RICKY WANTS A MAN OF HER OWN^©

Official studio version

A one, two, three, four!

Well look out mama, your little girl she has changed
She cut her baby curls and she's got her act rearranged
Well look out daddy, what she needs now she can't find at home
Oh Ricky wants a man of her
She wants a man of her
Ricky wants a man of her own

Mama says her little girl won't talk to her anymore
She just goes in her room, turns on the radio, and shuts the door
She's got her own bathroom, TV, stereo, extension phone
Oh but mama, Ricky wants a man of her
She wants a man of her
Ricky wants a man of her own

Well daddy says when he drops her off Friday night at the gym
She slides way down in the front seat so the kids won't see her with him
She don't do no work, she won't tell nobody when she's coming home
She makes poor daddy wait down on the corner at midnight all alone

She used to like me to take her to a ball game or a movie show
She used to make daddy take his little girl where she wanna go
Now we're left peeking through the curtains every time that we hear a horn blow
Well I guess Ricky wants a man of her own

Well my folks say, "Son, talk to her, she'll listen to you"
Yeah she listens real nice and she does what she wants to do
Daddy says she wears her jeans so tight, "Well you change 'em or you're stayin' home"
Oh but daddy, Ricky wants a man of her
She wants a man of her
Ricky wants a man of her own
She's almost grown
Ricky wants a man of her
She wants a man of her
Ricky wants a man of her own

Whoa!

Page last updated: 30 Aug 2008

Intro

Music and lyrics by Bruce Springsteen, RICKY WANTS A MAN OF HER OWN is a The River outtake that was released on the Tracks box set in 1998.

Composition and Recording

According to the Tracks booklet liner notes, RICKY WANTS A MAN OF HER OWN was recorded on 16 Jul 1977 at The Power Station, New York City, NY. This is clearly a typo and the correct recording date must be 16 Jul 1979, in the middle of The River sessions. The song is a known The River outtake, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band did not record at The Power Station in 1977, and Neil Dorfsman wouldn't get recording credit either.

In addition, in an interview for Mojo Magazine published in January 1999, Springsteen told Mark Hagen that on the Tracks box set there's an entire album of tracks from The River album, and he mentions RICKY WANTS A MAN OF HER OWN among those tracks. He adds that these tracks are "all three-minute, four-minute pop songs. [...] But one of my favourite records that summer [1979] was The Raspberries Greatest Hits. They were great little pop records, I loved the production, and when I went into the studio a lot of things we did were like that. Two-, three-, four-minute pop songs coming one right after another."

Available studio takes

Three studio takes of RICKY WANTS A MAN OF HER OWN are in circulation, all of them are fully finished and similarly arranged. They must've all been recorded around the same period.

The official studio version is the on that was released on the Tracks box set and to which the above lyrics correspond

Unofficial studio version 1 has very similar lyrics to the official studio version, but the mix is completely different; it has Roy Bittan's organ way up in the mix. It appeared on The Lost Masters Vol. 5 bootleg (Labour Of Love). According to this bootleg's liner notes, this take was recorded on 20 Jul 1979 at The Power Station, New York City, NY. There's a good possibility that this date is accurate.

Unofficial studio version 2 has also very similar lyrics to the official studio version, but two lines are different in the second-to-last verse. The mix is completely different; it has guitars way up in the mix. It appeared on The Definitive River Outtakes Collection Vol. 1 (E Street Records) bootleg.

On the above bootlegs, the song is titled RICKY (WANTS A MAN OF HER OWN).

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, much 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 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.

Live history

Bruce Springsteen opened his 24 Aug 2008 show at Sprint Center, Kansas City, MO, with RICKY WANTS A MAN OF HER OWN. That was the second-to-last date of the Magic Tour, and the first and – by the time this page was last updated – last known live performance of the song. Check out the live 24 Aug 2008 version.

Available versions

List of available versions of RICKY WANTS A MAN OF HER OWN on this website:

• Official studio version
• Unofficial studio version 1
• Unofficial studio version 2
• Live 24 Aug 2008 version