Eulogy for Danny

Below is the eulogy delivered by Bruce Springsteen at Danny Federici'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 officers 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 laughed 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.

Bringing It All Back Home… Side Two

If side one suggests, lyrically, a crack in the dam, on side two the levee breaks, the concrete crumbles… pray for those people in the houses down in the valley.

Yes, “Mister Tambourine Man” is a reference to guitarist Bruce Langhorn, but this is clearly not to suggest that the song has anything to do with Langhorn. It’s easy to read the text as a drug song as well – “Take me on a trip…” “The smoke rings of my mind…” but that’s a bit too easy too. I believe the pleasures here are all right on the surface, not to be found in some deeper meaning needed to be dug out.

Now the language play begins in earnest.

The magnificent parody video of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” done by Weird Al would never work here. These lyrics can’t be replaced by nonsense verse and palindromes. It’s also right that the rock band backing is gone too, nothing here to get in the way of Dylan the writer, the wordsmith.

“My weariness amazes me, I'm branded on my feet / I have no one to meet /And the ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming.”

“Though you might hear laughin', spinnin', swingin' madly across the sun / it's not aimed at anyone / it's just escapin' on the run /And but for the sky there are no fences facin'.”

And he saves the best for last. The “one hand waving free” calls up my favorite line in any Springsteen song – “What else can we do now but roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair?” Find me a popular image of FREEDOM in which something isn’t waving. Go on, I double dog dare you.

“Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.”

The Byrds added McGuinn’s Rickenbacker 12-string – a guitar whose distinctive sound is not just in the novelty of an electric 12-string guitar, but in the way the Rickenbacker is strung on the lower 3 sets of strings with the octave strings in the opposite position than they are on other makes of 12-strings – and changed the time signature. And, as good as it is, their version is more a novelty that Dylan’s acoustic recording which has a certain naturalness to its presentation that suggests some sort of psychedelic troubadour.

I have a friend in New York who collects rare psychedelic records and is a Dylan fan, but bristles at the description of these records as psychedelic; something I find genuinely puzzling as Dylan’s LSD use starts around the time of Another Side and can be heard rising up in the lyrics of songs like “Chimes Of Freedom.” To me, the 1965-1966 trilogy seems increasingly acid-fueled as it grows in intensity; much like John Wesley Harding seems so ahead of the curve as far as post-acid music is concerned.

“Gates of Eden” and “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” seem to me cut from the same cloth as “A Hard Rain.” I’ve long suspected The Doors got the idea of ending their records with their own epic songs (“The End” “When the Music’s Over”) from this and the next couple records. And what better way to announce “This is an epic” than to begin with a reference to the mother-of-all epics.

“Of war and peace the truth just twists / its curfew gull just glides.”

The lines that end “the gates of Eden” are interesting too for the choice of “inside” “outside” etc. It seems like a precursor to “Desolation Row” in that regard. “Mail them from (not “too”) Desolation Row… etc.” By the next record the rather stern, foreboding – I always imagine them made of wrought iron – gates of Eden get transformed into the run-down funky neighborhood of “Desolation Row.” Creatively, it’s a move that suggests an Old Testament story rewritten as a John Steinbeck novel.

“Gates of Eden” is stuffed full to bursting with a tableau of characters that leap forth from Dylan’s inflamed imagination. The curfew gull, the cowboy angel, a lamp post that stands with folded arms and iron claws; the savage soldier, shoeless hunter, utopian hermit monks… the list expands throughout the song as these vague, half-formed images root around in your mind, reaching one of its peaks is the fourth from last verse:

“The motorcycle black Madonna, two-wheeled gypsy queen
And her silver-studded phantom cause the gray flannel dwarf to scream
As he weeps to wicked birds of prey who pick up on his bread crumb sins
And there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden”

That dichotomy is one that I think Dylan borrows from the Beats – the hip outsider world versus the square gray flannel world – and it’s clear which side Dylan prefers (remember too how the gray flannel world continually tries to capture that icon of resistance and co-opt it. See: the Fonz).

One of Dylan’s strongest 1990s songs is the outtake “Series of Dreams” and I think many of the songs from 1965 can be approached as series of dreams. The closing verse here sort of supports that idea:

“At dawn my lover comes to me, and tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words but these to tell what's true
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.”

Close your eyes and try to imagine bringing Bringing It All Back Home home in March of 1965. Maybe it’s a little chilly, that last little bit of winter hanging on before the world changes. Back then Columbia records were not sold in plastic shrink wrap. The record was sealed inside the cover, it came in a plastic inner sleeve that had a perforated edge that you had to tear off to open the sleeve and take the disc out. The edge always ended up tearing the bag itself, so, there you are, that little strip of plastic in your hand, setting the disc down onto the platter of your Garrard turntable, your copy of Another Side of Bob Dylan leaning up against one speaker, dropping the tone arm and BOOM!

