Roll of the Dice: The Ghost of Tom Joad

“I had been watching what’s happening in the world and seeing thirty years of work undone. It seems disastrous to me–and everyone is compliant. I don’t think there is any such thing as an innocent man; there is a collective responsibility.” — Bruce Springsteen to David Corn, December 1995

“The Ghost of Tom Joad” holds a special place in Bruce’s catalog. Not only is it widely considered to be one of his finest songs, it’s also his only song to receive not one or two–or even three–but four separate studio recordings in three distinct arrangements, released on four different albums. Sadly, it seems to speak to the moment–when it was first released, today, and at any point along the way.

It originated as a rock song, but when Bruce couldn’t figure out a way to make it work (Tom Morello hadn’t entered the scene yet), Bruce recast “The Ghost of Tom Joad” acoustically and recorded it in the spring of 1995 with a restrained quartet of musicians that included Danny Federici, Garry Talent, Marty Rifkin, and Gary Mallaber.

The result was the most widely known version of the song, the one that appeared as the title track of Bruce’s eleventh studio album.

For a song that wears its lyrical influences on its sleeves, “The Ghost of Tom Joad” is surprisingly elusive to pin down. On first listen, it seems straightforward: the song is nothing more (or less) than a painted street scene, the way Bruce used to do frequently in his earliest work.  But the people in this painting have nowhere else to go. But go they must–because they have no place to stay, and nowhere to return.

Men walking ‘long the railroad tracks
Going someplace and there’s no going back
Highway patrol choppers coming up over the ridge
Hot soup on a campfire under the bridge
Shelter line stretching ’round the corner
Welcome to the new world order
Families sleeping in their cars in the southwest
No home, no job, no peace, no rest

Well the highway is alive tonight
But nobody’s kidding nobody about where it goes
I’m sitting down here in the campfire light
Searching for the ghost of Tom Joad

Much is made of the line “The highway is alive tonight,” because of the prominence of the open road as a metaphor for opportunity and escape in Bruce’s early work. In “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” the line simply serves to contrast the stillness of the homeless with the motion of the moneyed, to make us wonder the next time we’re driving late at night who we might be passing along the roadside bed. The follow-up line, “nobody’s kidding nobody about where it goes” acknowledges the inescapable reality of these people’s existence.

If it seems like nothing really happens in “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” that’s precisely the point: the characters in Bruce’s painting live in limbo. With no home and no job, there’s no peace and no rest. These people live in time out of time, and Bruce is careful to create a sense of musical and lyrical rootlessness and hopelessness that penetrates the comfort and security of even the most privileged audiences.

But there’s also a nagging ambiguity in “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” Who is the narrator, exactly? Is he one of the characters in the painting, sleeping in his car, waiting in a shelter line? Or is he merely an observer, unable to look away from his fellow man but unable to summon the strength and will to try to change things?

He pulls a prayer book out of his sleeping bag
Preacher lights up a butt and he takes a drag
Waiting for when the last shall be first and the first shall be last
In a cardboard box ‘neath the underpass
You got a one-way ticket to the promised land
You got a hole in your belly and a gun in your hand
Sleeping on a pillow of solid rock
Bathing in the city aqueduct

And the highway is alive tonight
Where it’s headed everybody knows
I’m sitting down here in the campfire light
Waiting on the ghost of Tom Joad

I tend toward the latter–I think if Bruce had intended us to empathize with the preacher bathing in the aqueduct, or with the men walking along the railroad tracks, he’d have taken pains to clearly establish his narrator as one of them. No, the point of “The Ghost of Tom Joad” isn’t for us to put ourselves in the place of the dislocated, but rather for us to take a good hard look at who we actually are.

Are we like Steinbeck’s hero Tom Joad, determined to make a difference and stand up for our fellow human beings, or are we complacent–complicit, even–in allowing a social order (which isn’t all that new) that perpetuates and feeds inequality so long as our individual basic needs are being met?

Like many of Bruce’s best songs, “The Ghost of Tom Joad” works either way. Perhaps we’re the preacher, struggling to maintain our hope for deliverance to the promised land, keeping our faith in the Bible’s promise that someday the last shall be first, searching all around us for a savior inhabited by the virtues of Tom Joad.

