Manfred Mann’s Earth Band – Spirits In The Night

Springsteen’s flop became a European hit with one singer and an American Top 40 single with another, and in the US it never carried the same title.

There are two Manfred Mann’s Earth Band records of this song, sung by two different men, and in America neither one carried the title the rest of the world knew. The band’s 1975 version, with Mick Rogers on lead vocal, opened the album Nightingales & Bombers and went out across Europe as Spirits in the Night. In the United States and Canada, Warner Bros. kept Bruce Springsteen’s singular, Spirit in the Night. Two years later the band recorded the song again with a new singer. The footage here was filmed for West German television in September 1975, long before the second version, when the song was a European hit and nowhere near the American charts.

Keep watching: Manfred Mann’s Earth Band – Blinded by the Light · more Springsteen songs →

Springsteen wrote it in a hurry. When he delivered his debut album to Columbia in August 1972, label president Clive Davis heard nothing that sounded like a single, so Springsteen went away and wrote two more songs: this one and Blinded by the Light. He recorded it on September 11, 1972. Most of his band had scattered to other work by then, so he played nearly everything himself, joined by drummer Vini Lopez and a saxophonist named Clarence Clemons. The lyric follows a gang of nicknamed friends out to a spot called Greasy Lake for one night of freedom. Columbia released it as a single in May 1973, and it went nowhere.

Manfred Mann heard something else in it. The Earth Band rebuilt the song around his keyboards, changed the harmonies in the chorus and stretched it past six minutes as the album’s opening track. Bronze released a single edit in Britain on July 25, 1975, nearly a month ahead of the album, with As Above So Below (Part 2) on the flip side. When the record reached America that fall, the trade papers noticed how far it had traveled. Cash Box heard a more R&B-leaning treatment that kept the original’s night-away-from-the-city setting. Record World said the added dynamics turned it into an aggressive hard rocker.

A Saturday in September

By September the single was finding its audience on the continent. The band’s own channel dates this performance on Pop 75 to September 20, 1975, the same day the record entered the Dutch Single Top 100, where it went on to peak at No.10. Pop was a West German music show built around the current charts, hosted in those years by Hans-Jürgen Kliebenstein. Rogers sings lead here, as he does on the record, so the clip shows the song as the band first made it, before the singer change that gave it a second American life. It is the song as European viewers met it that autumn, months before anyone in America was paying attention.

America caught up slowly. Warner Bros. released the single there on October 27, 1975, under Springsteen’s original title, and the Billboard Hot 100 ranked it no higher than No.97 in 1976. The band’s breakthrough came instead from another song on Springsteen’s debut. Their Blinded by the Light reached No.1 on the Hot 100 in February 1977, and by then Rogers had left and Chris Thompson was the Earth Band’s lead singer.

So the band went back to the song that had stalled. A new version with Thompson singing lead came out in 1977, still “Spirit” in America and “Spirits” elsewhere. This time the Hot 100 ranked it No.40, and in Canada it reached No.64. The arrangement had never been the problem. In 1975 it had a European audience and an American audience that had never heard of the band, and what changed by 1977 was that America knew who Manfred Mann’s Earth Band were. The Pop 75 footage catches the song before its second chance, as the record Europe had already taken to.