It’s time for another visit to the “1968 Notebook,” where an 18-year-old Bruce Springsteen jotted down lyrics and song ideas for songs he never (as far as we know) recorded and that don’t appear on any bootlegs.
(Previous entries: “Turn Around,” “Crystal,’ and “Until the Rain Comes.”
Today’s entry, “For Never Asking” is at least believed to have been played publicly in the spring of 1968 at one of Bruce’s solo gigs at the Off Broad Street Coffee House in Red Bank.
Bruce dates the handwritten pages below as April 29, 1968, but as the notebook contains 11 songs date-stamped over a three-day period, it’s likely that the date represents when Bruce transcribed the songs, not when he composed them.
It’s interesting to note that the first page of lyrics are transcribed almost in paragraph form, rather than in a one-lyric-per-line format, and that strikes me as curious. It’s not always a matter of not being able to fit a complete line, so I wonder why Bruce chose that particular format only for the first four verses.
Format aside, the lyrics reflect darkness, sadness, isolation, and alienation–not necessarily extraordinary themes for a teenager, but with the benefit of hindsight and our knowledge of Bruce’s lifelong battle with depression, “For Never Asking” screams at us from the past like a cry for help, or at least a young man grappling to understand what’s happening in his mind:
Grayish skies choked with rain
cloud my head and turn away
Even as time passes by
life goes on, from lie to lie
but someday I will fly
The darkened room I dwell within
smiles at me gently – “won’t you please come in?”
Then binds me in its iron chains
never to let me go again
my tears will have all run dry
If that’s not an explicit description of a descent into depression, I can’t imagine what one would sound like.
Then I hear a knock on the door
open it to find a Union sword
with a finger pointing straight at me
when everything just ceased to be
“come kill with us, my friend”
The Great Society jumps and screams
but its not really what it seems
it runs down the alley and calls my name
wants me to play its silly games
but no, no, no, not I
Bruce calls upon two historical metaphors here, referring first to the U.S. Civil War (being conscripted to fight alongside the Union army) and then to President Johnson’s Great Society, which by 1968 had experienced a Republican backlash and was being pared back by President Nixon.
Both examples are rooted in political, cultural, and class rifts, and Bruce doesn’t so much declare a position as he opts out of having one. He’s struggling to figure out who he is and what he believes, free of influence from one side or the other:
Let me hear what I have to hear
Let me see what I have to see
Let me feel what I have to feel
Let me be what I have to be
without you
Man clown, up down
which way am I flowing?
Man clown, up down
which way is my life rowing, rowing?
Bruce gets no answers to his questions, though, and he returns to his alienation, feeling the clown, unable to escape but determined to someday:
The circus has arrived in town
children see the funny clown
Find the man behind the grin
he will never let you in
for nothing ever really sinks in to help you
Grayish skies scarred by the sun
scream in anger and start to run
ripped by the spear of its own forgotten lies
it runs for cover but dies, dies, dies
but someday I will fly
“For Never Asking” is a stark, sobering song–we don’t know what it would have sounded like, but it seems that it was intended as a solo acoustic song. Bruce may never have released it, but it’s a theme and a battle he would revisit throughout his life and career.
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