Roll of the Dice: It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City

True fact: the last song on Bruce’s debut album, “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City,” fades out before it’s over.

I’m not talking about the demo version from Tracks–I mean the actual Greetings version ends too soon. If that’s the only version you’ve heard, then you’ve never heard how Bruce finished the song.

So let’s start off by listening to the original mix, and turn the volume way up around the 2:45 mark.

Yeah, that’s Bruce rapping his way out of the song as the music fades:

Walking down some side street
With your back flat jacked up against some wall
A-cutting down the corner with the wind
She cuts your car, she cuts your car, the wind, she cuts your car
Well the way the black ash flow through
Well can you, the black ash flow through

Is it significant? Does it change the meaning of the song? Nah–it’s just cool, and this song is nothing if not a celebration of and a struggle to be (or maybe keep) cool.

“Saint in the City” is the story of a street rat-turned-cool cat, a legend in his own mind. He looks cool, acts cool, walks like Brando, and dances like Casanova. But he wasn’t always that way: he was poor once (a prince of paupers), and recently, too.

He was the lookout for a local pimp relying on his gift of gab, which is seriously impressive. Look–I mean really look–at the sheer density of assonance and alliteration packed into these three lines:

With my blackjack and jacket and hair slicked sweet
Silver star studs on my duds like a Harley in heat
When I strut down the street I could feel the heartbeat

Holy cow, that’s some hotshot writing!

And then one day, he gambles in a street game over a steam vent and loses–but then something miraculous happens:

And when the heat came down and it was left on the ground
Devil appeared like Jesus through the steam in the street
Showin’ me a hand I knew even the cops couldn’t beat
I felt his hot breath on my neck as I dove into the heat
It’s so hard to be a saint when you’re just a boy out on the street

The police arrive on the scene, and the players scatter, abandoning their cards and their cash. And through the chaos, our “hero” sees his opportunity–he dives for the cash, feeling the Devil’s breath in the steam from the vent, and makes a run for it.

Now he’s got the cash to back up the image he’s carefully groomed. He’s set now… or is he?

“It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” is one of the more significant songs in Bruce’s catalog–it’s the one that got him noticed by both Mike Appel and John Hammond. Bruce played an acoustic version of the song for both of them, and both men were taken by the cascade of lyrics musical bravado that poured forth before them.

The Appel audition was on February 14, 1972–their second meeting. Appel had been unimpressed the first time around, but he was taken by the new batch of material Bruce performed on this day, songs that Bruce explained he had written just a couple of months earlier. Appel was so taken by “Saint in the City” that he made Bruce play it again.

Appel immediately began to work on signing Bruce (which he did a month later), and on May 2, Appel talked his way into an audition for Bruce with the legendary John Hammond at Columbia Records. Hammond–like Appel–was hooked upon hearing “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City.”

The very next day, Bruce was recording demo tracks–fourteen of them–with Hammond at Columbia, and one of them was this acoustic version of “Saint in the City” — the one you can find on Tracks.

Personally, I prefer the earlier Tracks version to the Greetings version. The song is essentially the story of a guy trying to survive on his own in the big city, and the presence of a band–especially one playing as loose as the band does on the Greetings track–kind of undermines that. When I listen to the demo version, I can envision Bruce walking through the city with his acoustic guitar, doing his best to hustle up some cash when the opportunity presents itself and slip along unnoticed when it doesn’t.

The lyrics are also subtly different between the two versions. For the first half of the song, the differences don’t matter: an extra conjunction here, and added “mama” for meter and emphasis there… pretty insignificant stuff.

But about two thirds of the way through, the small changes start having a bigger impact. Let’s pick up the story where we left off:

It’s too hot in these tunnels, you can get hit up by the heat
I get up to get out at the next stop but they push me down in the seat
My heart starts beatin’ faster as I struggle to my feet
And I get out of that hole and I’m back up on the street

And them south side sisters sure look pretty
Oh, and the cripple on the corner knows I don’t pay for no pity
And them gasoline boys, yeah, they sure talk gritty
It’s so hard to be a saint in the city

…becomes:

But it’s too hot in these tunnels, you can get hit up by the heat
You get up to get out at your next stop but they push you back down in your seat
Your heart starts beatin’ faster as you struggle to your feet
And you’re out of that hole, back up on the street

And them south side sisters sure look pretty
The cripple on the corner cries out, “Nickels for your pity“
Them downtown boys, they sure talk gritty
It’s so hard to be a saint in the city

In other words, Bruce took an intensely personal song and made it more inclusive by changing the perspective mid-song from first- to second-person. It’s a deliberate technique that Bruce uses from time to time to trick us into identifying with the main character of the song. It’s sneaky, and it almost always works.

But here, not so much.

That part of the song is already intense–the protagonist is already in dire straits, and very specific ones: he’s been cornered and is being harassed by the police (“the heat”). Do they know he stole the money? Do they suspect? No, it turns out they’re just treating him like the street rat he is. He panics, and he runs, his self-image destroyed.

The music speeds up to keep pace with the cascade of lyrics, and we’re carried along with it–the focus-shift from first to second-person isn’t necessary here, and I’d argue that it doesn’t really work anyway. The circumstances are so specific and foreign to most of us that the song works better as an intimate first-person narrative.

And the change from “…the cripple on the corner knows I don’t pay for no pity” to “…the cripple on the corner cries out ‘Nickels for your pity'” is just criminal (and a recycled line as well–it appears two verses earlier). That hardness in the main character–particularly on the heels of his escape from the “heat”–is key to understanding him. His desperate need to maintain his image for his own sake is his key to survival. The fact that he doesn’t change–that he puts his cool cat disguise back on like a jacket–is a much stronger ending to the song than the more ambiguous fade-out on Greetings.

That one small lyrical change weakens the Greetings version right at its climax, and that’s too bad.

In concert, “Saint in the City” was an E Street setlist mainstay through the Darkness Tour, after which it virtually disappeared until it resurfaced in acoustic form on the Ghost of Tom Joad Tour.

In electric form, it seemed to serve primarily as a showcase for Bruce’s guitar-playing from the beginning. Here’s the first recorded performance of the song, from July 31, 1973:

As the years passed, it evolved into a guitar duel between Bruce and Steve, which was fun and impressive but completely overshadowed and undermined the content of the song.

For my money the song still works best acoustically. I haven’t been lucky enough to be there when Bruce performed it that way, but I still hold out hope.

It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City
Recorded: June-October 1972
Released: Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (1973), Tracks (1998) (Demo version)
First performed: May 2, 1972 (New York City, NY)
Last performed: April 3, 2023 (Brooklyn, NY)

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