ICEMAN^©

Official studio version

Sleepy town ain't got the guts to budge
Baby, this emptiness has already been judged
I wanna go out tonight, I wanna find out what I got

You're a strange part of me, you're a preacher's girl
And I don't want no piece of this mechanical world
Got my arms open wide and my blood is runnin' hot

We'll take the midnight road right to the devil's door
And even the white angels of Eden with their flamin' swords
Won't be able to stop us from hittin' town in this dirty old Ford

Well it don't take no nerve when you got nothin' to guard
I got tombstones in my eyes and I'm runnin' real hard
My baby was a lover and the world just blew her away

Once they tried to steal my heart, beat it right outta my head
But baby they didn't know that I was born dead
I am the iceman, fightin' for the right to live

I say better than the glory roads of heaven, better off ridin'
Hellbound in the dirt, better than the bright lines of the freeway
Better than the shadows of your daddy's church
Better than the waiting, baby better off is the search

Page last updated: 24 Aug 2008

Intro

Music and lyrics by Bruce Springsteen, ICEMAN is a Darkness On The Edge Of Town outtake that was released on the Tracks box set in 1998.

Composition and Recording

Springsteen reached a final settlement in his yearlong litigation with Mike Appel on 28 May 1977. Effectively this meant that for the first time in a year Springsteen was able to go into a studio and record. The Darkness On The Edge Of Town recording sessions kicked off in early June 1977 at Atlantic Record Studios, New York City, NY. According to the Tracks booklet liner notes, ICEMAN was recorded on 27 Oct 1977 at The Record Plant, New York City, NY.

Springsteen had completely forgotten this song existed until he started listening to material to compile the Tracks box set; Bob Benjamin assembled a few box set suggestions from bootlegs and gave them to Bruce. Springsteen told Mark Hagen in an interview for Mojo Magazine published in January 1999, "Bob Benjamin sent me a tape with about three songs on it, and 'Iceman' was one of them. I had forgotten I had even written it and I had no idea what it was, and I went back and it was a pretty nice song. Finding some of the things you'd forgot you had done, that was fun [...] 'Iceman', like 'Born in the U.S.A.', was just something that I didn't get at the time that I did it."

Bootleg releases

ICEMAN has first surfaced on bootlegs in the mid-eighties, known under the tile THE ICEMAN. In the CD era, it appeared on many bootlegs, including The Definitive Darkness Outtakes Collection (E Street Records), The Iceman (Scorpio), and Son You May Kiss The Bride (unknown label, taken from the eighties bootleg LP of the same title). That circulating version of ICEMAN is actually the same recording that appears on Tracks, but the mix is different (it includes some backing vocals) and the sound is not so clean and suffers from drop-outs.

Lyrics

The line "I wanna go out tonight, I wanna find out what I got" appears on BADLANDS. IN a Nov 1998 interview for Billboard, Springsteen was asked, "'Iceman' is the first to contain words from 'Badlands' – 'I wanna go out tonight. I wanna find out what I got.' The ability to see what you nicked from your earlier material for future songs is part of what makes the set so compelling." Springsteen replies, "That line is what I was thinking about at that time. I hadn't recorded in a couple of years. I was stuck in that big lawsuit [with former manager Mike Appel] in the early part of my career, and there was a tremendous amount of 'whatever happened to' articles at that time. That whole record was a record where I felt like I was going to have to test myself and that was what I wanted to know, so that line ended up in a few different songs."

The Tracks box set

In the liner notes of Tracks, Bruce Springsteen introduces the box set as follows:

During long intervals between my record releases, as I was spending more and more time in the studio, when I met a fan out on the street I was often asked, "What are you guys doing in there?" I regularly pondered that question myself.

What we were doing in there was making a lot of music, a lot more music than I could use at any one time. As a result, my albums became a series of choices – what to include, what to leave out? I based my decisions on my creative point of view at the moment – the subject I was trying to focus on, something musical or emotional I was trying to express. In certain instances, as on Darkness on the Edge of Town, Nebraska, and The Ghost of Tom Joad, these choices crystallized the album I was making. On some of my other records the reasons I had for choosing one song over another, in hindsight, feel a good deal less significant. One of the results of working like this was that a lot of music, including some of my favorite things, remained unreleased.

This collection contains everything from the first notes I sang in the Columbia recording studio, my early and later work with the E Street Band, through to my music in the 90s. It's the alternate route to some of the destinations I travelled to on my records, an invitation into the studio on the many nights we spent making music in search of the records we presented to you. I'm glad to finally be able to share this music; here are some of the ones that got away.

-- Bruce Springsteen, September 1998

Bruce Springsteen's albums were thematically linked even if they were not strictly concept albums; so some tracks that didn't fit the theme of the album ended up orphaned, not necessarily because they didn't meet his high standards, but because, he says, they didn't fit in with the tone or themes he mined for each set. Many of these unreleased studio outtakes got under the hands of bootleggers. Discussing that issue in 1984, Springsteen told Rolling Stone's Kurt Loder, "We record a lot of material, but we just don't release it all. [...] I always tell myself that some day I'm gonna put an album out with all this stuff on it that didn't fit in. I think there's some good material there that should come out. Maybe at some point, I'll do that."

