Roll of the Dice: Goin’ Cali

Funny how those dice work.

I was wondering what song they would assign me to start the year off with, secretly hoping for a classic like “Thunder Road” or “Backstreets” that I could sink my teeth into. Instead, I got “Goin’ Cali,” a straightforward obscurity that I rarely listen to, much less consider.

But after a quick reacquaintance listen, I realized it’s a perfect selection for a New Year’s Day. “Goin’ Cali” is about fresh starts and new beginnings; leaving your past behind and taking action for a brighter future. Isn’t that what today is all about?

Because it wasn’t released until eight years after it was written, it’s easy to miss the significance of “Goin’ Cali.” It’s the bridge between Tunnel of Love and Human Touch/Lucky Town, one that traces Bruce’s literal and metaphorical journey to self-awareness, self-acceptance, and a new family of his own creation.

When Tracks was originally released, Bruce sat down for an interview with Mark Hagen of Mojo Magazine. There were a lot of songs that Hagen could (and did) ask about, but Hagen zeroed in on the personal, asking Bruce: “Two songs seem to be very about you; one is ‘The Wish,’ which is clearly about your mother. The other autobiographical song is ‘Goin’ Cali’; is that you?”

Bruce:

Yes, that’s me. I was going to go out and play with a band and needed music that was going to fuel that show, but in the meantime I wrote about half a record on the bass, where you had a note and you had your idea. I wrote about half or more of a record. The only one that made it to release was “57 Channels,” but on this thing there was “Over the Rise,” “When the Lights Go Out,” “Loose Change,” “Goin’ Cali,” “Gave it a Name,” even “My Lover Man,” all these very psychological portraits of people wrestling with relationships and their own isolation. “Goin’ Cali,” I suppose, was just an experimental thing I laid down in the studio one day; I don’t even remember recording it or how it came about but it traces, ironically, my journey at that time out West.

I don’t think it’s ironic at all–I think Bruce is perhaps a bit too coy, here. “Goin’ Cali’ is about as blatantly autobiographical as it gets, but in those pre-autobiographical days twenty years ago, Bruce could pretend to have a bit more of a veil on his life story.

Hagen presses on: “A classic American tradition–if you assume that America was founded on people who could not fit in where they were in the first place, so moved and kept moving…”

Bruce:

Well that isolation is a big part of the American character. Everyone wakes up on one of those mornings when you just feel like you want to walk away and start brand new. The West obviously always symbolized that possibility for a long time here in the States–it probably still symbolizes the illusion of that possibility today. I reached a point where I wanted something different. I tried living in New York City for a while and I just was not a city boy, and I had a small place in California from the early ’80s on, and it was a place where I could go and I had my cars and my motorcycles, and I enjoyed the geography of the state; you can be out of Los Angeles in 30 minutes and hit the edge of the desert and travel for 100 miles. There is still a lot of nothing out here and I loved it. You are dwarfed in it and it puts your daily concerns in immediate perspective.

While it’s fascinating to read Bruce’s insights into such a personal song, he doesn’t really tell us anything we couldn’t suss out for ourselves with even a casual listen. Let’s look at the lyrics:

Well he’d been hearing too many voices and feelin’ a little off-track
Like there was something big pressing down on his back
So he called up his friends and they said come on out west
It’s a place where a man can really feel his success

At the time of its release in 1998 on Tracks, most of us probably didn’t read too much into those first two lines. As Bruce notes above, sometimes you just have those days where you itch for the ability start anew. But today, with full knowledge of Bruce’s adult-life-long struggle with depression, those first lines carry additional heft. Perhaps Bruce’s move out west (which did indeed happen shortly before the song was likely written) was indeed an attempt by Bruce to wrest himself out of the throes of his illness by moving away from the ghosts of his past.

The next verse is one of Bruce’s most heart-wrenching (so much so that he’d re-use it in “Living Proof“):

So he pulled his heart and soul down off the shelf
Packed them next to the faith that he’d lost in himself
Said his good-byes and when the dirty work was done
He turned his wheels into the fading sun

The backing track for “Goin’ Cali'” is so spare (Bruce plays every instrument), and the vocal delivery so straightforward, that the crisis of confidence and identity that plagues our hero almost goes unnoticed. His band dispersed, his peak mega-stardom in the past, and with no clear vision to propel new work, what must Bruce have been feeling during that time?

For seven days and nights like a black-top bird he sped
Maintained radio silence ‘cept for in his head
And just like his folks did back in ’69
He crossed the border at Needles and heard the promised land on the line

Bruce has often talked about his first trip out west–in fact, it formed the basis of a set piece in Springsteen on Broadway–but he doesn’t often speak of this one. At the time, it must have felt significant, leaving behind his roots and retracing his parents’ migration.

And that “promised land” reference–that’s no accident. Last year, I wrote an essay on “The Promised Land,” arguing that it serves both as a song of defiance and a song of surrender. I still believe that Bruce meant it that way, and I believe that his reference to it here is very much in keeping with that dual interpretation.

Now where the Transcontinental dumps into the sea
There’s a bar made up to look like 1963
Girl in the corner eyed him like a hungry dog a bone
As he brushed the desert dust off that Mercedes chrome
Bartender said “Hey, how’s it hangin’, tiger?”
He had a shot of tequila, smiled and whispered “lighter”

This verse is probably more metaphorical than literal, but either way it represents Bruce’s warring desires for recognition and anonymity. This theme surfaces in other parts of Bruce’s contemporaneous catalog as well (see “Local Hero“).

He went down to the desert city where the rattlesnakes play
And left his dead skin by the roadside in the noon of day
Sun got so hot it almost felt like a friend
It could burn out every trace of where you been

This a lovely, poetic verse. The notion of shedding one’s past like a rattlesnake sheds its skin, and of the desert sun burning off the remnants–this is Bruce still very much at the pinnacle of his lyrical craft, and it holds its own amongst the best verses in Bruce’s catalog.

There was a woman he’d met in a desert song
A little while later a son come along
Looked at that boy’s smile and called it home
And that night as he lay in bed the only voice he heard was his own

Goin’ Cali…

I think that Bruce perhaps mis-remembered the context of the song in his interview with Hagen above. He implies that it was written around the time he was planning to go on tour with a new touring band, but that didn’t happen until mid-1992. “Goin’ Cali” was recorded at the very beginning of 1991 and was therefore probably written in 1990. The song is so clearly autobiographical that the mention of “a son come along” is almost certainly a marker for when it was written: Bruce’s first son, Evan, was born on July 25, 1990, and “Goin’ Cali” was therefore likely written during Bruce’s first months of fatherhood.

Those final lines belie the central notion of the song: Bruce may have fled west to escape his past, but he found his future, his home, not in geography but in family.

Over the months that followed, Bruce would embrace and explore that theme more fully and overtly, infusing his next albums with a sense of inner peace, satisfaction, and acceptance that contrasted sharply with his earlier work.

But those are stories for another day.

Goin’ Cali
Recorded: January 29, 1991
Released: Tracks (1998)
Never performed live

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