It’s time for another visit to the “1968 Notebook,” where an eighteen-year-old Bruce Springsteen jotted down lyrics and song ideas for songs he never (as far as we know) recorded and that don’t appear on any bootlegs.
The 1968 Notebook was unveiled at an auction in 2006. where it was snapped up for more than $57,000 by a lucky bidder with some very deep pockets. It contains some of Bruce’s earliest songwriting exercises.
Today’s entry is buried deep in the heart of the notebook, and it reads more like a newspaper article than a song–an article that could just as easily be printed today, more than a half century later. Let’s take a look at the eleventh entry in Bruce’s notebook: “Death of a Good Man,” dated April 30, 1968.
It’s June of 2019 as I write this, in an American society that has become inured to mass shootings. In 1968, they were a lot less common, and yet Bruce–barely past his childhood–managed to capture the confusion we all feel when we learn a heretofore upstanding member of the community had been harboring a simmering rage.
Bruce writes sparingly, without a trace of metaphor, and his rhyming dictionary is missing in action. If you’re at all familiar with his early pre-label work, you’ll appreciate what a departure this was for him even then.
The title of the song is a feint, as is the first verse. Bruce leads us to believe that the song is about an innocent man gunned down for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
A man described as an unemployed carpenter
was shot and killed in a gun battle today
that lasted about a quarter of an hour
several blocks from the New York Harbor
But as we quickly learn, the “good man” isn’t the victim but rather the killer–until he himself is shot and killed by police officers in self-defense.
Authorities said he was in a boarding house window
when he opened fire down upon them
They returned his shots in self-defense now
and to think he was a World War II veteran
Bruce implies that his war experiences might have had something to do with his demise, but we never really learn why he snapped. As is usually the case in real life.
And as we often see, in retrospect his neighbors identify something off about him.
A neighbor said he was quite a good man
he moved into the house about three years ago
He seemed to keep to his own business, she told me
but I always thought he was a little strange, you know
Bruce remains a clinically detached reporter for the remainder of the song, capturing the way the slain murderer was afforded respect by his community and even hints of redemption, but offering no comment.
He was dead upon arrival
at the hospital where good men go
A friend and his wife watched from a nearby car
as they rolled his body through the cleansing rainfall
They wrote about him in all the papers
even mentioned his name once or twice
Now he’s the gossip of all the neighbors
survived by a brother and his own dear wife
Oh and the funeral home was really quite pretty
brother made sure enough flowers were sent
They sent him into the ground with just enough sorrow
Williams Funeral Home in charge of arrangements
There’s no music to accompany “Death of a Good Man,” only a few spare chord notations–so we may never know what Bruce intended if he had finished and recorded the song.
But lyrically, “Death of a Good Man” offers us perhaps the earliest insight into the spare, observational storytelling style that Bruce would reveal on Nebraska more than a decade later.
Death of a Good Man
Never Recorded
Never Performed
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