Left of the Dial

A Good Question

The toddler walks in with his new acquisition.

ME: You have a battleaxe?

He nods grimly with a small satisfied smile. His little fists loosen slightly before tightening up again on the axe handle.

I play along.

ME: Don't chop anybody's head off with it.

He looks down at it, then slowly back up at me. He tilts his head quizzically, a disappointed look on his face.

HIM (sadly): Why?

Wreck on the Highway

Death, as a topic, was no stranger to Bruce Springsteen by the time he recorded his fifth album, 1980's The River. Already on his first album, 1973's Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, death features prominently on at least two tracks. But "Wreck on the Highway," The River's final song, dispenses with the earlier romantic view of death for a much more matter-of-fact take on the subject, an almost (but not quite) documentarian viewpoint.

Compare and contrast the opening lines to the earlier songs:

The ragamuffin gunner is returnin' home like a hungry runaway

and

Princess cards she sends me with her regards

Barroom eyes shine vacancy, to see her you gotta look hard

with

Last night I was out driving

Coming home at the end of the working day

I was riding alone through the drizzling rain

On a deserted stretch of a county two-lane

When I came upon a wreck on the highway

The flowery, poetic language is replaced by flat, largely monosyllabic words. The scene is set with perfect clarity but with nothing extra—it is what it is.

There was blood and glass all over

And there was nobody there but me

As the rain tumbled down hard and cold

I seen a young man lying by the side of the road

He cried Mister, won't you help me please

In addition to being heartbreaking and horrifying, the ambiguity of the writing right here is especially powerful: is the narrator hit by the horrible scene before him, by this sight of this terribly injured driver in need of help and his own inability to provide the kind of assistance so clearly required, by the fact that this guy needs help and it’s up to the narrator, since he’s the only one on this lonesome road? Or when he says there was nobody there but him, does he mean he looks at the injured driver and sees himself?

A brief instrumental interlude follows, the move into the relative minor imbuing the section with an extra haunting, melancholy feel, as if any additional push in that direction were needed.

An ambulance finally came and took him to Riverside

I watched as they drove him away

And I thought of a girlfriend or a young wife

And a state trooper knocking in the middle of the night

To say your baby died in a wreck on the highway

Why? Why’s he think this? Why’s he imagine the state trooper delivering that news? Did the young man die during the instrumental break? Was it clear he was going to die? Were his injuries so severe there was little chance of his pulling through? Is the narrator assuming the worst or is he simply imagining it? Is it all in his head? And can it possibly be mere coincidence that the name of the album and the name of the hospital are so clearly related?

Sometimes I sit up in the darkness

And I watch my baby as she sleeps

Then I climb in bed and I hold her tight

I just lay there awake in the middle of the night

Thinking 'bout the wreck on the highway

That’s an amazing ending in and of itself, but taken in the context of Springsteen’s other album closers, a huge departure. His first album had closed with desperate bravado against a slinky rock beat, and his next two with romantic longings set to lush, sometimes jazzy, sometimes progressive music. His fourth album, often considered (justifiably) his first fully adult collection, ended on a howl of defiance and fierce statement of purpose.

And then we come to this. His narrator, awake in the middle of the night, tormented by what he’d seen and what he fears is to come in his own future, alone even as he's holding his loved one. In his earlier songs the narrator's witnessed a spectacularly public death and tried to save a girlfriend from suicide. Here there's nothing quite so obviously dramatic. Instead, we're left with a narrator, isolated even when with others, quietly obsessed with his own mortality after being the lone witness to a single car accident.

It's all mirrored by the music, which is the most country song he'd yet recorded, carried by Danny Federici's organ and Garry W. Talent's simple but melodic bassline. No sax, no guitar solos, just a bit of quiet piano and some restrained guitar arpeggios.

A final whispered "oh," and the song's over.

Only then it's not. After a brief false ending, the instrumental middle section comes back, carried mainly by the bass, repeating until it fades out, a strange, atypical and utterly effective ending.

Wreck on the Highway

Perspective

He's got it. But, I'm guessing, at least kind of wishes he didn't. 

I wonder if there's anyone who can watch this without getting at least choked up.

Racing in the Street

And now we come to the final two songs in what are, to my mind, the finest four song run I’ve ever heard live, the centerpiece of Bruce Springsteen's September 19, 1978 concert in Passaic.

We start with Roy Bittan’s gorgeous piano introduction, proving once again, as if any further proof were needed, of how unsurpassed he is as a rock and roll pianist. Beautiful and just a bit sad, it gives little hint of the song to come. Until he transitions into what many consider Bruce Springsteen’s best song, “Racing in the Street.”

When Danny’s organ comes in after the first verse and chorus, it’s an awesome moment, simultaneously managing to make the music both warmer and more melancholy, something which should be impossible in theory but somehow isn’t in execution.

To kick off the second verse, Max Weinberg begins to click his snare evenly, the metronomic effect imparting a threatening sense of one’s inexorable mortality, a feeling echoed in the tiny changes Springsteen’s made to the lyrics, changing the first “summer’s here” to “summer’s hanging on.”

The song proceeds perfectly, building to a rousing instrumental section, before coming down unexpectedly for the final, subdued verse. Although the narrator has won both the race and, more important, the girl, it’s far from triumphant, as even victory and love have, to their surprise and disappointment, proven insufficient to conquer the difficulties in life. Racing and love beat them back for a while but couldn’t shut them out forever.

