Roll of the Dice: Reno

“[On] his last solo record, Devils & Dust, there’s a song about the man in the hotel room with the hooker and stuff. My artistic side said, ‘That is so brave.’ Then, just thinking right from the heart, I was like, ‘What are you writing about that shit for? Are you fucking crazy?’  –Patti Scialfa to Austin Scaggs, Rolling Stone, September 2007

If you can get past lyrics that earned Bruce his first “contains adult imagery” explicit CD warning label, you’ll find one of Bruce’s most beautiful songs and easily his most poignant.

“Reno” has ranked among my top ten Springsteen songs since the first time I heard it, and it’s one of only three of Bruce’s songs that reduce me to tears each and every time I hear it. (“My Father’s House” and “Moonlight Motel” are the other two, the latter of which is close to the same song as “Reno.”)

Everything about “Reno” is perfect–on the album track, at least. Bruce’s live performances of the song, while admirable, have never matched the studio recording, because the music and studio production are inseparable from Bruce’s powerful lyrics.

Let’s take a close listen.

There’s a lot to unpack here: “Reno” is beautifully layered and meticulously detailed. It’s about as finely crafted a song as Bruce has ever written, rivaled only by much of Western Stars.

Before we jump into the lyrics, go back and take a close listen to the instrumentation, at least in the introduction. Then compare it with “Maria’s Bed,” which follows three songs later on the same album. Notice the similarities, not in melody but in sound: this is important, and we’ll address it directly in a little while.

“Reno” begins in a hotel room, although we don’t learn this until the end of the first verse. Pay attention to the way Bruce parcels out exposition, because the master is at work:

She took off her stockings
I held them to my face
She had your ankles
I felt filled with grace
“Two hundred dollars straight in, $250 up the ass,” she smiled and said
She unbuckled my belt, pulled back her hair and sat in front of me on the bed
She said, “Honey, how’s that feel? Do you want me to go slow?”
My eyes drifted out the window and down to the road below
I felt my stomach tighten
The sun bloodied the sky
Sliced through the hotel blinds
I closed my eyes

Where to begin? Fifteen words in, we already know that the narrator is having a tryst, but his mind is somewhere else. Or rather, with someone else. And we know whoever it is he’s thinking of, it’s clearly someone who means a lot to him, because he’s memorized her in such detail that he can summon the shape of her ankles, and because even that lone resemblance in the woman he’s with is enough to take him back in time.

By the fifth line, we learn that our narrator is with a prostitute, and a chatty one at that. Our nameless protagonist does his best to ignore her solicitous concern  (interestingly, Bruce changed “Do you want me to go slow” to “baby, you let me know” when performing the song live, for reasons he’s never commented on), directing his gaze away and closing his eyes in order to summon his lost love.

Much ado has been made of the crassness of that down-to-business line, but it’s a necessary lyric: it’s not enough to establish that the woman in the hotel room is merely a proxy, we need to understand their complete lack of connection in any way other than physical.

Notice, at this point, how the music swells as we transition from the hotel room of the first verse to the Peruvian/Guatemalan valley (never take geography lessons from Bruce Springsteen) of the second verse.

Bruce is playing cinematographer here: “Reno” is a three-act story, and Act Two is all flashback–vibrant, verdant, sunlit, and packed with all the color and detail deliberately missing from Acts One and Three. The change in the music–Bruce is joined by horns and strings now–is the equivalent of a camera lens pulling back from a tight close-up to a wide vista. This is Bruce Springsteen at his most cinematic:

Sunlight on the Amatitlan
Sunlight streaming through your hair
In the Valle de los Rios
Smell of mock orange filled the air
We rode with the vaqueros down into cool rivers of green
I was sure the work and that smile coming out ‘neath your hat was all I’d ever need
Somehow all you ever need’s never really quite enough, you know
You and I, Maria, we learned it’s so

Again, let’s not break out the atlas, because Bruce’s name-dropping is more for emotional context rather than geographical precision.

Just feel the warmth of the scene as our hero is transported back to a time when he had all he ever needed, and then let’s focus on the single line that captures the tragic heart of the song:

Somehow all you ever need’s never really quite enough.

That line ranks up there with “is a dream a lie if it don’t come true” and “God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of.” It also tells us a great deal: that his love most likely still lives, and that his loss is one of his own making.

