Many of Bruce’s best songs are deceptively simple. At first listen, they strike us as a simple tale, a short story–perhaps fictional, perhaps biographical. On closer inspection, we find deep set human themes beneath their surface.
Case in point: “Used Cars,” buried deep in Bruce’s Nebraska album.
At first listen, it’s a vignette, a reminiscence of a vivid childhood memory. Bruce has often spoken of his father’s uncanny knack for finding troublesome vehicles. In fact, here’s how he introduced the song the very first time he performed it:
But on closer listen, and especially with contextual knowledge of Bruce’s upbringing and family relationships, “Used Cars” reveals itself to be about shame, and about the dawning, inevitable distancing of parent and child.
Let’s take a listen.
Like much of Nebraska, “Used Cars” is a showcase for Bruce’s newfound, well-wrought songwriting economy. He skillfully conveys information through a combination of context, melodic construction, restrained vocals, and seemingly spare but powerfully important details–all working together to tell a story beneath a story. (“Used Cars” may, in fact, be the best example of this in Bruce’s catalog.)
My little sister’s in the front seat with an ice cream cone
My ma’s in the back seat sitting all alone
As my pa steers her slow out of the lot
For a test drive down Michigan Avenue
Let’s unpack that first verse, because there’s just so much information there:
Yes, there’s the obvious: a family flirting with the notion of buying a car. But look deeper, and notice how much Bruce tells us about his family through simple character placement:
His baby sister, in the coveted front passenger’s seat: her placement, along with the treat in her hand, reveal her favored treatment as the baby of the family.
Bruce’s mother, alone in the backseat, all but ignored.
And most importantly, Bruce himself: he’s not even in the car. He stands apart as an observer, not a participant. Immediately, Bruce has established the theme of the song–the alienation and growing distance he feels between his father and himself.
That ice cream cone isn’t just there for rhyming purposes–it’s meant to convey the closeness between his sister and his father, both literally (they are next to each other in the front seat) and figuratively (through the doting purchase). The very fact that Bruce notices, remembers, and draws our attention to their closeness so many years later (combined with his own apartness) gives us all the context we need for the rest of the song.
There’s also the unresolved second couplet. By not closing the loop on the rhyme and instead trailing the melody like his father setting off on a test drive, the distance between Bruce and his father widens.
Now my ma, she fingers her wedding band
And watches the salesman stare at my old man’s hands
He’s telling us all about the break he’d give us if he could, but he just can’t
Well if I could I swear I know just what I’d do…
The image of Bruce’s mother playing with her wedding band is fraught with symbolism and deliberate uncertainty. Perhaps it’s merely an indication that his mother is deep in thought and pre-occupied by a significant purchase; more likely, it’s Bruce’s way of drawing our attention to his parents’ marriage and the unequal consideration given to his mother in a potentially significant purchase (which Bruce reinforces through the salesman’s preoccupation with his father’s hands instead).
The last two lines of the second verse drip with sarcasm and repressed anger, but you’d never know it from the vocal. Bruce seems as if he’s distanced himself from the memory, or at least from the emotion of it. He remembers feeling so angry at the salesman for taking advantage of his father, but his alienation in the present is so complete and deep set that he’s unable to summon the emotion in his delivery.
For a moment, we hear that final line (“I swear I know just what I’d do…”) as a promise of wishful violence against the salesman. But Bruce quickly redirects:
Now mister the day the lottery I win I ain’t ever gonna ride in no used car again
….and here we are, the core of the song revealed: the used car as a symbol of shame.
Bruce flashes forward now. The transaction happens off-camera, and the family arrives home with their new addition. The next verse ranks among Bruce’s best:
Now the neighbors come from near and far
As we pull up in our brand new used car
I wish he’d just hit the gas and let out a cry
And tell them all they can kiss our asses goodbye
What a marvelous verse! In four spare lines, Bruce contrasts his father’s pride in his ability to purchase a vehicle–even if used–against Bruce’s own shame at the stigma of a used car and the transparent window it provides into his family’s modest means.
And again, the polar opposite reactions between father and son reinforce the widening gulf between them. But through the shame, and underneath the resentment of his judgmental neighbors, Bruce is also begging his dad to be the hero he desperately wants to see him as.
He’d feel closer to his father if his dad understood and acknowledged the stigma and owned it–the family would be united in solidarity. But his father seems unaware of the judgment the Bruce feels being passed on them, and his blindness to it only increases Bruce’s shame.
Bruce ends the song the way he began it: alone and apart, his father connecting with his baby sister somewhere beyond his sight, with Michigan Avenue serving as a metaphor for the distance between them. He reiterates his resolution before the song fades, and this time we hear more than resentment in his voice.
We hear a note of longing, along with a promise:
My dad, he sweats the same job from morning to morn
Me, I walk home on the same dirty streets where I was born
Up the block I can hear my little sister in the front seat blowing that horn
The sounds echoing all down Michigan Avenue
Now mister the day my number comes in I ain’t ever gonna ride in no used car again
We realize now, at the end, that Bruce isn’t just shunning the symbol of his shame, he’s resolving to redeem his father’s name by erasing the ignominy his father never even realized he carried.
“Used Cars” made its live debut at the opening night of the Born in the U.S.A. Tour, and Bruce performed it regularly (if not continually) throughout the entire 1984-1985 tour. Here’s his very first performance from that tour-opening night in St. Paul, on June 29, 1984.
After the tour ended, however, “Used Cars” disappeared for a decade. Perhaps Bruce’s reconciliation with his father made the song less necessary for him to sing; perhaps it was merely the lack of a quiet space to perform it.
It may have been a little bit of the former, but time suggests that it’s primarily the latter, because Bruce brought the song back to the stage on his two solo acoustic tours in the years that followed. First (and appropriately), at a special homecoming show at his elementary school in Freehold in 1996:
(It had to have felt therapeutic to sing the “kiss our asses goodbye” in a place that looms so large in his childhood.)
It took another decade (and another acoustic tour) for “Used Cars” to make its next appearance, but when it did, Bruce provided more color commentary as introduction, introducing us to some of his dad’s most questionable vehicle choices. And this time, Bruce altered the money line to what he’d really been saying all along:
Bruce played “Used Cars” only once more in the years since. It was another acoustic performance, a one-off theme-appropriate performance at a presidential campaign rally for Barack Obama in Ypsilanti Michigan.
As I wrote at the top, there’s a lot of information conveyed in “Used Cars,” and even more emotion–and almost all of it lies beneath the surface. To this day it remains one of Bruce’s most nuanced and powerfully layered songs.
Used Cars
Recorded: December 1981 – January 1982
Released: Nebraska (1982)
First performed: June 29, 1984 (St. Paul, MN)
Last performed: October 6, 2008 (Ypsilanti, MI)
Looking for your favorite Bruce song? Check our full index here. New entries every week!
