Bruce Springsteen's "The River": Still fresh after 42 years (First released 17/10/1980)

Every Bruce Springsteen studio album since his first has been named after one of the songs it contains: that’s 15 records on the bounce that have a title track. There are two possible explanations for this. One is that Springsteen is a complacent, bone-idle hack who can barely be bothered to give his works another thought after he’s ground his way resentfully to the requisite track count: this seems unlikely. The other is that Springsteen writes for each of his albums one song which he believes emblematic, one which serves as an executive summary of the themes, musical and lyrical, of the record as a whole. You can hear it, to pick a few random examples, in the exuberant fury of “Born To Run”, in the anguished patriotism of “Born In The USA”, the mournful portent of “Magic”, even in the muddled search for meaning of “Human Touch”. But you can hear it most of all in Track Six, Side Two, of The River.

“The River” (the song) defines not only The River (the album), but Springsteen (the artist): three decades, half Springsteen’s lifetime, since its release, it remains one of his crucial texts. It freights everything that makes him extraordinary. There’s his complex relationship with America’s songwriting lineage, in which he’s bold enough to steal from the greats yet humble enough to acknowledge it (“The River” borrows the motif of a parching creek bed from Hank Williams’ “Long Gone Lonesome Blues”). There’s his perspicacious paring of a man’s concerns down to a fundamental triumvirate of work, women, and what the heck it’s all about anyway. There’s his assembly of an enduringly superlative backing group (“The River” brandishes the E Street Band at their most stately). There’s that voice, maturing as a vehicle for balladry, growing growly and gravelly as its owner passes 30. And most of all where this particular song is concerned, there’s the writing.

There are uncountable songwriters who deploy their words chiefly as testaments to their own cleverness: Springsteen has (almost) always been sufficiently disciplined to realize that the work matters more than he does. The writing in “The River” is so clever that it’s very easy to listen to the song many times without realizing how clever it is. The very first lines - "I come from down in the valley/ Where mister, when you’re young/They bring you up to do/Just like your daddy done’’- tell you instantly and exactly who and what your narrator is. He’s accustomed to subservience: he doesn’t know who you are, but he has addressed you as “Mister”. He’s either or both a proud upholder and resigned prisoner of tradition, doggedly plodding in his father’s footsteps. And his education is incomplete -or he’d be doing, with all due respect to the demands of the rhyme, like his daddy did.

Having established his character, Springsteen then exercises enough of an auteur’s arrogance to enfold him in his own universe. It can’t possibly be coincidental that the pregnant teenage sweetheart with whom our new friend is entwined and entrapped is called Mary. Last time we saw her, she was debating whether or not to walk from her front porch to the front seat of the car being revved outside by some ambitious tear away and decamp this "town full of losers". By the end of the first verse, Springsteen has you wondering: is this the ardent, wild-eyed suitor she fled to Thunder Road with, or is he some earnest local schlub she stayed behind for?

Either way, it has worked out badly. He’s knocked her up, shackling them both to the failing industrial town in which they were born (“I got Mary pregnant/And man, that was all she wrote"). The second verse contains a summary of his woes that, again, is much smarter than it appears. There’s a reflexive inclination to wince at the line, "Lately there ain’t been much work on account of the economy". It’s clunky, crashingly unsophisticated, and barely scans. But it’s the kind of thing this bewildered blue-collar stiff, whose life is over before he’s even turned 20, would say.

That said, the climax of the song contains flights of genuine poetic agility, skillfully trimmed though they are to the plausible limits of the vocabulary of a man to whom you’re starting to feel friendly, perhaps protective, or at least regard with there-but-for-the-grace-of-whatever sympathy. His summation of his floundering, dwindling marriage (“I just act like I don’t remember/And Mary acts like she don't care") might be a half-remembered hook from a Merle Haggard tune. The song’s devastating crescendo pairs conundra which, while certainly philosophically complex, are nevertheless the sort of things often slurringly asked among lubricated drinking buddies as the jukebox is switched off, the lights are switched on, and the bartender enquires whether or not they've homes to go to: "Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true? Or is it something worse?"

