Roll of the Dice: Galveston Bay

“That’s a miracle that can happen, that does happen: People get to a certain brink, and they make a good choice instead of a deadly choice.” –Bruce Springsteen to David Corn, Mother Jones, March/April 1996

“Galveston Bay” is barely a song, but it’s a heck of a story.

Less a melody than an intonation, lacking any semblance of verse/chorus structure, “Galveston Bay” is a harrowing but ultimately redemptive story ripped from the headlines in south Texas.

By the late 1970s, tensions were running high around Galveston Bay. In the aftermath of the fall of Saigon, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese  fled their country by boat and emigrated to the United States. By the end of the decade, about 30,000 had made Texas their home.

Finding the climate and terrain familiar and friendly, many gravitated to the crabbing industry, where work was plentiful but hard and unpopular, and the shrimping industry, which offered the Vietnamese a chance to work for themselves and sell to local bait shops.

The increased competition alarmed the locals. Resentment bred accusations of unfair competition, over-fishing and regulation violations, and when civil tactics didn’t work, things soon turned violent. By 1979, there were several incidents of arson against Vietnamese fishing boats.

Things came to a head in a town called Seadrift on the evening of August 3rd, 1979, when a local crabber named Billy Joe Aplin confronted two Vietnamese brothers (both crabbers as well) named Chinh Van Nguyen and Sau Van Nguyen, and the brothers shot and killed Aplin in self-defense.

Over the course of that bloody evening, three Vietnamese boats were burned and a house occupied by a Vietnamese family was firebombed.

The brothers were eventually acquitted and released on the grounds of self-defense, which fanned the flames of racism and resentment even higher. The white locals now turned to the Ku Klux Klan for help.

Although the real-life story continues on from here, this is the point at which Bruce sets “Galveston Bay.”

“Galveston Bay” appears to be loosely inspired by the events above, with Le Bin Son standing in for the Nguyen brothers and Billy Sutter playing the role of Billy Joe Aplin.

Bruce structures the opening stanzas of “Galveston Bay” in parallel, introducing us to his two characters without a hint of where things are headed. First, we meet Le Bin Son, an émigré to the town of Seadrift (a thinly disguised stand-in for the aforementioned Seabrook) in the promised land of Texas, where Le toils until he can afford to start his own shrimp boat business.

For fifteen years Le Bin Son fought side by side with the Americans
In the mountains and deltas of Vietnam
In ’75 Saigon fell and he left his command
And brought his family to the promised land

Seabrook, Texas and the small towns in the Gulf of Mexico
It was delta country and reminded him of home
He worked as a machinist, put his money away and bought a shrimp boat with his cousin
And together they harvested Galveston Bay
In the morning ‘fore the sun come up he’d kiss his sleeping daughter
Steer out through the channel and cast his nets into the water

Next we meet Billy. Note how Bruce carefully constructs character profiles that highlight their similarity rather than their differences:

Billy Sutter fought with Charlie Company in the highlands of Quang Tri
He was wounded at the battle of Chu Lai, shipped home in ’68
There he married and worked the gulf fishing grounds in a boat that’d been his father’s
In the morning he’d kiss his sleeping son and cast his nets into the water

Both men fought on the same side in Vietnam, settled in the same Texas town, took up the same occupation, and start their day with the same family ritual.

Things soon take an ominous turn, as Billy quietly watches the influx of Vietnamese refugees to Seabrook. As we’ve seen time and again, when economic pressure tightens its grip, people start to look for scapegoats. The locals find one in the immigrants, and passions rise to the point where the Klan is invited to help.

Billy sat in front of his TV as the South fell and the communists rolled into Saigon
He and his friends watched as the refugees came, settled on the same streets and worked the coast they’d grew up on
Soon in the bars around the harbor was talk of “America for Americans”
Someone said “You want ’em out, you got to burn ’em out” and brought in the Texas Klan

(Bruce takes some liberty with chronology here, as the real residents didn’t invite the Klan in until after the violent incident and acquittal played out.)

Now we arrive at our fated confrontation. Bruce is a little unclear about whether Billy is directly involved or not–we can’t tell whether the details of the incident are first-hand or third.

One humid Texas night there were three shadows on the harbor come to burn the Vietnamese boats into the sea
In the fire’s light shots rang out, two Texans lay dead on the ground, Le stood with a pistol in his hand
A jury acquitted him in self-defense as before the judge he did stand
But as Le walked down the courthouse steps, Billy said, “My friend you’re a dead man.”

It’s possible that Billy was the third of the three (presumably Klan) arsonists that night; it’s also possible he simply heard about the events in the town newspaper or gossip. Either way, we’re led to believe that until his neighbors were gunned down, Billy’s resentment stopped short of a desire for physical harm.

“Galveston Bay” now reaches its climax, as Billy lies in wait for Le in the dark of night, knife in hand. Bruce knows his listeners are now invested in both characters, and he deliberately sustains the tension through film noir imagery. Finally, Bruce releases the pause button, and we hold our breath as Le passes Billy. We know what’s about to happen–at least we think we do.

One late summer night Le stood watch along the waterside
Billy stood in the shadows, his K-bar knife in his hand and the moon slipped behind the clouds
Le lit a cigarette, the bay was still as glass
As he walked by Billy stuck his knife into his pocket, took a breath and let him pass
In the early darkness Billy rose up, went into the kitchen for a drink of water
Kissed his sleeping wife, headed into the channel and cast his nets into the water of Galveston Bay

Bruce fakes us out: at the crucial moment, Billy’s conscience gets the better of him. Bruce has given us no reason to think of Billy as a sympathetic protagonist, but there are clearly lengths to which he will not allow himself to go.

Standing at the precipice of darkness, Billy pulls himself back and goes home to his family, his job, and his life. His problems still exist, but he knows that violence won’t solve them.

“Galveston Bay” is a strange candidate for an optimistic song, but in context of the album it appears on (The Ghost of Tom Joad), that’s exactly what it is. On an album cloaked in rage, hopelessness, alienation, and darkness, “Galveston Bay” is a candle.

That’s why Bruce saved it for the encore of his Joad Tour sets, more often than not serving as the penultimate song of the night and a lead-in for the show-closing “The Promised Land” (which itself takes on new meaning after being namechecked in “Galveston Bay”). Positioned at the end of the night, “Galveston Bay” allowed Bruce to ensure that his audience went home each night on a note of hope and optimism.

“Galveston Bay” is a quiet song that demands focused attention from its listeners–something that arena and stadium crowds aren’t known for. So even though Bruce has performed it more than a hundred times over the years, all of those times were either on his solo acoustic Ghost of Tom Joad Tour or his Devils & Dust Tour.

All but one, that is. In the autumn of 2009, Bruce made an appearance on Elvis Costello’s shortlived television show, Spectacle. Airing in two parts, the two men alternated revealing conversation with performances selected from each other’s catalogs, as well as a few covers.

Most of the set list selections were either obvious or predictable candidates, but there were definitely a couple of wild cards–perhaps none wilder than “Galveston Bay,” played solo by Bruce upon request from Elvis, who cited it as one of his favorites.

Here’s that rarely seen performance–to my knowledge, it’s the only professionally filmed, officially released clip of Bruce performing “Galveston Bay.” (That’s the Professor on keyboards, by the way.)

Galveston Bay
Recorded: March-August 1995
Released: The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995)
First performed: November 21, 1995 (New Brunswick, NJ)
Last performed: September 25, 2009 (New York City, NY)

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