence for the original arrangement. A lot of people understand that his work is as lyrically verbose as Bob Dylan’s in many respects, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying their hand at going in a bit of a different direction. And while Frankie Goes to Hollywood covering one of his tunes may have been one of the single weirdest things to come out of the 1980s, getting other people to sing his songs before he hit the big time was a bit of a mixed blessing.
Because it’s not like Manfred Mann’s Earth Band was going to be getting any high praise for their version of ‘Blinded by the Light’. The massive arrangement that they put behind the song was far away from what turned up on Springsteen’s debut, but given how much Springsteen had been critical of his early work, getting something that sounded a lot more lively should have been the trick, right? Wrong.
According to guitarist Chris Thompson remembered running into ‘The Boss’ and realising that he wasn’t exactly the biggest fan of what they were doing, saying, “We were playing Zurich, and [Bruce Springsteen] was playing there, too. We played two nights, and he was playing the night after us. The promoter asked if we wanted to go to dinner with Bruce because we had a day off in between or whatever. I said, ‘Absolutely.’ I said to him, ‘Bruce, what did you think about ‘Blinded by the Light?’ He hated it. He really disliked it.”
Granted, that could have something to do with the fact that the lyrics got a little bit muddled in the Manfred Mann version of the tune. There had always been the urban legend about the band saying ‘wrapped up like a douche’ instead of ‘deuce’, and while the lyric is admittedly pretty funny for it, you could tell that Springsteen was a bit uncomfortable with it when he addressed the difference with the crowd on an episode of Storytellers.
Then again, there are some moments on the record that actually build on what Springsteen started with. Say what you will about the original version, but the fact that it doesn’t have that amazing guitar lick in the middle of the tune that builds up to that massive organ swell is one of the more inspired choices, especially with the voices that layer on top of each other during the final chorus.
But when listening to both back to back, they sound like they’re taking place on different worlds half the time. Springsteen could put as much Jersey lingo into the music as he could, but Manfred Mann seemed to look at it like some psychedelic fairytale that may or may not have included comparisons to hygiene products.
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