Left of the Dial

Matamoros Banks

aBy the time of 2005's Devils & Dust, Bruce Springsteen was solidly back on (or at least near the) top. His seventh #1 album, a solo album sorta kinda fitting into a trilogy with Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad almost, it was something of a grab bag of songs, with many of them going back a decade or more. Some of them were brilliant (the title track, "Reno," the "Rosalita" sequel "Long Time Comin'"), some were...not, even if well-intentioned ("Black Cowboys," "Silver Palomino") and some were simply enjoyable if surprisingly lightweight love songs ("Leah," "Maria's Bed," "All the Way Home," "All I'm Thinkin' About"). The album shared Tom Joad's exploration of the southwestern area of the United States, as well presaging his next LP's meditation on the Iraq War, while also continuing Springsteen's obsession with familial bonds and religion. Kind of a lot for a hodgepodge of old and new songs, all of which were newly recorded with producer Brendan O'Brien.  

"Matamoros Banks," the LP's closing song, is one of the album's strongest, and one of Springsteen's sweetest—albeit of a decidedly bittersweet nature—since his commercial revival. An admitted sequel of sorts to Tom Joad's "Across the Border"—itself a tribute to Ry Cooder's "Across the Borderline"—it bookends the opening title track with its ambiguity, religious questions and focus on death and love, but with a markedly more upbeat tone (if not tempo). Given that the song opens with the narrator's dead body being eaten by wild animals, this is no mean feat. 

Matamoros Banks

For two days the river keeps you down
Then you rise to the light without a sound

Opening with the flat assertion that the river holds you down is probably not meant as an in-joke, per se, but when dealing with a writer of Springsteen's nature and calibre, it's unlikely it wouldn't have occurred to him. But more than that, it's an upending of the more common view of a river in literature, which is as a giver of life, and bringer of civilization. Meanwhile, the second half of the sentence will come to assume more significance a little later on. 

Past the playgrounds and empty switching yards
The turtles eat the skin from your eyes so they lay open to the stars

These lines are a remarkable study in contrast, with the pleasant, youthful connotation of the playgrounds immediately juxtaposed against the derelict train yards. But the next sentence ups the ante considerably, as the corpse's eyelids are eaten by animals, allowing them to view the stars without obstruction. The first line is delightful and grim in one sentence, but the second half of the couplet combines brutality and effulgence. Such a horrible thing, and yet here it's portrayed as almost a boon. Sure, you were eaten by eaten by wild animals. granted. but in a glass half-full kind of way, they were, you know, kinda cute wild animals. and hey! now you can see the stars all the time—isn't that nice? look, I'm not going to come right out and say you're better off this way...but... And, amazingly, it's not presented with any sort of ironic tone.

Your clothes give way to the current and river stone
'Till every trace of who you ever were is gone
And the things of the earth they make their claim
That the things of heaven may do the same

Again with the contrasting imagines of water and stone, heaven and earth, leading to an interesting assertion, that clothes are evidence of who you were—an echo of the well-known phrase "the clothes make the man," a saying that goes back at least as far as Mark Twain—setting up and in some ways seemingly refuting the earth/heaven balancing of the next couplet, while that couplet at the same time echoes the belief that only by giving up one's earthly possessions can one enter the kingdom of heaven. 

That's the opening verse—a corpse, desecrated by animals, bobs to the surface of the water in which the singer died, and it leads to the chorus, simpler than the plainest hymn:

Goodbye, my darling, for your love I give God thanks
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros banks

Fascinating and instantly arresting as the opening verse is, the second verse ups the emotional ante by taking a step backwards in time, to when the narrator was just starting out on his journey. 

Over rivers of stone and ancient ocean beds
I walk on sandals of twine and tire tread
My pockets full of dust, my mouth filled with cool stone
The pale moon opens the earth to its bones

That Springsteen so liberally uses such elemental images—river, stone, ocean bed, dust, moon, bone—is not accidental. He is breaking things down to their most essential essences, performing an autopsy of sorts on not the man this verse but the man's journey, and even the planet itself over which he's making his trek. 

We immediately get a sense of who this man is and what he's doing. That he's attempting to cross over the Rio Grande is obvious, but his footwear—sandals either made of recycled tires, held together with twine, or at least repaired with those materials the best he can—leaves no doubt as to his station, nor any question as to whether or not he's got calves the size of cantaloupes, as some unhinged, hateful, reprehensible specimens would gleefully imagine. His pockets are full of dust and on his feet are the same garments worn by Jesus, and the odds that that's a coincidence are virtually nil. The narrator is, if not literally Christ, certainly one of followers, both metaphorically and literally, making a journey not unlike that described in the bible. 

The interconnectedness of the writing in this song is exquisite, as the final line of the verse ties in, once again, to the heavens/earth dichotomy first introduced in the opening verse, even as the first line continues the river imagery, albeit in this case long dried up. 

I long, my darling, for your kiss, for your sweet love I give God thanks
The touch of your loving fingertips
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros banks

Then we get the third verse, and we move forward in time again, albeit not quite as far as the first verse. 

Your sweet memory comes on the evenin' wind
I sleep and dream of holding you in my arms again
The lights of Brownsville, across the river shine
A shout rings out and into the silty red river I dive

The man is exhausted, thirsty, after making this long, arduous, dangerous journey...and yet he's able to keep moving thanks to the dreams of his beloved; so deeply in love is he that even the wind carries her memory to him. Across the river, he can view that long cherishd Springsteen staple, the promised land: and true to form, he can see it in the distance, but he cannot quite get there. In fact, he doesn't entirely plan on making it all the way there, at least not alone: he's urgerly her to meet him on the Matamoros banks, the southern side of the river—a river which is already red, even before it's further stained with his blood, as it's soon to be—so they can cross over together...or perhaps because he plans to return to her, and his home, for good. Or perhaps because he knows that he cannot make it to the promised land alone, that without her, it cannot possibly be the promised land. 

The religious symbolism is the song is nearly unmissable, even if you're not aware of just how often Springsteen has peppered his songs with biblical allusions. But it's chilling to get to the end of this lovely, gentle song and see how it was all set up in the opening couplet, as he rises to the light—both literal and metaphorical. 

The structure is fascinating in that Springsteen doesn't just tell the story in reverse. Instead, he jumps around in time. He starts at the end—or arguably a bit past the ending—then goes back to the beginning, and then jumps forward again, but not quite all the way to the end, instead filling in the middle bit. The only other song I can think of that jumps around in time like this Bob Dylan's "Tangled Up in Blue," although in that masterpiece the timeline is even more jumbled, so it can be difficult to tell just where you are in the story—or even in time—at any given point of the song. Here there's no such ambiguity. The man is dead at the beginning, and then we go back and see what led up to his death. 

But what that is is both clear-cut and ambiguous. It's his dive into the river, as he attempts to escape. But as Springsteen himself put it, when introducing the song on the Devils & Dust tour: 

"a man makes the same journey and is fuelled by the same hopes and love for his partner and his family, his children, in search of something a little bit better." 

His death is brought about by hope and his love for his partner and family, his children, for the deep-seated need to give them a better life. How beautiful and terrible. 

It's all on a musical bed which is an incredibly simple harmonic structure—just the same I-IV-V chords Springsteen has used in dozens and dozens of his songs, including many of his very best, but with the lovely touch of subtle Mexican coloring in the actual guitar playing. 

I long, my darling, for your kiss, for your sweet love I give God thanks
A touch of your loving fingertips
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros banks

Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros banks

This album closer could not be further from The Rising's gospel closer. And yet at the same time it feels like its twin brother from a different mother, one who was born on just the other side of the border. The now empty vessel which had once been a man may no longer make a sound, but Springsteen is here to still give him voice. 

My City of Ruins

From 1973 on, Bruce Springsteen's career trajectory was more or less upward. Yes, his first album tanked after an over the top and ill-advised advertising campaign, and his second album did no better, despite showing significant artistic growth and garnering some excellent reviews. If his third LP hadn't been successful, it's entirely likely he would have been dropped by his label. Fortunately, he pulled a little something called Born to Run out of his hat and he never had to worry about sales again. (Which isn't to say he didn't—just that he didn't have to.) But even if he hadn't, it's likely he would have had a decent, if disappointing, career as a northeast legend, a sort of roots rock solo NRBQ. And although it's hard to predict how his writing might have progressed—or not—in such a scenario, it certainly seems likely he'd have managed to have at least a few songs covered by successful artists, further cementing his relative financial security. 

But that's in an alternate universe. In ours, fortunately, triumph led to triumph. Born to Run gave way to Darkness on the Edge of Town, which led to the hit single "Hungry Heart," which led to the amazing solo acoustic album Nebraska, which led to worldwide blockbuster Born in the U.S.A. with its seven top ten singles, which led to the best-selling live album in history which led to Tunnel of Love, the only album to ever challenge Blood on the Tracks for supremacy in the I'm-in-love-and-my-marriage-is-falling-apart department. (Despite those two masterpieces, this is not necessarily a department you're looking to tower over.) Everything the guy touched seemed to turn to gold. 

And then it went away. His marriage dissolved, and he broke up the E Street Band. His recorded two solo albums, the first time he'd used studio musicians. The results were Human Touch and Lucky Town, the first albums he'd released in nearly 20 years where the hosannas weren't nearly universal and verging on deafening. And with good reason: Lucky Town was, it can now be said objectively, a wonderful album, but Human Touch really is terrible. A few years later he released the quiet and solo but not acoustic The Ghost of Tom Joad, a very good album with some brilliant material, but one which, despite winning a Grammy, didn't cause any buzz with a public that had moved on. A boxset of largely unreleased cuts was good-to-great but, again, Springsteen—while never in danger of going homeless—seemed unable to make a larger audience care again; even the ones who listened to him daily on classic rock radio didn't want to hear anything newer than 1984, and preferably 1978. 

A decade-ending reunion tour with the E Street Band sold out everywhere instantly—and, what's more, was damn good. The final few shows at Madison Square Garden, in summer of 2000, were recorded for HBO and made news when "American Skin (41 Shots)," a powerful and incisive new song, was performed, addressing the killing of Amadou Diallo. A handful of cops walked out, egged on by reactionaries, while those who listened even cursorily a single time understood it—the writing was exquisite, but one had to be clinically brain-dead or actively try in order to misunderstand the song's point. 

Bruce Springsteen was once again in the headlines, and once again, it was at least in part because people were stupid. But either way, he was a major rock star again. 

And then came September 11th, 2001. The legend goes that a few days after the attack, a guy pulled up next to Springsteen, rolled down the window and said, "we need you." Soon after, Springsteen began working on The Rising, the first full album of new material recorded with the E Street Band since 1984. Although all the recordings were new, a few of the songs were written before the attacks, including the album's closing track, "My City of Ruins." 

Performed just 10 days later, accompanied by Patti Scialfa, Steven van Zandt and Clarence Clemons, to open the live telethon America: A Tribute to Heroes, "My City of Ruins" was actually written nearly a year earlier, for an Asbury Park Christmas show, and was meant to illustrate his love for his adopted city, which had fallen on hard times since its pre-Vietnam war-era heyday. Without more than minor tweaks to the lyrics, and essentially the same arrangement (albeit a bit less New Orleans in the horns), the song was seemingly reborn as something of a salve for a shellshocked nation. The omnipresent optimism of Springsteen's words served as perhaps the first homily delivered following the tragedy that spoke not of vengeance, payback or even pragmatic response, but rather of hope. Or so it seemed at the time of that first broadcast. 

As far as his closing tracks go, "My City of Ruins" is an amazing return to form for Springsteen, after the disappointment of 1995's Tom Joad's "My Best Was Never Good Enough" and win one/lose one doubleheader of 1992's Human Touch ("Pony Boy") and Lucky Town ("My Beautiful Reward"). The confidence and assurance of a master musician shines through every moment, all the more remarkable not just because it's his first time in nearly 20 years in the studio with the E Street Band but because, on this particular song, Springsteen tackles a genre he'd barely even brushed up against previously.

Rock, soul, pop, disco, reggae, funk, country, blues, folk, even jazz—virtually every major American genre had been at least broached by Springsteen at some point, and many were cornerstones of his style. But gospel was one genre with which he'd never reckoned. At least, not until the reunion tour. There, he not only converted "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" into a gospel-tinged endurance test stretching out for up to 20 minutes, he had a long, long segment in the middle where he did his best imitation of a preacher, even breaking out in the Reverend Al Green's "Take Me to the River." And beyond that, there was "Land of Hope and Dreams," the magnificent song with which he'd closed the shows. The gospel connection was obvious, not least because he'd interpolate the great Curtis Mayfield song "People Get Ready," but it was still gospel-influenced, not pure gospel.  

Not so "My City of Ruins." From stem to stern, it's gospel through and through—or as close as a white guy from New Jersey who's a famously lapsed Catholic can get. Which, one listen will make clear, is pretty damn close, far closer than one would ever have guessed Springsteen could get even just a few years earlier. 

My City of Ruins

The song opens with a tasteful Max Weinberg introduction—the first time any Springsteen album closer has opened with just drums. (Interestingly, The Rising has more songs [six of 'em] that open with drums than any other Springsteen album, except, oddly, Lucky Town—which is the only Springsteen album to feature one drummer that's not a member of the E Street Band—and The River, which is a double album.) 

Immediately, the drums are joined by bass, piano, wordless vocals and, not insignificantly, organ—what instrument is more closely associated with the church, going all the way back to Bach and earlier?—with a descending line that will become a recurring element of the song, dropping down, down down to the searching subdominant IV chord.

There is a blood red circle
On the cold dark ground
And the rain is falling down
The church door's thrown open
I can hear the organ's song
But the congregation's gone
My city of ruins
My city of ruins

If there were any doubt about the importance of gospel to this tune, the first verse dispels it handily, with its reference to church doors and congregations. After the first time Springsteen sings the title, there's some absolutely lovely guitar work—live it's played by the great Nils Lofgren, although I'd have bet that on record it was originally Little Steven—more than a little reminiscent of Pops Staples. 

Now the sweet bells of mercy
Drift through the evening trees
Young men on the corner
Like scattered leaves,
The boarded up windows,
The empty streets
While my brother's down on his knees
My city of ruins
My city of ruins

Again, the religious imagery is obvious, with the brother—whether literally related genetically or not—on his knees, presumably in prayer. But this is Springsteen, so it's just as likely—or even more so—that it's not reverence that has him genuflecting, but exhaustion or dejection, an inability to remain standing another moment. (Of course, there's also the possibility, given the desolation of the surroundings, that it's neither of those scenarios, but something considerably more sordid.) But notice where the singer is: he's talking about hearing the organ wafting out from inside the open church, but he's singing about what's going on outside—he can see the promised land, but whether he's welcome or not, he's not inside, hasn't entered; they appear rank strangers to each other.

The opening two verses are significantly more downbeat than is generally customary for gospel, lyrically; and musically, although the song's in a major key, it surely feels like it's in the minor. 

But then Springsteen pulls out the chorus, which manages to be both unexpected, given the preceding proceedings, and utterly right. 

Come on, rise up! Come on, rise up!
Come on, rise up! Come on, rise up!
Come on, rise up! Come on, rise up!

An organ solo from Phantom Dan Federici follows this exhortation, an incitement which comes across as of a decidedly earthly nature, encouraging his fellow sufferers to take matters into their own hands. (A word which will become a prominent player shortly.)

Now's there's tears on the pillow
Darlin' where we slept
And you took my heart when you left
Without your sweet kiss
My soul is lost, my friend
Tell me how do I begin again?
My city's in ruins
My city's in ruins

This third verse is perhaps the most interesting, in that it turns even more personal—whereas before the singer was chronicling the sad state of his surroundings, here he pulls the camera in much closer...much, much closer, all the way into the bedroom, where we find that his beloved is gone. Was her departure deliberate, premeditated? Or the result of a horrific act of violence? We don't know and it doesn't matter, not right now: all that matters is the devastation it's wreaked upon the narrator. 

Springsteen mentions the lost lover's sweet kiss, a motif he touched upon repeatedly throughout the rest of the album. But even more interesting is the way he seems to conflate the animate and inanimate here. When he cries "my city's in ruins" this time, it feels less like he's bemoaning the downfall of his town, and more as though he himself has somehow become it, or it him, as though their fates are so inextricably entwined, they have become each other. Springsteen has often personified objects—highways that are alive, calliopes that sneeze and wheeze, dictaphones that possess nervous systems. He's even dabbled in chremamorphism, as in the dreamlike final verse of "My Beautiful Reward." But this here is something new for him—something perhaps new for rock and roll. 

And then he's into the final verse, a simple repetitive recitation, and the kind of call-and-response for which gospel is famous.  

