“Jackson Cage” may be one of the trickier songs on The River to interpret, but in fairness it took Bruce himself quite a while to figure out. From all available evidence, it seems like this is a case of Bruce landing a hook in search of a song.
The earliest known recording of what would become “Jackson Cage” is just a snippet of a chorus, recorded at home in mid-1979.
We get perhaps a little more insight into Bruce’s original concept with this single home-recorded verse, also from 1979, but given the slower speed and more introspective tone, it’s likely from a different session.
Bruce’s early lyrics here are interesting. Unlike the final version, where the focus is on the dual prisons of a convicted criminal and his romantic partner left to fend for herself, here Bruce focuses on the day to day experience of the prisoner himself, struggling physically, mentally, and emotionally for survival:
You take the chances that you’ve got to take
You drive hard and you stay awake
You take what you can get and keep what you hold
Pound for pound, you’re bought and sold
You sit crying, dirty on stage
You learn to cool your temper and collect your rage
To use it well down in Jackson Cage
Men down in Jackson Cage
Down in Jackson Cage
The quieter melody is fascinating, too–listening to the all-too-brief snippet above, one can’t help but wonder if this version of “Jackson Cage” might have ended up on Nebraska had Bruce not returned to it during the River sessions a year later.
Let’s fast forward to those 1980 recording sessions. Here we have Bruce’s next recorded attempt at “Jackson Cage,” from January. The lyrics are far more fleshed out now, and the instrumental track is fully recognizable… although not in the way you’d expect:
Well, that’s surprising, isn’t it?
Here we have lyrics that will appear in very similar form in the final version of “Jackson Cage,” but the instrumental track is all “Restless Nights.” And those lyrics–even though they’re familiar, there’s a subtle but significant difference:
…crossed swords on the killing floor
To settle back is to settle without knowing
The hard edge that you’re settling for
There’s always just one more day
It’ll always be that way
Once, oh, you’re back, baby stay
Way down, babe, in the Jackson Cage, in the Jackson Cage
Turning tricks and kings
Turn the corner, grab something to eat
Turn the corner and drive down her street
In a row of houses, she fade away
A scene in a new play
And girl, what’s your sin
That you’re living in?
You’ve been judged and handed life
In this version, Bruce has shifted the focus away from the prisoner (who doesn’t even seem to be a factor here, although that may just be due the incomplete recording) and instead to his girl–and the lyrics that describe the prisoner’s trap in the final version instead judge the woman here for allowing herself to remain in her situation.
A month later, on February 5, Bruce and the Band were in Bruce’s home studio (or more accurately, barn studio), taking a cut at the song. Once again, we have a very different melody and arrangement:
…and the lyrics seems to have taken a step backward (although since this was a band rehearsal, it’s quite possible that Bruce was just bluffing much of the song in order to focus on the band arrangement. Still, the focus here is still clearly on the girl waiting for her locked-up man, although now she doesn’t seem so trapped–she goes out dancing while the narrator/prisoner whiles his life away in jail.
A second rehearsal from the same day is largely similar, but it reveals more of the lyrics (supporting the theory that Bruce was bluffing above) and interestingly the words “Jackson Cage” altogether, and the song now seems almost like a “Two Hearts“-style pep talk. Take a listen:
Still, even though it may seem like Bruce was pretty far afield from the song that would end up on The River later that year, it didn’t take long for the song to gel from here: within a month, Bruce and the E Street Band would take a melody Bruce had tried out earlier on “Take ’em as They Come“…
…and record the final version we know and love today. This is the version we’ll dive into:
Let’s start off by acknowledging the power of the instrumental track–it may have taken Bruce a while to settle on what he was aiming for, but he certainly got there in the end. Max’s rat-a-tat barrels us out of the starting gate, only to have us land with a thud right in the middle of what feels like an action scene. In the background, Bruce’s distant wails make us feel almost like we’ve landed at the end of “Jungleland,” with our narrator hauled off by the cherry-tops.