You just sat through the most amazing side one of a record, probably ever. Your head is spinning, you can barely remember your own name; you stumble back to the player and flip the record over and drop the arm on side two. While the blaring electric yowl of side one is gone, the simple acoustic arrangements put the exploding surrealism of the lyrics even more front and center.

You’re not in Kansas anymore.

The structure of “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” is five sets of three verses each divided by a series of three-line refrains that stick a variation of the title in the last if the three lines. There is a relentlessness here that actually works against the song after a bit, at least it seems that way to me now, 40 years later. We’re told “there is no use in trying” because “he not busy being born is busy dying” and we’re really just “one more person crying.” And “while others say don't hate nothing at all except hatred” “it's easy to see without looking too far that not much is really sacred” and “even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked” (a line that caused crowds to explode in the fires of Watergate when Dylan returned to the road in 1974 after an eight year absence).

The third set of verses reminds me of a section in Dylan’s magnificent “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie.” Compare this set of verses about half way through “It’s Alright, Ma…”

“Advertising signs that con
You into thinking you're the one
That can do what's never been done,
That can win what's never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you.

You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks
They really found you.

A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit to satisfy
Insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not forget
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to.”

…to this section of “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie”

"Cause you can't find it on a dollar bill
And it ain't on Macy's window sill
And it ain't on no rich kid's road map
And it ain't in no fat kid's fraternity house
And it ain't made in no Hollywood wheat germ
And it ain't on that dimlit stage
With that half-wit comedian on it
Ranting and raving and taking yer money
And you thinks it's funny
No you can't find it in no night club or no yacht club
And it ain't in the seats of a supper club
And sure as hell you're bound to tell
That no matter how hard you rub
You just ain't a-gonna find it on yer ticket stub
No, and it ain't in the rumors people're tellin' you
And it ain't in the pimple-lotion people are sellin' you
And it ain't in no cardboard-box house
Or down any movie star's blouse
And you can't find it on the golf course
And Uncle Remus can't tell you and neither can Santa Claus
And it ain't in the cream puff hair-do or cotton candy clothes
And it ain't in the dime store dummies or bubblegum goons
And it ain't in the marshmallow noises of the chocolate cake voices
That come knockin' and tappin' in Christmas wrappin'
Sayin' ain't I pretty and ain't I cute and look at my skin
Look at my skin shine, look at my skin glow
Look at my skin laugh, look at my skin cry
When you can't even sense if they got any insides.”

I also hear strong similarities in the way this has to be sung and with “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” I’d love to discover a lost outtake in which that same band rocked-out on a version of “It’s Alright, Ma…” Try to imagine these lyrics sung on top of that driving electric band with Michael Bloomfield’s guitar at the wheel:

“While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer's pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death's honesty
Won't fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes must get lonely.

My eyes collide head-on with stuffed graveyards
False gods, I scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I have had enough
What else can you show me?”

“What else can you show me?” indeed.

Maybe the album opens with “It used to go like that, now it goes like this” which is kind of an aggressive way of saying “things have changed.” But the album ends on a more melancholy note, as if Dylan accepts that his exit from the Folk/Protest Pantheon can never be that easy. Hearing this the first time in the swirling context of “Dylan has sold out!” and condemnations in Sing Out! magazine (with the wonderful reply from Johnny Cash who, at that time, hadn’t yet met Bob) and the story of how, after being booed from the stage at Newport, Dylan returned with an acoustic guitar and played this song and then left (true, not true, who cares) it is without question that when you heard this song at the end of the acoustic side of this record you heard it as the most eloquent “Dear John” letter of all time, from Bob to the folk community.

“You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last.
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast. . . . .
Look out the saints are comin' through
And it's all over now, Baby Blue.”

How many songs does this guy actually know? Who else takes “When the Saints Come Marchin’ In” and twists it into that line, “Look out now, the saints are comin' through….”?

Ancient New Orleans idiom music recycled as end of an era folk melancholia.

Jesus.

The thing that just knocks me off my feet and won’t let me up is this endless parade of characters, all arising as if from the subconscious of the body of 20th century modernist literature. The list grows: the orphan with his gun (how do you cry “like a fire” anyway?), the empty-handed painter, seasick sailors, reindeer armies, and the vagabond who's rapping at your door.

