There's a Shadow in My Back Yard

Bruce Springsteen — "Roulette" (1979)

My dear old pal Jason came to visit me in the Shawangunks this past weekend, and it was a total blast.

I use “old” in the sense that we’ve been close friends for nearly 45 years now, though our conversations still reverberate with the same giddy enthusiasm and absurdist humor we shared in our teens. Our lives have taken considerably different trajectories since then, but we are ultimately (and thankfully) both still very much the same people we were when we first recognized each other as kindred spirits — though we’ve also both evolved somewhat since our initial meeting, when I asked Jason to show me how to make the phrase “Reagan Licks George’s Bush” run in perpetuity on a Commodore PET 2001 during the first week of our high school computer science class.

Our three-day chinwag found us dizzily bouncing back and forth through the decades, alighting on everything from the profoundly heavy to the delightfully silly, with music the constant thread running through all of it. Which is always how it’s been with us; Jason was the first genuine “Beatlemaniac” I ever knew, and he also had an older sister who’d gotten into late-seventies punk and new wave in real time. I gleaned so much valuable info from him on both topics during our high school days.

And then there were artists like The Jam, The Kinks (Jason and I attended our first Kinks show together in 1983) and Bruce Springsteen, where our fandom developed more or less simultaneously. We’d spend untold hours together listening to their records, quizzing each other on their lyrics, and exchanging whatever bits of lore or trivia about them that we’d managed to pick up through books or magazines or word of mouth. In the case of Springsteen, our enthusiasm was further stoked by our friend Brian, who had a much bigger “Bruce-leg”-buying budget than either of us, and who would generously cherry-pick the highlights from his latest illicit purchases and put them on cassettes for me; I would inevitably play said cassettes for Jason the next time we hung out.

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Quite a few of our shared high school listening-session memories came flooding back this past weekend, but one particular memory was goosed from my hippocampus by Springsteen’s recent onstage criticisms of the current US administration, and the full-on meltdowns that followed from our would-be dictator and his bootlicking minions.

As Rolling Stone pointed out, Springsteen “has been an extremely vocal critic from nearly the moment Trump came down the golden escalator in 2015,” so his latest words should come as no surprise to anyone. But it’s unfortunately also no surprise that there’s a small-but-vocal contingent of self-proclaimed Bruce fans who are angry at him for “getting political,” and who are demanding that he just shut up and entertain them, despite the fact that political realities have infused his songs at least as far back as “Lost in the Flood” on 1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.

Bruce’s songs were never explicitly political in that narrowly-defined “Democrat vs. Republican” way, but c’mon — did you really expect the guy who wrote “Factory” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad” to keep his mouth shut at a time when elected GOP officials are frantically trying to slash benefits, healthcare, services, programs and entitlements for millions of Americans in order to further enrich the ultra-wealthy? Did you really think that guy who wrote “Atlantic City” and “My Hometown” was going to look the other way while the most corrupt president in our country’s history conducts mob-style shakedowns of everyone from foreign governments to US media conglomerates for his own benefit, and American businesses large and small stagger under the weight of his witless tariffs? Or that the guy who wrote “American Skin (41 Shots)” would somehow sit back and nod with approval as this administration illegally disappears people without any due process, and our presidentially-appointed Secretary of Homeland Security presents herself as totally clueless about the meaning of habeas corpus? Maybe you’d better go back and re-read those lyrics…

Personally, I’m grateful that Bruce is speaking out right now, both because silence is never a winning strategy in the face of authoritarianism, and because Dear Leader’s blood pressure clearly spikes at much higher levels when rich celebrities call him out on his treason and corruption than when everyday Americans do the same.

But I’m also pleased and relieved that Bruce no longer feels any need to pull his punches — not that he has done so in a while (see 2001’s “American Skin,” which he performed at his NYC concerts that year despite then-mayor Rudy Giuliani demanding he not do so), but I still vividly recall how frustrating it was to watch Bruce hem and haw over how best to respond when Ronald Reagan, George F. Will and other Republicans twisted “Born in the USA” into a message of jingoistic pride. (Again, go back and read those lyrics!)

