Bruce goes to the vaults

Seven complete albums but bring your wallet $

When an artist decides to go to the vaults, there’s a lot of ways to look at it. If you’re Bob Dylan, now 83, and you’ve been recording since Time Began (or so it seems) and your recording career has had a lot of twists and turns and you’ve been pretty careful about what you’ve let get out in the first place, once you finally decided to do something dramatic — like a “Biograph,” where the world officially gets to see all the neato-beato stuff you’ve been sitting on and holding out — you can understand why that led to something like the Bob Dylan Bootleg Series, which is up to 15 or 17 volumes, depending on how you count them.

There was a lot of material — The Basement Tapes, The 1966 World Tour, The 1974 Tour — that everybody and his brother clamored to hear for the longest time, especially once some of the remarkable bootleg material that leaked out in the mid-sixties when he had quieted down for a bit after the motorcycle crash. Did Dylan or his people have a hand in letting that bootleg stuff out all along?

If you’re 79-year-old Pete Townshend of The Who and you’ve done a slew of shows on your own, why not compile 14 CD’s of live material and release the whole batch for $109.80?

If you’re 79-year-old Neil Young, you’re already way ahead of the curve and you have your own online Neil Young Archives with three different levels, la de da: The Classic $24.99 a year, The Rust $44.99 and The Patron $99.99 with enough material to keep a fan (or writer) going for months if not years. (I have to be done by 2026 - wish me luck!)

So it was only a matter of time for 75-year-old Bruce Springsteen to throw his guitar pick in the circle, offering what he calls “Tracks II” — a whopping 82 previously unreleased songs, 74 of them never-heard-before — which also carries a whopping price — $349.98 on vinyl. Yikes!

Bruce’s brand new box set offers a lot of music for a lot of money.

That calculates to $4.27 per unreleased song, pretty reasonable. But when I saw the $350 price tag (that’s for vinyl, CD’s are a mere $300 ($299) that still sounds like a whole lot of moolah for music that, for one reason or another, Bruce recorded, in some cases, actually mixed for release, then kept them in the can. That’s the kind of thing Neil Young did more times than the good folks at Reprise Records would want to remember. And now Neil, like all these other old-timers, is releasing a whole bunch of that material. Not only the Volume II, Archives box set which I got for Christmas but still haven’t listened to, but some of the individual albums, too.

Speaking cynically, which is not my typical bag, these guys are all old, many of their fans are old, too and you can’t sell records to dead people. Sounds harsh, I know but that seems to be the case.

We have heard for years that Bruce had a wealth of material in the can; when you’ve made enough money to have your own studio AT YOUR HOUSE, you really have no excuse NOT to record a whole bunch of other material, right? And Bruce, apparently, did. Knowing how particular he can be about what songs he decides to include on an album — he might record 75 and pick eight or nine — there are always a lot of leftovers. A whole batch of those came out on his first “Tracks” compilation, a four-disc, 66-song collection that came out in 1998. And was fun, if not revelatory.

The actual tracks won’t be available until June 27, according to the story on Pitchfork and since so many of the songs haven’t been heard by anybody but Bruce, his band and perhaps a few friends, who knows what to make of it? That’s a lot of music, for sure.

While I liked “Tracks” and of course, bought it as I have every Springsteen album all the way up to “High Hopes” and “Western Stars,” which I liked but saw the movie and that was good enough for me. I had no interest in his covers’ album “Only The Strong Survive.” Of course I’m curious about “Tracks II” but it doesn’t appear the songs most people really wanted to hear are included. Those were the “Nebraska” songs recorded by the E Street Band that Bruce wasn’t satisfied with, which is why he ended up releasing the “Nebraska” demo cassette. They aren’t here.

Now there may be wonderful songs and with Bruce’s track record, you’d think a bunch of these tunes couldn’t help but be terrific. But how many fans have that kind of scratch? It’ll be interesting to see.

Having spent a good part of 2025 so far wading through Neil Young’s archives, listening to what he did release and some of what he didn’t, I’m sort of torn, just as when I read about Dylan fans who are majorly disappointed he didn’t play this or that song when they went to see him.

To be honest about it, there are those fans of Dylan, Young, The Who and Springsteen who, if there were 250 versions of a particular song including outtakes, they’d insist on hearing every one of them. How many times, for example, do you think Pete Townshend has swung his arm through “Baba O’Riley” since 1971? (The Internet says 890 but I bet it’s more than that. How much difference is there between those 890 versions? How much is enough?)

Yet am I glad Springsteen has finally decided to release these tracks? Sure. Will it add to his legacy the way Dylan’s Bootleg Series has added to his? I doubt it. Having listened to so much of Neil Young’s outtakes so far (with many more to go) I don’t know that I’d say they added a great deal to his legend.

By and large, unlike Dylan, who we have plenty of evidence that, perversely or not, has kept some marvelous songs off albums, Neil has generally speaking released his best material (even though there are some pretty lousy albums mixed in among his regular releases; he just can’t stop himself!) What Pete Townshend outtakes I’ve heard — There was “Scoop’s 1-2-3,” there are some fun songs — I loved “Dirty Water” — but nothing that I would say eclipses his work with The Who, which I would suspect he’d agree with.

Hearing the live performances of Bob Dylan’s explosive 1966 World Tour with the Hawks definitely gave us a a different perspective on him, his music, his reception in the world. Then came The Bootleg Series, which was also a revelation.

Will Bruce’s “Tracks II” do that for him? Maybe, but I think his legacy is so established that it’d be hard to imagine whatever he could do that would add much to it. Being Bruce Springsteen, I wouldn’t put it past him. Like many of his fans, I’d love to hear that stuff from the vaults, too. But not for $350 bucks. Not unless he’s coming to the house.