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,’ “Until the Rain Comes,” and “For Never Asking.”
Today’s entry, “Slum Sentiments,” doesn’t have any date stamp, and there is no evidence that Bruce ever performed it. As one of the later songs in the notebook, it was probably written (or at least transcribed) sometime after April 1968, possibly a few months later.
In “Slum Sentiments,” Bruce paints a picture rather than tells a story. There’s no message, and nothing happens; instead, he creates a stark portrait of a hopeless poverty:
Golden horses ride down the city streets
Starving children clutter beneath their feet
‘Cause they haven’t had enough to eat
And the sweat drips from their bones in the heat
Of today’s sun
That’s a powerful opening verse–for an eighteen-year-old who didn’t enjoy school, Bruce was already expertly using language to convey a powerful image. We could nitpick, I suppose: was it really necessary to state that the children were starving when he more poetically expressed it by describing their sweat as dripping from their bones? Perhaps he wasn’t confident yet in his poetry and wanted to make sure. But the use of the word “clutter” to convey just how insignificant these children are to the unseen riders of the “golden horses” shows that Bruce had already honed his lifelong talent for surgically precise lyrics.
In their houses the rats have eaten all of the meat
down the hallways weary travelers often meet
and lay together in a drunken sleep
like all the dirt that needs to be sweeped
Up tomorrow
Similar to the “clutter” of children above, Bruce uses simile here to imply the insignificance and disposability of the vagrants.
But it’s the third verse that is the gem of the song:
Broken ladies on street corners with plate-glass eyes
Frozen babies wake the morning with a cry
As sewage pipes try to harmonize
With a sweet young mother’s sighs
That color the night
That entire verse is magnificent: from the broken ladies whose plate-glass eyes convey both outer fragility and inner disassociation simultaneously; to the frozen babies that imply the severity of the impoverished families that can’t even afford heat; to the notion of finding music in the blend of sewage pipes and hopeless sighs, when it can’t be found anywhere else–there’s so much packed into these five lines. To my mind, this stands tall among the best of Bruce’s early lyrics. And once again: he was eighteen!
Unfortunately, the last verse can’t sustain that peak, and Bruce slips a little into literal explanation:
When all have vanished there, still the hobo will sleep
for his bed is the gutter, the only home he knows is the street
He wakes in the morning and everything’s gone
then vomits gently in the dawn
Of tomorrow, of tomorrow
It’s a weak verse, but it has a killer final image: the hobo vomiting gently into the dawn is a crudely beautiful outro, the ugly quiet that passes for peace in this somber scene.
“Slum Sentiments” feels more like a poem than a song, and perhaps it’s for the best that we may never know what Bruce had in mind musically, and whether this was intended end-state or just a backdrop to develop something fuller. But it provides us with another window into a rapidly developing songwriter honing his already impressive skills.
Slum Sentiments
Never recorded
Never performed
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