In 1984, on the cusp of superstardom, Bruce Springsteen agreed to let a producer rework three songs from his upcoming album,made Bruce Springsteen the biggest rock star in the world. Along the way, one chapter of the album's legacy has nearly vanished from official history: club remixes of three of the album's biggest singles.Born in the U.S.A.
For his part, Springsteen pitched in with an international tour, but was also more willing to engage in other sales efforts than he had been previously. So while he hadn’t wanted any part of appearing in a video to support 1982’s, he enlisted Brian DePalma and danced onstage with a then-unknown Courtney Cox in a video for “Dancing in the Dark” that MTV showed at the top of every hour.
Arthur Baker was the name that Springsteen chose from that list of potential remixers. Baker grew up as a rock and roll kid in Boston — he’d even seen early Springsteen shows there — and after studying record production and working as a DJ, had made a name for himself as a producer and remixer in hip-hop.
These weren’t the only voices, but it was a sentiment voiced by many fans who had been there since Springsteen’s earliest days, and it feels like this might be one of the reasons that, to this day, the remix has never been released on CD, and has not made its way onto streaming services, despite the fact that it was successful by any widely accepted metric.
“That’s my favorite of the three, because that one I easily can play out now in a cool club, and people will really dig it, and I really like it,” Baker says. “It had the vibe to me, a Jamaican reggae, the vocal, you could have Black Uhuru cover that, you could have a reggae artist cover that, with that bass line.” “Cover Me” got as high as #11 on theYouTube