By: Brad Gallagher
Have you ever listened to the song “Don’t Bring Me Down” by the Electric Light Orchestra and gotten to the chorus and heard them sing “Don’t bring me down – Bruce”? And at that point have you ever wondered to yourself, “Who is this Bruce guy they keep singing about?”
As the story goes:
Bruce is not a member of the band, or the sound guy, or even a friend or relative of someone in the band. No, actually Bruce doesn’t even exist. But, he also is not a fictitious person. Bruce is not any type of person, either real or imagined.
When it comes right down to it, after all those years of listening to the song and singing along with it with our friends, we actually just had the lyrics wrong. The name “Bruce” is not even in the lyrics of the song.
You see, back in the 70’s it was very common to say the word “gross” when describing something disgusting or undesirable. Over the years the most popular story was that Elo decided to add the word “gross” to this song because they felt that to “bring me down” would be gross. So they added it, and also rolled their “R” when they sang it. So, when we as listeners heard the song, we heard the name Bruce instead of the word gross, and we have been singing “Bruce” ever since.
Now that being said, there is another version of the story. I recently heard an interview with Jeff Lynne, the leader of ELO, and he told the story differently. According to Lynne, he added the word during a rehearsal. There was a gap in the song after the words “Don’t bring me down”, and he spontaneously shouted the word “Grusse”. Lynne said in the interview that the German word grusse is a greeting, like Hi!, or Hello!. So he was simply filling the gap by saying Hi! to the audience in German.
Which of these stories is true? Well, you can decide for yourself. And tell your friends so they can decide for their selves which story to believe. And come back and visit me real soon. Because if you don’t, that would bring me down.
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AS THE STORY GOES 