Listen to the explosion of songwriters A.D. (After Dylan) as they all do their best to populate their songs with similar characters. Just off the top of my head, look at this cast of characters from “Blinded By the Night,” the opening track off Bruce Springsteen’s first album:

Madman drummers bummers and Indians in the summer (with a teenage diplomat), some all-hot half-shot, some fleshpot mascot, young Scott with a slingshot, some brimstone baritone anti-cyclone rolling stone preacher from the East, some new-mown chaperone, some fresh-sown moonstone, some silicone sister with her manager's mister, and Go-Cart Mozart, little Early-Pearly, some hazard from Harvard, and some kidnapped handicap. And, if there’s room, add Crazy Janey, her mission man, Wild Billy with his friend G-Man, Hazy Davy and Killer Joe (from the cast of “Spirits in the Night”).

I don’t quite know what to make of the fact that this is also a record of my own time.

My memories of 1965 are hazy at best, I would have been 12 years old in March of that year, and turned 13 in late August. I can’t say for sure but I’m fairly certain I came to Dylan via The Beatles. My earliest recollection of The Beatles is an interesting one, I think.

I remember sitting in a classroom in the Catholic grade school I attended when the voice of the Mother Superior came over the public address system. She told us that the parish priest had something important to tell us. The appearance of the priest on the school’s PA was reserved for the deaths of presidents or a 5 minute heads up before a full scale first strike by the Russians. Duck and cover my 4th grade Polish ass… we were nervous.

“Boys,” the disembodied voice intoned; “I want you all to understand in no uncertain terms that beetle haircuts will not be tolerated.”

That was it.

It was like one of those coded messages transmitted over allied radio in enemy territory, “The captain has embarked and we will engage the fish in October; I repeat, the captain has embarked and we will engage the fish in October. That is all.”

But I didn’t have the code. And as I looked around at my fellow Catholic youth, in our matching uniforms of short-sleeve white shirts and blue plaid school ties, I could tell no one else did either. No matter, whatever it was, we wanted one. This was probably in December 1963 and may mark the actual start of the sixties.

I was with the Beatles starting with that first Ed Sullivan Show appearance in February 1964. This was where the fuse of my later record collecting self was lit. At some moment in there, with some LP or single, I must have experienced that first, primal pleasure rush that comes when you show someone something you have that they don’t have and you can see them want it and realize you feel good because it makes them feel bad.

It’s hard to describe the heady rush of those times; the acceleration of the culture. Think of it this way: The Beatles released the albums Meet The Beatles, The Beatles’ Second Album, Something New, A Hard Day’s Night, Beatles 65, The Early Beatles, Help!, Beatles VI, Rubber Soul, Yesterday and Today, and Revolver in 1964-1965.

During that same period Bob Dylan released The Times They Are A-Changing, Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde.

Rufus Wainwright released five albums between 1998 and 2007, and he’s fairly prolific by contemporary standards.

If your own adolescent consciousness was forming at that same time, if your own growth covered a comparable distance from “I Want To Hold Your Hand” to “Tomorrow Never Knows” or from “Boots of Spanish Leather” to “Visions of Johanna” then it’s in that context that a 12 year-old runs out to buy Bringing It All Back Home when it hit the stores in March/April 1965.

So…. It’s the impact of living through those times versus hearing this record for the first time in 2007 that I can’t quite measure. I just don’t know if it means anything or, if it does, what it means.

The recent CD remaster of Bringing It All Back Home is exceptionally well done with sound that rivals the original vinyl pressing. Some Dylan fans complained that the Dylan remastered CDs were too short and should have added some bonus material but I think “bonus tracks” are a curse of the CD age; most especially true for reissues of genuinely great albums. Should this ever get reissued again with a bunch of outtakes tacked on at the end, I’ll tell you now, I won’t buy it. This album needs extra material like The Bicycle Thief needs extra scenes.

Images of Freedom in Popular Song....

I was reading something someone over at Expecting Rain had posted in a discussion of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and he'd quoted one line from Springsteen's "Thunder Road" which is one of my favorite lines, ever.

"So what else can we do now, except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair."

There's something about freedom, something about possibility, something about... I don't know, I can't quite articulate it; something about... Old America in there.

I don't mean the Old Weird America that Greil Marcus works out in his book about (not about) The Basement Tapes. I mean some vague ill-defined notion of an earlier America, an America that still had a sense of uphill motion, still had some sense of possibility.

And I say all this very much aware that I may not be thinking of America at all as much as remembering some earlier version of myself.

But I digress.

There is a mixture of freedom and responsibility in Springsteen's "Thunder Road" that I think is unique within American popular music, at least of the last century or so.

The screen door slams, Mary's dress sways
Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays
Roy Orbison singing for the lonely
Hey that's me and I want you only
Don't turn me home again, I just can't face myself alone again

When you're hearing the song for the first time it's easy to hear that verse in the voice of Charles Starkweather driving up to the house where Caril Fugate stood on the lawn. A few years later Springsteen would write "Nebraska" and sing into a 4-track cassette recorder,

I saw her standin' on her front lawn just twirlin' her baton
Me and her went for a ride sir and ten innocent people died

But here Springsteen isn't in Truman Capote mode yet, isn't trying for a 3 minute version of In Cold Blood. He's writing about the same people he was writing about on every record so far - and this I think is crucial in understanding Springsteen - he follows his cast of characters from their adolesence into adulthood.