Now with these hands,
With these hands,
With these hands,
I pray Lord
With these hands,
With these hands,
I pray for the strength, Lord
With these hands,
With these hands,
I pray for the faith, Lord
We pray for your love, Lord
We pray for the lost, Lord
We pray for this world, Lord
We pray for the strength, Lord
We pray for the strength, Lord

The repeated chant "with these hands" leads to the obvious followup "I pray for the strength, Lord." But because, before that, it follows the words "my city of ruins," the line "with these hands" first leads one to think of rebuilding, of the very real hard work of manual labor, of hands clearing away the wreckage and beginning again with literal tools and physical materials and very human sweat.

And note who prays: not just "I," but "we." And they pray, and they pray, and they pray. And then they—and not just he—once again exhorts the listeners to rise up, and if it's now clearly the kind of triumphant call for the congregation to stand, it's not only that. There's also the sense of encouraging the listeners to pick up tools and get to work in this life, as the backing vocalists become first Springsteen's equal in the mix and then nearly overwhelm him. 

Come on
Come on
Come on, rise up
Come on, rise up
Come on, rise up
Come on, rise up
Come on, rise up
Come on, rise up
Come on, rise up
Come on, rise up
Come on, rise up

And then, exhausted, they sing the descending line yet again, and sink into silence, leaving only the piano to doggedly repeat the line by itself, falling, falling, falling into a state of semi- but seemingly not full musical resolution, the fate left hanging, until only silence is left. 

My Best Was Never Good Enough

Bruce Springsteen's 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad was an odd creature. Largely acoustic during an era of loud rock music—much as Nebraska was an (almost) entirely acoustic collection released during the heyday of British synth-pop—it was his only album of new material released in the 90s, after the disappointments of the twin LPs Human Touch and Lucky Town at the beginning of the decade. 

It was a good album—considerably better than Human Touch, although that's not exactly saying much—but (despite winning a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album) connected with the general public even less than the Human Touch and Lucky Town albums had, and no surprise: it can't have helped the album's commercial prospects that the economy in 1995 was far more robust than it had been back in 1982.

 But staying in the musical realm, The Ghost of Tom Joad was, like Nebraska, quiet and downbeat. Unlike Nebraska, however, its somber lyrics weren't at least occasionally leavened by more uptempto tracks such as "Johnny 99" or the more lighthearted "Open All Night." Perhaps even more to the point, Nebraska, for all its dark tone, didn't skimp on the tunes. They weren't the singalong good time melodies of "Hungry Heart" or "Dancing in the Dark," but they were hummable and catchy. The music for many of the songs on The Ghost of Tom Joad felt somehow even more skeletal than the simple single fingerpicked guitar on Nebraska. Some of the best songs—"Highway 29" or "Straight Time," for instance—took repeated listenings to sink in, a common enough occurrence for a Springsteen song...but that was usually lyrically; here, even the music took effort to dive into. But on several of the songs—especially the penultimate track, the lyrically excellent but musically interminable "Galveston Bay," the only 17 hour, 29 minute and three second long song in Springsteen's entire career—Springsteen seems to have actually forgotten the need for melody at all. 

That's not the case with the album's final track. "My Best Was Never Good Enough" may be the single catchiest tune on the entire LP. And unlike some of the more challenging songs, such as "Sinaloa Cowboys" or "The Line," the lyrics grab the listener's attention from the beginning. That's because they're composed almost entirely of cliches. 

It's deliberate, of course—a writer of Springsteen's attention to detail doesn't open with a line like "every cloud has a silver lining, every dog has his day" without being fully aware of what he's doing—and enjoyable, as the song piles stock phrase on stock phrase to achieve a Tower of Babylon of pat, empty platitudes. Combined with the catchy melody, it's an agreeable respite from the almost overwhelmingly grim timbre of the rest of the album.

The problem is...it doesn't work. Or, rather, it does, to some extent, but not well enough. The whole is no more than the sum of the parts. There's no revelation, and even what was supposed to be some sort of final twist at the end ends up being...nothing. It's not even sound and fury. It's just sound, albeit a mildly pleasant one. It tries for both humor and depth and doesn't quite achieve either.  

Had "My Best Was Never Good Enough" been released as a b-side, it would have been utterly delightful. Or Springsteen could have saved it for the subsequent tour, which saw him playing several similar songs live, in a justified attempt to pierce the darkness of the (outstanding) shows; alongside songs such as "Sell It and They Will Come," "It's the Little Things that Count" or the filthy "Pilgrim in the House of Love," "My Best Was Never Good Enough" would have been a highlight. But it's simply not up to the task of closing a Bruce Springsteen album: ironical, really, given the title. It was good...but not good enough. Not nearly good enough. Because it wasn't his best—it was no "New York City Serenade" or "Jungleland," no "Reason to Believe" or "My Hometown," certainly no "Wreck on the Highway" or "My Beautiful Reward." What it was was simply the weakest original song Springsteen had yet closed an album with. Which is a shame. The Ghost of Tom Joad deserved better.

My Best Was Never Good Enough 

Every cloud has a silver lining, every dog has his day
She said, "Now don't say nothin' if you don't have something nice to say."
The tough, now they get going, when the going gets tough
But for you my best was never good enough

"Now don't try for a home run, baby, if you can get the job done with a hit"
Remember, "A quitter never wins and a winner never quits"
"The sun don't shine on a sleepin' dog's ass"
And all the rest of that stuff
But for you my best was never good enough

"If God gives you nothin' but lemons, then you make some lemonade"
"The early bird catches the fuckin' worm
Rome wasn't built in a day"

"Now life's like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get"
"Stupid is as stupid does and all the rest of that shit"

Come on pretty baby, call my bluff
'Cause for you my best was never good enough

My Beautiful Reward

By the time spring 1992 rolled around, Bruce Springsteen hadn't been the biggest name in rock and roll for five or six years. Nevermind, Ten, Achtung Baby, Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Metallica's black album had all been released, as well as Use Your Illusion I and II (not to mention Appetite for Destruction from the previous decade). Still and all, Springsteen was more than a big enough name that there was considerable interest and anticipation in his first new album in five years, never mind his first two non-E Street Band albums, released the same day. 

There was therefore considerable disappointment when, it was only grudgingly admitted, the albums weren't really Boss-worthy. After eight studios albums that were not only more or less home runs (giving the debut more than a little benefit of the doubt) but which also showed remarkable growth from album to album, Human Touch and Lucky Town were incredible letdowns. Turned out Bruce Springsteen was not only human after all but very, very human indeed. 

A lot of people gravitated towards Lucky Town from the first. Some otherwise extremely astute observers thought they detected at least a whiff of latent racism behind that, given that Human Touch was a soul record, and Lucky Town was more or less straightforward rock and roll of the kind Springsteen had been able to write and play in his sleep for years. And given the makeup of most of Springsteen's audience, it's sadly far from an unreasonable theory. 

It was only with that magical 20/20 hindsight that Lucky Town's reputation has revived considerably. Part of that is that its sound (read: mainstream albeit at least slightly stripped down rock and roll) is more accessible to most of Springsteen's hardcore fans. Some of it might be that it's virtually all Springsteen, the boss playing all the instruments himself, joined only by a drummer and a very few other additional instrumentalists on a small number of songs, as compared to Human Touch with its cast of thousands.

But most of it is that the songs are simply better—indeed, significantly better. The weakest track on Lucky Town is at least the equal of and possibly superior to even the best song on Human Touch. Still, by dint of its association with Human Touch, Lucky Town is generally considered one of Springsteen's weakest albums. Which, hey, for any artist, even one of his stature, some record's gotta be the least great, so that's fair. 

What isn't fair—not that anyone needs to shed any tears for the critically-acclaimed world-famous millionaire family man in seemingly spectacular health—is that a lot of truly first-rate songs get consequently overlooked. "Local Hero" is not only one of his funniest songs, it's an incisive but not self-pitying look at the transience of fame. "Book of Dreams" and "If I Should Fall Behind" are gorgeous love songs, "Leap of Faith" the powerful (and semi-profane) flipside of the entire "Tunnel of Love" album and "Living Proof" one of the best takes on the joy (and terror) of parenthood, deftly balanced by the sheer terror and anguish of losing a loved one in "Souls of the Departed." For any other major artist, this album would be a career highlight; for Bruce Springsteen it's a low point. 

And then there's its closing track, "My Beautiful Reward." 

My Beautiful Reward

The opening is simply lovely, just a pair of acoustic guitars being picked in time to a gentle hi-hat accompaniment. Soon the full drum kit will be joined by bass and a subtle organ part played by the late Ian McLagan, but for this brief moment, it's still pastoral and intimate. 

Then the vocals enter, Springsteen showing off the newly prominent southern twang he'd adopted for this album and which he'd use almost (but not quite) exclusively for the next two decades plus.  

Well I sought gold and diamond rings
My own drug to ease the pain that living brings
Walked from the mountain to the valley floor
Searching for my beautiful reward
Searching for my beautiful reward

On the rest of the album, especially but far from exclusively on "Local Hero," Springsteen had already taken aim at his image as the all-American rock god, pure and unsullied in his rock and roll ethics. No drug busts, no selling out to commercials, no tour sponsorships, no crazy huge mansions on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or blood transfusion or attempts to buy the Elephant Man's bones: Springsteen was far too pure for that. All he needed was rock and roll to sustain him. And yet here he—or his protagonist—is openly stating that's simply not true, that rock and roll was not enough for him, that he indeed sought in material possessions for something to numb his own personal unhappiness. 

From a house on a hill a sacred light shines
I walk through these rooms but none of them are mine
Down empty hallways I went from door to door
Searching for my beautiful reward
Searching for my beautiful reward

Once again, as with the first verse, only more so—second verse not quite same as the first—Springsteen's lyrics become, well, a tad more lyrical than had been the standard in his career, certainly since he toned down the Dylanesque wall of words before or with his third album. But here his lyrics, always several notches above most very good songwriters, whether overly verbose in his early years or extraordinarily incisive from Born to Run on, become more overtly poetical than is customary for his writing, with its continuing use of metaphor, an almost unknown facet of writing for him. Symbolism Springsteen used, often and deftly, from the very beginning, but metaphor wasn't one of his common tools. 

Also out of the ordinary for him is the additional dip into a minor chord on the word "rooms"—such chord substitutions aren't a regular feature of his writing—lending a certain extra bit of darkness to this verse, a darkness present neither in the first verse nor rest of the song. 

Well your hair shone in the sun
I was so high I was the lucky one
Then I came crashing down like a drunk on a barroom floor
Searching for my beautiful reward
Searching for my beautiful reward

The bridge highlights the unusual writing in the verses, as it features a little bit of simile, but no metaphor—much closer to Springsteen's normal style. 

Tonight I can feel the cold wind at my back
I'm flyin' high over gray fields my feathers long and black
Down along the river's silent edge I soar
Searching for my beautiful reward
Searching for my beautiful reward

This final verse is interesting, in that this most famously realistic writer of blue collar rock and roll, who'd already in the first two verses explored metaphor, suddenly veers off into dreamlike imagery or even a foray into chremamorphism. And the river reference, as most of the instrumentation drops back out, is surely no accident, not for a writer of his careful, considered nature. 

The song ends, as do so many of Springsteen's studio recordings, with a fadeout, underscoring the fact that he still seems to be searching for his elusive prize. And if it hasn't yet been located—and the repeated chord progression for this section would seem to make plain it hasn't, as the stability of the tonic chord is buried between the unresolved dominant and subdominant chords—the tone isn't one of dejection or resignation but rather a placid serenity. He's still searching, and he's enjoying the quest. 

Pony Boy

Human Touch's closing song, "Pony Boy," is perhaps the oddest Bruce Springsteen had yet released—and considering some of its peers, that's stiff competition—and, in retrospect, the way he approached closing songs seems to have changed with this track and this album.

The Springsteen recording is his arrangement of the 1909 song, "My Pony Boy," written (according to the handy wikipedia and the trusty YouTube) by Bobby Heath and Charley O'Donnell and was introduced in the 1909 musical "Miss Innocence." The same year Ada Jones and the Peerless Quartet had a hit with their recording of it. 

Here's an excerpt of that recording.  

My Pony Boy (1909)

(Huge thanks to Zefren Anderson for uploading this to YouTube.) 

For Human Touch, Springsteen tweaked the lyrics and, in doing so, altered the structure, cutting off the introduction, which accounted for nearly 25% of its total time. And simply by dint of his style, Springsteen moved it out of the realm of (Broadway) cowboy music and into a more purely folk neighborhood. (Obviously, there's more than a little crossover between folk and cowboy songs.) He also added a few extra verses.  

Pony Boy 

Pony boy pony boy
Won't you be my pony boy
Giddy-up giddy-up giddy-up whoa
My pony boy

Ride with me ride with me
Won't you take a ride with me
Underneath the starry sky
My pony boy

O'er the hills and through the trees
We'll go ridin' you and me
Giddy-up giddy-up giddy-away
My pony boy

Down into the valley deep
'Neath the eaves we will sleep
Sky of dreams up above
My pony boy

It's intersting how much the last two verses—the new ones—echo/foreshadow the final track on Human Touch's companion LP, Lucky Town, with its dreamy nighttime imagery. It's also a bit humorous how he can't help but make his new verses much more sophisticated lyrically. 

"Pony Boy" is unusual in several ways. It's the first cover on a Springsteen studio album. Sonically, it's worlds away from most of the rest of the Human Touch album, with not a hint of the soul music that makes up the majority of the LP, and absolutely none of the overproduction, as the track mainly consists of a quietly picked acoustic guitar; the ghostly keyboards that enter towards the end of the recording show up later on 1995's The Ghost of Tom Joad album and, especially, the ensuing tour. 

Even without knowing that Springsteen and Patti Scialfa had recently had children, it's nearly impossible to miss that this is a bedtime song sung by a parent (or, more accurately, given Scialfa's lovely harmonies, parents plural). So, thematically, you can more or less see how it sorta kinda fits in with the rest of the Human Touch album, especially given the LP's title. Except that it's the only song like it on the album—the rest deal strictly with the trials and tribulations of adult relationships. (More or less. Some of it's just bizarre macho posing. We'll ignore those for now. And by "now," I mean "hopefully forever.")

But it's not a good fit. The transition from the execrable "Real Man" to "Pony Boy" may be the most awkward in Springsteen's oeuvre. "Pony Boy" works less as a summing up of Human Touch and much more clearly and successfully as a signpost towards the subsequent album, Lucky Town, released the same day. (Not that it really would have been a good fit there, either.) It's easily the sweetest moment on his worst album, and a lovely recording, but still his least successful closing track yet. By a country mile. 

But at least it's better than "Real Man." So there's that. 

"lyrical dissonance"

So Max had to bring a short piece of music, roughly thirty seconds or so, into her first college computer class—some sort of music programming course—and explain why she liked it. It could be just a small excerpt from a longer piece; the entire thing didn't have to be 30 seconds long. Most kids brought in a current pop hit, or a bit of a video game theme, or a snippet of classical from a movie soundtrack.

She brought this.

(That should have started at about 3:06, and her clip ended around 3:42.)

This is what she said about the piece:

"The lyrical dissonance of this clip adds a layer to the song not present in either the words or instrumentals alone; while the lyrics are despondent, hopeless -- 'broken heroes,' 'no place left to hide,' -- the music sounds just the opposite -- not just hopeful, but triumphant.

"Together, they could indicate that things may seem now like it can never get better from here, but that in fact there is still hope, that the narrator and Wendy will someday 'get to that place where [they] really want to go' and 'walk in the sun,' no matter how bleak the future seems now."

If I may just take a moment to say? That's my girl. 

Valentine's Day

Context is everything. 

I've found that to be a pretty good rule of thumb, in general, but when it comes to Bruce Springsteen's music, especially so. Springsteen himself seemed to recognize this, as illustrated in a story told by Dave Marsh in his book Glory Days. When Ronald Reagan and others first began misinterpreting the songs on Born in the USA, especially (but not exclusively) the title track, Bruce was bemused but not terribly concerned; surely in the context of his entire oeuvre, the meaning was unmistakable. Only once it was pointed out that Born in the USA had sold more than all his other albums combined had did he realize how many of his fans had no knowledge of his previous work and how easily, therefore, they could misconstrue his artistic intent. 

Which brings us to "Valentine's Day," the gorgeous closer to Tunnel of Love, perhaps his most overlooked masterpiece. Of all the times rock and roll has broached the subject of love—which is to say, pretty much as long as rock and roll has existed—only Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks is superior to Tunnel when it comes to entire album-length meditations on the topic. With only a few exceptions, the songs all deal with the difficulties of sustaining an adult relationship. It's only on the final track that the narrator seems to finally realize what he's got and accept that the only path to happiness for him is through the love of his (presumably) wife.

It opens with the singer, as in so many Springsteen songs, driving. True to form, he's driving a big ol' car on the highway at night.  

