Roll of the Dice: My Hometown

It was ’69, not ’65; Monday night rather than Saturday night; and it wasn’t his high school.

But it was his home town, and when the high-running tensions boiled over into riots and violence, it made a lasting impression on nineteen-year-old Bruce Springsteen.

On the evening of May 19, two black teens were shot by a fifteen-year old white boy from the passenger seat of a passing car.

Both of the offenders were intoxicated after purchasing and consuming a couple of six-packs that they shouldn’t have been able to, and early in the evening they found themselves in a verbal altercation with a group of African-American teens. The boys went home, picked up a shotgun and some buckshot, and came back to Freehold looking for trouble.

Police officers spotted the troublesome teens and sent them back home, promising to arrest them if they were spotted in town again. Undeterred, the boys simply switched cars, returned to Freehold, and found another car with black teens at the intersection of Route 33 and South Street, heading home from the local Burger Chef. And from that point, Bruce’s “My Hometown” retelling is accurate.

It may or may not have been the spark that started a fire, but the kindling had certainly already been laid. Unrest had been building through a series of small incidents, and earlier that day black community leaders called off a planned Memorial Day parade due to threats of violence against black citizens. After the drive-by incident (both victims lived, although one lost an eye), a reported 140 citizens took to the streets, breaking windows for more than two hours.

For residents of Freehold, the incident was a defining moment. It forced them to reckon with social change that many had been able to ignore until that point.

Thirteen years later, Bruce Springsteen wrote a song that centered on both that incident and that question: what do you do when you realize that your home and your community are no longer the idyllic haven of your childhood, when social and economic forces threaten to tear your home apart? Do you stay and become part of the solution? Or do you leave?

Although never asked outright, these questions are at the heart of Bruce Springsteen’s “My Hometown,” the seventh and final single off of Born in the U.S.A.

Although instantly recognizable today from the opening notes from Roy Bittan’s synthesizer masquerading as a french horn, “My Hometown” began its life in 1982 as a rockabilly number with a slightly different, second-person title.

The melody would transform dramatically by the time the final version was recorded in June 1983, but the lyrics of “Your Hometown” were pretty well set early on. Take a listen to this early take from January 1983.

You probably noticed the different and extended chorus:

This is your hometown, this is your hometown
The world you may travel around, but this is your hometown

And you almost certainly caught the alternative couplet that opens the final verse:

Now there’s a hill outside of town where me and my wife
Watch the stars rising bright in the black endless sky

(Kudos to Bruce for swapping that out–it makes the song end on an idyllic and therefore far less powerful note than the lyrics he’d eventually settle on.)

And if you were paying very close attention, you might have even caught the extra bit of local color in the bridge:

They’re closing down the textile mill across the little Texas tracks

(Texas was the name that locals gave to a Freehold neighborhood due to the concentration of southern migrants who had come north for work.)

But other than those small variations, “Your Hometown” and “My Hometown” are lyrical twins.

By the time Bruce laid down his next demo (possibly as late as mid-February), the final verse was in its final form–all he had left to do was settle on the name of the protagonist’s wife–Jane would become Kate by the time the album track was recorded in late June.

We’re not sure exactly when Bruce realized that the emotional content of “Your Hometown” was being undermined by its rockabilly arrangement, but when the band gathered to record it on June 29th (now under the song’s final title), the final arrangement had gelled.

It took a few tries to get the song down to single-length, though–the first two takes recorded that day were more than six minutes long, and even the runner-up take below is almost a minute longer than the released version.

The album track is tighter and just a hair slower–and by far the most powerful of all the attempts we’ve heard. Mournfully nostalgic, we feel the song’s content long before we hear it.

Almost all of “My Hometown” is drawn from real-life events, the past rhyming with the present.

In the first verse, the narrator is a little boy filled with pride as he “drives” through town with his father:

I was eight years old and running with a dime in my hand
Into the bus stop to pick up a paper for my old man
I’d sit on his lap in that big old Buick and steer as we drove through town
He’d tousle my hair and say son take a good look around
This is your hometown

On stage, Bruce would often say that when he wrote “My Hometown,” he was trying to imagine himself as a father, even though he really couldn’t. But the memory of sitting on his dad’s lap and steering as they drove through town–that was real, and ironically it was that very distant memory that made it possible at the age of 33 to picture himself as a father.

When you’re a boy, and you’re out with your father, and it feels like you’re driving the car by yourself–that’s something you identify with dad-ness. For those moments, at least, Bruce was able to imagine himself as his dad and share his pride and place in their community.

When you’re eight years old, your parents are still paragons, and your home is a haven. It’s only as you grow that the imperfections in both appear.

