“The screen door slams
Mary’s dress sways”
I have been listening to the harmonica-and-piano infused introduction to Thunder Road my whole life and it wasn’t until last week that I discovered “Mary’s dress sways.” All these years…I thought her dress “waves.”
It took reading Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen’s eminently entertaining 2016 autobiography, for me to be reminded about what all his fans know: he is the consummate storyteller. He is also a man who seems to have taken Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style (“A sentence should contain no unnecessary words”) on as his bible.
“The screen door slams
Mary’s dress sways”
In these seven words we have a setting. There is no question of what is going on. It is told in such an elegant, pared-down style that we immediately know we are in the presence of a gifted writer.
“The car door slammed
It was a hard day at work”
I recently heard these lyrics on a country tune at a drug store. I immediately thought of Springsteen. This is not good writing; it is not interesting and does not capture the imagination of the reader.
And what a setting…
“Like a vision
she dances across the porch
As the radio plays
Roy Orbison sings for the lonely…”
One of the most eye-opening aspects of Springsteen’s own story is his moment of reckoning: when he has to decide, as a young artist, what will set him apart from the rock ’n’ roll market, already overwhelmed with great singers and instrumentalists.
“I needed to travel light and be able to blow somebody away with just my voice, my guitar and my song. Voice...guitar...song...three tools. My voice was never going to win any prizes. My guitar accompaniment on acoustic was rudimentary, so that left the songs. The songs would have to be fireworks. I decided the world was filled with plenty of good guitar players, many of them my match or better, but how many good songwriters were there? Songwriters with their own voice, their own story to tell, who could draw you into a world they created and sustain your interest in the things that obsessed them. Not many, a handful at best.”
And not only that; it is his ability to analyze his gift to the early ‘70s music scene -- wholly his own -- and the fact that, no matter how many early experiences of failure he suffers, he only has to fall back on himself, a hard-working Jersey musician who can blow the house away. He likes who he is and doesn’t have to run away from him.
“To give you an idea about how much the music business has changed, John Hammond, a historical figure in the industry” [producer of Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and Billie Holiday] “was receiving complete no-names like us off the streets of New York in his office!”…“I would’ve been in a state of complete panic except on the way up in the elevator I’d performed a little mental jujitsu on myself. I thought, ‘I’ve got nothing so I’ve got nothing to lose. I can only gain should this work out. If it don’t, I still got what I came in with. I’m a free agent. I make my way through the world as myself and I’ll still be the same person when I leave no matter the outcome.”
That takes courage.
And for sheer tragicomic effect there is nothing like the contract-signing scene…
“I’d lived off the grid for so long. I was totally ignorant of the way of the law, musical or any other kind. I knew no lawyers; I’d been paid only in cash my entire life and had never paid a cent of income tax, signed an apartment lease nor filled out any form that might bind me in any way. I had no credit card, no checkbook, just what was jangling in my pocket…frightened, slowly, reluctantly, recklessly, contract by contract, I signed, finishing the last one, one evening, on a car hood in a New York City parking lot.”
Or the penny scene…
In the days before students were practically handed credit cards, Springsteen lived on cash. And pennies. Literally. Which caused problems when he, desperate for grocery money, drove into the city to borrow $35 from his manager. At the Lincoln Tunnel, the “No Pennies” sign would turn out to be his nemesis.
However, ultimately, he emerges triumphant; after years of legal negotiations with a manager who bought the rights to all his work when he was young and very naive, he wins it all back…
“I’m one of the few artists from those days who owns everything he ever created. All my records are mine. All my songs are mine. It’s rare and it’s a good feeling.”
Amen, brother.