Rolling Stone - November 10, 1998 The River Runs Through It "Bruce Springsteen: Tracks" is the nosh Boss zealots have been waiting for BLAIR R. FISCHER

• About twenty years ago, Thom Panunzio made a technical faux pas that -- to his great relief -- eluded the notice of his boss, the Boss -- a k a Bruce Springsteen. While preparing a song during the Born to Run sessions, the then twenty-three-year-old assistant engineer accidentally placed guitar on a track that already contained vocals. The track was never included on the landmark album, so no one was ever the wiser, and Panunzio, who assisted on the next Springsteen album, Darkness on the Edge of Town, was free and in the clear from blame -- for about twenty-five years.

  "My assistant goes, 'You may want to have this tape transferred again [from analog to digital] because I think they [Sony] screwed it up," Panunzio says regarding his reunion with the "track" snafu during this summer's preparation for the four-disc set Bruce Springsteen: Tracks, out this week. "And I'm thinking, 'those jerks, how could they do this? How could it happen?' And then, all of the sudden, I got this shiver. This was a mistake I made twenty-three years ago."

  So much for statute of limitations. And even though, once again, the song didn't end up on the sixty-six track Tracks, which contains fifty-six previously unreleased songs, the Boss found out about Panunzio's mistake and asked him to fix it. The song, by the way, has a name, but the fortress-like security that is the Bruce Springsteen Camp prohibits Panunzio from revealing it. In other words, if it was important enough to mention, it would be on the more than four-hour long Tracks. Panunzio, along with technical coordinator Toby Wright (The River, The Ghost of Tom Joad), and co-mixers Ed Thacker (XTC, Semisonic) and Bob Clearmountain (Born in the U.S.A, Tunnel of Love), worked on the box set this summer with producers Springsteen and Chuck Plotkin (The River, Born in the U.S.A.).

  Including material recorded during Springsteen's first Columbia Records sessions as early as May '72 ("Mary Queen of Arkansas," "Growin' Up") up to and including sessions for 1995's despairing The Ghost of Tom Joad ("Back in Your Arms," "Brothers Under the Bridge"), with a heavy concentration of material from The River and Born in the U.S.A. eras, this compilation is the oasis that overzealous, bootleg-buying, Backstreets-subscribing Springsteen fans have yearned for, well, since Springsteen greeted the world from Asbury Park, N.J., twenty-six years ago.

  "That's the way it was from the beginning," Panunzio says regarding the preoccupation with unreleased Springsteen material. "He was the first person that I ever saw that needed [to put material under lock and key] and stuff still got out. I'm thinking, 'The guy's got safes and it's getting out. I'm the only one with the tapes. How did this happen?'"

  Through the years, Springsteen material -- regardless of quality -- has been at a premium, and the now forty-nine-year old singer-songwriter finds himself embroiled in a legal battle against Masquerade Music, a record label that intends to release twenty-year-old Springsteen demos recorded with original producer Jim Cretecos. Springsteen filed an injunction to bar the release of the material and testified in London's High Court this October; a decision should be handed down by the end of November. At any rate, the release of Tracks should diminish the Holy Grail-like quest for Bruce material, though, as Panunzio's quick to point out, Tracks could just have easily been an eight-disc set. Springsteen recently said he had approximately 300 songs to choose from, and Tracks was originally going to be a six-disc set. "I've never worked with an artist who had anywhere near the songs sitting on the wing that weren't used that he did," he says. In fact, for Tracks, Panunzio went to great lengths mixing and re-mixing material -- sometimes spending four days working on each song -- intended for inclusion on Disc One (1972-1977), much of which never made the set.

  "What was important and what Bruce was aware of was the vibe," says Panunzio. "That you keep the vibe of what it was then. A lot of stuff wasn't recorded on hi-tech equipment. To clean it up and [make it] sound good and keep the atmosphere was difficult. Some songs didn't make it [on Tracks] because they didn't have the right atmosphere."

  In hindsight, it's easy to wonder why songs recorded during sessions for Springsteen's early albums, such as The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle (1973) or Born to Run (1975), didn't make the grade, considering both records only included seven and eight songs, respectively. However, Panunzio says, in addition to the length of many Bruce songs and the consequent time constraints on LPs, Springsteen was concerned with the overall complexion of each record. "Bruce always put together a great album and the whole record was saying something," he says. "It wasn't just a bunch of songs. I never saw him care for all the technical stuff."

  He has, however, always cared about the road and now all die-hards need to complete their full-on Springsteen orgasm is a tour -- preferably with the E Street Band. "I'm sure he'll do it," says Panunzio. "I would sure love to see him out there playing. I'm sure we'll see him one way or another. He's one of the greatest performers in rock & roll. He's still ... he's still great."

   

   

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