Roll of the Dice: Factory

My wife and I have this debate from time to time: when it comes to art–any form of it–sometimes you can love something you don’t like.

That holds true for music especially: sometimes you can admire and appreciate a song more than you actually enjoy listening to it.

For me, “Factory” is a prime example.

I do not like this song. While I’m glad I’ve heard it once in concert (to satisfy the completist in me), I’m more than happy to never hear Bruce perform it again. It’s plodding, monotonous, and devoid of hope. It’s no fun to sing along with, and it sucks the energy out of the room whenever and wherever it’s played.

That said:

I love this song. Its lyrical economy, the dance between Danny’s organ and Roy’s piano, the way the Bruce’s vocals and Max’s incessant drumbeat combine to drive home the world-weariness and rut that is at the very heart of the song, the way Bruce double-tracks his vocals on the last line of each verse–one high, one low to represent both the blessing and curse of factory work… holy cow, this is a stunning piece of work–and barely more than two minutes in length!

We’ll break it down, but let’s take a listen first:

Let’s state the obvious, first: this is clearly an autobiographical song. Bruce is usually coy about how much a given song is drawn from reality, but we certainly know that his dad worked in a factory (among the many gigs Douglas Springsteen held during his life). But the most telling detail is in the second verse: “Factory takes his hearing.” We know that about his dad, too, so it would seem that “Factory” is a naked attempt to come to grips with the role and the impact the factory had on Bruce’s father and family life–despite Bruce’s timid attempt to generalize the song to simply “Man.”

Early in the morning factory whistle blows
Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes
Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light
It’s the working, the working, just the working life

Or maybe it wasn’t Bruce’s intent to generalize at all. Bruce has spoken, written, and sung about how he formed his views of manhood by observing his dad, both for examples and counter-examples. So when Bruce refers to “Man” in this song, that may very well be the purest distillation of how he sees his father–Bruce’s archetype of manhood.

Semantics aside, just look at the economy in that verse–there’s not a single word wasted. Where in the world did this Bruce Springsteen come from? The writer who never met an adjective he didn’t like, the geographer with a detailed atlas of streets and lakes and rivers, the scenarist with a posse of colorful characters to populate his terrain… all are missing in action, and in their place is a fearless diarist staring his pain in the face and confronting it, stripped of all metaphor.

Well, maybe not all metaphor:

Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain
I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain
Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life
The working, the working, just the working life

Let’s talk about those mansions for a moment. They are the only metaphor in the entire song, and I don’t believe that’s by accident.

“Factory” was released on Darkness on the Edge of Town, the follow-up album to Born to Run. Where the former album is full of romance and color, Darkness is spare, dark, and real. In Born to Run’s anthemic title track, Bruce rides through “mansions of glory.” Meanwhile, in “Factory,” his dad walks through mansions of fear and pain.

When you listen to the two songs side-by-side, it’s hard not to read a note of guilt into Bruce’s subdued “Factory” vocals. His dad doesn’t have the escape of the open road that Bruce writes about (neither did Bruce, actually, when he wrote “Born to Run” — I’d argue that the road imagery of “Born to Run” is a metaphor itself for the release and escape that Bruce found in music, but that’s an essay for another day). The sacrifice that his father made for his family every day when he went to work–losing his hearing, surrendering his dreams, whittling his life even as the factory sustains it–is a theme that recurs in Bruce’s early work as he struggles to come to terms with it, until he finally confronts it head on in “Independence Day.” (“I swear I never meant to take those things away.”)

End of the day, factory whistle cries
Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes
And you just better believe, boy, somebody’s gonna get hurt tonight
It’s the working, the working, just the working life
Cause it’s the working, the working, just the working life

The most chilling line of the song is buried deep within that last verse: for everything the factory gives to families of the men who work within it, it exacts a price in return. For at least some of the men, the death of their dreams and aspirations gives birth to a seething, simmering anger, and Bruce implies that it’s an anger that can’t be indefinitely contained. There’s an undercurrent of abuse in that town–whether physical, verbal, or emotional (perhaps all three), we don’t know. We certainly know that for Bruce, at least, it took the form of some pretty heated late-night arguments that would be recounted on stage years later.

And all the while, Roy and Danny are intricately embellishing on Bruce’s very simply stated melody, finding and shining a light on the beauty that life holds even when routine is so deep-set as to become a prison. As if to drive the point home, Bruce’s double-tracked “working, the working, just the working life” soars and plods simultaneously.

And once again–Bruce accomplishes all this in under two minutes and thirty seconds.

Like I said: I love this song. I just don’t like it.

“Factory” came out to play on a regular basis during the Darkness  and River tours. Here’s its very first performance, from Nashville, on July 21, 1978:

After the River Tour, however, “Factory” pretty much disappeared until the Reunion era. One performance in particular from the Reunion Tour is notable for the addition of strings, courtesy of guest-star Soozie Tyrell (she wouldn’t join the band for another three years).

Interestingly, that wasn’t an altogether new arrangement. An alternate take of “Factory” with strings was considered at one point–you’d recognize it as the instrumental track from “Come On, Let’s Go Tonight” from The Promise. (Both of those officially released songs use virtually the same instrumental track, except for the violin absent from “Factory.”) Take a listen to the unreleased outtake (featuring David Lindley on violin) below:

This version also has a minor but significant lyrical change–“Factory takes his hearing, but he understands: He’s a working, a working, just a working man.” That implication of acceptance is probably a step too far for the man, who is never fully at peace with his trade-off.

I’ll leave you with two other notable performances of “Factory,” both of which I think do an admirable job of matching (but not surpassing) the beauty of the original recording.

The first is Bruce’s opening number from a Labor Day concert in Philadelphia in 2012, performed solo and acoustic on guitar and harmonica:

…and the second is a full-band performance in the empty Paramount Theater in Asbury Park. There’s something about the empty hall, the lack of an audience that forces Bruce to look inward for connection rather than outward–and the close-up camera captures his emotion and reminiscence throughout.

Factory
Recorded: October-November, 1977
Released: Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978)
First performed: July 21, 1978 (Nashville, TN)
Last performed: September 5, 2016 (Virginia Beach, VA)

Looking for your favorite Bruce song? Check our full index. New entries every week!