I'm driving a big lazy car rushin' up the highway in the dark
I got one hand steady on the wheel and one hand's tremblin' over my heart

But unlike the narrator of "Racing in the Street," for instance, or certainly "Stolen Car" or "State Trooper," he's not looking for comfort or saftey in solitude or the open road—this time the road itself is bringing absolutely no peace.

It's pounding baby like it's gonna bust right on through
And it ain't gonna stop till I'm alone again with you

And then, for what was then tremendously rare, Springsteen wrote of fatherhood in unambiguously positive terms: 

A friend of mine became a father last night
When we spoke in his voice I could hear the light
Of the skies and the rivers the timberwolf in the pines
And that great jukebox out on Route 39
They say he travels fastest who travels alone
But tonight I miss my girl mister tonight I miss my home

The bridge is interesting. The narrators ask several (unusally flowery) questions: 

Is it the sound of the leaves
left blown by the wayside
That's got me out here on this spooky old highway tonight
Is it the cry of the river
With the moonlight shining through

But the answer doesn't seem to quite follow logically: 

That ain't what scares me baby
What scares me is losing you

So...he's out on the highway not on business but, apparently, because he's scared of losing her? Meaning, what, that he wasn't due to return home yet? 

We'll get back to that. 

Let's skip, instead, to the final verse:

They say if you die in your dreams you really die in your bed
But honey last night I dreamed my eyes rolled straight back in my head
And God's light came shinin' on through
I woke up in the darkness scared and breathin' and born anew
It wasn't the cold river bottom I felt rushing over me
It wasn't the bitterness of a dream that didn't come true
It wasn't the wind in the grey fields I felt rushing through my arms
No no baby it was you
So hold me close honey say you're forever mine
And tell me you'll be my lonely valentine 

And this is where context becomes vital. Because what finally hit home for the narrator, the huge epiphany he had, was never found when he was actually with her—it all came to him in a dream, when he was miles and miles away from her. So now he's on his way back home to be with her...but he's not there yet. And given that the things that have affected him the most are talking to a friend on the phone and a dream of his girl, it's highly unlikely that these overwhelming feelings of love will last long once they're actually together. The idea of love, his belief in the importance of love, is more powerful than love itself, or at least, than the love he and this woman have for each.

There are several clues that lead to that conclusion. The first is the context of the album: song after song explores just how hard it is to make a relationship work—and even the very few that seem, at first glance, to have things going okay actually reveal, upon examination, serious hidden and potentially fatal flaws in them. ("All That Heaven Will Allow," for instance: again, the narrator is trying to get to the girl but is unable to.)

But the other is right there in the final words. He sweetly asks her to be his valentine. But not his tender valentine or his loving valentine or his gorgeous valentine or his blushing valentine. He asks her to be his lonely valentine. But...what kind of valentine is lonely? Unfortunately, not a truly happy one. 

And yet the keyboard line as the music fades out—one of the extraordinarily rare non-4/4 songs in the Springsteen catalog—is ever so lovely and gentle and soothing that you're tempted to believe things'll work out for them, that they'll live happily ever after. But even there's a hint: he could just as easily have gone with an ascending melody. Instead, it's falling. Beautifully, but inexorably. 

Valentine's Day

My Hometown

Bruce Springsteen has spoken before about how much attention he paid to the sequencing of his albums, the need for strong statements of purpose on "the four corners"—that is, the first and last song on each side of vinyl. While album openers tend to get the most consideration, Springsteen clearly put every bit as much time into thinking about how to close his records. For his six albums he covered an enormous amount of territory, from rock, soul and jazz to prog, country and folk. They include some of his most popular songs ("Jungleland" and "Darkness on the Edge of Town") as well as rarely-played fan favorites ("New York City Serenade") and critical darlings ("Reason to Believe"). With the closing song off 1984's blockbuster Born in the USA, he added pop with a song that went to #6 on the charts and which, as a result of its mass popularity, may be the most overlooked masterpiece of his first seven album closers.

"My Hometown" has several of the classic Springsteen calling cards: cars, fathers and sons, class consciousness, economic uncertainty and the importance and difficulty of hard work. But the most pervasive sense is one of quiet loss. Opening with a pair of scenes from the narrator's childhood—buying a newspaper for his father, and sitting in his father's lap, steering the car as they drive around—it's perhaps the most positive depiction of fatherhood yet in a Springsteen song, free of the angst and tension in "Adam Raised a Cain" or "Indepence Day." 

Of course, that's a relative term, and even here things are far from rosy: the song closes with an identical scene, as the narrator is now the father, driving around town with his own son, allowing him to steer. But it's in the context of conversations the narrator's had  with his boss and with his wife, acknowleding that jobs are scarce and getting scarcer as their town slowly dies, and that their best hope for a decent life likely lies elsewhere, meaning he's going to need to abandon the only home he's ever known.

Sandwiched between those two famililal tableaus are another pair of scenes, one the aforementioned work scene, with the boss warning his workers that their jobs are about to be eliminated, and the other a memory of racial tension back in high school. Interestingly, the scene of racial violence is the only time the title is literally sung, as all other times the narrator actually sings "your hometown." While it's clearly because the other times it's someone talking to the narrator—or the narrator speaking to his own son—the effect is to turn what could otherwise have been a strictly personal meditation into something far more universal.

The mirrored scenes that open and close the song are an effective technique, comparing and contrasting the narrator at eight years old with himself at thirty-five. But the most effective bit is the way he sings "your hometown" one and only one time in the last verse, rather than repeating it multiple times as he had previously throughout the song, allowing the song to gently fade out, the music lovely and gentle but, disturbingly—if like parenthood and life itself—ultimately unresolved.  

My Hometown

Darkness on the Edge of Town II

Darkness on the Edge of Town was the first Bruce Springsteen album I heard when it was new—or, at least, newish; I think it was the summer of 1980 when I heard it for the first time. And for 32 years I've thought the narrator of the title track was related to the narrator of other Springsteen songs such as "Racing in the Streets" and "Adam Raised a Cain" and so many others: guys born into a tough situation struggling against the odds, having a pretty good idea of the score and their chances but not going down without a fight. 

And then the other night a few phrases leapt out at me for the first time and I wondered if I'd had it wrong all these years. And I suddenly realized that it's possible that the narrator is, in fact, a victim of his own vices and weaknesses. Looked at it in a different light, the narrator sounds like he's not so much a guy struggling to beat the odds. No. He's actually a compulsive gambler, and the reason he's lost everything is through his own bad choices brought on by his addiction.

They're still racing out at the Trestles
But that blood it never burned in her veins
Now I hear she's got a house up in Fairview
And a style she's trying to maintain
Well if she wants to see me
You can tell her that I'm easily found
Tell her there's a spot out 'neath Abram's Bridge
And tell her there's a darkness on the edge of town

Everybody's got a secret Sonny
Something that they just can't face
Some folks spend their whole lives trying to keep it
They carry it with them every step that they take
Till some day they just cut it loose
Cut it loose or let it drag 'em down
Where no one asks any questions
Or looks too long in your face
In the darkness on the edge of town

Some folks are born into a good life
Other folks get it anyway anyhow
I lost my money and I lost my wife
Them things don't seem to matter much to me now
Tonight I'll be on that hill 'cause I can't stop
I'll be on that hill with everything I got
Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost
I'll be there on time and I'll pay the cost
For wanting things that can only be found
In the darkness on the edge of town 

Darkness on the Edge of Town 

That's why you can find him in places like Abram's Bridge and on that hill with everything he's got. The blood may have never burned in her veins for the racing, but the implication, therefore, is that it did and it still does for him. He lost his money and his wife and yet he still cannot stop. The compulsion, the addiction is simply too strong. Even with nothing left, he's still chasing that one big win and will forever, no matter what happens, no matter how many times he wins or loses in the meantime. That secret that he just can't face? The secret is this: it's all his own damn fault. 

Reason to Believe

The first song, the title track, off his next album is his most famously misunderstood lyric. But it's "Reason to Believe," the final track on 1982's Nebraska, which is the most ambiguous song Bruce Springsteen ever recorded. Just how ambiguous is this most ambiguous of all Bruce Springsteen songs? This ambiguous: even the artist himself misinterpreted what it was about. 

On November 19, 1984, in Kansas City, Springsteen said, "this is a song about blind faith and its tragic consequences." Which just goes to prove, yet again, that sometimes even the most intelligent, most talented and most thoughtful artists don't actually understand their own work. Because that may be one interpretation of "Reason to Believe"...but it's not what it's "about." Frankly, it's not even an interpretation well supported by the actual text. 

There are five groups of characters in the four verses, and only one is a victimsof an abundance of blind faith. The driver in the first verse, for instance, hit the dog and now he's hoping against hope it'll come back.

Seen a man standin' over a dead dog lyin' by the highway in a ditch
He's lookin' down kinda puzzled pokin' that dog with a stick
Got his car door flung open he's standin' out on highway 31
Like if he stood there long enough that dog'd get up and run
Struck me kinda funny seem kinda funny sir to me
Still at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe

He didn't hit it expecting it would come back. He hit it and now he's hoping it won't be really dead—maybe only mostly dead. Deep down, he knows better, but he can't help hoping he's wrong. The parents baptize their child and the mourners pray for the deceased—and if that's all for naught, what of it? Who or what does it harm? The parents aren't denying the baby needed medical attention, and the dead man didn't seem to refuse treatment in favor of faith. It doesn't change anything for them, not in the time immediately preceding the song and not immediately after the song. 

Take a baby to the river Kyle William they called him
Wash the baby in the water take away little Kyle's sin
In a whitewash shotgun shack an old man passes away take his body to the graveyard and over him they pray Lord won't you tell us
tell us what does it mean
Still at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe  

As for the groom in the last verse, she agreed to marry him, which is a pretty strong bit of evidence that she was intending to actually marry him. When one person asks another to get married and the party of the second part agrees to marry the party of the first part, it's not blind faith on the party of the first part to assume the party of the second part is actually going to go through with it.   

Congregation gathers down by the riverside
Preacher stands with his Bible, groom stands waitin' for his bride
Congregation gone and the sun sets behind a weepin' willow tree
Groom stands alone and watches the river rush on so effortlessly
Wonderin' where can his baby be
Still at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe

But then there's Mary Lou.

Now Mary Lou loved Johnny with a love mean and true
She said "Baby I'll work for you every day and bring my money home to you"
One day he up and left her and ever since that
She waits down at the end of that dirt road for young Johnny to come back
Struck me kinda funny seemed kind of funny sir to me
How at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe

Mary Lou may indeed be a victim of blind faith, in that she's still there waiting at the end of the dirt road, pissing her life away, hoping against hope—no, against all clear evidence and common sense—that young Johnny will come back when it's crystal clear to everyone that he's never going to. So, okay, one of the five subjects of this song may indeed have fallen prey to a surfeit of blind faith. 

But the rest of the song is about faith—just not blind faith. It's about the faith people have, that they cling to, in desperation, even when all available evidence would lead one to give up the ghost. That's foolish faith, perhaps, or simply an overabundance of faith. But it's not blind faith.   

It's an interesting song, in terms of construction. The first verse, for instance, is the only one where the guy seems to definitely be at fault—assuming he's the one who hit the dog, and that it's not actually his dog and someone else hit it and the owner's now dearly hoping his beloved dog'll get up and run. All the rest would seem to be victims of fate. The first verse is also the only one where the narrator is directly witnessing the scene being described: in all the others, it's omniscient. 

Interestingly, the second and third verse tell, more or less, the same story, just swapping the genders and locales. Meanwhile, the first and third verses both deal with death, but in very different ways. The third verse is the only one with two contrasting stories, whereas all the others are single tale verses. And it's this third verse, with its circle of life that's really the heart of the song. The first verse may also have dealt with death, but the third adds birth and religion to the mix, leading the narrator to address God directly, begging him to tell us what it all means. 

There's no answer. Just another verse conveying a heartbreaking tale of betrayal and lost love. And a jilted, humuliated, perplexed groom staring at the river rushing past, implaccable, unknowable. As is Springsteen's voice: as he sings the final lines, his delivery is first whispery and then rises to the kind of semi-shout with which the more casual Springsteen fan is most accustomed, but neither delivery gives any indication whatsoever what the singer is really thinking about, what his feelings on these matters of faith truly are. And then the lyrics drop out and it's just Springsteen's guitar, rumbling on like the river rushing past, as time stretches out. Is he thinking about the vagaries of nature? Or the incredibly short lifetime of humans compared to billions of years of the planet? Is he thinking of drowning himself? 

Who knows. All we're left with is the knowledge that somehow, some way, for some reason, people still find some reason to believe. Is this admirable? Is it worthy of contempt? Springsteen gives no indication, in the lyrics or his performance. All we know is that they do. 

Reason to Believe 

Radio Silence

Things have been a bit quiet here on Left of the Dial. One reason is because I've been blogging over at a new blog, Reason to Believe, with old friend and regular Left o' the Dialian DT. The new blog is pretty much entirely devoted to music, at least for now, so I might post less music-related stuff here. Then again, maybe not, since that would just leave funny or sweet family stories and, honestly, we simply don't have much such material these days. 

Hm. Probably time to throw them all into Thunderdome and see what happens. Bet there'd be some funny and sweet stories then. 

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 in the minor comes back, carried mainly by the bass, repeating until it fades out, a strange, atypical and utterly effective ending.

Wreck on the Highway

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)

American Skin (1 Shot)

 

12 years after originally written and performed, now with the ghost of Trayvon Martin as well as Amadou Diallo hanging over it, still just as sadly applicable as ever.

 

Darkness on the Edge of Town

Bruce Springsteen ruined me. For a while, at least, I had a had time listening to other artists, even ones I loved, such as David Bowie, because no one else seemed to have the passion Springsteen had. Where other musicians sang their songs, Springsteen screamed his lyrics like they were poison he had to expell. The difference, it felt to me, was that Springsteen meant every word with every fiber in his being and other musicians, well, they were performing.

That was nonsense, of course…to some extent. After all, upon hearing Darkness on the Edge of Town, Springsteen’s fourth album, Pete Townshend, no stranger to passion himself, said, “When Bruce Springsteen sings on his new album, that's not 'fun', that's fucking triumph, man.”

Mainly I think I learned to appreciate a certain emotional distance from most of my favorite artists; after all, I don’t think Nick Drake or Elliott Smith meant their songs any less than Springsteen, they simply had a different way of showing it. 

Nick Drake: "Day Is Done"

Elliott Smith: "Say Yes"

And there were other artists who showed it every bit as passionately as Springsteen…but with a few exceptions, such as Howlin’ Wolf, I tended to dislike those other artists as being embarrassingly emotive. (The exact same thing which turns so many otherwise perceptive listeners off from Springsteen himself.)

But then there’s the final song on Darkness on the Edge of Town, the title track. If Darkness isn’t Springsteen’s finest album—and it very well may be—it’s certainly neck and neck with it. The song itself has never gotten the sort of radio play that a few of the other tracks, such as the singles “Badlands” and “Prove It All Night,” have, and maybe not even as much as a few of the album’s deeper cuts, such as “The Promised Land” and “Candy’s Room.” And it’s not the best song on the album—but it’s no shame to lose to “Racing in the Street,” a serious contender for Springsteen’s greatest song ever.

But it remains not only a masterpiece on its own terms, it’s something of a calling card for Springsteen, being featured prominently on every major tour, solo or band, E Street or otherwise, since its initial release. Despite it clearly being a work of fiction—marriage was, at that point, a very, very long seven years away for Springsteen, although it’s interesting that in later years he would sometimes change the line to “I lost my faith when I lost my wife”—the final verse, at least, captures a key element of Springsteen’s success, as gauged by looking back over the past 40 years. When he screams

Tonight I'll be on that hill 'cause I can't stop
I'll be on that hill with everything I got

you believe.

Almost alone amongst artists of his stature, Springsteen's not only still releasing new material, rather than coasting on past successes, but trying new approaches and, even more nearly unique, observing and chronicling life as an older man with every bit as critical and astute an eye as he had as an angry young man. What drives a guy who’s reached the heights of fame and fortune he has to keep pushing like that? Looking at his peers, both those slightly older and those slightly or even considerably younger, it’s plain to see how easily one can succumb to the temptation to rest on one’s laurels—and no slight intended, as that’s exactly what I would do if I had even a fraction of wealth.

The answer, it seems to me, is to be found, at least in part, in this song.