Springsteen’s voice in the final chorus is initially determined before dropping down resignedly. And tellingly he once again changes the original “summer’s here,” but this time it’s to a grim “summer’s gone.”

There are a few moments of Roy’s solo piano, before he’s joined by Bruce’s haunting harmonica. They duet briefly until joined by Danny’s soulful organ and Max’s subdued snare. Max adds his heartbeat-like bass drum and then some arpeggiated guitar enters. Garry’s bass and Clarence’s tambourine chime in and without even noticing it’s now the entire band. What had been verging on despondent has become something else, a quiet sense of community. They all may be feeling the same overwhelming and bleak emotions but at least they’re feeling them together.

Meanwhile, Roy has subtly transitioned from his simple yet gorgeous initial chords to some of the loveliest and most searching playing of his career, building, building, always building, intertwining with the guitars lines majestically, twisting in and out but always coming back, always returning to the pack.

And then they all drop out, leaving Roy on his own once again, playing something reminiscent of but not quite identical to his solo introduction. Subtly it begins to change. And Springsteen begins to talk.

Racing in the Street_plus (Passaic 1978)

By 1978, Springsteen already had a reputation for the stories he told in concert. Sometimes intense and dramatic, some hysterically funny, often surprisingly personal, many were far, far longer than audiences of the time were used to. And yet none lasted a moment longer than necessary, Springsteen keeping his listeners in the palm of his hand, a master storyteller at work.

That’s not what happens here. In just over a minute he gives a little backstory to the next song’s origin and then tells briefly of something related he later encountered. Almost but not quite imperceptively Roy follows him until in perfect sync they move into the next song. And as they begin the song in tandem and the audience moves along with them, you get one of those experiences that remind you, this, this is why human beings create art, for moments of pure catharsis like this. 

Prove It All Night

One of the things which often gets overlooked in discussions of Bruce Springsteen is what an outstanding musician he is. He doesn’t have the voice of Marvin Gaye or the chops of Eddie van Halen or the compositional skills of Stevie Wonder. But he’s far more complex and subtle a musician, as a performer, composer and arranger, than his most popular songs might lead one to believe.

Take this performance of “Prove It All Night,” from the September 19, 1978 Passaic show. This is the introduction he gave the song every night on the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour, an introduction which is not only utterly unlike the album version, but unlike almost anything else in rock and roll. Dave Marsh once described it as sounding like “an unholy alliance between the Yardbirds and Bob Dylan,” a great description, but one which has never seemed quite right to me. For twenty years I’ve tried to figure out a more apt one and failed, until recently it struck me: it sounds like the Allman Brothers covering Television. It’s got the uniquely slinky post-midnight menace of “Marquee Moon,” but features the kind of extended guitar and keyboard interplay at which the Allmans excelled.

And what guitar. Springsteen is no Hendrix, in terms of sheer technique, but he’s much better than most casual fan probably realize, and here he plays like a man possessed, making the guitar, as John Lennon said of his own abilities, “howl,” his initial introductory note, nearly a minute and a half in, positively screaming, and leading Roy Bittan’s piano comping to suddenly become syncopated, as though the unexpected arrival of the guitar has thrown the keyboard off balance. As Springsteen’s solo continues, showing his characteristic love of bent notes and triplets as well as an odd fondness for a legato approach, the band ramps up and up until exploding into the song proper. An insanely fierce rendition of the song ensues, finally collapsing, exhausted. 

Prove It All Night (Passaic 1978)

 And then things get really good. 

The Promised Land

So my seven loyal readers may have noticed that I like music. Although over the past few years I’ve rediscovered a love for the album as a work of art, for a long time I listened to almost nothing but live shows. And of the hundreds and hundreds of concerts I’ve listened to—almost all recordings as, perhaps oddly, I’ve never been all that big a fan of the actual live experience live—I’ve never heard one better than the show Bruce Springsteen gave in Passaic, New Jersey on September 19, 1978. Broadcast live, the show was only a few months after Darkness on the Edge of Town had been released.

The previous three years had been difficult ones for Springsteen, as his career had hinged on the success of the Born to Run album, an album which was incredibly hard to record. Once released, the album was tremendously successful, of course, but more trouble ensued, as he was seen by many as nothing more than an overhyped product of the record industry. And then he and one of his best friends in the world, his manager, found themselves entangled in legal troubles, a lawsuit between them prohibiting Springsteen from entering a recording studio, rendering him unable to record a follow up. When that was finally resolved, things didn’t get any easier, as Darkness on the Edge of Town proved every bit as difficult to record as Born to Run had.

But eventually, after three years, they got the album they were looking for—although it took recording 70 songs to find the 10 that ended up on the record—and the band went on tour. So. That’s what you’re hearing here: an artist finally, finally let loose, with a successful album before an adoring crowd in his home state.

And even by the standards of this amazing show, there’s a four song run which is as good as any I’ve heard in the thousands of hours of concerts I’ve heard. Today we’re starting with the first song of that run, the sixth song of the night.

With the exception of the new introduction, there’s nothing particularly different about the arrangement, as compared to the studio version—although the intro itself is wonderful and a great example of Springsteen’s qualities as an arranger. As the song transitions from the introduction into the body of the song, the bands speeds up slightly, giving a sense of unstoppable momentum, something which will continue through the song.

I’ll be coming back to this song at least two more times, eventually, but for now, that’s about all I have to say about that. Just a great performance of a great song, with Springsteen’s harmonica solo at the end especially inspired, and the band playing like a bunch of guys clearly feeling their oats.    

The Promised Land (Passaic 1978)