“Records are often auditory Rorschach tests; we hear what we want to hear,” he mused in his 2016 autobiography Born to Run, recalling the Republican rush to paint a happy face on “Born in the USA”. “In 1984, add to this an election year, a Republican Party intent on co-opting a cow’s ass if it has the Stars and Stripes tattooed on it, sitting president Ronald Reagan cynically offering thanks for ‘the message of hope in the songs of… New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen’ on a campaign swing through the state and, well… you know the rest.”

But though obviously unhappy that his song was being co-opted by right-wing flag-wavers, Bruce for whatever reason failed to push back with the same kind of force and clarity that he’s unleashing these days. His comments didn’t get much more confrontational than this onstage introduction to “Johnny 99,” his Nebraska song about a laid-off auto worker who loses his house and drunkenly kills a man: “Well, the president was mentioning my name in his speech the other day,” he said, “and I kind of got to wondering what his favorite album of mine musta been, you know? I don’t think it was the Nebraska album. I don’t think he’s been listening to this one.”

Which was funny, of course, but it was also way too subtle a rejoinder to silence all the mooks who were now bellowing “Nuke Iran!” between songs at his stadium shows, much less to get through to the politicians and columnists who were misinterpreting his work in order to push their own agenda.

And then there was “Roulette”. Inspired by the March 1979 meltdown of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station near Harrisburg, PA, and the contradictory, confusing messages that followed from state officials and the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission regarding the severity of the accident, “Roulette” remains one of the most powerful and most politically-charged songs in the Springsteen catalog. Written and recorded with a punk-like urgency in early April 1979, just days after the worst nuclear accident on American soil had occurred, “Roulette” was the first song completed during the Power Station sessions for what would become his 1980 double-album The River.

And yet, “Roulette” wound up sitting in the can until February 1988, when a mix from that April 1979 session quietly slipped out on the B-side of “One Step Up”. “I may just have gotten afraid,” Springsteen said in an interview with Mojo, shortly after “Roulette” finally saw a digital release on the 1998 outtakes collection Tracks. “It went a little over the top, which is what’s good about it. In truth it probably should have gotten put on. It would have been one of the best things on [The River] and it was just a mistake at the time.”

“What the hell, man? I thought ‘Roulette’ was gonna be on here!” 14 year-old me gets The River for Christmas. (December 1980 photo by Lyn DelliQuadri)

It’s debatable how well “Roulette” would have actually fit on The River, an album I loved at the time but which now annoys me with its unwillingness to commit to a unified mood or vibe across even one of its four sides. (As best I can tell, the song was also not slated to make the final track listing of The Ties That Bind, the single-LP disc initially intended for a late 1979 release before Bruce decided to scrap it and go back to the drawing board.) Much as I love, say, the brutally sad “Point Blank,” the fact that it’s immediately followed on Side 3 by good-time party numbers “Cadillac Ranch” and “I’m a Rocker” means that I never, ever feel compelled to pop that side onto my turntable anymore…

Still, “Roulette” would have certainly made a killer topical single in the spring or summer of 1979 — or even released in conjunction with that September’s “No Nukes” concerts organized in New York City by Musicians United for Safe Energy, two of which were headlined by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. But while such of-the-moment, non-LP single releases were fairly common in the UK punk scene that Bruce admired from afar, it’s pretty hard to imagine Columbia Records (or, for that matter, Springsteen’s manager and co-producer Jon Landau) being at all enthusiastic about him following suit in the US with such an angry, authority-questioning song, especially given that 1975’s “Born to Run” had been his only single thus far to break into the US Top 30.

By the time “Roulette” finally appeared on vinyl in 1988, the Three Mile Island accident was mostly just a bad and distant memory. Instead of bringing additional national awareness to the thorny issue of nuclear energy and our government’s inability to deal honestly with the ramifications of such a disaster, the song’s release was now mostly just newsworthy to the hardcore Springsteen fans who’d already been digging “Roulette” for years on various bootlegs.

I was one of those fans. I first heard “Roulette” on a hot Chicago night in the August 1982, via my latest bootleg Bruce cassette from Brian, one which featured several tracks from his latest purchase, Don’t Look Back: Bruce Springsteen Collectors Items 1974-1980. I’d already read somewhere about “Roulette” and its Three Mile Island origins, but nothing had really prepared me for the track’s pounding intensity, or the profound pessimism expressed by the song’s protagonist as he’s forced to deal head-on with this nuclear meltdown bullshit.