Our narrator picks up the story from his prison cell, as he imagines the limbo his love is now imprisoned in:
Driving home she grabs something to eat
Turns a corner and drives down her street
Into a row of houses she just melts away
Like the scenery in another man’s play
Into a house where the blinds are closed
To keep from seeing things she don’t wanna know
She pulls the blinds and looks out on the street
Where the cool of the night takes the edge off the heat
Once, she was the star of her own story and the romantic lead in his. Now, she allows herself to fade into the background. Whether it’s out of loyalty to her man or her anger and fear over the violence that took him away from her, she shuts herself away inside her inconspicuous house, serving her time in a self-imposed prison.
We don’t realize this at first, of course, but we do as soon as the chorus comes in:
In the Jackson Cage
Down in the Jackson Cage
And you can try with all your might
But you’re reminded every night
That you been judged and handed life
Down in the Jackson Cage
Jackson is a New Jersey town about 15 miles south of Freehold, but the song could just as easily take place in Jackson, Mississippi or any other town by that name. It’s not the town that’s significant, it’s the circumstances.
As the narrator sings the chorus, we get our first inkling of just how long he’s likely to be there. It seems he’s committed a capital crime, and he knows he’s never going to go back to his former life. But he’s empathetic enough to recognize that the lines apply equally to his love–that she now faces a life without him, and a dilemma over whether to move on, whether emotionally, geographically, or both.
He goes on, describing their new life of biding time:
Every day ends in wasted motion
Just crossed swords on the killing floor
To settle back is to settle without knowing
The hard edge that you’re settling for
Because there’s always just one more day
And it’s always gonna be that way
Little girl, you’ve been down here so long
I can tell by the way that you move you belong
To the Jackson Cage
Down in Jackson Cage
And it don’t matter just what you say
Are you tough enough to play the game they play?
Or will you just do your time and fade away
Down into the Jackson Cage
The heart of this song lies in the irony of their circumstances and the raw emotional power of the final verse: her prison is self-imposed, but his is immutable, and they both know it. The narrator can never summon the emotional bravery to say it straight out, but “Jackson Cage” is his way of exhorting her to move on, to leave him behind, to escape her prison.
Baby, there’s nights when I dream of a better world
But I wake up so downhearted, girl
I see you feeling so tired and confused
I wonder what it’s worth to me or you
Just waiting to see some sun
Never knowing if that day will ever come
Left alone standing out on the street
Till you become the hand that turns the key
Down in Jackson Cage
Down in Jackson Cage
Well, darlin’, can you understand
The way that they will turn a man
Into a stranger to waste away
Down in the Jackson Cage
For as much solace as she brings to him through her visits and loyalty, she increases his torment as well: in part because he can’t bear to see her tired, confused, and defeated by life, but if he’s completely honest, it’s more because he can’t bear to let her see what he knows will become of him as time passes in the cage. Better to have her move on and remember him as he was than as the stranger he will ultimately waste away to become.
There’s no happy ending in “Jackson Cage,” no resolution of any sort–or even an inkling of one. This is a song about prison, after all. All we can do is wonder whether at least one of them someday escapes their cage.
(Ironically, though, Bruce took the opening lines of the song and repurposed them in one of his most carefree compositions, “Where the Bands Are.”)
“Jackson Cage” made its live premiere on the first night of the River Tour in Ann Arbor. Bruce introduced it simply as a song off the new album and performed it faithfully, if a bit slowly:
But a much clearer and more confident performance can be found on the concert video from Tempe just over a month later, included in The Ties That Bind: The River Collection. This arrangement is virtually identical to the album, but with a guitar solo taking the place of Bruce’s harmonica from the studio version.
“Jackson Cage” came out most nights during the first leg of the River Tour, sporadically during the 1981 leg, and then it disappeared entirely for more than a decade. Starting with the Rising Tour, “Jackson Cage” made a few cameo appearances on each E Street Band Tour but was never a setlist staple until it became one by default during Bruce’s 2016 River Tour, where it appeared during every full album performance.
Here’s one of those performances, from one of the very last full-album shows in Barcelona, on May 14, 2016.
Will we see “Jackson Cage” again? If history is any indication, probably. Although it didn’t show up in the brief 2004 Vote for Change and 2017 Australian tours, it hasn’t skipped out a full E Street Band tour in over fifteen years. We haven’t heard the last from our lifers.
Jackson Cage
Recorded: February-March, 1980
Released: The River (1980)
First performed: October 3, 1980 (Ann Arbor, MI)
Last performed: July 28, 1980 (Oslo, Norway)
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