In ’65 tension was running high at my high school
There was a lot of fights between the black and white, there was nothing you could do
Two cars at a light on a Saturday night, in the back seat there was a gun
Words were passed in a shotgun blast, troubled times had come
To my hometown

We’ve flashed forward in time now, and our eight-year old is now in high school.

When discussing “My Hometown,” it’s almost always the drawn-from-the-headlines second half of that verse that gets the attention. But the heart of the entire song is hidden away in the first half:

There was nothing you could do.

Of course there was something you could do. Across America during the civil rights era, high school and college students took to the streets in protest, support, and activism.

But our narrator is a spectator rather than an actor against the backdrop of societal upheaval. We’ve no reason to think he participated in the fights between the black and the white, but we’re given no reason to believe he tried to prevent them, let alone change hearts and minds.

While our attention is diverted by a tragic shooting, Bruce slipped his theme past us without us even realizing it. Yet.

Let’s flash forward again, to the present.

Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there ain’t nobody wants to come down here no more
They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back
To your hometown

Bruce isn’t comparing hard economic times with hate crimes and civil unrest, but he is telling us that we’ll all be tested someday, and we’ll have to choose: do we become part of the solution, stay part of the problem, or do we just pack up and leave?

Last night me and Kate we laid in bed talking about getting out
Packing up our bags maybe heading south
I’m thirty-five, we got a boy of our own now
Last night I sat him up behind the wheel and said son take a good look around
This is your hometown

The contrast between the first and last verses couldn’t be more stark: the prideful eight-year-old son is now a father with a song of his own. As the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme: “My Hometown” ends as it begins, but this time with a warning rather than a blessing, foreboding rather than pride.

Take a good look around, says the father to the son, because it may not last much longer.

“My Hometown” trails off without a final chorus, a by-design effect to make the song feel unresolved. Thirty years later, however, Bruce would revisit the theme of “My Hometown”–and possibly the place and the characters–when he wrote the Wrecking Ball album.

They destroyed our families, factories
And they took our homes
They left our bodies on the plains
The vultures picked our bones

Just like the surely intentional similarity of their titles, the bridge of “Death to My Hometown” is meant to parallel the bridge of “My Hometown.”

In 2011, the son from “My Hometown” would be about the same age as his father was when Bruce first wrote the song. It’s easy to imagine him all grown up and watching history rhyme yet again.

Unlike his father, though, he’s not resigned–he’s angry, and he’s not going to surrender his town without a fight. There was something he could do.

But that’s an essay for another day.

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“My Hometown” was the seventh and final Top 10 single generated from Born in the U.S.A., and while it only peaked at #6 on the Hot 100 chart, it reached the very top of Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart, the one and only time Bruce ever accomplished that feat. (It’s quite possible, however, that the chart success of “My Hometown” was bolstered by its improbable B-side, Bruce’s 1975 live cover of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.“)

The studio version of “My Hometown” never received an official music video, but Bruce did release a live performance to bolster the song’s airplay and sales.

While not nearly as iconic as many of the song’s album-mates, “My Hometown” has nevertheless seemingly enshrined itself as a semi-permanent fixture in Bruce’s set lists. He’s performed it well over 500 times to date, and other than the 2006 Sessions Band tour, “My Hometown” has never missed a tour since its release.

Autobiographical in content but universal in theme, “My Hometown” has proved its pliability, effortlessly translating to new arrangements. From solo piano…

…to acoustic guitar and violin…

…and even reggae:

(Okay maybe that one wasn’t so effortless.)

It’s been covered by luminaries like U2, Neil Young, and Emmylou Harris. In concert, fellow icons like Eddie Vedder and Tracey Chapman turned “My Hometown” into a duet.

In 2014, “My Hometown” got an updated official live video release, even more powerful than its predecessor 30 years earlier.

And of course, Bruce featured “My Hometown” nightly on Broadway, the perfect illustration for the “heart-stopping, pants-dropping, race-rioting, freak-hating, soul-shaking, redneck, love- and fear-making, heartbreaking town of Freehold, New Jersey.”

As Bruce self-mockingly pointed out each night during his Broadway run, he thought his answer to the central question of “My Hometown” was that he was born to run. But we know that didn’t last.

Today Bruce lives ten minutes from his hometown, which tells us all we need to know to guess where his characters ended up, too.

Bonus: Here’s Bruce’s very first live performance of “My Hometown,”  a rarely heard warm-up for the Born in the U.S.A. Tour at The Stone Pony three weeks before the tour kicked off in St. Paul.

My Hometown
Recorded: June 29, 1983
Released: Born in the U.S.A. (1984), Greatest Hits (1995)
First performed: June 8, 1984 (Asbury Park, NJ)
Last performed: July 11, 2023 (Copenhagen, Denmark)

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