Darkness on the Edge of Town 

They're still racing out at the Trestles
But that blood it never burned in her veins
Now I hear she's got a house up in Fairview
And a style she's trying to maintain
Well if she wants to see me
You can tell her that I'm easily found
Tell her there's a spot out 'neath Abram's Bridge
And tell her there's a darkness on the edge of town

Everybody's got a secret, Sonny
Something that they just can't face
Some folks spend their whole lives trying to keep it
They carry it with them every step that they take
Till some day they just cut it loose
Cut it loose or let it drag 'em down
Where no one asks any questions
Or looks too long in your face
In the darkness on the edge of town

Some folks are born into a good life
Other folks get it anyway anyhow
I lost my money and I lost my wife
Them things don't seem to matter much to me now
Tonight I'll be on that hill 'cause I can't stop
I'll be on that hill with everything I got
Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost
I'll be there on time and I'll pay the cost
For wanting things that can only be found
In the darkness on the edge of town

Jungleland

Wherein Bruce Springsteen goes prog.

That’s right, I said it. Bruce Springsteen, hero of meat and potatoes rock and roll, comes up with one of his most beloved songs, featuring multiple distinct sections, abrupt tempo shifts, long instrumental passages, unexpected modulations and an overtly melodramatic storyline. In other words, prog.

Oh, sure, it wouldn’t seem to have a lot in common with ELP or King Crimson, musically. And lyrically it’s got nothing in common with Yes since the lyrics are comprehensible.

But it’s not far off from what Genesis was doing its last few years with Peter Gabriel—in fact, given the radically different backgrounds of its creators, it really is like the American cousin of Selling England by the Pound’s “Battle of Epping Forest.” 

The Battle of Epping Forest

Both take scenarios thoroughly steeped in their own local mythologies—Robin Hood’s old stomping grounds as a setting for a gang war versus the New Jersey Turnpike and a more mundane urban street scene—and craft a relatively straightforward narrative around them, both shot through with violence and ending in death. 

There are more than a few differences, of course: for one thing, Peter Gabriel’s lyrics play up the absurdity for comedic effect, and the variety of voices he utilizes only emphasizes that. Springsteen, in contrast, is aiming for high tragedy, complete with heart-breaking catharsis.

But even the names—the Magic Rat and the Maximum Lawman, Liquid Len and Bob the Nob—are of a piece. Both feature slower, softer instrumental intros which burst into uptempo rock and roll. (Well…something kind of approaching some sort of rock and rollian, rock and rollesque approximation, in the case of Genesis.) Both feature prominent keyboard parts as the dominant instrument overall, but “Jungleland” makes outstanding use of Clarence Clemons’ saxophone for its long, arduously composed and recorded solo, the most memorable part of the song—no small feat, given the gorgeous piano and violin intro, or the fine guitar solo.

And coincidence that the only time Springsteen released a song like this was in 1975, during the height of prog, when it was pretty much the most popular genre going at the time? And he wouldn’t do anything even remotely approaching it for 35 more years? I say thee nay.

Which isn’t to say it’s not great, of course. ‘cuz it is, and I say that as someone who admits he’s got a fondness for prog. “Jungleland” is epic and sprawling and gorgeous and ambitious and moving and sums up the entire Born to Run album perfectly. It’s the last gasp of a tenacious young kid willing, happy, desperate to try anything, to toss the kitchen sink and anything else he can find into the pot, hoping to discover the ideal medium for his message. He’d find it when recording his next album, and things would pretty much forever be far more stripped down and direct. So enjoy this last gasp of Bruce Springsteen figuring out who he is.  Once he figures that out for sure, things might get even better, maybe, but there’s nothing quite like the rush of a young artist exploding into full promise. 

 

Jungleland

 

New York City Serenade

The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle's “New York City Serenade” is perhaps the oddest album closer in the first half of Bruce Springsteen’s catalog. The longest (although just barely), it eschews what had already by this point, still early in his career, become a fairly standard and straightforward storytelling approach—one which he would streamline much, much further in the years to come—instead opting for a series of vignettes, almost character pieces.

The track opens with over a minute and a half of David Sancious improvising on the piano and, not surprising, given his brilliance as a player, brilliantly.

New York City Serenade

Springsteen’s acoustic guitar suddenly jumps in, his jazzy interjections combining a little flamenco with some blues.

And then we’re into the first verse, wherein we find Billy and Jackie down by the tracks. In what’s now thought of a Springsteen cliché, they’re in a car, but there are two things notable about this: on his first two albums, cars—in stark contrast to subsequent releases—are barely even featured, possibly because Springsteen himself had apparently not yet owned a car. The other interesting feature: the car isn’t moving, but is parked, static, a location rather than a vehicle. But the placement, by the train tracks, is also interesting, trains connoting movement, escape and even the rhythm which laid much of the foundation for rock and roll--perhaps ironic, then, that this track is in many ways musically one of the least rock and roll he would record. (Rock and roll being such a large tent, of course, it’s impossible to deny that it is rock and roll—and if it’s not rock and roll, it’s hard to put a label on just what it is.)

The rest of the first verse is a series of descriptions and phrases which are pleasing—Jackie's both diamond and yet falls so softly; she's intact, perhaps signifying this is her first time? and if so what a romantic time it is—but which, really, don’t add up to much:

Billy, he's down by the railroad tracks
Sittin' low in the back seat of his Cadillac
Diamond Jackie, she's so intact
As she falls so softly beneath him
Jackie's heels are stacked
Billy's got cleats on his boots
Together they're gonna boogaloo down Broadway and come back home with the loot
It's midnight in Manhattan, this is no time to get cute

save the final couplet:

It's a mad dog's promenade
So walk tall or baby don't walk at all

“Mad Dog” being the name of Vini Lopez, the original E Street Band drummer, it seems likely this is something of an in-joke. But it’s more than that. It feels like a fine description of the music industry Springsteen was still trying to find his footing in. For his first album he’d been shoehorned by the record company and his producers into going the then lucrative singer-songwriter route, which decidedly mixed results. On this, his second album, he’d stretched out musically, heading in a much more soulful, even jazzy direction. Most of all, his music became far more assertive—walking tall, one might say.

The next verse shifts focus to a prostitute who’s too discerning to take on just any customer:

Fish lady, oh fish lady
She baits them tenement walls
She won't take corner boys
They ain't got no money
And they're so easy

but who might, he hopes, be persuaded to give the singer a chance:

I said "Hey, baby
Won't you take my hand
Walk with me down Broadway
Well, mama take my arm and move with me down Broadway"

It’s interesting that on the record he changes the lyrics up slightly, singing “Hey, baby, I’m easy, won’t you take my hand,” a chance which seems to undercut his chances and, really, makes little to no sense.

Then he’s back to his sales pitch:

I'm a young man, I talk it real loud
Yeah, babe, I walk it real proud for you
Ah, so shake it away
So shake away your street life
Shake away your city life
Hook up to the train
And hook up to the night train

a pitch which is thematically related to "It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City," the final song on his debut album, with its surfeit of braggadocio and train setting. 

While this song doesn’t have a chorus—and never even uses the actual title—we move into the song’s bridge:

But I know that she won't take the train, no she won't take the train
Oh, she won't take the train, no she won't take the train
Oh, she won't take the train, no she won't take the train
Oh, she won't take the train, no she won't take the train
She's afraid them tracks are gonna slow her down
And when she turns this boy'll be gone
So long, sometimes you just gotta walk on 

How’d this happen? How did we go from him trying to get her to give him the time of day to him suddenly blowing her off? An argument could perhaps be made that she was originally standoffish out of a fear of rejection, but the text doesn’t really support that assertion. It's almost as though this song were composed using the stream-of-consciousness technique and never went through a second draft. 

And then we’re into the third and final verse:

Hey vibes man, hey jazz man, play me your serenade
Any deeper blue and you're playin' in your grave
Save your notes, don't spend 'em on the blues boy
Save your notes, don't spend 'em on the darlin' yearlin' sharp boy
Straight for the church note ringin', vibes man sting a trash can
Listen to your junk man
Listen to your junk man

Again, these lines sound good one by one, but they don’t really add up. The two things which jump out the most are the ideas of advising a jazz man to hold onto his notes, not to waste them on the blues but, rather, to save them for the church, implying gospel is inherently superior to the blues—an idea which was far from unique to Springsteen.

The other thing is the admonition to pay heed to the junk man. Here the junk man seems to assume the role of the fool, the wise man openly in disguise, the idiot who’s the only one brave and insightful and treasured enough to speak the truth. In other words, after going through jazz, blues and gospel, we come to...rock and roll. Because what’s the junk man doing? The only thing a poor boy can do.

He's singin', he's singin', he's singin'
All dressed up in satin, walkin' past the alley
He's singin', singin', singin', singin'

It’s a nice detail, the junk man being dressed in satin.

And that's it. When we get to the end we find what we've got is, really, a jumble of lyrics with some nice bits which simply just don’t add up to much. There’s no through-line, there’s no clear progression and lyrically, the three separate vignettes don’t build to any kind of dramatic conclusion. Looked at on paper, it’s hard to argue this might not be the weakest song on his first two albums.

But the music.

Rock and roll is not poetry. John Lennon asserted that rock and roll never got better than “a wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom.” Because the fact of the matter is that some things in life, the most important things, can’t usually be put into words clearly, that there are some things felt crystal clearly but which just cannot be translated properly. And “da doo doo doo, da da da da” or “da do ron ron ron, da do ron ron” or “sha la la la la” or "yeah yeah yeah" or, yes, “a wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom” is the closest we can get to the heart of the matter.

So the words here are fine, intriguing and evocative even, but aren’t nearly up to his standards. So what? Doesn’t matter. Because the music is as glorious and gorgeous as any he would ever go on to make, which is to say pretty much as glorious and gorgeous as any anyone would ever make, and the performance somehow presides over the marriage of these arguably sub-par lyrics and the undeniably magnificent music and combine to create an absolutely transcendent recording, as lovely and powerful as any rock and roll ever committed to tape. And when Springsteen wails the final lines, as his cries of singing give way to wordless howls and the Big Man’s sax twists in and out of David Sancious’s piano, while Sancious’ string arrangement floats over the top, lifting and sweetening without overpowering or being cloying, and when the entire thing finally, inevitably, exhaustedly draws to a slow, serene, whispered, blissful close, it’s like dawn breaking after a tumultuous but magical night and it could not possibly be more right and more extraordinary and more simply and utterly perfect.

Listen to your junk man. He’s singin’. 

Follow That Dream

So here's a piece I wrote for a graduate class I took a few years back. I've been meaning to post it for, well, a few years—in fact, I'd actually forgotten that I hadn't. So here it is, occasionally funky formatting and all.     

 

• Follow That Dream •

Tracing the story arcs of characters in the songs of Bruce Springsteen

 

            Bruce Springsteen has a history of revisiting certain subjects over the years, most notably cars, driving, and the open road. This has led to more than a little criticism—

 

 “Springsteen has glued together a badly imagined shantytown of ‘blue collar’ images and buzz-words—‘mill,’ ‘car,’ ‘street,’ ‘girl’—meant to touch a suburban generation that only knows the ‘working class’ through sitcoms and ‘nostalgia’ films and old black-and-whites in granddad’s wallet.” (John Lombardi, Esquire Magazine, December 1988)

 

—and even parody, as in the Bob Dylan song, “Tweeter and the Monkey Man” on the first Traveling Wilburys album. What such critics miss is the way in which those subjects change with each album, from a symbol of romance, freedom, and power on Born to Run, to desperation, longing, and escape on Darkness on the Edge of Town, to isolation and emptiness on Tunnel of Love, and even to death and pointless murder on Nebraska.

              So too has Springsteen revisited certain characters over the years. In some cases it’s been not a literal sequel as much as a reusing of archetypes, although as Springsteen himself pointed out, many of the characters on subsequent albums may indeed be the same as on earlier, even if they’re not named:

 

 “I’ve tried to keep my eye on the ball, to keep a clear view of those things. And I try to be consistent with the characters. The guy on ‘Beautiful Reward’ is the guy on ‘Born to Run.’ Hey, that’s where life has taken these people. I always try to make sure the stuff I’m writing is inclusive in that sense. That it’s broad enough. It’s partly about me but for it to work right it’s got to also be partly about you. If it’s just one or the other something’s missing.” (“Ambition, Lies, & the Beautiful Reward: 
Bruce Springsteen's Family Values,” Interview by Bill Flanagan, Musician, November 1992)

 

             But while he has often followed characters from album to album throughout his career, actual direct sequels are rarities in Springsteen. In fact, there are only a few times in which Springsteen seemed to do a literal update. In this instances, his song choice is most notable indeed: “Thunder Road” and “Rosalita,” two of the most beloved songs—in fact, possibly the two most beloved songs to his most devoted of hardcore fans—in his entire canon. It is, of course, impossible to know for sure why Springsteen chooses to revisit certain characters. But what does become clear, upon examination, is the result: it adds depth and extra meaning to the songs themselves, both the originals and the sequels. The new songs start off in a world which has already been established, enabling the listener to fill in many of the blanks easily, and characterization can thus be focused on, as the need for exposition is greatly reduced. Given the right circumstances—the correct songs and the proper framing—the results can be stunningly powerful.

 

*****

 

             “Thunder Road” is, without question, one of Bruce Springsteen’s greatest and most important songs—as well as one of his most popular. According to Wikipedia:

 

 In 2004, it was ranked #1 on the list of the “885 All-Time Greatest Songs” compiled by WXPN (the University of Pennsylvania’s public radio station). Rolling Stone magazine placed it as #86 on its “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” The song came in at #226 in Q magazine’s list of the “1001 Greatest Songs Ever” in 2003, in which they described the song as “best for pleading on the porch.”

 

Among other things, “Thunder Road” is one of Springsteen’s very first songs to make explicit themes—the power of the automobile and the freedom of the open roads—which would come to dominate his music for the next decade and beyond.

 

Thunder Road

Although never even released as a single, it would become a staple of AOR radio in the 1970s and 1980s, and Springsteen would go on to release multiple versions of it, from the piano-based live version on Live 1975-1985, to the 1979 No Nukes version on his video anthology, to his acoustic guitar rendition on MTV Unplugged in 1993. Springsteen himself acknowledges the song’s power, while seeming a bit mystified by it:

 

 

 “I’m not sure what that song has. We played it the other night at the Sony studio, when we were taping a European show, and it just felt all-inclusive. It may be something about trying to seize a particular moment in your life and realizing you have to make very fundamental and basic decisions that you know will alter your life and how you live it. It’s a funny song because it simultaneously contains both dreaming and disillusionment.” (“Human Touch: Bruce Springsteen reflects on his music, life with and without the E-Street Band, and the glory of rock & roll,” Neil Strauss, Guitar World, October 1995)

 

             In August 1976 Springsteen began playing a new song in concert, “The Promise.”

 

The Promise

Speculation immediately began as to the song’s “meaning,” speculation which was later to prove decisive in determining the song’s fate. The main interpretation was that it was about the contentious lawsuit between Springsteen and his manager, Mike Appel.  In an interview with Paul Nelson, Springsteen denied that it was about the Appel situation, per se. “I wrote it before the lawsuit,” Springsteen claimed. “I don’t write about lawsuits.” (Bruce Springsteen: The Rolling Stone Files, 70) He did, however, much later admit on the Charlie Rose show that “The Promise” was indeed a continuation of the “Thunder Road” narrative, when responding to a question as to why it wasn’t on the Tracks album:

 

 

 “Basically, I went back and I listened to it and we never really got a good recording of it in my opinion. It’s been a favorite song of a lot of..a lot of people mention it. It sort of was the sequel to “Thunder Road” in some fashion, it referred back to those characters. But I went back and we sort of had a very plodding, heavy-handed version of it. I couldn’t quite live with it, so maybe another time.”

 

             One of the keys to Darkness on the Edge of Town is the hope to be found in each and every one of its songs. While its pervasive sense of pessimism is the album’s most prominent feature—indeed, following the youthful romanticism of Born to Run, it feels like its defining feature—that nugget of hope contained in each song is the key to the album. In many of its most popular songs—most obviously “Badlands” and “The Promised Land”—the optimism is unmistakable, but even the album’s most somber songs, the ones which upon first examination seem devoid of any spark of hope, reveal themselves to have at the very least a glimmer. “Factory,” for example, may very well be the starkest, most desolate song on the album, yet even it contains the line

 

             Factory gives him life

 

Coming as it does hard on the heels of the previous line

 

             Factory takes his hearing

 

it is, at the very least, a mixed blessing, to be sure. Nevertheless, as compromised and difficult a life as it may be, the fact remains that the factory does give him something—and not just anything, but specifically life. What’s more, the song ends with the promise

 

             And you just better believe, boy, somebody’s gonna get hurt tonight

 

Even after all the workers have been through, years and even decades of back-breaking, grueling, (almost) thankless and unrewarding work which has taken its toll, the men are still fighting, not just metaphorically, but literally, an act which in and of itself proves that they’ve not acquiesced, surrendered or given up. It’s not ideal…but nor is it nothing. It’s not ideal, but it is still something.

