GIVE THE GIRL A KISS

Official studio version

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Alright boys! One, two

Well now I ain't looking for excitement
Baby that's just a fact
If you want to get to her heart
You better let her know just where you're at

Well I say
It ain't written in the sky above
Well no fortune-teller told me this
You gotta tell her that you love her
Tell her that you need her
And give the girl a great big kiss
Alright, give the girl a great big kiss

Now if you're such a fool you think
It don't matter, baby, what you say
Maybe you better tell her how you're feeling
It ain't gonna happen any other way

'Cause darling it ain't written in the sky above
Well don't you tell her who told me this
You gotta tell her that you need her
Tell her that you love her
And give the girl a great big kiss
Yeah you better give the girl a great big kiss

Now baby all I wanna do
Is darling make sweet love to you

Danny!
Boss time!

Now I don't know what the meaning is
Why you wanna hide the things you feel and say
But baby it's just a natural fact
Love was never meant to be that way

And darlin' it ain't written in the sky above
Well no fortune-teller told me this
You gotta tell her that you need her
Tell her that you love her
And give the girl a great big kiss
I say give the girl a great big kiss
Repeat that!
I say give the girl a great big, great big, great
Now give the girl a great big, great big
You gotta give the girl a great big, great big
You gotta give the girl a great big kiss

Well now darling all I wanna do
Is darling make sweet love to you

Give the girl a great big, great big, great big
Give the girl a great big kiss
Give the girl a great big, great big, great big
Give the girl a great big kiss
Give the girl a great big, great big, great big
Give the girl a great big kiss
Give the girl a great big, great big, great big
Give the girl a great big kiss
Give the girl a great big, great big, great big
Give the girl a great big kiss
Give the girl a great big kiss

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Info

GIVE THE GIRL A KISS is a song written by Bruce Springsteen and released on the Tracks box set in 1998. The above lyrics are for Bruce Springsteen's official studio version of GIVE THE GIRL A KISS as released in 1998.

GIVE THE GIRL A KISS is among 25 songs compiled for a 1993 project that never came to fruition. See the "1993 Concept Album" section below for more details.

Writing and Recording

GIVE THE GIRL A KISS is loosely based on The Shangri-Las' 1964 single GIVE HIM A GREAT BIG KISS (written by George Morton).

According to the Tracks booklet liner notes, GIVE THE GIRL A KISS was recorded on 10 Nov 1977 at The Record Plant in New York City, NY. The listed date is "11/10/77"; the Tracks liner notes use the American style of notation (month–day–year order). In his 2012 book E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Clinton Heylin, who had access to Sony's logs of Bruce Springsteen's studio sessions, notes that GIVE THE GIRL A KISS "went unlogged at the time" and that "there doesn't appear to be a session on November 10; whereas October 11 was Springsteen's second day back in studio." Heylin guesses that the correct date is 11 Oct 1977 or 11 Nov 1977.

On this recording, most members of the E Street Band step out for a moment in the spotlight, even Springsteen, who introduces his guitar solo with the words "Boss time". The Horns Of Love, the horn section from the Tunnel Of Love Express Tour (Ed Manion on baritone sax, Mark "The Love Man" Pender on trumpet, Richie "La Bamba" Rosenberg on trombone, and Mike Spengler on trumpet, with newcomer and Max Weinberg 7 member Jerry Vivino, stepping in for Mario Cruz on tenor sax), overdubbed the brass parts around 1998 prior to the release of the song on Tracks.

GIVE THE GIRL A KISS was totally unknown prior to its release on Tracks in 1998. Springsteen even told Mark Hagen in an interview for Mojo magazine published in January 1999 that "there were some things that I forgot I'd done. Give The Girl A Kiss, which was a big sort of party tune, I had forgotten."

During the 19 Mar 1999 warm-up rehearsal show in Asbury Park, NJ, Springsteen introduced GIVE THE GIRL A KISS as "something silly... we cut this for Darkness On The Edge Of Town. Now you're gonna see why we didn't use it". In a Billboard interview published in November 1998, Springsteen said, "The editing on Darkness was based around creating a record that had a seriousness of tone. Meanwhile, there were all these bar-band records that we had cut, [such as] 'Give the Girl a Kiss' and 'So Young and in Love.' So I had all this music that I couldn't use at the time."