Bruce strongly implies that despite how crazy in love our narrator might have been (and still is) with Maria, he gave into temptation and strayed–and that infidelity cost him Maria.

Oh, and: Maria! Our off-screen love interest has a name, and it’s an important one.

Bruce only mentions Maria by name once, which is all he really had to do in order to contrast her with the nameless, detail-less hooker (detail-less except for Maria-esque ankles, of course). But he didn’t need to choose that particular name, especially since we just met another Maria three songs earlier on the same album.

Or did we?

Go back and take a close listen to “Maria’s Bed” again. Like I wrote in this essay a couple of years ago, I believe “Maria’s Bed” and “Reno” are two halves of the same story, prequel and sequel. Not only do the two songs work perfectly together, not only do they feature the same love interest, they even feature similar instrumentation. “Maria’s Bed” may be jaunty compared with the aching “Reno,” but they sound similar, as if the same musicians are playing the same instruments (they’re not). That’s probably not coincidental.

The core backing track for “Reno” is believed to date back to the late 1990s; I’m pretty certain that “Maria’s Bed” hails from that era as well–it shares too much lyrical DNA with “Further On (Up the Road)” to not have originated in the same period.

I think there’s a strong case to be made for Bruce knowing exactly what he was doing when he recorded both songs and co-located them on the same disc.

Author Brian Hiatt appears to have had a similar idea, and he asked Bruce about it in his book Stories Behind the Songs: “The lost love [in Reno] is named Maria–could it be about the romance from ‘Maria’s Bed’ gone wrong?”

Bruce was typically coy in his response: “I never thought about it, but could be. They’re all the same person anyway, I guess.”

Which is Bruce’s way of saying “the love interests in my songs are your love interests. When you hear my songs, you visualize yourself as the singer and your loved one playing opposite.” It’s also his way of completely ducking a question he knows will only make the song more specific and less relatable.

We’ve digressed enough. Let’s return to the hotel room for Act Three:

She slipped me out of her mouth
“You’re ready,” she said
She took off her bra and panties
Wet her finger, slipped it inside and crawled over me on the bed
She poured me another whisky
Said, “Here’s to the best you ever had,” we laughed and made a toast
It wasn’t the best I ever had
Not even close

Again, Bruce is overly clinical with his language, drawing our attention to the mechanics of sex rather than the emotion. There’s another reason he does this: it forces us to notice that he completely skips over the act itself. Ordinarily, we’d consider this an act of tact, but Bruce has already made it clear that he’s not shying away from explicit language.

So why does Bruce skip over the deed itself? Because it’s meaningless. The protagonist is lost in memory. He may be physically present, but not emotionally–and it’s the emotional connection that he needs the most.

It’s a lesson he’s learned too late.  We’re meant to believe that our narrator strayed because he couldn’t accept the vulnerability that comes with a mature romantic relationship. Or as Bruce explained in a New York Times interview: “He’s in this room with this proxy because he couldn’t handle the real thing. Casual sex is kind of closing the book of you. It’s ecstasy, and it’s release. Sex with somebody you love is opening the book of you, which is always a risky and frightening read.”

The last lines of “Reno” rank among Bruce’s best, at once bitterly cynical, achingly poignant, and brutally honest. It’s the confession of a man who knows he screwed up irreparably and is doomed to dwell in his loss, forever seeking a substitute for the best he ever had, knowing full well that he’ll never find it.

Bruce performed “Reno” regularly throughout his solo acoustic tour in 2005, but never again since. That’s probably just as well: “Reno” is a difficult song to translate to the stage, and when Bruce tried, the performances lacked the cinematography of the record.

However, there is one superb live performance that’s worth viewing, and it’s a rarely seen one. Devils & Dust shipped in a hybrid CD/DVD format, and the DVD part included a few beautifully filmed live performances. One of those songs was “Reno,” and while it’s not strictly speaking a live performance (there’s a lovely off-screen piano accompaniment that seems like it was added later), it’s a gentle, appropriate reflective performance sung in an unusually high register.

It’s very different from Bruce’s nightly performance on tour, and the only live performance of “Reno” that I revisit frequently. I’ll leave you with that beautiful performance of this heartbreaking song.

Reno
Recorded: 1997-2004
Released: Devils & Dust (2005)
First performed: April 22, 2005 (Asbury Park, NJ)
Last performed: November 22, 2005 (Trenton, NJ)

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