Each of the 20 tracks of this double-album epic is either an effort at solemn contemplation of such existential terrors, or a damn-the-torpedoes attempt to escape them - which is why listening to the entirety of The River in one sitting is such a disorienting experience, a continuous careen between big night out and calamitous morning after, as it lurches from joyous, head-back, nigh mindless, garage-­rattling rock’n’roll (I'm A Rocker”, "Ramrod”, “You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)”, etc) and brooding, furrow-browed, pensive, bedsitter blues (“The Price You Pay”, “Independence Day”, “Fade Away”, and so forth). The dichotomy is a consequence of the album’s hesitant gestation. The River was originally conceived as a single album, a largely upbeat affair to be entitled ‘The Ties That Bind’, due for release in late 1979 or early 1980. At a late stage in the build-up to the album, Springsteen apparently decided his putative work was lacking in depth and gravitas. Given Springsteen’s politics, and his tendency to conscience-of-a-nation hubris, it’s easy to imagine he felt it necessary to reflect the recession that had gripped America in the first part of 1980. The River ended up being released three weeks before Ronald Reagan routed the decent but hapless Democratic incumbent of the White House, Jimmy Carter.

The sprawling length, colossal ambition and riotously diverse moods and tempos of The River would test the abilities, and the patience, and very likely the sanity, of most backing ensembles, but it remains one of the E Street Band’s finest hours. They’re a six-man jukebox, unloading note-perfect performances of various idioms every time Springsteen kicks them into action-Byrdsian jangle on “The Ties That Bind", Heartbreakers-style barroom­ shaking on “Cadillac Ranch”, their own patented supercharged synthesis of Beach Boys and prime Motown on “Two Hearts" and “Out In The Street". They even react to being shanghaied into cheap wedding band tuxedos for “I Wanna Marry You" with verve and wit, cheerfully ladling syrup over Springsteen’s gruff entreaty: "To say I’ll make your dreams come true would be wrong/But maybe, darlin’, I could help them along," could come from the same range of Springstonian Hallmark cards as “ You ain't a beauty but hey, you'real right" (“Thunder Road”), "Well it ain’t no secret, I’ve been around a time or two/ Well I don 't know baby, maybe you’ve been around too" (“Tougher Than The Rest”) and “When I’ve lost all the other bets I’ve made/Honey you ’re my lucky day" (“My Lucky Day”).

The E Street Band are at their best, however, at the same moments Springsteen is, on the album’s two resonant ballads. On “The River”, they’re a study in coiled rage, Roy Bittan’s beautiful, understated piano complementing Steve Van Zandt’s 12-stringguitar (lifted, he has since admitted, from Keith Richards’ rhythm parts on The Rolling Stones’ “Good Times Bad Times” and “Congratulations”). On “Independence Day”, they deploy the same elements to just as crushing an effect. Had this astonishing song appeared on any album that didn’t have “The River” on it, it’d be the one everybody still talks about. It is, indeed, surely intended as a companion piece to the title cut. Aside from the obvious musical congruence, it’s another one about a boy and his dad, but in this one the kid is saying everything he wishes he’d said in the other song. Which is that he’s going to learn from the old man’s mistakes - and, perhaps, from the copy of Born To Run he might recently have purchased- and hit the road the hell out of here ("They ain’t gonna do to me what I watched them do to you”).

There’s no doubt that these songs were, even by Springsteen’s mercilessly confessional standards, personal. The version of “The River” that appears on the Live 1975-85 boxset, recorded at the Los Angeles Coliseum on the Born In The USA tour in 1985, is preceded by a lengthy soliloquy in which Springsteen discourses on his tempestuous relationship with his old man. This speech contains one reflexive moment that says much about Springsteen’s notions of ethics and patriotism at this point: when the audience whoop at his admission that he failed the physical examination for the Vietnam draft, he rebukes them, muttering, “It’s nothing to applaud about”. But it mostly illuminates the thinking, and the writing, behind “The River”, both song and album. As Van Zandt picks at his guitar, Springsteen talks about how he and his father would fight so much that the young Bruce would spend as much time as possible out of the house, only coming home when he had no choice, tucking his paternally enraging long hair into his collar and slinking inside hoping to avoid his father and his perennial, unanswerable enquiry: “What did I think I was doing with myself? ”

It’s the question Springsteen has been asking himself all along, but rarely with the sustained rigour he applies here. The closest he comes to furnishing an answer is the album’s desperately bleak sign-off, “Wreck On The Highway”. It’s a simple enough story- a recollection of pulling up at the immediate aftermath of a traffic accident. And it’s a simple enough metaphor- a reminder of the random, arbitrary cruelty with which a life can be ended, or at least upended. Springsteen’s only response, as ever, is a suggestion that we reach for what we can hold. He goes home and lies awake next to the woman it’s worth going home for, thinks about what he saw, and remembers that the dying man he couldn’t help called him “Mister”.