Roll of the Dice: Chevrolet Deluxe

For a song that never made it out of the incubator, we certainly have a lot of insight into the development of “Chevrolet Deluxe.”

Bruce started working on this song at home in the autumn of 1979. By November, he was developing a full-band arrangement with the E Street Band. We have bootlegs of both sessions, and each one traces a step in the song’s lyrical and musical development.

What’s most fascinating to me about the acoustic demos is that they reflect not just one but several of the themes that Bruce was grappling with at the time. In fact, even some lyrical and musical elements show up at one point or another in “Chevrolet Deluxe,” only to find a permanent home elsewhere.

Case in point: take a list to the first take in the clip below (about the first 1:20).

Check out those opening lyrics:

I had a wife and kid, and I tried to settle down
I just wanted to live an honest life on the edge of an honest town

…and compare to “Stolen Car,” which ultimately ended up on Bruce’s next album:

I met a little girl and I settled down
In a little house out on the edge of town

That’s not to say that “Chevrolet Deluxe” morphed into “Stolen Car,” but it is to say that the concept of a settled life–the life you’re “supposed to” live but can’t quite be at peace with–is a theme (or at least a backdrop) that Bruce would turn to more than once. (“I had a job, I had a girl, I had something going Mister in this world” is another example.)

The take goes on:

But in the end they left me danglin’ danglin’ in the night
And I went crazy tryin’, tryin’ to walk that thin line

Oh Chevrolet Deluxe, I bought you with all your accessories
But Mister, I can’t keep my payments up
I lie awake at night and I wonder if I’m tough enough
To win back the hand of Chevrolet Deluxe

The theme of the song is immediately established, and the car as metaphor for life drives it home: the singer bought into the whole concept–the wife, the family, the nice car–but can’t maintain it. On the surface, it’s about a car that’s too expensive to keep; below the surface, it’s his life that’s exacting a price.

(The melody, too, is reminiscent of “The River,” which Bruce had already debuted by this time, and I wonder if that’s accidental, deliberate, or that thematically similar song’s lingering presence in his subconsciousness.)

Let’s move on and listen to take #2, which runs from about 1:20 to 3:16 in the video below.

They shut the power off down at the mill, and counted their time
And these days when you ride down Main Street
It’s just whitewashed windows and vacancy signs
Did you ever think in the end your kids you would never believe
That if you wouldn’t leave this old town, that it would leave me

Too bad Bruce discarded that last line–it’s brilliant. But if that verse sounds vaguely familiar, compare it to “My Hometown,” which wouldn’t surface for another five years:

Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there ain’t nobody wants to come down here no more
They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back 

And we’re only on take #2. Let’s move on to #3, starting from 3:16 to 4:55.

Bruce is trying a different tack, here, and a clever one: rather than the old faithful “I had a job, I had a girl” opening, Bruce uses the common practice of anthropomorphizing (and feminizing) a car to make it unclear until the very last line whether he’s talking about a woman or a vehicle–and even then, you can read the “her” as applying to either.

I saw her when I was 17 down at Hansen’s Chevrolet
I made up my mind to get her anyhow, anyway
I spent that summer I worked till I had enough
I laid it down and I bought that Chevrolet Deluxe

It’s a much more creative and nuanced way to establish the scene, but Bruce doesn’t really do anything with it in this take. Let’s listen to Take #4, from 4:55 to 6:48 to see how it progresses.

We drove her that whole summer to the water <unintelligible>>
We drove her when the men came and shut that power down
We rode her down to Bond Street to the unemployment line
We rode her on Main Street and past the vacancy signs 

See how Bruce has now taken the “My Hometown” backdrop from take #2 and applied the take #3 metaphor to it? The song is so much more powerful now–the imagery of driving through a ghost town is also increasingly closer to “Stolen Car” territory.

Let’s check out take #5, from 6:48 to 8:00.

The only new element here is the infusion of the narrator’s dilemma, expressed starkly: is he tough enough to live the way he wants to rather than the way he’s expected to:

It don’t matter what you want, it don’t matter what you say
Are you tough enough not to play the way they play

We have one last acoustic take, but inexplicably, the song seems to lose cohesion. We have something resembling an intact song in length, but much of the lyrics are unintelligible, and Bruce has now named his characters and backdrop:

She was sittin’ down at Highway Chevrolet out on Route 3
She was looking like she was waitin’ just for me

(That’s a great opening line–definitely a keeper.)

I worked all summer long and I saved my money up
And I went down and I put that money down

It’s hard to understand what happens next, though, because the song suddenly seems to shift to a different point-of-view character, the singer’s friend Billy who shipped down to Fort Bragg. It doesn’t seem like Bruce has figured out how to merge the streams, though, and it’s almost jarring when his vocals suddenly clarify:

But it was like all of a sudden there was a curse
Things got bad and then they got worse

That rhyme–curse/worse–is lifted from “The River,” and since that song had already been performed live around this time (at the No Nukes concerts), it seems likely that it’s just a placeholder here.

So what happened next? Lyrically, we don’t know, but we do have some full-band takes from a couple of months later. Maddeningly, though, the vocals are so distant and muddy that it’s almost impossible to determine if the song had congealed at all. (Didn’t Bruce know his rehearsal sessions would leak for posterity?)

See what I mean? The second take is a bit more uptempo, but still unintelligible. At this point though, the song is certainly starting to gel musically, and the band is getting into it:

…and that’s where the tale of “Chevrolet Deluxe” ends, unfortunately. Whatever the reasons, Bruce abandoned it, scrapped it, and sold it for parts (and used them for later songs).

I still wonder if there’s isn’t a fully fleshed-out version of “Chevrolet Deluxe” in the vaults somewhere–or at least developed enough for Bruce to apply some touch-up work (a la The Promise) and release someday. Until then, this is all we have.

Chevrolet Deluxe
Never recorded
Never performed

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