Roll of the Dice: Waiting on the End of the World

Friend of the blog John J. Kelly requested I jump the queue with this one. It’s a good pick, and a challenging one.

“Waiting on the End of the World” is one of the more obscure entries even among Bruce’s catalog of unreleased outtakes, and it has a curious history.

Too new to have been widely bootlegged, “Waiting on the End of the World” originated in the limbo period between the “other band” era and the acoustic Ghost of Tom Joad era.

In fact, Bruce recorded it twice–once with the other band (or at least the core members of it) in 1994, and once again during the E Street Band reunion sessions in 1995–and neither version has ever been officially released.

The original take with the other band remains securely in the vault, to the best of my knowledge, but the E Street Band version escaped some years ago, and it’s that version that we can listen to and discuss:

Musically and vocally, it’s immediately datable. Even though we’re listening to the E Street Band, the arrangement, production, and Bruce’s vocal style are all very reminiscent of the Human Touch/Lucky Town era. That may be why  Bruce chose not to release it–alongside other songs from those sessions (“Blood Brothers,” “Secret Garden,” “Back in Your Arms.” for example), it would have been a bit jarring. There may also be another reason, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

Still, the ESB took a swing at it in January 1995, when Bruce convened the E Street Band (including Steve Van Zandt) in the studio for the first time in over a decade, to record a few bonus tracks for Bruce’s planned Greatest Hits album.  The song selection was an interesting mix–in addition to the above songs, there was a cover of “High Hopes,” a new take of “This Hard Land,” and “Waiting on the End of the World,” which was probably still top-of-mind for Bruce, since he had intended it to be the title track of an album he’d originally hoped to release in 1995, but which Jon Landau discouraged in favor of the Greatest Hits project, and about which Bruce himself had considerable ambivalence after mining similar thematic ground for the past three albums.

It seems that both recordings of “Waiting” were poorly timed, and that’s too bad–because it’s a good song with a great hook and a lot of potential. (The version we’re fortunate enough to hear is almost certainly unfinished–a giveaway is how submerged Clarence’s sax solo is in the mix.)

Lyrically, “Waiting on the End of the World” requires close attention and invites interpretation:

For one deadly love like a disease
I came to you crawling on my knees
Your eyes filled with rain
I can feel poison running through my veins

I’m waiting, I’m waiting, I’m waiting, waiting on the end of the world

For one deadly kiss what would we give
Your skin trembling ‘neath my fingertips
All I know is someday
For love, baby, everybody pays

I’m waiting, I’m waiting, I’m waiting, waiting on the end of the world

Bruce repeats the world “deadly” in the opening lines of the verses, comparing love and a kiss to disease and death, and ominously predicting that the love he sings about exacts a terrible cost.

Clearly this is a forbidden love–an affair perhaps? It’s certainly possible to read this is as a prequel of sorts to “Hearts of Stone,” two married-to-others would-be lovers resisting temptation lest they destroy their families and their lives–the end of their individual worlds.

But I think that perhaps Bruce meant this song to be more literally interpreted: this love is truly deadly, there really is poison in the narrator’s veins, and the disease he likens it to is real: AIDS.

Remember that “Waiting on the Edge of the World” was first recorded in 1994–the same year that Bruce released “Streets of Philadelphia.” The two songs share some very similar imagery, too. Remember those lines above–“Your eyes filled with rain/I can feel poison running through my veins”–and compare to “At night I could hear the blood in my veins/Just as black and whispering as the rain.”

And the check out the next verse:

We hide from truth in our hearts
Like one look and everything will fall apart
Here in your arms, soft decay
I can feel myself wasting away

That last line echoes “Streets of Philadelphia” as well: “So brother are you gonna leave me wasting away”

Through this lens, that key line in “Waiting” becomes even more sinister and layered:

All I know is someday
For love, baby, everybody pays

The similarities in language and imagery sways me toward believing that “Waiting on the End of the World” is an alternate universe “Streets of Philadelphia,” and that Bruce chose to release the stronger of the two. The only reason I have any pause is that Bruce continued to work on “Waiting” for a full year after “Streets of Philadelphia” was released, and it strikes me as a bit odd that Bruce would follow up a song about a lover stricken with AIDS with another song about the same subject so quickly. It certainly wouldn’t have been the first or last time that Bruce would cross-pollinate his songs, though. To my knowledge Bruce has never discussed this song specifically, so it remains open to debate.

What do you think?

Waiting on the End of the World
Recorded: January 1995
Never Released
Never Performed

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