Roll of the Dice: Atlantic City

Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact.
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.

That’s one of the finest couplets Bruce has ever written.

But what to make of those lines? The first one sounds nihilistic; the second sounds hopeful. So what’s he really singing about?

Unless you grew up around the Jersey Shore prior to the 1980s, it’s hard to truly understand “Atlantic City” simply by listening to it. It’s a song deeply rooted in a very real place at a very specific time.

Luckily, I spent much of my childhood summers at Atlantic City in the seventies, and I remember the events that Bruce sings about playing out in our local newspapers and on the boardwalk. So allow me to set the stage–but first, watch the song’s video (Bruce’s first one ever). It really helps.

Pretty bleak, isn’t it?

It’s worse today.

The Atlantic City of my childhood was an idyllic seaside resort town. On summer mornings, families rode bikes together on the boardwalk. On summer evenings, we “walked the boards,” people-watching all the way, stopping at arcades to play skee-ball, lured into Planters Peanuts and James’ salt water taffy by the aromas, and all the while making a pilgrimage to the Million Dollar Pier amusement park, or if we had the stamina, all the way to Steel Pier for rides and music. If we got tired and had the money for it, we’d take a rolling chair back–a big, wicker, cushioned chair with wheels, wide enough for my whole family, somehow pushed by a single person.

The motels you see in the video preceded the casinos. My family would drive down the shore from Philadelphia, and we’d rent a cheap room for the weekend. I’m sure at some point we stayed at the ones in the “Atlantic City” video.

On July 4th, we’d watch fireworks on the beach. When the annual Miss America pageant was held, we’d line the boardwalk to watch the parade of contestants.

But that was all on the oceanfront, along the boardwalk. Just a few blocks west, a very different scene played out. Although it seemed to my young eyes like the world would flock to Atlantic City every summer, in truth, tourism had been down for years. Unemployment had risen, as had crime, and the city was looking for a way to inject life into the local economy. The town was dying.

And so, in the late seventies, the state of New Jersey became only the second American state to legalize gambling. It was a hard fought electoral battle–there was significant citizen resistance to the idea, for fear that organized crime would invade the town as soon as gambling was  legalized.

In the early years, if you didn’t know better, you’d think that Atlantic City had someday come back.

With more dollars and people in the city on any given day, more businesses sprang up, more concerts and events, more carnival rides… but slowly, the casinos began sucking the life out of the city. Organized crime did indeed set in, along with the usual trappings that accompany gambling towns, and families began going to other shore points for their vacations. I remember vividly the town’s first mall opening on the site of my beloved Million Dollar Pier amusement park.

The video for “Atlantic City” was shot only about 4 years after the first casino opened. The city skyline is still barren, the billboards on the approach to the city are modest and quaint.

But you can already see the city becoming more run-down and dilapidated. It would accelerate not long after Bruce released this song, and the arrival of Donald Trump in the late eighties drove the nail into the coffin.

Today, Atlantic City is deader than ever. Condemned buildings pockmark the town, and the husks of abandoned casinos (one still bearing Trump’s name) loom over the abandoned boardwalk.

Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City” is set in the early years of the casino era–a handful had already opened, and the effects (both good and bad) were being felt.

The opening lines of the song set the stage:

Well they blew up the chicken man in Philly last night
Now they blew up his house too

The Chicken Man was Philip Testa, a local Philly mob boss who had indeed been murdered (by a bomb) by an underling in March 1981, shortly before Bruce wrote “Atlantic City,” suggesting that Bruce was catalyzed by the event to write the song. Testa’s death ignited a violent mob war that played out over more than a decade across the metropolitan area.

Down on the boardwalk they’re getting ready for a fight
Gonna see what them racket boys can do
Now there’s trouble busting in from outta state
And the D.A. can’t get no relief
Gonna be a rumble out on the promenade
And the gambling commissions hanging on by the skin of its teeth

The scene is clearly set–we are contemporaneously in the early casino days, the South Philly mafia proving too strong for the overpowered local law and gaming commissions (the latter of which was itself facing a federal corruption investigation).

And now, the song’s chorus and key theme appears:

Well now everything dies baby that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City

So it’s the city itself that dies and then came back! At this point in the song, it seems that the narrator is referring to the town’s premise and promise that gambling would restore the city’s vitality, and he’s determined and excited to be a part of it. But maybe that’s not all…

Well I got a job and tried to put my money away
But I got debts that no honest man can pay
So I drew what I had from the Central Trust
And I bought us two tickets on that Coast City bus

Now baby everything dies baby that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City

Ah… so it’s not just the town; it’s also our protagonist’s fortunes that have died. His debts that no honest man can pay (a line that sounds like foreshadowing even if you don’t recognize that line from another song about an outlaw) are leading him to Atlantic City, where he hopes he can gamble his way back to life.