             That stands in stark contrast to “The Promise,” perhaps the bleakest song Springsteen had written up to that point, and thirty years later, still one of his grimmest songs. The narrator runs down a list of his friends and acquaintances:

 

             Johnny works in a factory and Billy works downtown

             Terry works in a rock and roll band

             Lookin’ for that million-dollar sound

 

It’s interesting to note the way “The Promise” begins here, with a recitation of the narrator’s friends, as opposed to the only characters in “Thunder Road”: just the singer and Mary. No one else is named in the earlier song, and there’s barely even a mention of another human, in fact, save Roy Orbison’s disembodied voice singing about loneliness. The only other people who get brought up are Mary’s lovers, for whom she idly and vainly makes crosses, until the end of the song:

 

             There were ghosts in the eyes

            Of all the boys you sent away

            They haunt this dusty beach road

            In the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets

 

            They scream your name at night in the street

            Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet

            And in the lonely cool before dawn

            You hear their engines roaring on

            But when you get to the porch they’re gone

            On the wind

 

So are they even real? Are they ghosts? Are they merely metaphorical? Whatever they are, they’re not physical, tangible presences like Mary and the singer, no more able to touch or be touched than Roy Orbison’s voice floating in the background.

             There may be one additional character in the initial song, but it’s not human: it’s Thunder Road itself, the only other proper name in the song, and which exhibits some decidedly human traits:

 

             Lying out there like a killer in the sun

             Hey I know it’s late we can make it if we run

             Oh Thunder Road, sit tight take hold

             Thunder Road

 

Is the singer directing Thunder Road to take hold? Is he telling Mary to grab onto Thunder Road? Is he telling her to grab onto him in order to keep that killer in the sun from snatching her? Whatever the answer, the result is that Thunder Road itself becomes an actor in this drama, and one which shows up in the sequel.

             Acting, in the sense of taking action, is notably missing from “The Promise.” The narrator’s friends may have jobs to which they go, but he himself isn’t exactly ambitious

 

             I got a little job down in Darlington

             But some nights I don’t go

             Some nights I go to the drive-in, or some nights I stay home

 

This isn’t the romantic rebellion of a guy stuck in a job he hates, who’s willing to throw it all away for a shot at something bigger and better, and it’s not a former grad student filled with what he imagines is intellectually-viable existential ennui: this is a man who’s learned the ugly truth of what the world is really like. As Springsteen himself said in Philadelphia on December 9, 1980, “It's a hard world that makes you live with a lot of things that are unlivable.”

             So sometimes the singer goes to his job and, well, sometimes he doesn’t. And when he doesn’t, it’s not to run off to the beach—or even some sleazy hot sheets motel—with a girl, it’s to go to the drive-in, apparently alone: certainly there’s no mention of Mary or any other female. Unless he doesn’t go to the movies either, on those nights when he can’t even be bothered to do that. And yet the listener doesn’t get the impression that the narrator’s what would later be termed a “slacker,” a guy who’s voluntarily, even happily, dropped out of society, seeing it for the receptacle of inherently shallow set of values it is. The narrator of “The Promise” is man who has learned, to his crushing disappointment, that despite what he was always told growing up, this is the reality of the adult world. This, we discover, is a man who tried the best he could to play the game the way he was taught in school, and learned the hard way that the game is a fake, that it’s rigged, that the American dream is a con, a shell game, and that guys like him, from his socioeconomic class, are always the marks.

 

             I followed that dream just like those guys do up on the screen

             And I drove a Challenger down Route 9 through the dead ends and all the bad scenes

             And when the promise was broken, I cashed in a few of my dreams

 

             Like the singer of “Racing in the Street,” and so many other Springsteen songs, the narrator of “The Promise” views cars as, among other things, a means to freedom. And as a symbol of rugged American self-reliance, both singers actually built (or, more accurately, rebuilt) their own cars themselves. From “Racing in the Street”:

 

             I got a sixty-nine Chevy with a 396

             Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor

             She's waiting tonight down in the parking lot

             Outside the Seven-Eleven store

             Me and my partner Sonny built her straight out of scratch

 

So too the singer of “The Promise”:

 

             Well now I built that Challenger by myself

 

But unlike the singer from “Racing in the Street,” whose car continues to be a means of support, both financially and spiritually:

 

             And he rides with me from town to town

             We only run for the money got no strings attached

             We shut 'em up and then we shut 'em down

 

the singer of “The Promise” has lost his car:

 

             But I needed money and so I sold it

 

But the loss of his car is more than merely an inconvenience. It symbolizes his loss of faith and hope later in the song.

 

             All my life I fought this fight

             The fight that no man can never win

             Every day it just gets harder to live

             This dream I’m believing in

             Thunder Road, oh baby you were so right

             Thunder Road there’s something dyin’ on the highway tonight

 

How far the speaker has come since the Born to Run album. Then the highway was an escape. From “Born to Run”:

 

             Sprung from cages out on highway 9

 

and “Thunder Road” itself:

 

             Well the night's busting open

             These two lanes will take us anywhere.

 

The road signifies freedom and unlimited possibilities, and any fear Mary feels isn’t so much fear of the open road or its chances, but her own reticence, her hesitation to leave the safety of home—and perhaps her doubts about the long-term prospective of the singer. It may not have been an easy path to freedom:

 

             The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive

 

but the fact that it’s jammed means it’s clear that everyone knows what the highway is: it’s the way out. Furthermore, note who it is on the highway—broken heroes—and they’re not merely fleeing but on “a last chance power drive.” Even the language implies strength and a vital desperation, compared to “The Promise,” where death, whether physical or spiritual, awaits. It’s not even clear just what’s dying—it’s ambiguous, as though it’s too dark and murky to be able to tell for sure. But that something is dying there, there’s no doubt. 

             The narrator of “Thunder Road” had seemingly limitless beliefs in himself and life’s possibilities:

 

             Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night

 

but by “The Promise” any such illusions have been stripped away and he’s learned that even if you seem to have won, it’s not enough:

 

             I won big once and I hit the coast

             But somehow I paid the big cost

             Inside I felt like I was carryin’ the broken spirits

             Of all the other ones who lost

 

             When the promise is broken you go on living

             But it steals something from down in your soul

             Like when the truth is spoken and it don’t make no difference

             Something in your heart goes cold

 

As with many of the other songs on the Darkness on the Edge of Town album, “The Promise” takes the singer far from the east coast of the first three albums. But whereas the Utah desert of “The Promised Land” had its share—maybe more than its share—of trials and tribulations, the region of “The Promise” has nothing to offer but rundown dives without even the devastating power of a tornado:

 

             I followed that dream through the southwestern flats

             That dead ends in two-bit bars

             And when the promise was broken I was far away from home

             Sleepin’ in the back seat of a borrowed car

 

Even here, so far from home, so broken-hearted, it comes back to cars. But how things have changed, how far he’s fallen: he’s in a car, but he’s not racing it, nor is he cruising—he’s sleeping, apparently homeless. But not just homeless: despite being reduced to living in a car, it’s not even his car—he actually has to borrow a car to sleep in.

 

             Thunder Road, for the lost lovers and all the fixed games

             Thunder Road, for the tires rushing by in the rain

             Thunder Road, Billy and me we’d always say

             Thunder Road, we were gonna take it all and throw it all away

 

The listener never actually finds out what promise was broken, not literally, but it doesn’t really matter. The very ambiguity attached to that mystery enables the listener to identify all the closer with the concept, for who hasn’t had a promise broken and felt the accompany devastation of betrayal? The singer doesn’t overly romanticize the reality of the harm done: he admits it’s not life-threatening, that the damage isn’t physical. But he insists that it robs a piece of your soul, with the strong implication that if it’s not a fate worse than death, it’s not far from it, at best. And yet the singer is “merely” wounded, and not even dead. He lacks the strength to even throw it all away—perhaps because he feels it was already taken from him or perhaps because he’s just a shell of the man he used to be. Either way, he’s a man who’s been pushed beyond his limits. And, unlike other Springsteen characters who find that out beyond their furthest limits they have still more as-yet-untapped resources of which they’d never even dreamt (such as the singers of “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and “The Promised Land”), the narrator of “The Promise” has no such resolve. He has been beaten and can do nothing more than lie in the dark, listening to the melancholy, woeful sound of cars driving past him in the rain—driving past him, away from him, leaving him behind, again and again and again, and the existence of the rain implying he’s no longer in the southwest but is instead right back where he started from, in the northeast again, but with a decidedly untriumphant homecoming—as he, carless and bereft, is impotent, powerless, unable or unwilling to act.

             Which may just give a clue as to what the broken promise was: perhaps it was the promise the narrator of “Thunder Road” felt was made by those two lanes, and which he, in turn, then tried to sell to Mary. “We’re pulling out of here to win” is not just an exultation, it’s a promise, a guarantee that good times and good fortune lie ahead. And indeed, the narrator of “The Promise” seems to have won, at least once, and that apparently a big win. But what the narrator seems to find out is either that one big win doesn’t make one a winner or perhaps that it doesn’t guarantee future wins. In any case, it makes that closing promise of the earlier song a lie. That is the promise which has been broken and which has, in turn, so utterly broken his spirit.

             It’s fascinating to note that while Springsteen himself admits “The Promise” is a sequel of sorts to “Thunder Road,” that there’s no mention of Mary. Whether she decided to stay on the porch and forced the narrator to travel on alone, or whether she’s the cause of the narrator’s crushed spirit is unclear: there’s no textual evidence to support either view. But her very absence looms large either way, especially as through the rest of his career Springsteen would continue to use the name Mary again and again, in more than a dozen songs, and even more than that if one were to count the number of times “Maria” pops up in his work. It is as though the Mary of “Thunder Road” became a prototype for The Springsteen Female, almost an archetype to which he returns times and again. Yet in “The Promise” itself she’s notable mainly by her glaring omission, especially when limned against the dramatic appearance of Thunder Road itself in the chorus. 

             “The Promise” is one of the finest songs Springsteen wrote in the 1970s, with a beautiful melody and unexpected yet still logical chord changes, and a complex lyric. But it’s also an utterly pessimistic song, lacking any of the optimism to be found in even the grimmest of songs on his first four album. While there’s no doubt that the way song was already being viewed vis-à-vis the Appel lawsuit was a major, perhaps even the major, reason for the song’s exclusion from Darkness on the Edge of Town, it is this unrelentingly harsh viewpoint which makes the song more fitting for later Springsteen works such as Nebraska and merits exclusion from the album, regardless of its high quality. Additionally, it is hard to discount the idea that Springsteen himself back away from casting such a negative light on “Thunder Road,” a song which had already begun to take on a mythical, almost mystical quality, as he himself would admit. It’s one thing to write and sing such a bleak sequel in concert; it is something else entirely to go on and release it on an album.

 

*****

 

             In virtually any list of The Most Important Bruce Springsteen songs, “Rosalita” holds a unique position. The song is large and rather unwieldy for an artist known largely for his straightforward rock and roll, and it is wild and passionate but lacking the depth for which Springsteen, a writer renowned for his complex lyrics, is known. And it’s the only song from his first two albums to have played a significant role on some tours—such as both his Born in the U.S.A tour as well as The Tunnel of Love Express—which virtually ignored his earliest records. As Jimmy Guterman writes, “The lyric is simple—I’m going to be a rock and roll star, I’m going to transcend my Jerseyness and you should be my girl.” Springsteen himself spoke of “Rosalita” this way in his book “Songs”:

 “‘Rosalita’ was my musical autobiography. It was my “getting out of town” preview for Born to Run, with more humor. I wrote it as a kiss-off to everybody who counted you out, put you down, or decided you weren’t good enough. The lyrics also took a peek into the future—‘Someday we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny.’ Not that it would all BE funny, but that it would all SEEM funny. Probably one of the most useful lines I’ve ever written.”

             Anyone who grew up in the New York/New Jersey/New England area in the 1970s or 1980s will have had little choice but to be familiar with “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight),” as it was a staple on rock radio, as well as in other Springsteen mainstays such as Philadelphia and Cleveland. Seven and a half minutes of barely controlled chaos, it’s one of the most irrepressible Juliet and Romeo love songs in the rock canon—although, unlike Shakespeare’s play, the ending is left unresolved: the lovers are alive but remain separated, the singer camped out below Rosie’s bedroom window, still calling for her to come out tonight. 

 

Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)

 

             Springsteen ended every single concert with this barnburner from the time he wrote it back in 1973—as Guterman wrote, “You’d end your shows with it too if you had thought of it”—until about halfway through the Born in the USA tour, when it became more sporadic. The song returned for the first half of the Tunnel of Love Express tour, with a horn section and a slightly altered melody. Since then it’s been an occasional presence, but one that Springsteen clearly came to consider something of an albatross, especially as in concert it would often balloon to as much as fifteen minutes.

             One result was that Rosalita—both the song and the girl—are beloved but seemed encased in amber, unchanging and eternally perfect, the happy ending presumed but always just out of reach. And the song is really more about the narrator’s quest to win the girl than the girl herself—no matter how many times one may have heard the song, the listener still knows virtually nothing about Rosie, except that the singer will do anything to be with her, despite the strenuous objections of her parents. 

             Of all his songs to revisit, the sprawling behemoth that is “Rosalita” would hardly seem likely. It’s a young man’s song in more ways that one. Not only is the narrator clearly a young man, with the passion and apparent depth of a young man, but the structure itself screams that it was someone barely out of his teens. It’s got multiple verses, multiple bridges, sections that don’t fit any particular mold, every rock chord the key could accommodate, an acappella singalong section and an energy level that’s off the charts, propelled by great guitar, raucous sax and drumming that leads the listener to wonder if the drummer, Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez, snorted rocket fuel immediately before the take. All of which makes it perhaps the most unlikely of his early songs for the older, more mature Springsteen to go back to. And yet on “Long Time Comin’,” Springsteen, as unpredictable an artist as American rock and roll has produced, did exactly that.

             “Rosalita” opens with a statement of purpose:

 

             Spread out now, Rosie, doctor come cut loose her mama’s reins

             You know playin’ blindman’s bluff is a little baby’s game

 

Immediately the listener knows exactly what this song’s about: the singer is being denied access to his girlfriend by her overbearing parents, and he finds this situation intolerable. The next two lines lay out the rest of his basic philosophy:

 

             You pick up Little Dynamite, I’m gonna pick up Little Gun

             And together we’re gonna go out tonight and make that highway run

 

And with those opening lines, the entire song is laid out in microcosm: parents are oppressive and overbearing, friends are what you need to have a good time, and the open road promises freedom.

             The rest of the song only expands upon these assertions, as the narrator runs down where each friend is and what he or she is doing:

 

             Dynamite’s in the belfry playin’ with the bats

             Little Gun’s downtown in front of Woolworth’s tryin’ out his attitude on all the cats

 

             Jack the Rabbit and Weak Knees Willie, you know they’re gonna be there

              Ah, sloppy Sue and Big Bones Billie, they’ll be comin’ up for air

             We’re gonna play some pool, skip some school, act real cool

             Stay out all night, it’s gonna feel all right

 

Compare the vibrancy of these friends, exemplified by their names, and their actions with the way the parents are presented:

 

             Papa’s on the corner waitin’ for the bus

             Mama she’s home in the window waitin’ up for us

             She’ll be there in that chair when they wrestle her upstairs

             ‘Cause you know we ain’t gonna come

 

Although it’s not spelled out, the implication is that Rosie’s father is waiting for the bus to take him to work on the night shift, while her mother is merely sitting. Not playing with bats in a belfry, not trying to impress the guys down on the corner with a surfeit of attitude and most certainly not shooting pool. Just…sitting. And trying to keep her daughter from the fun that awaits. Or so the singer seems to believe.

             In stark contrast to the opening of “Rosalita,” “Long Time Comin’” couldn’t possibly open much differently.

 

Long Time Comin'

Instead of a raucous electric guitar call to arms, we get a gently strummed acoustic guitar at a much more moderate tempo. And whereas the earlier song announced from the fourth word that it was directed to Rosie, the sequel doesn’t mention her by name until well into the third and final verse, although the flowers the singer’s carrying can safely be presumed to be a present for her.

 

             What’s more, the setting of “Rosalita” is urban. This is clear from context: the rest of The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, from the opening track, “The E Street Shuffle,” through to the gorgeous finale, “New York City Serenade,” is set in the New York/New Jersey area, ranging from the boardwalk of “4^th of July, Asbury Park,” to the Bleeker Street of “Kitty’s Back,” only veering away briefly for “Wild Billy’s Circus Story.” But it’s also clear just from “Rosalita” itself, as Springsteen sings of waiting at the bus stop on the corner, hanging out in front of Woolworth’s, and skipping school in favor of the pool hall. 

