This is one of the essays I’ve been dreading, but I knew the dice would turn it up eventually.
It’s not that I don’t like the song–in fact, it’s such a gloriously hot mess that I can’t help but love it.
It’s just that “Living on the Edge of the World” is indeed a hot mess–its lyrics and lineage are so entangled with other songs, and its musical elements are such a crazy hodgepodge of rockabilly punk and TexMex, harmonica and handclaps, oom-pa-pows and woo-woos, that I can’t figure out why it works.
But it does work, maybe because it barrels ahead so fast and furiously that we don’t have time to consider the reasons why.
Check it out and see what I mean:
I’m gonna give myself a hall pass on analyzing the lyrics, because a) they almost all turn up in other officially released Springsteen songs, and b) content-wise, “Living on the Edge of the World” from 1979 is essentially the same song as “Open All Night” from 1982’s Nebraska — even when the lyrics differ.
Both songs focus on the same poor schmo, stuck working the night shift while his girl works the days at a roadside diner two hours away (in “Living on the Edge of the World” it’s a HoJo at Exit 24; in “Open All Night” it’s the Bob’s Big Boy on Route 60). Each morning before dawn, our hero races back to his girl, racing down a deserted New Jersey turnpike across a state so quiet and empty it’s “like a lunar landscape.”
Working the night shift all alone, driving that lonely road–it’s enough to make a man feel like he’s almost disconnected from the world, living on its very edge.
That pretty much the song. Both songs. Some details get longer or shorter shrift, but in essence they’re the same.
Some verses appear in complete form in both songs:
Early North Jersey industrial skyline
I’m a all-set cobra jet creeping through the night time
Gotta find a gas station, gotta find a pay phone
This turnpike sure is spooky at night when you’re all alone
Now the boss don’t dig me, so he put me on the night shift
It takes me two hours to get back to where my baby lives
In the wee wee hours your mind gets hazy
Radio relays towers, won’t you lead me to my baby
Underneath the overpass, trooper hits his party light switch
Good night good luck, one two power shift
Radio’s jammed up with gospel stations
Lost souls calling long distance salvation
Hey mister deejay won’t you hear my last prayer
Hey ho rock ‘n roll deliver me from nowhere
Others vary a bit:
Radio, radio, hear my tale of heartbreak
New Jersey in the morning like a lunar landscape
…and some details (like the name and employer of the aforementioned girl) differ.
But even when the lyrics identical, they’re often all out of order. In fact, if you listen carefully to the November 1979 rehearsal sessions below (it’s hard to make out the vocals, but if you concentrate, you can), you’ll realize that Bruce was constantly swapping around the order of lines and verses, suggesting that “Living on the Edge of the World” is less of a narrative and more of a portrait (or perhaps the stream-of-consciousness late-night rambling we might all fall victim to in the same circumstances).
See what I mean?
Except it’s not just “Open All Night” that intermingles its lyrics with “Living on the Edge of the World.”
Both:
Down past the refinery towers where the great black river flows
and
In the wee wee hours my mind gets hazy
Relay towers, won’t you lead me to my baby
appear in “State Trooper” as well, along with references to radio stations jammed with gospel (“Living”) or talk show (“State Trooper”) stations.
But even that’s not all–check out this 1981 home demo of “Living on the Edge of the World.” (yes, Bruce was still working on the song two years later, although by now it had a new name, “Open All Night,” which makes the latter song arguably the “finished” version of the former (I prefer to think of them as different songs, though)).
Once you get past the “Nebraskafication” of the song, pay careful attention to the last verse…
Mister, can you tell me what happened to the seeds
What happened to the seeds I’ve sown
Yeah, where they fall from my hand
And they fell on the ground of this hard land
Yep… that’s right: now we have “Open All Night,” “State Trooper,” and “This Hard Land,” all spinning out of one song: “Living on the Edge of the World.”
If it wasn’t for that crazy instrumental track, we’d probably consider “Living on the Edge of the World” just a curious historical artifact, but it’s just so darn crazily and addictively compelling that it stands on its own.
The bootleg rehearsals above had been circulating for a while with unclear vocals, but Bruce finally released the song “officially” on his Tracks boxset compilation in 1998. The song got a second release in 2015 when it was included with The Ties That Bind: The River Collection box set that documented the sessions and outtakes that surrounded that classic album.
But “Living on the Edge of the World” has only been performed once*–when Bruce opened with it(!) at MetLife Stadium on the Wrecking Ball Tour. That was a true one-off, head-turning moment (it even throws Bruce and the band toward the end), and you can watch it for yourself below:
*Technically, Bruce has only performed “Living on the Edge” that one time in 2012… at least that’s the only time he’s played it in full with its own melody.
But here’s a bonus: check out this genuine one-off historical curiosity. It’s a performance of “Ramrod” from a couple of months into the River Tour, on November 28, 1980–a full year after Bruce recorded the take of “Living on the Edge of the World” that’s included on Tracks and The Ties That Bind.
Listen carefully to the performance, especially around the 3:40 mark, and you’ll see the Bruce clearly hadn’t forgotten about his “lost” song.
Living on the Edge of the World
Recorded: December 7, 1979
Released: Tracks (1998), The Ties That Bind: The River Collection (2015)
First performed: September 21, 2012
Last performed: September 21, 2012
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