Now our luck may have died and our love may be cold
But with you forever I’ll stay
We’re going out where the sand’s turning to gold
So put on your stockings, baby, ’cause the night’s getting cold

Wait… so now he’s got romantic problems as well? His relationship has died, but if all goes well where the sand turns to gold (a wonderful line), maybe that will come back to life, too.

So now we have three different layers to death and resurrection. But Bruce isn’t done yet:

Now I’ve been looking for a job but it’s hard to find
Down here it’s just winners and losers and don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line
Well I’m tired of coming out on this losing end
So honey last night I met this guy and I’m gonna do a little favor for him

Bam! That devastating last line makes everything crystal clear: our hero isn’t going to A.C. to try his luck on the slots; he’s taken a contract from the mob. And he knows full well the danger:

Well I guess everything dies baby that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City

He’s accepted his fate. He knows full well the risk he’s taking, but hey–if everything that dies some day comes back, maybe he will, too.

That’s a master class in songwriting, folks: four different layers and interpretations of death and resurrection in 3 minutes and 40 seconds. The irony is that the line itself–“maybe everything that dies someday comes back”–is a lift from the 1980 movie by the same name as the song. Bruce added layers of meaning to it.

I mentioned earlier that Philip Testa–the Chicken Man–was murdered in March of 1981. Bruce’s imagination must have been immediately catalyzed by the event, because within a month, he’d worked out a demo for a song called “Fist Full of Dollars.” The melody isn’t familiar, and the setting is geographically generic (although clearly somewhere along the shore), but the lyrics sure are familiar:

The almost-final Testa lyrics stand in such stark contrast to the roughness of the rest of the lyrics that it’s natural to assume that it was Testa’s death that moved Bruce to write the song, and that he only happened upon the Atlantic City metaphor for death and resurrection later. But not much later–Bruce continued working on the song, and before long, he’d transplanted it to Atlantic City (still unnamed, but the casinos give it away):

However, both of these prototypes lack the death/resurrection theme and complexity of the final product. That would come soon enough, too. About six months or so later, Bruce had settled on the melody, theme, and most of the lyrics. You’ll hear a couple of lines in the demo below that didn’t make the final cut, though.

Let’s talk about that final cut for a moment: “Atlantic City” is one of the songs Bruce recorded during the Nebraska sessions at his home studio in Colts Neck, NJ. Benefiting from a four-track recorder, Bruce recorded his own backing vocals and plays all the instruments we hear, including the mandolin and glockenspiel, which evoke the old-time, pre-casino Atlantic City so well.

So much care was taken with the layered vocals and instrumentation–which makes it all the more mystifying to me why he never fixed the glaring mistake in the final chorus! Listen carefully and you’ll hear him trip over the lyrics: The line is supposed to be “Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty.” But he accidentally sings, “Put your hair up nice,” realizes the mistake, bluffs for a second, and then mumbles his way back on the “pretty.” To this day, it astounds me that he didn’t go back and fix that.

Bruce released the song on the Nebraska album in September 1982, but since he didn’t tour for that album, he wouldn’t perform it live until almost two years later. When the Born in the USA Tour kicked off, “Atlantic City” featured prominently on the setlist from the very first show. Listen to that very first live performance from June 29, 1984 here:

Notably, the arrangement is full band, as Bruce had originally intended (“Atlantic City” is one of the Nebraska songs that successfully transitioned from acoustic to electric–others proved famously elusive).

Bruce wouldn’t play “Atlantic City’ acoustically in public until 1990, where it featured in the legendary Christic shows.

“Atlantic City” has been a staple of almost every tour setlist since its debut–the Tunnel of Love tour remains the only tour without a single outing. The arrangements typically vary between full band and solo acoustic guitar, but there have been a few notable exceptions, including solo piano renditions in 2005:

…and a dramatic new arrangement for the Seeger Sessions Tour 2006 that transforms the song’s protagonist from fatalist to optimist:

In any arrangement, in any setting, “Atlantic City” remains one of Bruce’s crowning song-writing achievements. He’d covered similar ground earlier (“Meeting Across the River“) and he’d return to it later (“Easy Money” is so close to the let’s-go-out-and-be-well-dressed-criminals motif of “Atlantic City” that I wonder why he took the time to revisit it), but for its combination of layered metaphor, real-world setting, atmospheric recording, and clever final reveal, “Atlantic City” remains alone at the top of that mini-genre. Maybe that’s why it’s had no less than six official album releases and is one of his most covered songs.

Atlantic City
Recorded: December 1981 – January 1982
Released: Nebraska (1982), In Concert/MTV Plugged (1993), Greatest Hits (1995), Live in New York City (2001), The Essential Bruce Springsteen (2003), Live in Dublin (2007)
First performed: June 29, 1984 (St. Louis, MO)
Last performed: September 3, 2023 (East Rutherford, NJ)

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