             “Long Time Comin’,” on the other hand, begins far from the city:

 

             Out where the creek turns shallow and sandy

            And the moon comes skimmin’ away the stars

            The wind in the mesquite comes rushin’ over the hilltops

            Straight into my arms

             Straight into my arms

 

This pastoral opening couldn’t be more different from the earlier work, and whereas “Rosalita” laid out its intent right in the first line, this opening shows little hint of the conflict to come. The rest of the verse subtly introduces the song’s main theme:

 

             I’m riding hard carryin’ a catch of roses

             And a fresh map that I made

             Tonight I’m gonna get birth naked and bury my old soul

             And dance on its grave

             And dance on its grave

 

Although it won’t be made obvious until the next two verses, Springsteen quietly sets up the theme with his birth and death imagery, subjects with which the rest of the song will be concerned.

             But it’s worth noting the preponderance of nature in this first verse. It’s not just that the song is set outside the city, nor is the country a passing mention; Springsteen spends considerable time singing about the creek, the moon, the stars, the wind and the hills. And not merely to set the mood—while the middle verse seems to be set back in the city, he returns to nature for the final verse. “Rosalita,” on the other hand, barely makes any reference to nature at all and when it is noted, briefly in the final verse, it’s in a derogatory fashion, a passing mention at the unfortunate circumstance of a car (that symbol of freedom) being “stuck in the mud somewhere in the swamps of Jersey.” In “Rosalita” nature is a place of (mild) danger, of mud and swamps, where your beloved automobile (even if it is a dud) gets trapped, much as Rosie is trapped by her parents. Yet in the sequel, the wind rushes straight into the singer’s arms like a lover, an echo of the way “Rosalita” ended:

 

             Hold on tight, stay up all night ‘cause Rosie I’m comin’ on strong

             By the time we meet the morning light I will hold you in my arms

 

But unlike the world of “Rosalita,” in this world nature is not an irritant or obstacle, and isn’t even just an idyllic backdrop: it’s lovely, friendly and welcoming—a mirror to the different manner in which family will come to be viewed.

             Unlike “Rosalita,” “Long Time Comin’” has not a single mention of cars or trucks or motorcycles. The narrator does mention riding hard and while it’s never specified, given the rest of the opening verse, one gets the impression that he just might be riding a horse—and what could be much further from the stereotypical Springsteen mode of transportation?

              Whereas “Rosalita” announced its presence and point with authority right from the very beginning, “Long Time Comin’” backs into its major argument, lightly touching upon its theme of family in the first verse and only addressing it head-on in the second.

 

             Well my daddy he was just a stranger

             Lived in a hotel downtown

             When I was a kid he was just somebody

             Somebody I’d see around

             Somebody I’d see around

 

This father bears little resemblance to Rosie’s parents: her overprotective mother standing guard at the window, ready to repel intruders, and her hard-working father, off to man the night shift and disapproving of her boyfriend, whom he can’t understand. The narrator’s father is here just a cipher, not a tangibly oppressive presence, just a malign shadow, just some other ghost out on the street to whom he doesn’t even stop and politely speak when they pass on by. And whatever the faults Rosie’s parents may have—traits which, one suspects, the singer would perhaps view differently nowadays—they had a home and a job, while the narrator’s father appears likely to have at most one and possibly neither, hence the hotel residence.

             But here’s where “Long Time Comin’,” already a lovely song, begins to pick up emotional power, as we contrast the singer’s relationship with his father to his own identity as a father:

 

             Now down below and pullin’ on my shirt

             I got some kids of my own

Well if I had one wish in this god forsaken world, kids

             It’d be that your mistakes would be your own

             Yeah your sins would be your own

 

Again the contrast with the earlier song could not be more stark. Whereas in “Rosalita,” the singer crowed of possessing God’s favor:

 

             My tires were slashed and I almost crashed but the Lord had mercy

 

Here he proclaims this world a god-forsaken one and wishes—not even prays—that the sins of the father would not be visited upon the sons, leading the listener to intuit that perhaps the singer’s father was not such an insignificant presence after all: perhaps they had next-to-no contact on a daily basis, but the father’s actions, certainly past and possibly present, indeed maybe his very existence, has left lasting scars, and the singer devoutly hopes his offspring won’t know the same pain.

             What had seemed a lovely, almost bucolic song in the first verse—albeit with some slightly ominous overtones, with its references to a metaphorical funeral—has turned quite a bit darker here, as family is brought up and presented as a burden. Even as the world is god-forsaken, the singer laments the notion of his sins having a deleterious effect on his children, compared to “Rosalita” where God’s mercy is clear and the concept of  “sin” absent—indeed, given the ebullient tone of the song, virtually laughable.

             But the third verse marries the tone and ideas of the first two verses together, as again the listener is brought back to the country:

 

            Out ‘neath the arms of Cassiopeia

             Where the sword of Orion sweeps

             It’s me and you, Rosie, cracklin’ like crossed wires

             And you breathin’ in your sleep

             You breathin’ in your sleep

 

And here, at long last, we get to see Rosie again, after so very long, and we discover that what had been unresolved—would the lovers get together?—has been most definitely resolved, and for quite some time: certainly long enough for the two of them to have children. Most encouraging of all, the Rosalita who lit the seemingly unquenchable thirst in the singer of the earlier song may be older, may be a mother, but she’s still got the spark that nearly drove the younger version of the singer out of his mind with desire, as things between the two of them are still electric. And this despite the fact that she’s actually asleep, a huge change from our last glimpse of her, standing at the window, high up above, ungettable, almost unapproachable, certainly unattainable—but most definitely wide awake. Here she’s asleep, and the change in action brings with it possible connotations of old age, being worn down, beaten, exhausted. But not this time, as Rosie and the singer still have that sexual tension between the two of them as strong as ever, despite the fact that we have certifiable evidence that they have, in fact, consummated their relationship (leading one to conclude that her tongue was not, in fact, the only lover he would ever need). Yet here they are, still as randy as ever after all these years, which leads to her slumber being viewed with nothing but positive connotations: security and contentedness and if exhaustion is in there as well, it’s the exhaustion every mother knows, a very real weariness, but a pleasant one, most unlike that of the men walking through the factory gates in the rain.

             Nature and Rosie even begin to reflect each other, as the spark that is Rosie and the fire burning nearby mirror the other:

 

             Well there’s just a spark of campfire burning

 

And the kids that had been pulling on his shirt earlier have also dropped off to sleep:

 

             Two kids in a sleeping bag beside

 

And then comes one of the most beautiful and intimate lines Springsteen has ever written:

 

             I reach ‘neath your shirt, lay my hands across your belly

             And feel another one kickin’ inside

 

In another context—“The River,” for instance—it would be easy to see this move as a precursor to the singer feeling trapped, or cutting and running, as the singer of “Hungry Heart” did. But here we see a man determined not to be anything like his father was and who, whether he realizes it or not, is already far different, as his attitude towards his children is never less than protective (but not, one suspects he would argue, overprotective, as Rosie’s parents had been) and always loving, even tender. And yet he’s still determined to improve:

 

            I ain’t gonna fuck it up this time

 

After each verse the singer repeats the same basic line twice:

 

             It’s been a long time comin’, my dear

             It’s been a long time comin’ but now it’s here

 

It’s a nice chorus when heard the first time two times, but after the third, and repeated as it is, it takes on extra weight, gaining momentum and importance as the song progresses, and by the end the listener realizes just what it is which has been so long in coming and which is finally here: maturity and understanding and true adult love, the ability of the narrator to love and be loved, to realize the way he was brought up affected him, how he’s determined to do better by his own children, and the ultimately limited extent to which he’ll be able to do so.

             On December 11, 1996 in Columbus, Springsteen introduced “Long Time Comin’” as having been written for the Ghost of Tom Joad album, but explained why it didn’t make the cut: “Too damn happy!” he said, and laughed.

             Only Springsteen could consider a song as nuanced and complex as “Long Time Comin’” happy. Because it’s not a happy song, per se. It is layered, aware of the difficulties of parenthood, of the hardness of the world, of how desperately parents want to protect their children and how, as Springsteen would say on the Devils & Dust tour, they can’t possibly. None of which leads to “happy.” What it does lead to, in the case of “Long Time Comin’” is instead deep, adult joy, a joy borne of the deepest love, never ignoring or denying the difficulties of family, but able to look past them or perhaps even amplified by them. It is one of the greatest songs Springsteen has written in the past decade and a half and perhaps of his entire career.

 

*****

 

             It’s instructive to compare and contrast “Rosalita” and “Thunder Road,” as both are, when stripped down to their most basic essence, about a guy trying to get a girl to run away with him. The difference is in how the two young men approach the situation. The singer of “Rosalita” says, in effect, hey, look, I know this awesome little place down around San Diego. I scored a record contract, so why don’t you run away with me? It’ll be great! Whereas the singer of “Thunder Road” basically says, there’s nothing but losers in this town. It’s gotta be better somewhere else—I’m sure of it. Come on, let’s go. But he’s got no set destination in mind, simply “somewhere other than here.” And while he certainly would seem to be the more mature, more grounded of the two narrators, he’s lacking the material career prospects Rosie’s guy has. So while the song “Thunder Road” is by virtually any yardstick the more mature, sophisticated work, in the end, it is the narrator of “Thunder Road” who is the more childish of the two narrators, lacking the clear vision and definite goal the singer of “Rosalita” has. He doesn’t want to get someplace specific, he merely wants to get anywhere else. Rosie’s guy wants to go mainly because he’s in love with her. Mary’s would-be suitor wants to go because he hates where they are.

             It’s also instructive to compare and contrast the history of the two sequels. “The Promise” was written soon after “Thunder Road,” about a year and a half later, but then remained unreleased for an additional 22 years—and when it was released, it was semi-buried on 18 Tracks, a compilation which sold a fraction of what even a lesser-selling original Springsteen album would be expected to sell. “Long Time Comin’,” on the other hand, wasn’t written until roughly 20 years after “Rosalita,” and then had to wait another decade to be released—but when it was, it was a highlight of Devils & Dust, an acclaimed and successful album of new material. So one sequel was written relatively quickly after the original, while the other wasn’t written for decades. The first was hidden and only saw the light of day in a way and time unlikely to gain it major attention and was only released because of demand from a fairly small (but devoted) group of hardcore fans, while the other came out because it finally fit an album. But the grim message of “The Promise” would have fit on The River, or Nebraska (even if its tone wouldn’t have) or The Ghost of Tom Joad. Yet still it remained unreleased, as compared to “Long Time Comin’” which merely had to bide its time.

             And in the end, these four pieces are linked not just by the extreme popularity of the original pair of songs, “Rosalita” and “Thunder Road,” but by the fact that in their sequels the listener discovers the power of the promise: how in “The Promise” a vow being broken leads to utter destruction, while in “Long Time Comin’” the vow being kept leads to ineffable joy.

Paul Evans once wrote, “…with Springsteen’s growing older we see a chance that we missed with Elvis—that of a great American rocker confronting age with grace.” (The Rolling Stone Album Guide, 665.) Fifteen years after Evans wrote that, it’s clear that we have, in fact, a great American rocker not just confronting age with grace but continuing to grapple with the biggest of questions and in doing so turning out some of the best work of his entire career: which is to say, some of the greatest rock and roll ever, made all the more powerful for revisiting earlier works, updating, and even improving upon them—not a risk most rockers would care to take. But then, Bruce Springsteen isn’t most rockers. He’s one of the true American masters.

 

 

 

 

It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City

Hit with the dreaded “New Dylan” label before his debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, was released, it’s not hard to see why Bruce Springsteen was thusly tagged. His songs were bursting with the sort of free flowing lyrical ideas and wordplay that Dylan had introduced to rock and roll a decade earlier. The results were generally delightful, ranging from the touching and effective (“Growin’ Up”) to absurdly funny (“Blinded by the Light”) to somewhat self-defeating (“For You”).

But Springsteen tended to apply his seemingly stream of consciousness lyrics to straightforward narratives in a way Dylan seldom did outside his talking blues. And in a few of those cases, such as “Spirit in the Night,” his antecedent seems less Dylan than Chuck Berry, with the outlandish names or even going back further, to Woody Guthrie.

But on the final track—“It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City,” one of the least noted of the album's songs—Springsteen seems to reach back even further still. 

It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City

I had skin like leather and the diamond-hard look of a cobra

This is just about straight out of the Bo Diddley songbook, harkening, of course, to his classic “Who Do You Love?” But then things take a turn for the slightly cosmic.

I was born blue and weathered but I burst just like a supernova

When it comes to bragging, other than outright stating you’re a deity, it’s nearly impossible to top comparing yourself to a supernova. Where can you go from there? What can possibly live up to a supernova?

I could walk like Brando right into the sun

Ah, yes. Marlon Brando. That’s what.

Now we go past Bo Diddley and back to the early blues, as the song, despite its more modern references, is basically a one-sided version of The Dozens, the game of trading insults and/or boasting of one’s own prowess, maybe most familiar these days for its prevalence in hip-hop.

Then dance just like a Casanova
With my blackjack and jacket and hair slicked sweet
Silver star studs on my duds like a Harley in heat
When I strut down the street I could hear its heartbeat
The sisters fell back and said "Don't that man look pretty"
The cripple on the corner cried out "Nickels for your pity"
Them gasoline boys downtown sure talk gritty
It's so hard to be a saint in the city

The title stands out there. Where'd it come from? How did we get here? Other than the line which immediately precedes it, it’s the first time we’re not focusing on the narrator and how badass he is—even the ladies of the night and the cripples are awed by his very presence. What’s so hard? The narrator's so tuned in, he can even hear the street’s heartbeat. It seems, so far, as though he’s living the life…relative to his surroundings.

And as to those…

I was the king of the alley, mama, I could talk some trash
I was the prince of the paupers crowned downtown at the beggar's bash
I was the pimp's main prophet I kept everything cool
Just a backstreet gambler with the luck to lose

Now it starts to make a bit more sense. Note that even in this made-up world of his, he’s not the king of rock and roll, or even England—or, as Elvis Costello would later crown himself, of America—but the king of the alley, talking trash…as he’s doing here. The prince and the pauper? He’s the prince of the paupers. Earlier he compared himself to a supernova, or Marlon Brando. (But I repeat myself.) But look at how much more realistic he’s getting as the song progresses. He opened big, went bigger...but now, when going for grandiose, his dreams are, sadly, far more grounded.

And when the heat came down it was left on the ground
The devil appeared like Jesus through the steam in the street
Showin' me a hand I knew even the cops couldn't beat
I felt his hot breath on my neck as I dove into the heat
It's so hard to be a saint when you're just a boy out on the street

Things continue to get dicier as we go along. First he was a supernova, then the prince of paupers, and now the devil’s breathing down his neck.

And then the bridge appears, and the mask slips away for good.

And the sages of the subway sit just like the living dead
As the tracks clack out the rhythm their eyes fixed straight ahead
They ride the line of balance and hold on by just a thread
But it's too hot in these tunnels you can get hit up by the heat
You get up to get out at your next stop but they push you back down in your seat
Your heart starts beatin' faster as you struggle to your feet
Then you're outa that hole and back up on the street

Suddenly, the assured braggadocio is gone, replaced by something close to panic. Where he had been an astrophysical entity, now he’s not even a prince, treated more like one of his former subjects, a pauper, and even though he's going through the classic decent into hell, he's no classic mythological hero—he's barely even a hero in his own eyes any more, manhandled until he can break free and escape.

And them South Side sisters sure look pretty
The cripple on the corner cries out "Nickels for your pity"
And them downtown boys sure talk gritty
It's so hard to be a saint in the city

And once freed from the underworld he goes back to the earlier refrain…but why? Comfort? Unable to think clearly enough to come up with something else? The bragging is gone and doesn’t return. Instead, he laments—or, perhaps, simply states—the plain fact of the difficulty of being a saint in the city. In fact, he's now listing the various denizens he's running across and seems to count himself one of them, no longer one well above the rest. No more bravado, no more dozens. His voice almost cracks as he semi-whispers these lines. At the end of an album stuffed to the breaking point with wordplay, what he leaves us on is the just the facts, ma'am. Just the plain and simple reality: life in the city is hard, you’re beset on all sides, so you’d damn well better develop a tough shield, an impenetrable persona, or you're not going to make it. They'll get you. They'll win. 

Springsteen opened his debut claiming he was going to stare straight into the heart of the sun, over his mother’s admonitions, just for the fun of it. By the end of the record, he’s relieved to still be alive, and realistic about the chances of being the kind of person that, his boasts to the contrary, he’d like to be. The world's too challenging for that. You're lucky to just get by. 

He’d soon change styles, leaving this type of excessive wordplay and even the more fanciful music behind. But already on this first album, he’s setting up one of his major themes: the hardness of the world and what it does to people just trying to make their way in it.   