Or maybe we’re just a bystander, tormented by the scene to which we bear witness, trying to summon the fortitude that Joad promised would be with us when we needed it.

Tom said, “Mom, wherever there’s a cop beating a guy
Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries
Where there’s a fight against the blood and hatred in the air
Look for me, Mom, I’ll be there
Where there’s somebody fighting for a place to stand
Or a decent job or a helping hand
Wherever somebody’s struggling to be free
Look in their eyes, Mom, you’ll see me”

The highway is alive tonight
But nobody’s kidding nobody about where it goes
I’m sitting down here in the campfire light
With the ghost of old Tom Joad

Bruce’s allusions to The Grapes of Wrath are many–and the most important ones lie much deeper than the title and the last verse. For one, Bruce’s decision to make the central character of the second verse a preacher isn’t an accident–that’s a direct reference to Jim Casy, the doomed preacher, moral center, and Jesus Christ stand-in (note the character’s initials) in Steinbeck’s novel that inspires Tom to be a better man.

In the book and the film, it’s Casy’s murder that sparks Joad to vengeful action and dooms Tom to a life on the run. Joad decides to spend his days working for the betterment of his fellow citizens, in a speech that became one of the most memorable moments of the film (certainly to Bruce, who cried when he first saw it):

Bruce’s decision to cast a preacher in his song serves two purposes: first, it’s an opportunity for redemption–if we are possessed by the spirit of Tom Joad, what could galvanize us to action more than the opportunity to save a latter-day Casy?

But the preacher is also a stark reminder that it’s not always easy to be good–or without cost. Casy paid the price for his social activism with his life; Joad was blacklisted and presumably on the run forever.

Faced with both reminders, do we rise to the occasion or walk on by? We never find out for certain, but the song’s last line offers a hint of hope: no longer searching for Joad’s ghost (as in the first verse) or waiting on him (as in the second), we’re now with him.

In other words, Bruce is telling us that the spirit, the strength, the courage we’ve been asking for is already with us.

Now we just need to act.

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“The Ghost of Tom Joad” made its live debut almost a full month before it was released on album. Bruce debuted it without fanfare during his set at Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefit in 1995. Here’s that very first performance, and the first time anyone outside of Bruce’s inner circle heard the song:

Once the album was released (two days before Thanksgiving), it seemed that “The Ghost of Tom Joad” was everywhere. In part, this was because the song heralded Bruce’s first new album of original work in  almost four years. But the song itself struck a chord with almost everyone who heard it. Throughout that holiday season (as the marathon Ghost of Tom Joad acoustic tour began), all the way through 1996 and into ’97, “The Ghost of Tom Joad” was Bruce’s reliable opening number almost every night.

He also conducted an uncharacteristic media tour starting from the song’s release in 1995, never seeming to pass up an opportunity to perform the song on television in various countries.

Even as Bruce’s tour wound down in 1997, Bruce could be found performing “The Ghost of Tom Joad” on the award circuit, from Madison Square Garden (where he was introduced by Pete Seeger)…

…to Stockholm, where he received Sweden’s prestigious Polar Music Prize.

As the calendar turned to 1998, now well more than two years since the song’s release, it seemed as if “The Ghost of Tom Joad” had become the song Bruce wanted to be most associated with. On a television special celebrating the 30th anniversary of Rolling Stone, it was “The Ghost of Tom Joad” (performed live for the first time with the original backing band from the album) that Bruce chose to contribute.

That Rolling Stone performance was also the first time Bruce had ever performed the song with any band at all; perhaps that inspired him to give it a try with the E Street Band on their Reunion Tour the following year. It quickly became a setlist staple throughout the tour, in a gentle arrangement reminiscent (but not imitative) of the original studio version.

In the meantime, though, the song had come to the attention of the band Rage Against the Machine, who heard in it the rock arrangement that Bruce had never been able to summon. The band recorded their hard rocking version in 1997, and it quickly became a highlight of their live shows.

That arrangement would shortly catch the attention of the songwriter, along with the astonishing guitar playing of band member Tom Morello. But we’ll get to that in a bit.

Remember back at the top of this essay when I mentioned that “The Ghost of Tom Joad” has had four studio releases? Most fans have only ever heard two of them–the ones that are featured on Bruce’s studio albums.

