In 1973, Springsteen's Rock Anthem Failed To Chart — Years Later, Manfred Mann's Cover Made It No. 1

If you know "Blinded by the Light" by Manfred Mann's Earth Band, and you probably do, you may know it more for a misheard lyric than the fact that Bruce Springsteen wrote it, but the song became a No. 1 hit thanks to Mann and his band's revisions. Springsteen's original version came from his 1973 debut album "Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J." It didn't catch on with mainstream audiences back then, but it did garner the attention of Manfred Mann, who had had some big hits in the '60s with songs like "Do Wah Diddy Diddy" and "Mighty Quinn (Quinn the Eskimo)." 

In the mid-'70s, Mann started the Earth Band, fronted by Chris Thompson, who told Guitar Player that Mann was "relentless" about covering "Blinded by the Light." The band often played the song live, but Thompson noticed it tended to thin out the audience, calling it a "toilet break song." For years, no one was having much luck with "Blinded by the Light," but Springsteen had hastily written the song in an effort to put out a single from "Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.," and the song may have suffered from being rushed. 

Springsteen's lyrics were written with a lot of help from a rhyming dictionary:  "Some brimstone baritone anti-cyclone rolling stone preacher from the east / He says, 'Dethrone the dictaphone, hit it in its funny bone, that's where they expect it least.'" Maybe audiences picked up on the half-hearted effort, too, but Mann refused to give up and kept working on the song. Finally, he included "Blinded by the Light" on the album "The Roaring Light" in 1976. His persistence paid off.

Bruce Springsteen's version of "Blinded by the Light" sounds a lot different than Manfred Mann's Earth Band's version, which is seven-minutes long, tricked out with a Moog synthesizer and built up with a keyboard-driven urgency, then slowed down in the middle as the lead guitar shreds out a searing solo before the keys jump back in and the whole song is built into a dramatic crescendo. While the song rocked enough to take it to the No. 1 spot in February 1977, there is one thing Manfred Mann's Earth Band did that forever marred Springsteen's version, and that was to change the lyric "cut loose like a deuce" to "revved up like a deuce," only for the recording to sound more like "wrapped up like a d**che." Those lyrics forced a collective head-scratching amongst '70s rock fans.

According to what Chris Thompson told Guitar Player, Springsteen hated the song, in part because of that ridiculous word. You can hardly blame him — it's impossible to imagine a world in which The Boss would use the word "d**che" in a lyric. On the other hand, were people really saying the word "duece" so much in the '70s that it warranted use in a song? Maybe that's the problem with writing a song with a rhyming dictionary. 

But if the trade-off for a No. 1 hit is some shade from Bruce Springsteen, Thompson, at least, was good with it, saying, "All I ever wanted to do was be successful in the music business ... And then I got a job with Manfred Mann's Earth Band, and the first song I recorded with them basically went to number one in America! It was such a fantastic thing for me."