RIP Clarence Clemons

I’ve seen Bruce Springsteen at least once on each tour he’s done since Born in the USA, with one exception brought about by an offspring’s most inconvenient surgery. (Oh, Science. Sure, you save the lives of my children but, you know: rock and roll.) Each and every one of those shows had more magical moments than I can count: watching him laughing as he forgot the words to “Born to Run,” during a gorgeous acoustic version in 1988. Hearing him perform a duet with Roy of “Fourth of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” for the first time on tour in 1992, minutes after telling Top Management he probably wouldn’t be playing this favorite of hers. (She’s still convinced he played it Just For Her.) Witnessing a surprising fall off a ramp in 2002, leading to him playing the rest of the show with blood dripping down his forearm. And so many, many more.

But none of them are more special to me than a different moment at that same show. It was the closest I’d ever been to the stage—we were about ten feet back, I’d guess. And at one point during the second song, “Lonesome Day,” I looked up at Clarence, the Big Man himself, who was watching Bruce, and just looked so happy. And I was just staring at his face, wondering what it felt like to be up there, doing what he was doing…and he looked down at me. He held my eyes for just a few seconds, but as he did, he kept smiling but it changed ever so slightly, and I swear he was saying, “Yeah…it just doesn’t get any better than this.” 

Artists Who Hate America

I love the internet.

I just read the following comment:

do the lirics to Springsteens song 
" born in the USA" bother anybody else besides me???

And I wanted to say:

Yes! Thank you! I thought I was the only one!

Although, you know what's even worse? Have you ever read The Grapes of Wrath? Oh my goodness! You won't belieeeeeve the way America is portrayed. 

It's shameful, really. 

UPDATE: Ah, now I see why the lirics bothered the aforementioned internet poster. 

It always goes back to Glenn Beck, doesn't it? What we do without him? 

Happy Birthday to U.S.

Big thanks to George and Tom and Ben and John and all the rest for the present. Sorry if we haven't treated it as well as we should. We'll try harder.  

Yes It Is

The Promised Land

So last night the fambly had itself an apple pie, in honor of this great nation of ours and its nutty experiment with democracy. Oh sure, there’ve been some stumbles along the way, a few of 'em not inconsiderable, but I like to think that after a couple hunnert years, we’re still doing okay.

The excitement over the election plumb wore out The Boy, so I put him to bed and was just checking email when the phone rang. And it turned out to be understandably reluctant Left o’ the Dialian Matthew, actually outside the front door, holding a bottle of fine agave-based spirits and a lime. “I’ve come to drink to America,” said he.

And so we did, left and right, red and blue, saved and heretic, tall and short, coifed and thinning, thin and thickening. And it was good.

And awaiting me this morning was an email from my first bloggety friend, Professor Steve the Llama, as far to the right as I am to the left, congratulating me on my candidate winning, and asking if I was going to be listening to “The Promised Land” on a loop today.

I was not. But I was more than happy to take his fine suggestion and run this here piece.

‘Cuz I ain’t a boy, but I do believe in a promised land. And I feel like we took one big step closer to it yesterday.

Long Walk Home

One of the greatest songs of this young century so far. 

Long Walk Home

Last night I stood at your doorstep
Trying to figure out what went wrong
You just slipped somethin' into my palm 
Then you were gone
I could smell the same deep green of summer
Above me the same night sky was glowin'
In the distance I could see the town where I was born

It's gonna be a long walk home
Hey, pretty darling, don't wait up for me 
Gonna be a long walk home
A long walk home

In town I passed Sal's grocery
The barbershop on South Street
I looked into their faces 
They were all rank strangers to me
The veterans' hall high up on the hill 
Stood silent and alone
The diner was shuttered and boarded 
With a sign that just said "gone"

It's gonna be a long walk home
Hey, pretty darling, don't wait up for me 
Gonna be a long walk home
Hey, pretty darling, don't wait up for me 
Gonna be a long walk home 
It's gonna be a long walk home

Here everybody has a neighbor
Everybody has a friend
Everybody has a reason to begin again

My father said "Son, we're lucky in this town
It's a beautiful place to be born
It just wraps its arms around you
Nobody crowds you, nobody goes it alone
You know, that flag flying over the courthouse
Means certain things are set in stone
Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't."

Its gonna be a long walk home
Hey, pretty darling, don't wait up for me 
Gonna be a long walk home
Hey, pretty darling, don't wait up for me 
Gonna be a long walk home 
It's gonna be a long walk home

Its gonna be a long walk home
Hey, pretty darling, don't wait up for me 
Gonna be a long walk home
Hey, pretty darling, don't wait up for me 
Gonna be a long walk home 
It's gonna be a long walk home

It's gonna be a long walk home   

Farewell to Danny

This eulogy was delivered by Bruce Springsteen at Danny's funeral on April 21 in Red Bank, New Jersey:

FAREWELL TO DANNY
Let me start with the stories.

Back in the days of miracles, the frontier days when "Mad Dog" Lopez and his temper struck fear into the band, small club owners, innocent civilians and all women, children and small animals.

Back in the days when you could still sign your life away on the hood of a parked car in New York City.

Back shortly after a young red-headed accordionist struck gold on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour and he and his mama were sent to Switzerland to show them how it's really done.

Back before beach bums were featured on the cover of Time magazine.

I'm talking about back when the E Street Band was a communist organization! My pal, quiet, shy Dan Federici, was a one-man creator of some of the hairiest circumstances of our 40 year career... And that wasn't easy to do. He had "Mad Dog" Lopez to compete with.... Danny just outlasted him.

Maybe it was the "police riot" in Middletown, New Jersey. A show we were doing to raise bail money for "Mad Log" Lopez who was in jail in Richmond, Virginia, for having an altercation with police officers who we'd aggravated by playing too long. Danny allegedly knocked over our huge Marshall stacks on some of Middletown's finest who had rushed the stage because we broke the law by...playing too long.

As I stood there watching, several police oficers crawled out from underneath the speaker cabinets and rushed away to seek medical attention. Another nice young officer stood in front of me onstage waving his nightstick, poking and calling me nasty names. I looked over to see Danny with a beefy police officer pulling on one arm while Flo Federici, his first wife, pulled on the other, assisting her man in resisting arrest.

A kid leapt from the audience onto the stage, momentarily distracting the beefy officer with the insults of the day. Forever thereafter, "Phantom" Dan Federici slipped into the crowd and disappeared.

A warrant out for his arrest and one month on the lam later, he still hadn't been brought to justice. We hid him in various places but now we had a problem. We had a show coming at Monmouth College. We needed the money and we had to do the gig. We tried a replacement but it didn't work out. So Danny, to all of our admiration, stepped up and said he'd risk his freedom, take the chance and play.

Show night. 2,000 screaming fans in the Monmouth College gym. We had it worked out so Danny would not appear onstage until the moment we started playing. We figured the police who were there to arrest him wouldn't do so onstage during the show and risk starting another riot.

Let me set the scene for you. Danny is hiding, hunkered down in the backseat of a car in the parking lot. At five minutes to eight, our scheduled start time, I go out to whisk him in. I tap on the window.

"Danny, come on, it's time."

I hear back, "I'm not going."

Me: "What do you mean you're not going?"

Danny: "The cops are on the roof of the gym. I've seen them and they're going to nail me the minute I step out of this car."

As I open the door, I realize that Danny has been smoking a little something and had grown rather paranoid. I said, "Dan, there are no cops on the roof."

He says, "Yes, I saw them, I tell you. I'm not coming in."

So I used a procedure I'd call on often over the next forty years in dealing with my old pal's concerns. I threatened him...and cajoled. Finally, out he came. Across the parking lot and into the gym we swept for a rapturous concert during which we laughted like thieves at our excellent dodge of the local cops.

At the end of the evening, during the last song, I pulled the entire crowd up onto the stage and Danny slipped into the audience and out the front door. Once again, "Phantom" Dan had made his exit. (I still get the occasional card from the old Chief of Police of Middletown wishing us well. Our histories are forever intertwined.) And that, my friends, was only the beginning.

There was the time Danny quit the band during a rough period at Max's Kansas City, explaining to me that he was leaving to fix televisions. I asked him to think about that and come back later.

Or Danny, in the band rental car, bouncing off several parked cars after a night of entertainment, smashing out the windshield with his head but saved from severe injury by the huge hard cowboy hat he bought in Texas on our last Western swing.

Or Danny, leaving a large marijuana plant on the front seat of his car in a tow away zone. The car was promptly towed. He said, "Bruce, I'm going to go down and report that it was stolen." I said, "I'm not sure that's a good idea."

Down he went and straight into the slammer without passing go.

Or Danny, the only member of the E Street Band to be physically thrown out of the Stone Pony. Considering all the money we made them, that wasn't easy to do.

Or Danny receiving and surviving a "cautionary assault" from an enraged but restrained "Big Man" Clarence Clemons while they were living together and Danny finally drove the "Big Man" over the big top.

Or Danny assisting me in removing my foot from his stereo speaker after being the only band member ever to drive me into a violent rage.

And through it all, Danny played his beautiful, soulful B3 organ for me and our love grew. And continued to grow. Life is funny like that. He was my homeboy, and great, and for that you make considerations... And he was much more tolerant of my failures than I was of his.

When Danny wasn't causing chaos, he was a sweet, talented, unassuming, unpretentious good-hearted guy who simply had an unchecked ability to make good fortune and things in general go fabulously wrong.

But beyond all of that, he also had a mountain of the right stuff. He had the heart and soul of an engineer. He learned to fly. He was always up on the latest technology and would explain it to you patiently and in enormous detail. He was always "souping" something up, his car, his stereo, his B3. When Patti joined the band, he was the most welcoming, thoughtful, kindest friend to the first woman entering our "boys club."

He loved his kids, always bragging about Jason, Harley, and Madison, and he loved his wife Maya for the new things she brought into his life.

And then there was his artistry. He was the most intuitive player I've ever seen. His style was slippery and fluid, drawn to the spaces the other musicians in the E Street Band left. He wasn't an assertive player, he was a complementary player. A true accompanist. He naturally supplied the glue that bound the band's sound together. In doing so, he created for himself a very specific style. When you hear Dan Federici, you don't hear a blanket of sound, you hear a riff, packed with energy, flying above everything else for a few moments and then gone back in the track. "Phantom" Dan Federici. Now you hear him, now you don't.

Offstage, Danny couldn't recite a lyric or a chord progression for one of my songs. Onstage, his ears opened up. He listened, he felt, he played, finding the perfect hole and placement for a chord or a flurry of notes. This style created a tremendous feeling of spontaneity in our ensemble playing.

In the studio, if I wanted to loosen up the track we were recording, I'd put Danny on it and not tell him what to play. I'd just set him loose. He brought with him the sound of the carnival, the amusements, the boardwalk, the beach, the geography of our youth and the heart and soul of the birthplace of the E Street Band.

Then we grew up. Very slowly. We stood together through a lot of trials and tribulations. Danny's response to a mistake onstage, hard times, catastrophic events was usually a shrug and a smile. Sort of an "I am but one man in a raging sea, but I'm still afloat. And we're all still here."

I watched Danny fight and conquer some tough addictions. I watched him struggle to put his life together and in the last decade when the band reunited, thrive on sitting in his seat behind that big B3, filled with life and, yes, a new maturity, passion for his job, his family and his home in the brother and sisterhood of our band.

Finally, I watched him fight his cancer without complaint and with great courage and spirit. When I asked him how things looked, he just said, "what are you going to do? I'm looking forward to tomorrow." Danny, the sunny side up fatalist. He never gave up right to the end.

A few weeks back we ended up onstage in Indianapolis for what would be the last time. Before we went on I asked him what he wanted to play and he said, "Sandy." He wanted to strap on the accordion and revisit the boardwalk of our youth during the summer nights when we'd walk along the boards with all the time in the world.

So what if we just smashed into three parked cars, it's a beautiful night! So what if we're on the lam from the entire Middletown police department, let's go take a swim! He wanted to play once more the song that is of course about the end of something wonderful and the beginning of something unknown and new.

Let's go back to the days of miracles. Pete Townshend said, "a rock and roll band is a crazy thing. You meet some people when you're a kid and unlike any other occupation in the whole world, you're stuck with them your whole life no matter who they are or what crazy things they do."

If we didn't play together, the E Street Band at this point would probably not know one another. We wouldn't be in this room together. But we do... We do play together. And every night at 8 p.m., we walk out on stage together and that, my friends, is a place where miracles occur...old and new miracles. And those you are with, in the presence of miracles, you never forget. Life does not separate you. Death does not separate you. Those you are with who create miracles for you, like Danny did for me every night, you are honored to be amongst.

Of course we all grow up and we know "it's only rock and roll"...but it's not. After a lifetime of watching a man perform his miracle for you, night after night, it feels an awful lot like love.

So today, making another one of his mysterious exits, we say farewell to Danny, "Phantom" Dan, Federici. Father, husband, my brother, my friend, my mystery, my thorn, my rose, my keyboard player, my miracle man and lifelong member in good standing of the house rockin', pants droppin', earth shockin', hard rockin', booty shakin', love makin', heart breakin', soul cryin'... and, yes, death defyin' legendary E Street Band.

RIP Danny Federici

Well, damn. Farewell to perhaps the most rocking accordian player ever.

Danny Federici, for 40 years the E Street Band's organist and keyboard player, died this afternoon, April 17, 2008 at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City after a three year battle with melanom

"Danny and I worked together for 40 years - he was the most wonderfully fluid keyboard player and a pure natural musician. I loved him very much...we grew up together." —Bruce Springsteen

The Promise

So I’m giving a presentation in my graduate class tonight on Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town and to start off I’m going to be talking about this song. Springsteen wrote “The Promise” in 1976, the year after Born to Run was released, and while he recorded it in the studio and played it in concert a few dozen times, it didn’t actually come out until 1999 , when he cut a new solo version and snuck it out on a little-noticed compilation.

An amazing song, and a key to understanding the album, even in—or maybe especially because of—its absence, like (in a very different way) the exclusion of “Fire” and “Because the Night,” both of which were written for the album and both of which went on to become huge hits for other artists, but which he kept off Darkness, since they didn’t fit the album’s larger theme.

“The Promise” does, though, perfectly. Perhaps too much so, with its quotes from and allusions to earlier songs, especially the chorus, which hits a hardcore fan like a brick. It would have taken an album already surprising in its maturity—its darkness, one might say—and made it simply too grim, too pessimistic.

Amazing song, though.

The Promise
Johnny works in a factory and Billy works downtown
Terry works in a rock and roll band
Lookin' for that million-dollar sound
I got a little job down in Darlington
But some nights I don't go
Some nights I go to the drive-in, or some nights I stay home

I followed that dream just like those guys do up on the screen
I drove my Challenger down Route 9 through the dead ends and all the bad scenes
And when the promise was broken, I cashed in a few of my dreams

Well now I built that Challenger by myself
But I needed money and so I sold it
I lived a secret I should'a kept to myself
But I got drunk one night and I told it
All my life I fought that fight
That fight you can't ever win
Every day it just gets harder to live
This dream I'm believing in

Thunder Road, oh baby you were so right
Thunder Road, there's something dyin' on the highway tonight

I won big once and I hit the coast
But somehow I paid the big cost
Inside I felt like I was carryin' the broken spirits
Of all the other ones who lost
When the promise is broken you go on living
But it steals something from down in your soul
Like when the truth is spoken and it don't make no difference
Something in your heart goes cold

I followed that dream through the southwestern flats
That dead ends in two-bit bars
And when the promise was broken I was far away from home
Sleepin' in the back seat of a borrowed car

Thunder Road, for the lost lovers and all the fixed games
Thunder Road, for the tires rushing by in the rain
Thunder Road, remember Billy what we'd always say
Thunder Road, we were gonna take it all and throw it all away

An open letter to the girl at the Springsteen concert

This is an open letter to the girl who pushed her way in front of us at the Bruce Springsteen concert in Los Angeles on October 30th.

There’s no question you’re attractive, a fact of which you are undoubtedly aware. The black tank top and tight white pants, the pretty face and long dark hair, and the bubbly, sassy, dare I say it, insouciant ‘tude all combined to make it more than obvious that you’re quite cognizant of your physical attractivicity.

The fact that you used your small, lithe frame to push past hundreds of larger people, reaching behind you to pull your much-larger-than-you male friends along for the ride was a classic trick, a variation on the film staple of the young hottie hitchhiker with her boyfriend waiting in the bushes.

That you were stunned that we’d be less than happy about you pushing in front of us, although we’d been waiting about four hours at the point, was itself pretty stunning. “Whoa…bad karma in this area,” you purred, as though you weren’t the one responsible for bringing said negative vibe to the region.
That you then lit up a spliff the size of Tulsa and consumed the entire thing in ninety seconds was impressive.
The way you started dancing once the music started, an odd combination of Woodstock-inspired hippie twirls with Y2K-era poledance grinding was amusing, if at times downright parodistic.
That you clearly thought said gyrations were fetching when what you were was actually mainly baffling and intrusive was humorously perplexing if distracting.
How clearly you knew and loved the music seemed contradictory but was at least somewhat endearing.
Watching you crash about 2/3 of the way through the concert was rather satisfying.

