Blinded by the Light

This song to me will always be the single version by Manfred Mann's Earth Band. I still have the 45 rpm 7 inch copy with Starbird No.2 on the flip side. It had so much excitement and class pumped into a tiny package that the longer album version on the cassette of Roaring Silence I bought in 1977 never seemed quite right.



The musical joke of chopsticks in the instrumental isn't as clever as I thought it was then but it is still fun and Chris Thompson's vocals are superb. My children only know him from his small part in Jeff Wayne's "War of the Worlds" and he sure looked different from the 70s when that show toured here last year. I tried hard to regard MMEB as dinosaurs when New Wave hit but I could never really give up on them although I did seem to buy all their albums as cassettes from discount bins. Most of these are struggling to function in the 21st century and have been repaired once or twice.

Now Bruce Springsteen's original was unknown to me until much later and it is the MMEB version that I am covering in reality. The only other version I've heard is the weird latin version Bruce concocted recently.

I tried years ago to make a Band in a Box file of this song and it sounded ludicrous. I recently played with it again and hit upon a mindless thumping that seemed to suit. Through the magic of the Boss DR 600 my 12 string electric sounds like a wah wah pedal out of hell was strapped on and the result is pleasingly chaotic.

If I've figured out Box.net you should be able to hear the thing if you happen to stumble upon this blog.