Roll of the Dice: The War is Over

The dice are mean today.

Just a few days after assigning me “Souls of the Departed,” they turn up the similarly themed Steel Mill number, “The War Is Over,” and the comparison is almost cruel.

To be fair, though, Bruce wrote “The War Is Over” when he was still a teen, so we can forgive the stridency of the lyrics and the stretched-to-its-breaking-point metaphor; instead we can admire the songwriter’s earnestness and the arranger’s creativity.

In the astonishingly pure recording below from the band’s January 1970 performance at The Matrix in San Francisco, we’re treated to a lovely extended guitar introduction. Even then, Bruce had a flair for the dramatic–the moment when the band enters is undeniably powerful. Take a listen:

That was, in fact, the band’s opening number that night, and it must have been quite an introduction. Although the lyrics pale in comparison even to much of his contemporaneous compositions, Bruce’s musical craftsmanship is on full display. Notice how he uses a recorder to set the scene in a medieval king’s court (I’d love to know who’s playing it)? That’s a stroke of genius.

Honestly, the most interesting thing about the lyrics is their timeliness today. Originally written during the Vietnam war to protest the deadly, disastrous conflict, the references to a king entertained by low culture while a resistance builds, betrayed by a steady stream of deserters, isolated and aggrieved, and beset on all sides by those who would remove him from power… well, let’s just say the lyrics require a lot less poetic license today than they did fifty years ago.

The king and the queen have drowned in their laughter
Today the new court jester has arrived
And he’ll tell you funny stories and dance a bit after
And help the king forget the revolution outside

Well the wars been lost can your army stay and watch
As thousands desert to the other side
Your people pledge allegiance in the face of a bomb
And too many people have died telling other jokes
The king, he cried

So far, so good, in either decade. Suddenly, though, Bruce rips the metaphor away like a band-aid, and we feel as if we’re dropped onto a battlefield, the screaming children all around us:

Well when are you gonna realize that your kingdom is crumbling before your eyes
Your tears have been streaming like blood from the sky
When you hear the children screaming whose brothers have died
You can murder in the name of freedom but you just can’t hide

By the time Bruce picks the story back up (after an extended power jam), we’re shell-shocked. We’ve all but forgotten the original setting. Luckily, the band reminds us that we’re back in the king’s court, but the whiplash from the stark bridge back to the verses’ metaphor doesn’t work nearly as well in reverse as it did at the beginning.

I can certainly see what he was aiming for: Bruce deliberately decorated the verses in order to make the plain-spoken bridge more powerful in contrast. But in the second half of the song, Bruce takes the metaphor a bit too far, sticking his toe over the line between novel and trite a few times:

The moon is hanging high over the castle tonight
There’s rumors of an attempt on the throne
The king has locked himself into his chamber
And the walls are screaming out “You’re alone, you fool, you’re alone”

And from the cave of night rides a horseman
And he comes bringing word of the war
He says “sire, your armies are defeated
No people are fighting anymore, for your kingdom it ain’t yours
And they killed your last soldier”
And the war is over

By the end of the song, we’ve truly entered the realm of a fairy tale, with a comeuppance for the ruler that’s so neat and tidy, only a nineteen-year-old could write it.

So yeah, this isn’t Bruce at his best–it’s not even Bruce at his teenage best. Like I said at the top, he’d get much better at exploring this theme with age, relying on empathy and subtlety rather than preachiness to make his point. But there’s still much to admire here, from the imaginative use of the recorder to the deliberate song construction to lyrics that resonate in ways Bruce couldn’t have possibly imagined when he wrote them.

And the next time you hear someone complain about Bruce getting political in his later years, point them to “The War Is Over.” His values were on full display a full half-century ago.

The War Is Over
Never recorded
Never released
First performed: September 20, 1969 (Richmond, VA)
Last performed: August 14, 1970 (Richmond, VA)

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