Don't run back inside, darling you know just what I'm here for
So you're scared and you're thinking
That maybe we ain't that young anymore
Show a little faith, there's magic in the night
You ain't a beauty, but hey you're alright
Oh and that's alright with me

What makes this song as powerful as it is might be that it is never about sex. Sex isn't anywhere near as scary as what she knows he's "here for." And he's a charmer, isn't he? Maybe a lack of articulation is the sincerest form of flattery.

You can hide `neath your covers and study your pain
Make crosses from your lovers, throw roses in the rain
Waste your summer praying in vain
For a saviour to rise from these streets
Well now I'm no hero, that's understood
All the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood
With a chance to make it good somehow
Hey what else can we do now?
Except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair
Well the night's busting open
These two lanes will take us anywhere
We got one last chance to make it real
To trade in these wings on some wheels
Climb in back, Heaven's waiting on down the tracks

Driving on a 2-lane black-top in the night, in the dark, with the window down and her hair blown back by the wind.... Can't you feel the plastic wrapper on the cigarette pack stuck in the arm of your t-shirt pressing against your bicep? Can't you see the headlights cut a path through history?

Or is it just me?

The whole song could come crashing down in ruin if the third line in the next verse were "your front porch to my back seat." But this song is not about sex, though I don't doubt that the two characters are having some. The ride's not free because it turns out that nothing really is.

Well I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk
And my car's out back if you're ready to take that long walk
From your front porch to my front seat
The door's open but the ride it ain't free
And I know you're lonely and there's words that I ain't spoken
But tonight we'll be free, all the promises'll be broken

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 Mary climb in
It's a town full of losers and I'm pulling out of here to win.

Waist deep in Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen's "folk big band" has been touring the globe playing rousingly sloppy arrangements of the music Pete Seeger brought to the stage well over a half century ago.

The album is fine. It's not one I play often, but it is fun and I've always admired Springsteen for, if not not repeating himself, then not repeating himself anywhere near as often as any other artist of his stature. And the record sounds like it was great fun to record, to corral all that energy without squelching it was a real accomplishment.

But there's one thing that's been bugging me since the record was announced, and it's been bugging me even more the longer the tour rolls on and his fans dutifully post each night's set list on the internet.

Given Springsteen's politics and the current debacle that is the War in Iraq it just puzzles me why he has chosen not to add one of Seeger's most timely and powerful originals.

Blacklisted from television in the US in 1963, Seeger was finally brought back for a performance on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967, but it wasn't until a return appearance in 1968 that he was permitted to sing this song, and sing it he did.

Until recently there was a clip from the 1968 performance on YouTube but it's now been pulled for "copyright violation" (another blog waiting to happen). This video uses Seeger's recording and is pretty good if you're not familiar with the music.

Look at the lyrics and, if you have Bruce's cell phone number, drop a dime and ask him what gives? Why isn't this part of every night's encore?

It was back in nineteen forty-two,
I was a member of a good platoon.
We were on maneuvers in-a Loozianna,
One night by the light of the moon.
The captain told us to ford a river,
That's how it all begun.
We were -- knee deep in the Big Muddy,
But the big fool said to push on.

The Sergeant said, "Sir, are you sure,
This is the best way back to the base?"
"Sergeant, go on! I forded this river
'Bout a mile above this place.
It'll be a little soggy but just keep slogging.
We'll soon be on dry ground."
We were -- waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.

The Sergeant said, "Sir, with all this equipment
No man will be able to swim."
"Sergeant, don't be a Nervous Nellie,"
The Captain said to him.
"All we need is a little determination;
Men, follow me, I'll lead on."
We were -- neck deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.

All at once, the moon clouded over,
We heard a gurgling cry.
A few seconds later, the captain's helmet
Was all that floated by.
The Sergeant said, "Turn around men!
I'm in charge from now on."
And we just made it out of the Big Muddy
With the captain dead and gone.

We stripped and dived and found his body
Stuck in the old quicksand.
I guess he didn't know that the water was deeper
Than the place he'd once before been.
Another stream had joined the Big Muddy
'Bout a half mile from where we'd gone.
We were lucky to escape from the Big Muddy
When the big fool said to push on.

Well, I'm not going to point any moral;
I'll leave that for yourself
Maybe you're still walking, you're still talking
You'd like to keep your health.
But every time I read the papers
That old feeling comes on;
We're -- waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.

Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep! Neck deep!
Soon even a Tall man'll be over his head, we're
Waist deep in the Big Muddy!
And the big fool says to push on!