But in the summer of 2006, during a break on the Seeger Sessions Tour, Bruce recorded his second version of the song–this one, a duet with Pete Seeger himself. Featuring new Springsteen vocals, spoken-word Seeger vocals, a Seeger Sessions-esque arrangement, and an entirely different backing band than any other version of the song, this new version of “The Ghost of Tom Joad” was featured on an anniversary CD compilation for Appleseed Records. It’s a rarely heard recording, but it’s very worth a listen:

https://youtu.be/NN0gy6fSRkU

When the Seeger Sessions Tour resumed that fall, “The Ghost of Tom Joad” was newly top-of-mind for Bruce, and it wasn’t long before he started featuring it in his shows, performed as a duet with Frank Bruno.

Emboldened by the successful translation of the song to a duet and full-band format, Bruce decided to give “The Ghost of Tom Joad” the full E Street Band treatment. But he waited for the right moment, which finally came midway through the Magic Tour, when Bruce invited Tom Morello to join him on stage for the song.

The story is now legendary–with little time to prepare and a little liquid courage, Morello not only rose to the occasion, he stole the freaking show. By the time Bruce and Tom traded off their first guitar solos, it was already clear the new arrangement was a galvanizing success. But watch what happens when Tom steps up for the second solo around the six-minute mark–in an unrehearsed moment of inspiration, Morello takes the song into the stratosphere, much to Bruce’s surprise and delight. Bruce never even tries to take the song back.

In the years since, we’ve become used to Morello’s frequent guest-turns with the E Street Band, and we now have a studio version of that arrangement as well. But it’s remarkable to watch that clip above and remember that at the time, no one had ever heard that particular rendition before–not even the musicians playing it.

It was such a success that Bruce and Tom reprised their alchemistic duet the following year at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th Anniversary Concert.

But in the meantime, the acoustic version of “The Ghost of Tom Joad” never really went away. Bruce recorded yet another studio version of it in 2009 for the soundtrack to The People Speak, a documentary based on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, one of Bruce’s long-time favorite books.

This one is also a rare recording, and it’s the only one of the four studio versions that feature Bruce in a solo performance.

In the years since, Bruce frequently featured “The Ghost of Tom Joad” in his live sets. The song that seemed to defy re-arrangement in its original version now seemed to epitomize versatility and pliability. The E Street Band performed it several times on their own, with Nils ably stepping up for the guitar solos, but once Morello’s genie was out of the bottle, it was hard for fans (at least this one) to hear the song with anyone other than Morello in that role. In 2014, Bruce released the fourth studio version of the song on his High Hopes album, this time featuring Morello on both vocals and guitar.

With Tom along for the ride throughout the High Hopes Tour, “The Ghost of Tom Joad” once again became a reliable nightly staple and showcase.

My personal favorite version, though, was Bruce’s solo performance from Rome in 2016. Dedicated to Italian social workers, featuring a particularly heartfelt reading and a unique acoustic arrangement for that night, this is easily the most beautiful version of the song that I’ve personally witnessed.

Even after Bruce’s most recent tour ended, “The Ghost of Tom Joad” refused to retire. Bruce re-released the original studio version on his career retrospective Chapter and Verse, and the song became an important keystone of Springsteen on Broadway, anchoring the part of the show where Bruce shared the importance of social activism as one of his core values

By now, it should be clear just how central “The Ghost of Tom Joad” has been to the beating heart of Springsteen’s work since its debut in 1995. It’s never gone away, it’s never missed a tour (except, ironically, for the brief Vote for Change Tour in 2004), and it never fails to resonate.

“The Ghost of Tom Joad” may not have the sound or the tone that we’d attribute to an anthem, but there’s no doubting that for Bruce, it’s a song of solemn purpose that will likely never disappear from rotation.

The Ghost of Tom Joad
Recorded: May 23, 1995 (1st version), August 2006 (2nd version), 2009 (3rd version), March 2013 (4th version)
Released: The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995), The Essential Bruce Springsteen (2003), Sowing the Seeds (2007), The People Speak (2009), High Hopes (2014), Chapter and Verse (2016)
First performed: October 28, 1995 (Mountain View, CA)
Last performed: May 13, 2021 (Colts Neck, NJ)

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