Story of the song: Because the Night by Patti Smith Group

From The Independent archive: Robert Webb on a Bruce Springsteen cast-off that became Patti Smith’s biggest hit

Pattis Smith Group (l-r): Jay Dee Daugherty, Lenny Kaye, Smith, Richard Sohl and Ivan Kral (Getty)

In October 1977, Bruce Springsteen switched recording of his fourth album, Darkness on the Edge of Town, to Manhattan’s Record Plant, where he had cut his breakthrough, Born to Run. Among the songs he had amassed over the intervening two years, as he battled a lawsuit that prevented him from releasing records, was one that refused to follow the rules. It originated as a working man’s lament, an irrefutably male song with an uncharacteristically Latin feel. It was good but lacked the cinematic noir of the other compositions he was working on. As his album took shape, some of the candidates clearly weren’t slotting in.

“I edited out anything that broke the album’s tension,” reasoned Springsteen. The cast-offs found good homes. His engineer, Jimmy Iovine, took a tape of the working man’s lament, now titled “Because the Night”, round to the next-door studio. Here, Iovine was producing an album for Patti Smith. “Because the Night” was far from finished but Smith already loved its hook. She took it and ran, recasting it from a female perspective. “I wrote the verses,” she later said. “I could never have written that chorus.”

When Smith played a CBGBs gig that December, Springsteen joined her for a debut airing of their new song. Included on her album Easter, it was released as a single in April 1978, turning the New York poet-punk into unlikely chart material. “When you consider [Springsteen] had, but didn’t use, songs like ‘Fire’ and ‘Because the Night’, you’ve got to assume he didn’t really want [Darkness on the Edge of Town] to be that big,” said his producer, Jon Landau.