Most of all, though, what you were was a jerk, a complete and total antithesis to what Bruce Springsteen and his music has been about for the past forty years, about the importance of honesty and hard work. You wanted a great view but didn’t want to have to earn it. Well, sure—that’s understandable. Generally speaking, getting things for free is way better than paying for them. But as our boy Bruce himself said, “you wanna play, you gotta pay!”

You wanted to play. But you didn’t want to pay. You just wanted to cheat and cut to the front of the line, past those who were willing to pay the cost, the hassle of getting there early and the physical discomfort of standing out in the cold for hours, and then standing packed together for a few more hours. It’s a little thing. Except it’s not. This deregard for doing what’s right in favor of what makes you happy at that exact moment is one of the things that’s worst about our culture in a microcosm.

At the end of the day, on the scale of all that is good and right, with Bruce Springsteen and his music at one end and George W. Bush and his incompetent, corrupt and nepotistic administration and family at the other, you are one hell of a lot closer to GWB than to Spruce. And given how well you knew Bruce’s lyrics, I take at least a tiny bit of comfort in knowing you’d probably be horrified by that. As well you should be.

When the Night Has Come

So this is one of the greatest songs in rock history, written and originally recorded by one of the great singers in rock history, and later covered by one of the other truly great singers in rock history.

Bruce Springsteen trails only the Beatles and perhaps Elvis Presley in terms of the all-time great cover artists in the history of rock. And while U2's covers are a bit inconsistent, when they're good, they're absolutely brilliant.

Put 'em together like this and you've got…well, a nice cover. It's nowhere near as good as the original or John Lennon's cover, nor as great as the covers Bruce and U2 have done separately in the past. On the other hand, seeing artists as great as these having fun like this is more than reward enough. And Adam and Larry make a hell of a rhythm section, even if Adam doesn't seem to be playing the classic bassline and how is that possible?

Back in the Saddle

Sorry for the radio silence. I threw out my back last Monday—as in, eight days ago—and long story short, I wasn’t able to get out of bed until today. I'll write more about my saga anon because, let’s be honest, all three of you are simply dying to know every tiny little detail. And who can blame you?

My recovery is due to TLC from Top Management and the rest of the fambly and heavy, heavy drugs: prednisone, flexiril, percocet and megadoses of advil. Oh, and a most amazing book, about which more later.

But it turns out I should simply have listened to Bruce Springsteen. I mean, hell’s bells, that’s obvious—everyone should. But who knew that, in addition to being our great nation’s finest living musical performer, he had healing abilities?

The following is from an interview with ABC reporter Bob Woodruff and his wife, Lee; folks may recall that Bob suffered horrific injuries in Iraq and wasn’t expected to make much of a recovery, if indeed any a’tall. Turns out he’s back in the saddle again.

Rock: the giver of life.

A range of music from the Boss to Bach was mentioned in your book. Were there favorite musicians, authors and books, and movies that both of you turned to for rejuvenation during the recovery process?

LW: Bob's mother and brothers talked to him constantly. His father read the sports pages out loud to him, especially any news of his beloved Detroit Tigers, Pistons, and Red Wings. Melanie Bloom came down to spell me for a few days while I went up to be with the kids and she read the book Endurance about Ernest Shackleton's ill fated journey to the South Pole.

But I have to say that Bruce Springsteen was a major part of Bob's recovery. Bob is a huge Springsteen fan and he would take his music on the road to obscure places in the world and blast it for all of the guys in the crew. Bruce got word of this through friends of ours and sent Bob a wonderful note and some CDs. We played those CDs all of the time. And when I read Bob the letter during his coma, I kind stretched the truth a little— hoping it would help him wake up faster. I—um—sort of lied and said if he woke up, Bruce would come and play for him and some of the other soldiers in the hospital.

I thought nothing more of that until the second day Bob was awake. He turned to me suddenly and made strumming guitar motions. "I have to get one of those...umm..." and he strummed the air. "I need to be ready to play when that Bossman comes," he said.

Damn, sam. Now I'm wondering what CDs Bruce sent.

That man's magic, I tell ye. Magic.

Born to Be a Folk Hero

I haven’t written about my boy Bruce in months, an egregious oversight. So here’s a nice piece on him from, of course, the Belfast Telegraph.

The Boss: Born to Be a Folk Hero
by Jane Graham

More than 30 years have passed since Rolling Stone's star writer Jon Landau abandoned journalism to manage a new singer-songwriter, so convinced was he that, in his now legendary words, he had "seen the future and its name was Bruce Springsteen".

Since then, the singer's career has been crowded out with moments of equally mythical status, making his one of the most compelling tales in the long history of rock music.

In the last few years his work has taken yet another fascinating turn, momentous in both artistic and political terms, and yet again his live shows are attracting a buzz unlike any of his peers'. Quite a feat for a man nearing his sixties but in pop-cultural terms, this man is a true one-off.

Springsteen's journey from America's favourite blue-collar rock 'n' roller to, more recently, the artist who has split US opinion more than any other is an illuminating one and says much about his continuing
relevance.

Perhaps the most fascinating element of the story is that few saw it coming. When Springsteen became the undisputed king of stadium rock in 1984 with the anthem Born in the USA his place as one of the continent's most revered music icons seemed assured. The Boss had conquered America and, as it tends to do with its big hitters, America embraced him, holding him up as a standard bearer for the American dream. Who would have thought that two decades on the same guy would be passionately vilified by the right-wing community who once hailed him as their own?

'Disgrace', 'dirtbag' and 'floating fag' are just some of the epithets that have been thrown at the singer in the last five years.

For those paying attention, however, there were early clues that Springsteen's Godlike status among the distracted masses may not last. The most obvious clue lay in the vast chasm between the average American's understanding of the lyrics of Born in the USA (the chorus was catchy, easy to sing along to, and sounded like a proud statement of national identity), and the actual meaning of the words (a bitter attack upon the hypocrisy and inhumane behaviour of said nation towards its Vietnam vets).

One can only imagine what Springsteen made of Ronald Reagan's words during his Presidential campaign in 1984: "America's future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts; it rests in the message of hope in songs so many young Americans admire - New Jersey's own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about." Never in the field of rock'n'roll have so many been so deluded by their own selective hearing.

Since that incredible gaffe, there has been a slow, growing awareness of Springsteen's liberal credentials - hugely disappointing for some of his mid-1980s fanbase - but few would have predicted just how extreme the pro- and anti- camps would have become by the new century.

The singer's swing from national hero to a love/hate figure is much to do with the unapologetic stance he has adopted on public, contentious issues, but it also pays tribute to the continuing power of his work because, ultimately, it's the songs that have p**sed people off.

Springsteen has always engaged with progressive politics with a small 'p', but since 2000 he seems to have decided to make more overt his dissatisfaction with the world's - and most particularly the US's - ills. In the years following Born in the USA, he was more inclined to write the kind of odes to smalltown loves and loss that first attracted Jon Landau (like Tunnel Of Love, 1987), his forays into political ommentary indirect, through portraits and pictures (The Ghost of Tom Joad, 1995).

But in 2000 he wrote American Skin, a mournful critique of the killing of African immigrant and New York resident Amadou Diallo, who died in a hail of 41 bullets by local police after a 'misunderstanding' about Diallo's intentions.

"You can get killed just for living in your American skin.
41 shots.
41 shots.
41 shots," Springsteen sang, outraging police organisations in New York, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and sections of the media.

New York's State Fraternal Order of Police, Bob Lucente, promptly bestowed the 'floating fag' tag upon the singer when he performed the song live in Atlanta.

After the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, the world waited for a response from the American artistic community. Bruce Springsteen stepped up, first opening the Tribute To Heroes fundraising concert in New York less than a month after the event, then releasing the first significant post 9/11 album, The Rising. At first glance it looked like the horror of the Twin Towers attacks had shocked the usually complex Springsteen into offering himself up as a poster-boy for all-American
sentimentality, and there are tracks on the album that do tread a mawkish, predictable line.

However, there is also Paradise, an unsettlingly non-judgmental ballad which imagines the last thoughts of a suicide bomber. It enraged one American reviewer so much he declared: "You could find no more direct example of the wickedness of liberal multiculturalism and moral equivalence".

For, many however, The Rising was bold, beautiful, truthful and an enlightening investigation into the heart of the human soul - in short, a return to the greatest of form. On a roll, Springsteen won a Grammy for his follow up, Devils & Dust, and continued to court political controversy.

Since 2002 he has been highly involved in a number of high-profile campaigns, including World Hunger Year and Vote for Change (which included solo sets at democratic candidate John Kerry's rallies). He also performed in New Orleans in April of this year, where he criticised the "criminal ineptitude" of local and national governments.

This year has also seen the release of one of Springsteen's best received albums for a decade (it went straight to No 1 in the US charts and to No 2 in the UK charts). The Seeger Sessions is a joyful, thrilling collection of traditional Americana, recorded and performed in single takes, with no rehearsals or overdubs, in the spirit of the great American folk icon Pete Seeger (and strongly reminiscent of Dylan's legendary Basement Tapes).

And though the songs themselves, only some actually written by Seeger, are steeped in time and place, the link between Springsteen's version of the protest song We Shall Overcome and his current feelings about his home country is clear.

Unlike Dylan, who long ago ducked out from political responsibility, Springsteen is strong and willing enough to carry the necessary weight on his shoulders. For this he should be celebrated and endlessly encouraged.

He has become a giant amongst his contemporaries, more relevant today than he has perhaps ever been, with no signs of going soft on us or looking to pass on the baton.

This boy was born to run. And run. And run.

Springsteen in New Orleans

Dave Marsh has long been one of my very favorite writers, even before he gave me some advice when Max was first diagnosed with leukemia.

Here’s a recent piece from him, which he encouraged others to repost.

Dave Marsh on Bruce Springsteen in New Orleans

GREETINGS FROM NEW ORLEANS, LA. —In a time of warfare against a phantom enemy abroad and a war against the poor creating phantom citizens at home, up pops Bruce Springsteen with an album titled We Shall Overcome. He didn't have New Orleans in mind when he started making it in 1997, but both the music and the ways he's using it speak directly to the situation there today.

Deciding to start his current tour with the Seeger Sessions Band at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival on April 30 reflected Springsteen's sensitivity to the issues of poverty and racism and his ability to pick up on a catalytic opportunity. What Vietnam veterans were twenty years ago--a powerful symbol of the people the system tries to erase from view--New Orleans is today.

Discussion of Bruce's new album has focused on its subtitle, The Seeger Sessions, probably because people are puzzled by what it all means. The song selections don't seem nearly as political as their source, Pete Seeger. Yet four of the thirteen--"O Mary Don't You Weep," "Jacob's Ladder," "Eyes on the Prize" and "We Shall Overcome"--have at one time or another been used as "freedom songs." "Pay Me My Money Down" is that rare thing, a song that truly protests the situation it describes. "John Henry," "My Oklahoma Home," and "Mrs. McGrath" are explicitly about oppressed folk. That's almost two thirds of the thirteen song album.

One reason the album seems to avoid politics is "We Shall Overcome" itself. Springsteen's version downplays its spirit-rousing aspect; instead he sings it as one of his desperate love songs, even changing the chorus from "Deep in my heart" to "Darling, here in my heart." The result is a lovely ballad of two people against a hard world, and a violation of the collective spirit that the song stands for. He sings "Eyes on the Prize" in the same emotional mode, but it works a lot better.

The difference between the two is that on "Eyes on the Prize," Springsteen uses his band to build an arrangement that brings in voices and instruments to illustrate a community spirit taking shape out of the dark shadows inhabited by lonely isolated souls.

The music Springsteen makes with his biggest-ever band (thirteen members on the record, seventeen to twenty on stage) abandons much of what has defined his sound. In particular, the stiff rock beat has given way to syncopation. The instrumental focus is on the drums, with the melodic contributions emerging from fiddles and horns, rather than guitars and keyboards. The vocals, both his own and the multipart harmonies, are freer than anything he's recorded. After three albums of tragedy, the mood here swings toward joy. The album's tone is sometimes silly and once in a while fearful but it's never doomed.

Bruce wrote none of these songs yet We Shall Overcome is as personal as any of his records. For once on a studio recording, you can feel the unaffected pleasure he takes from making music, from working with other players and singers.

New Orleans right now is an eerie place, but not just because of the devastation. Abandoned cars and strewn rubble, even the scent of rot, are all over the place in Detroit and, for that matter, Asbury Park. What makes New Orleans different is that despite all the hype about reconstruction, nothing is being done. The housing projects are empty, looking more than ever like prisons. The upper Ninth Ward's population is decimated; the lower Ninth Ward's population is gone. But it's not just people that are missing. So are cranes, building equipment and construction site supplies, even as the courageous volunteers of Common Ground are hard at work in the Ninth, with a blue-roofed house in each part of the ward serving as a center for returning residents, for clean-up, and for visitors.

Musicians in particular are struggling right now, and one reason is that tourism--40 per cent of the pre-hurricane economy--has dwindled so badly. New Orleans does have a great indigenous music community, but the gigs that pay have long been played for outsiders.

The Jazz and Heritage Festival offers a lot of jobs for musicians but the most prominent and best-paying main stages, even the themed tents for jazz and gospel, mainly feature stars from far away. The splendid group of New Orleans icon Allen Toussaint appeared on the main stage right before Springsteen, but with Elvis Costello stepping in to sing several numbers.

Tourists will come to see, hear and eat the music and culture of New Orleans and the Louisiana swamplands. But to get enough of them to fill the huge Fairgrounds racetrack and gain national attention, not to mention lucrative corporate sponsorship, the promoters of Jazzfest need artists like Bob Dylan, Dave Matthews and Springsteen. (The festival is run by a nonprofit corporation, which doesn't mean a lot of money isn't being made.) This aspect of New Orleans may thrive--but it's hard to see how it will do much to change conditions there. It's equally hard to see how presenting a festival with a more local focus would help rebuild the city, either.

Music can do a lot of other things though. Above all, it can provide inspiration and foster connection. Springsteen's always been a man on a mission when it came to those to jobs, and changing bands and singing traditional songs didn't affect that. If anything, this is the strongest outreach he's made in years, stronger than The Rising because he's playing a species of dance music, designed to activate the ass and the mind. And in New Orleans, as backstreets.com noted, "Bruce wasn't preaching to the choir for the first time in a long time."

Springsteen was not only starting a new tour with a new band and new material, but he's Bruce Springsteen, the rock star who is supposed to rise to occasions. He needed a set that lived up to the drama of closing the first big event in New Orleans since the flood.

His big brass section added Crescent City flavor, and drummer Larry Eagle's fat, syncopated beats kept the cadence right. And Springsteen kept things focused. "Oh Mary Don't You Weep," the opening song, ends with: "God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water but fire next time." "Eyes on the Prize" with its recurrent "Hold on" also invoked an embattled spirit: "The only thing that we did right was the day we started to fight." But the show found its legs and definition with a sequence that began with the refugee anthem, "My Oklahoma Home Blowed Away," and ran through the Irish antiwar ballad "Mrs. McGrath" before peaking with the Depression-era anthem, "How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live."

Springsteen introduced it with a statement about how shocked, furious and ashamed he felt about what he'd seen since hitting town, then dedicated his rewritten version--"Them that's got, got out of town / And them that's not got left to drown"--to "President Bystander." After that, he had the crowd.

With his somber "We Shall Overcome," he gripped them tighter. By the end of that one, even violinist Soozie Tyrell turned to wipe back a tear. That wasn't the climax though. For the first encore Springsteen came out and began to sing "My City of Ruins." As he described that "blood red circle," then pleaded for us to "rise up," tens of thousands of fists raised in the air. Thousands of tears formed a new salty flood.

The concluding "When the Saints Go Marching In," also slowed down considerably, should have been anticlimactic. But Springsteen unearthed verses rarely sung, beginning the song with "We are traveling in the footsteps of those who've gone before." In the ruins of America's oldest big city, those words resonated like a midnight echo in an abandoned housing project.

But I left contemplating the last verse, sung by this tour's Bruce sidekick, Marc Anthony Johnson of Chocolate Genius. "Some say this world of trouble is the only one we need / But I'm waiting for that moment when the new world is revealed."

Those lines took my understanding of one of Springsteen's best lines--"Don't waste your time waiting" from "Badlands"--and turned it around. And that made me consider what it would mean to reveal a new world in this life.

We need patience to wait for the new world to reveal itself, that's true. But we mustn't waste that time merely waiting, because only struggle and refusal to surrender can bring that new world forth.

Music can't change the world. But sometimes, it delivers some pretty great marching orders.-D.M.

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