The Pointer Sisters – Fire
Bruce Springsteen wrote it for Elvis and mailed a demo to Graceland — the King died before it arrived, and three sisters from Oakland carried it to No. 2.
In the summer of 1977, a demo tape left New Jersey addressed to Graceland. On it, Bruce Springsteen sang a slow, smoldering new song in his best Elvis Presley croon, hoping the man who made him pick up a guitar would record it. The package never got its hearing. Presley died on August 16, 1977, before the tape reached him. The song was Fire, and its biggest life belonged to none of the men who touched it first — not Elvis, not Springsteen, not even the rockabilly singer who recorded it before anyone. It belonged to Anita Pointer.
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Springsteen had seen Presley perform at the Spectrum in Philadelphia on May 28, 1977, and wrote Fire within days, shaping it deliberately for that voice. He cut his own studio version on June 17, 1977, during the sessions for Darkness on the Edge of Town, then shelved it. The song’s playful heat had no place on the darkest record he had yet made, and he reportedly worried that if it appeared on the album, Columbia would push it as the single. So one of the most commercial things he had ever written sat in a drawer while he finished a record full of shadows.
A piano player named Bruce
The song’s first recorded life came through Robert Gordon, a neo-rockabilly singer Springsteen had met through E Street Band bassist Garry Tallent. After catching Gordon live with guitarist Link Wray, Springsteen handed him Fire, saying Gordon’s voice gave him the impression of Elvis singing it. Gordon cut the track in December 1977 at Plaza Sound Studios in Manhattan with producer Richard Gottehrer, and the writer himself sat in on piano. Released on Gordon’s 1978 album Fresh Fish Special, the recording drew airplay on album-rock stations but never reached the Hot 100. The song was still waiting for its singer.
She arrived by way of Richard Perry. The Pointer Sisters had just come through the roughest passage of their career — Bonnie Pointer had left for a solo deal, and Anita, Ruth, and June regrouped as a trio on Perry’s new Planet Records label. For their November 1978 album Energy, Perry played them a tape of Springsteen singing Fire. Anita’s first instinct was to pass it along: the key sat too low, she told Perry, so he must want Ruth on it. Perry answered, “No – I want you to sing it.” Her restraint became the record. Where Springsteen wrote a man burning with desire, Anita sang a woman deciding — pulled close, saying no, and hearing her own kiss argue back. Released as the trio’s first single, it changed everything.
The No. 2 that stung its writer
Through the winter of 1978 into 1979 the single climbed steadily, peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1979, held from the top only by Rod Stewart’s Da Ya Think I’m Sexy? It became an international hit, the Pointer Sisters’ first pop top ten, and their first gold single. Anita later said the difference between gold albums and a gold single was the difference in their whole career — one song, played over and over, all over the world. For Springsteen, the view was more complicated. His own best chart showing remained Born to Run at No. 23, and Fire was now the third of his songs to become a bigger hit in someone else’s hands, after Manfred Mann’s Earth Band took Blinded by the Light to No. 1 in 1977 and Patti Smith carried Because the Night to No. 13 in 1978. The writer was watching his catalog conquer radio without him.
He never let the song go, though. Fire stayed in the setlists of the Darkness tour and remained a concert fixture; a live version from his Live/1975-85 box set was issued as a single in 1986 and reached No. 46 on the Hot 100, while his original 1977 studio recording finally surfaced on The Promise in 2010. Springsteen has since named the 1997 Babyface and Des’ree duet as his favorite version of all. But the definitive one still belongs to the Pointers. It lit the fuse on their Planet Records era — the run that produced He’s So Shy, Slow Hand, and I’m So Excited — and Billboard later ranked it No. 48 among the 100 greatest girl group songs of all time. Anita Pointer, who died on December 31, 2022, at age 74, spent one song proving that the smallest flame in the room can be the one nobody forgets.