Roll of the Dice: Sometimes at Night

Longtime readers know that while I love Bruce’s music from pretty much any era, I’m particularly fond of The Bruce Springsteen Band era of 1971-1972.

The Bruce Springsteen Band consisted of future E Street Band members (Bruce, Steve, Garry, Vini Lopez, and Dave Sancious) plus horns and backing vocalists. Bluesy and brassy, the band presaged in a way the big band incarnation of the E Street Band still fifty years(!) down the road.

Several songs from this era have surfaced on bootlegs; check out “Dance Dance Dance,” “It’s Time to Go Home,” and “When You Dance” for some great examples.

But many still haven’t, including “Sometimes at Night,” known to have been played by The Bruce Springsteen Band on at least one summer night in 1971, thanks to the surviving setlist below.

But no audio of “Sometimes at Night” has ever turned up. So imagine the surprise of fans who discovered this handwritten lyrics sheet on display at the Brussels Hard Rock Cafe in 2013:

It’s only the first page of the song–almost certainly just the set-up–and since the song is known to have been performed live, we can assume that Bruce eventually finished it. But it’s enough to give us some insight into the song’s subject:

Sometimes at night I lie awake for a while
Thinking and dreaming ’bout when I was a small boy child
Running and laughing as hard as I could
Everything easy, everything good

I’m older now that’s what the judge said
As I walked through the county hall, through a window I fled
The last thing that they did was put a price on my head
Now alone, scared, and running for something I never did

That’s a terrific opening. Note how Bruce deftly establishes a dreamlike, nostalgic first verse and contrasts it with a suspenseful escape from the law in the second, using a parallel “running” device to convey first freedom, then fright. Great songwriting there.

Fascinatingly, we can also see Bruce’s first attempt at the second verse, crossed out, but still quite readable:

I’m older now, that’s what the judge said
So now I walk the road with a price on my head
The last thing that they did

It looks like Bruce abandoned that version because he wanted to establish the escape as a contrasting device, but I actually like that version better. One of Bruce’s songwriting strengths is his ability to provide just enough context and then trust the listener to fill in the missing events. (See “Highway 29” for perhaps the best example of this.) Perhaps Bruce hadn’t honed that skill at the time, or perhaps he wasn’t quite so confident a songwriter yet. Either way, the “through a window I fled” replacement isn’t nearly as sure-footed as the rest of the song.

But that’s a picked nit. The lyrics above are still a great set-up for a song that seems like it would have been a great Nebraska candidate, and I can only hope an audio recording turns up one day so we can hear what it finally became.

Sometimes at Night
Never Recorded
Never Released
First performed: July 22, 1971 (South Amboy, NJ)
Last performed: July 22, 1971 (South Amboy, NJ)

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