I grew up here on this street
Where nothin’ moves, just a strange breeze
In a town full of worthless memories
There’s a shadow in my backyard
I’ve got a house full of things that I can’t touch
Well all those things won’t do me much good now

This past weekend dislodged a long-forgotten memory of how Jason came over the following evening to hang out, and how he was just as blown away by “Roulette” as I was. I remembered us sitting there on the floor of my sparsely furnished bedroom — my mom, sister and I had escaped just a few weeks earlier from my then-stepfather’s apartment, and there hadn’t been much of our own stuff to take with us — listening intently to the song over and over again on my Panasonic Platinum boom box.

The audio quality of the song wasn’t great, to say the least; this was a cassette copy made from a bootleg, so the high end was almost completely rolled off. But that lack of fidelity somehow made the song feel even more thrillingly claustrophobic, further heightening its already-pervasive sense of paranoia and desperation.

Down by the river that talks
The night speaks in searchlights
And shortwave radios squawk
The police patrol the streets
But I’ve left behind the man I used to be
Everything he believed and all that belonged to me

The squashed sound of the bootleg mix also reinforced the thump of Max Weinberg’s drums, which sounded like they were lifted straight outta Hawaii Five-O. I have many musician friends who can’t stand Weinberg’s drumming and criticize the stiffness of his playing, especially compared to the swinging grooves of original E Street skinsman Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez. There are indeed some songs where I think they might have a point, but “Roulette” isn’t one of them; from the very first time I heard it, I was impressed by the way his rolling toms set the stage for the musical and lyrical drama to come, and how his tense fills further amped up the sense of fight-or-flight adrenaline. By the last verse and chorus, Bruce’s lyrics were coming so thick and fast that neither Jason nor I could fully make them out; all we knew at the time was that some bad shit was going down…

I tried to find my way out to somewhere where I thought it'd be safe
They stopped me at the roadblock they put up on the interstate
They put me in detention but I broke loose and then I ran
They said they just want to ask me a few questions but I think they had other plans
Now I don't know who to trust and I don't know what I can believe
They say they want to help me but with the stuff they keep on saying
I think those guys just wanna keep on playing

Roulette, with my life
Roulette, with my kids and my wife
Roulette, the bullet's in the chamber
Roulette, who's the unlucky stranger
Roulette, surprise, you're dead
Roulette, the gun's to your head
Roulette, the bullet's spinning in the chamber
Roulette, pull the trigger, feel the click
No further danger

“Man, that’s an incredible song,” Jason marveled, as Weinberg’s galloping drums faded out at the end. “I know!” I said, reaching for the rewind button on the boom box. I don’t think either of us caught the similarity of the song’s main guitar line to Magazine’s “Shot By Both Sides,” even after repeated plays; we weren’t that hip, though clearly Bruce was…

Though my friendship with Jason would last to the present day, our mutual Springsteen fandom only had a couple more years to run. This past weekend, Jason reminded me that Born in the USA was the only album he’d ever returned to the store after a single listen; me, I listened to it again and again in the summer of ‘84, despite loathing its “state of the eighties” production, before grudgingly admitting to myself that I really only liked about half of it. And while a handful of Springsteen’s subsequent songs have really resonated with me over the years (“Brilliant Disguise” from Tunnel of Love and “My Lucky Day” from Working on a Dream tops among them), none of his post-Nebraska albums have ever ruled my world like his first six did during my teens.

But you know what? That’s okay, because I’ll be forever grateful for the comforting company those albums kept me in my youth, for the evocative pictures and dreams they painted in my brain, for the way they soundtracked several of my close friendships and early crushes, and for the emotions they still churn up in my chest whenever I spin them to this day. And as Jason and I also discussed this weekend, we’ll always be especially grateful for the Darkness on the Edge of Town songbook, which demystified one of our favorite albums and taught us a whole mess of guitar chords and progressions that we would both employ for decades to come. So thank you, Bruce, for all of that — and thank you for speaking out so fearlessly on our behalf in these troubling times.

“At the end of the day, all we’ve got is each other,” you said from the stage in Manchester the other night. Amen to that — and at a time when this fascist administration is playing roulette with all of our lives, I’m glad at least that we’ve still got you.

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