Springsteen also told Mark Hagen in the Mojo magazine interview: "So this long period went, and then when I went in to make Darkness I had very specific ideas of the record I wanted to make. I'd bring the band in and say, 'OK, tonight we do Give The Girl A Kiss... or So Young And In Love', anything to break the tension in the studio. You're still learning how you sound and how to use the studio. So a lot of different kinds of music occurred. I edited Darkness very, very tightly and specifically for that particular emotional tone and a very hard focus on what I wanted to write about. So, a lot of music I put to the side. Basically the second half of the first CD of Tracks were all things that occurred off the Darkness On The Edge Of Town. There were things that might have fit but we didn't have the time, and other things that were just terrific but would have been very out of context on that particular record, like to 'Give The Girl A Kiss' or 'So Young And In Love', which were great bar party songs."

1993 Concept Album

In his 2012 book E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days Of Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, Clinton Heylin revealed that in 1993 a 25-song compilation was produced for an archival project, which presumably became the Tracks box set released in 1998. According to Brucebase, the archival concept "album" was produced in-house, presumably following the conclusion of World Tour 1992-1993, perhaps to demonstrate the quality of Springsteen's unreleased archive.

Many of these 25 songs have been subsequently released, either on the Tracks box set or as part of other projects, and some others are known outtakes that are yet to circulate among fans. However, two are only known from this 25-song list: ARNIE and THAT'S OKAY.

Tracks

In the liner notes of his Tracks box set, 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 Joad 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 Recording (Springsteen's home studio) in Colts 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 Recording served as the main operational center for all Tracks project activities. Note that the "Thrill Hill Recording" name is used for whatever home studio Springsteen is recording at, whether it's in Rumson, NJ, Colts, NJ, or Beverly Hills, CA.

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 (April 2001 in the UK and June 2001 in the U.S.), and those recordings 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.

On 16 Jul 1998, Springsteen attended a convention for Sony Music Entertainment Inc. in Miami, FL, where he officially announced that a box set was the works and he played a tape of three songs: WHERE THE BANDS ARE, LOOSE ENDS, and I WANNA BE WITH YOU.

The Tracks box set was released on Columbia Records on 10 Nov 1998. It was issued on both compact disc and audio cassette formats. It's a 4-disc (or 4-cassette) 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 U.S.A.. 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 U.S.A. and Tunnel Of Love.
• Disc 4 consists of material from 1989 to 1998, taken primarily from the recording sessions of Human Touch.

Live History

In preparation for The Reunion Tour, GIVE THE GIRL A KISS was performed during one of the tour's two public warm-up rehearsal shows that took place in March 1999 in Asbury Park. The song is also known to have been practiced during at least one of the private rehearsals that took place in March 1999 in Asbury Park prior to the tour's first leg.

GIVE THE GIRL A KISS was performed once during what is known as The Reunion Tour (132 dates, April 1999 to July 2000), on 29 Jul 1999 in East Rutherford, NJ. See the live 29 Jul 1999 version for more details. The song was also reportedly sound-checked prior to the 23 May 1999 show in London, England.

GIVE THE GIRL A KISS was performed once during the Working On A Dream Tour (83 dates, April to November 2009), on 15 May 2009 in Hershey, PA. Jay Weinberg substituted for his father on drums during this show.

GIVE THE GIRL A KISS was performed once during the Wrecking Ball Tour (133 dates, March 2012 to September 2013), on 23 Oct 2012 in Charlottesville, VA.

Covers

At least one artist has recorded and released Bruce Springsteen's GIVE THE GIRL A KISS.

Available Versions

List of available versions of GIVE THE GIRL A KISS on this website:

GIVE THE GIRL A KISS [Official studio version]
GIVE THE GIRL A KISS [Live 29 Jul 1999 version]

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Page last updated: 27 Dec 2020