Roll of the Dice: Man at the Top

“This is a song that I guess fits both in Atlantic City or Washington.” — Bruce Springsteen, August 5, 1985

With those eerily prescient words, Bruce introduced “Man at the Top,” one of the very last songs he’d recorded during the Born in the U.S.A. sessions but that never made it on the album.

Played solo and acoustically, sung introspectively, and backed by what is very possibly the E Street Band’s finest harmony, Bruce’s rendition of “Man at the Top” that night–the second of only three performances ever–still ranks (in my opinion, at least) among Bruce’s finest yet underrated on-stage moments.

Certainly, it was stronger than the studio recording–released on Tracks a full thirteen years after its live debut, the studio version of “Man at the Top” moves a bit too swiftly, with too much jaunt in the backing track and too much brio in Bruce’s vocals.

If you listen to both the ’85 and studio recordings above, you’ll hear two very different songs. Bruce is famous for pairing lyrics with backing tracks that belie the song’s message (most famously on the title track for that very tour), but sometimes the wrong arrangement doesn’t just hide the song’s meaning but instead actually subverts it.

“Man at the Top” is a case in point. If you were to read the lyrics alone without ever hearing the song, you might think that Bruce had succumbed to the lure of unbridled wealth and ambition at the height of the 1980s:

Here comes a fireman, here comes a cop
Here comes a wrench, here comes a carhop
Been going on forever, it ain’t ever gonna stop
Everybody wants to be the man at the top

Everybody wants to be the man at the top
Everybody wants to be the man at the top now
Aim your gun, son, and shoot your shot
Everybody wants to be the man at the top

Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief
Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief
One thing in common they all got
Everybody wants to be the man at the top, yeah

The bridge especially seems awfully personal, and the final verse autobiographical:

Man at the top says it’s lonely up there
If it is, man, I don’t care
From the big white house to the parking lot
Everybody wants to be the man at the top

Here comes a banker, here comes a businessman
Here comes a kid with a guitar in his hand
Dreaming of his record in the number one spot
Everybody wants to be the man at the top

For a man who knew that he was on the precipice of mega-stardom when he wrote it (and had already made that leap by the time of that ’85 performance), “Man at the Top” sure reads like a self-pep talk meant to give himself that final nudge to grab the brass ring. And honestly, if we listen just to the studio recording, that’s the logical read of it.

But when Bruce played it that August night in 1985, he gave it a more reflective reading. It still sounds personal, but on the other side of stardom, we get the sense that he’s already paid the price he sings about, and maybe he does care after all. Not enough to want to change his fortune, but enough for that last verse to sound like a message to his younger self across the years.

Other than his offhand introductory comment (almost certainly a Donald Trump reference, a full thirty years before Trump declared his presidential candidacy), though, the political undertone of the song was muted. That’s a bit surprising considering the venue for the concert was the nation’s capital, but perhaps Bruce didn’t see a need to make the callout so soon after the recent presidential election.

The first time he ever played “Man at the Top,” though, was a different story. More than a year prior, at the beginning of the tour and just a few months before the election of 1984, Bruce was careful not only to introduce the song as political, he even changed a lyric: “one thing in common they all got” became “the movie star to the astronaut” (a reference to the incumbent president and one of his rivals that year).

After the Born in the U.S.A. Tour ended, it seemed like Bruce had permanently retired “Man at the Top,” but it made a surprising one-time-only (so far) return almost 30 years later, in Kilkenny, Ireland on July 28, 2013.

Performed in the same arrangement he used for the Born in the U.S.A. Tour, Bruce took full advantage of the talented backing vocalists that accompanied the E Street Band on their Wrecking Ball Tour. Just like the song’s last outing in 1985, this 2013 performance ranks among the highlights of the Wrecking Ball Tour.

Man at the Top
Recorded: January 12, 1984
Released: Tracks (1988)
First performed: July 12, 1984 (East Troy, WI)
Last performed: July 28, 2013 (Kilkenny, Ireland)

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