Roll of the Dice: Gypsy Biker

“Gypsy Biker” has the soul of Bruce’s classic narrative laments like “Highway Patrolman,” “The Line,” or “The River.”

In fact, in its first moments, “Gypsy Biker” almost sounds like a self-homage to “The River.” Seriously: listen to the opening bars of both, and you’ll hear the similarity in the rueful harmonica and acoustic guitar intros.

As the song proceeds lyrically, it sounds almost like a rewrite of “Shut Out the Light” (the two songs even share a lyric),  except that “Gypsy Biker” makes the family in “Shut Out the Light” seem fortunate by comparison.

But where the songs above get lost in contemplative regret, “Gypsy Biker” rages and rocks. It’s an angry song on an angry album, but unlike other Magic tracks, Bruce makes no attempt to disguise the point-of-view character’s pain or underline it with political metaphor. “Gypsy Biker” is a song of mourning.

The gypsy biker, of course, isn’t the singer. It’s the singer’s brother, whose death sends the singer spiraling into fury and despair as he struggles to come to grips with his loss.

In Bruce’s typical fashion, he spends the first verse setting the scene, intercutting between intimate scenes of familial grief and anonymous profiteering by those who’ll never know the price someone else paid for their riches. He sings in a high register, his vocals pinched to convey the anguish of the narrator.

The speculators made their money on the blood you shed
Your momma’s pulled the sheets up off your bed
The profiteers on Jane Street sold your shoes and clothes
Ain’t nobody talkin’ because everybody knows
We pulled your cycle up back to the garage and polished up the chrome
Our gypsy biker’s comin’ home

Another Springsteen trademark is in play: conveying information without directly stating it. Bruce strongly implies that the biker is a soldier (a recurring theme on the Magic album), and although the last line of the verse sounds hopeful, the earlier “sheets up off your bed” line informs us otherwise–the biker is not coming home alive.

We also know that the singer isn’t blaming whoever pulled the trigger on his brother; instead, he’s condemning the powers that be for concerning themselves with wealth over human lives. And if there’s any doubt about it, Bruce name checks “Jane Street.” Whether that refers to the financial trading firm or the upscale Manhattan neighborhood, the implication is clear.

In the next verse, Bruce sets up the central conflict of the song: a family and town torn apart by loss.

Sister Mary sits with your colors, brother John is drunk and gone
This whole town’s been rousted, which side are you on?
The favored march up over the hill in some fool’s parade
Shoutin’ victory for the righteous but there ain’t much here but graves
Ain’t nobody talkin’, we’re just waitin’ on the phone
Gypsy biker’s comin’ home

It’s unclear (probably deliberately so), whether Sister Mary is a religious or a familial reference, but either way she sits watch over the flag that drapes the biker’s empty coffin, while Brother John (a sibling, a close friend, or a fellow soldier) drowns his sorrows.

The townspeople take sides and demonstrate their political loyalties, but as the singer notes, nothing can bring back the dead.

The song’s bridge features the song’s most stark imagery, one that sticks with the listener long after the song ends:

We rode her into the foothills, Bobby brought the gasoline
We stood ’round her in a circle as she lit up the ravine
The spring high desert wind rushed down on us all the way back home

The biker’s friends and family drive the bike out to the desert and burn it, sending it to the heavens in place of the biker himself, and it’s at this point that we realize that the “home” the biker is going back to isn’t on this earth.

In the last verse, Bruce sings directly to the biker. Bruce’s vocal here is devastatingly laden with emotion–it’s one of his best performances on the album:

To the dead, it don’t matter much ’bout who’s wrong or right
You asked me that question, I didn’t get it right
You slipped into your darkness, now all that remains
Is my love for you brother, lying still and unchanged
To them that threw you away, you ain’t nothin’ but gone
My gypsy biker’s coming home

Listen to it, and feel the bitterness and regret in “I didn’t get it right”; the sincerity and devotion in “my love for you brother” and the anger and resentment in “you ain’t nothin’ but gone.” This verse shreds me every single time I hear it–as do the final lyrics:

Now I’m out countin’ white lines
‘Countin white lines and getting stoned
My gypsy biker’s coming home

When the song first came out, fans would argue about the “white lines.” Do they refer to cocaine or to highway lane dividers? To argue is to miss the point entirely: either way, the singer is self-medicating, distracting himself either with hard drugs or the soporific highway, unable to move past his loss.

Those lines join “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse” and “God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of” in the canon of devastating final Springsteen lyrics.

“Gypsy Biker” was a nightly staple throughout most of the Magic Tour, but following the passing of Danny Federici, Bruce performed it less frequently, dropping it from the setlist for most of the final months of the tour. Perhaps the song’s loss of a dear friend hit too close to home; certainly the song demands a vocal performance that would make it hard to detach oneself from it.

In the clip below, only days after Danny’s passing, you can see and hear the intensity and emotion in Bruce’s delivery. Are those tears or is it sweat the Bruce wipes from his eyes at around the 4:40 mark? Given that performance, it could easily be both.

“Gypsy Biker” was all but retired after the Magic Tour. Since then, it’s made but one appearance (thanks to a sign request), the following year in Charlottesville on the Working on a Dream Tour. It took a while for Bruce to remember how the song goes, but once it clicked, the performance was as intense as ever.

Gypsy Biker
Recorded: March-May 2007
Released: Magic (2007)
First performed: September 27, 2007 (Asbury Park, NJ)
Last performed: May 5, 2009 (Charlottesville, VA)

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