During a break in The Ghost Of Tom Solo Acoustic Tour, Springsteen thought that "if it's gonna be a year or longer in between records, I have all this music that I know is very good that I never released and I should release some of it whether it was just a CD or something. In that period of time, I should put something out because people would like to have it and I'd like to see it get out." He told Toby Scott (his audio archivist and recording engineer), "send me all the archives, send everything that we recorded". Scott then went to work gathering the potential material from Springsteen's massive audio library (located, along with Sony's sound archives, in the high-tech Iron Mountain facility near Buffalo, NY). "For a week or so," he told Billboard in a Nov 1998 interview, "I just listened to everything that I'd done that we hadn't put out. I made some very brief notes in a notebook, and then I just put it away. It was something that I could do at some point when I get to that place in a new project where I'm not sure how long it's going to take and it would be nice to sort of fill the gap so the fans wouldn't be so long without hearing any music from me".

Springsteen told Mark Hagen in an interview for Mojo Magazine published in January 1999, "So it began just with that idea and we listened to about 250 songs, maybe more, I made quick notes in a notebook and put it away. A year went by, more maybe, and I came off the Tom Joad tour and I began to write acoustically again and I wrote about half a record. Then I got stuck and said, 'Well, I'm going to put this aside for a while.' Then I wrote half of an electric record, and hit the same place. So I thought, instead of waiting for another year to put something out I'll put some of this music together. So once again I went back to the archives." According to interview comments made by engineer Toby Scott (Springsteen's audio archivist and recording engineer), it was in February 1998 during solo sessions being conducted at Thrill Hill East (Bruce's home studio in Colt's Neck, NJ) that Springsteen told Scott that the time was right to proceed with the long-anticipated box set of archived, unreleased studio takes. Thrill Hill East served as the main operational center for all Tracks project activities.

Springsteen told Billboard that the songs were culled from between 200 and 300 tunes. According to Toby Scott, the number was down to about 128 songs by late June 1998. It was then narrowed down yet again in July to about 100 songs that were prepped for the Tracks release. Although the project was originally projected to be a 6-disc set, there was a commercial decision made later in the summer to reduce the size of the release to a 4-disc (66-track) set. The package was delivered to Sony in mid-September in order to facilitate the mid-November 1998 release schedule.

Unreleased songs from the Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ sessions were not included on the box set due to ongoing and still-unresolved court proceedings involving most of these unreleased 1972 recordings. The court battle wasn't resolved until in 2001, and those material are now free for release at any time. The opening four tracks of the box set – which were culled from Springsteen's 03 May 1972 Columbia Records audition – were not part of the court proceedings.

The Tracks box set was released on Columbia Records on 10 Nov 1998. It's a 4-disc set consisting of a total of 66 tracks (almost 4.5 hours long), 10 of which were heretofore unavailable single B-sides, 6 were demos and alternate versions of already-released material, and 50 (48 studio and 2 live) were never-before-released songs recorded during the sessions for Springsteen's many albums. Some tracks were treated with a recent touch-up here or there to give the older recordings a fresh polish.

• Disc 1 consists of material from 1972 to 1980, including Springsteen's very first Columbia Records audition for legendary A & R executive John Hammond. This disc also features additional songs most of which recorded for (but never released on) Springsteen's first four albums.
   
• Disc 2 consists of material from 1979 to 1983, taken primarily from the recording sessions of The River, Nebraska, and Born In The USA. Springsteen describes this disc as "almost the completely other album from 'The River'."
   
• Disc 3 consists of material from 1982 to 1987, taken primarily from the recording sessions of Born In The USA and Tunnel Of Love.
   
• Disc 4 consists of material from 1989 to 1998, taken primarily from the recording sessions of Human Touch.

Click here to display/hide detailed track listing with locations and dates.

Appearance in movie

ICEMAN was used in 2007 in the Jon Kasdan directed film In the Land Of Women, but was not included on the film's soundtrack album.

Plot: After being dumped by his girlfriend, Los Angeles resident Carter Webb (Brody) travels to Michigan to take care of his sick grandmother. Webb immediately begins to bond with his grandmother's neighbors, housewife Sarah Hardwicke and her elder teenage daughter, Lucy (Stewart). The relationships he builds with these two and his grandmother lead him to look differently upon his own life and the future ahead of him. Starring: Adam Brody, Kristen Stewart, Meg Ryan Directed by: Jon Kasdan Produced by: Castle Rock Entertainment, Warner Bros. Written by: Jon Kasdan Release date: 20 April 2007 (USA)

Live history

ICEMAN was played live only once: on 17 May 2005 at the Tower Theatre, Philadelphia, PA, during the Devils & Dust Solo Acoustic Tour. That was the first and – by the time this page was last updated – last known live performance of the song. Bruce introduced it as being written for the Darkness On The Edge Of Town album, and he's never played it live before. It was reported that ICEMAN was sound-checked that afternoon. Check out the live 17 May 2005 version.