Roll of the Dice: Cadillac Ranch

“Cadillac Ranch” is one of the brightest, zippiest, and just plain fun songs in Bruce Springsteen’s catalog, as long as you don’t actually pay attention to the words.

Because if you do pay attention to the words, “Cadillac Ranch” is one of the darkest, fatalistic and just plain morbid songs in Bruce Springsteen’s catalog.

I mean, come on: Stripped of its melody and metaphor, the message of “Cadillac Ranch” makes Nebraska seem like a pop record.

And why doesn’t anyone ever talk about that horribly tragic yet laugh-out-loud last line?

We’ll get to that, but let’s start by taking a close read of the lyrics, and I apologize in advance to anyone for whom I’m about to ruin the song.

The Cadillac Ranch is a real place in Amarillo, Texas. Part public art and part roadside attraction, the Cadillac Ranch is a string of ten old Cadillacs buried nose down in the ground.

The cars themselves represent the golden age of the American automobile; buried and arranged as if in a graveyard, the installation serves as a metaphor for our fleeting youth and inevitable death.

In “Cadillac Ranch” the song, Bruce leaps behind the wheel of that metaphor and takes it on a manic, gleeful joyride before eventually driving it even deeper into the ground than the actual Cadillacs themselves.

Whenever Bruce refers to a Cadillac, he speaks of Death. (In this song, at least. In his other Caddy song, “Pink Cadillac,” it represents a vagina. Make of that what you will.)

So when Bruce sings…

Well there she sits, buddy, just a-gleaming in the sun
There to greet a working man when his day is done

…he’s saying: Death is always nearby, waiting patiently for the end of your working day (i.e. your life).

I’m gonna pack my pa and I’m gonna pack my aunt
I’m gonna take them down to the Cadillac Ranch

My dad’s dead. My aunt’s dead, too. I’m burying them both.

(Bruce sometimes changes the line to “I wanna pack my aunt” which makes the line much funnier.)

Eldorado fins, whitewalls and skirts
Rides just like a little bit of heaven here on earth
Well buddy when I die throw my body in the back
Drive me to the junkyard in my Cadillac

Heaven on earth, get it? Clever jokes aside, what Bruce is really saying in this verse and in the chorus that follows is: Life is a road trip, and death is the destination. If you don’t make an effort to enjoy the ride, then what’s the point of driving at all?

Cadillac, Cadillac
Long and dark, shiny and black
Open up your engines let ’em roar
Tearing up the highway like a big old dinosaur

James Dean in that Mercury ’49
Junior Johnson running through the woods of Caroline
Even Burt Reynolds in that black Trans Am
All gonna meet down at the Cadillac Ranch

James Dean died young; Junior Johnson and Burt Reynolds lived well into their eighties. But they all drove fast–both literally and figuratively.

Bruce couldn’t have known when he wrote the song that Johnson and Reynolds would live to such a ripe old age, but that foreknowledge would have only underscored the message of “Cadillac Ranch,” anyway. As Neil Gaiman once wrote (through his own metaphor for death), we each get the same amount of time on this earth as everyone else gets: a lifetime. Use it while you got it.

All this time, by the way, the E Street Band plays with barely restrained abandon, as if in desperation to distract us from our inevitable demise–which of course is the intent. But in the song’s final verse, things take an unexpectedly tragic turn.

Hey little girlie in the blue jeans so tight
Driving alone through the Wisconsin night
You’re my last love, baby, you’re my last chance
Don’t let ’em take me to the Cadillac Ranch

I love this verse, because we can read it in different ways: if we’re romantically inclined, the little girlie is a fellow life traveler–pairing up can help us both live better and maybe even longer. If we’re more self-absorbed, our little girlie represents youth, sex, a May/December mid-life crisis as we find ourselves no longer able to ignore our advancing age.

Either way, it doesn’t end well. In an ironic twist, it’s not our mortality-obsessed narrator who Death claims in “Cadillac Ranch.”

Cadillac, Cadillac
Long and dark, shiny and black
Pulled up to my house today
Came and took my little girl away

Wow! We didn’t see that coming, did we? I think we can safely assume that by “little girl,” our narrator refers to the aforementioned lady love, although it’s possible that he has a daughter.

Either way, what a downer of an ending! Every time I hear the song, whether on disc or on stage, I can’t help but laugh at this point of the song. Not because of the lyrics, but because of the way Bruce and the E Street Band just party as if they’re oblivious to what Bruce just sang.

Like, that’s seriously the last line of the song–the unexpected death of the person who presumably matters most to him–and Bruce just keeps on driving.

And there’s probably a message in that, too: time doesn’t stop for grief. Pulling off the road of life isn’t going to bring your loved one back, so you might as well keep driving.

Even by critics who do understand the song, “Cadillac Ranch” is often lumped into the same category as “Born in the U.S.A.” and “Hungry Heart” — songs where Bruce’s lyrics are belied by the backing track.

But that’s an unfair classification for “Cadillac Ranch,” because it’s hard to imagine the song working in any arrangement other than the one Bruce went with for the studio track. Trust me–Bruce has on rare occasion tried a different arrangement. It usually does not go well, like in this 2005 solo acoustic arrangement inexplicably interchanged with “Ramrod” on the tour.

Or in this 2006 Seeger Sessions arrangement, where Bruce mashes up “Cadillac Ranch” with a cover of “Mystery Train,” which is actually brilliant from a lyrical point of view but never quite lives up to its potential. (It pains me to write that, because I loved that tour so very much.)

No, “Cadillac Ranch” only ever works when the E Street Band commits–and I mean commits to it.

From their earliest performances, we could see the direction that “Cadillac Ranch” was inevitably going to take on stage. It’s almost impossible to not ham it up.

By the time Bruce’s mammoth, marathon Born in the U.S.A. Tour got underway a few years later, “Cadillac Ranch” was firmly established as a nightly set piece–in the beginning, loose and light:

…and by the end of the tour, tightly choreographed yet increasingly goofy.

Forty years on, “Cadillac Ranch” is still a mainstay of Bruce’s set lists. Other than the brief, thematic Vote for Change Tour, “Cadillac Ranch” hasn’t missed an E Street Band tour yet, and it’s been featured on the Seeger Sessions and Devils & Dust solo tours as well.

I’ll lay odds that we’ll hear Bruce and the band play “Cadillac Ranch” for as long as they continue touring.

Because the closer we all get to the end of the drive, the more we need to enjoy the ride.

Bonus: Here’s an unreleased studio outtake featuring a different mix, but the thing you’ll notice most is the siren and peelout that introduces the song. It makes “Cadillac Ranch” sound like the perfect candidate for the opening credits of a Burt Reynolds movie.

Cadillac Ranch
Recorded: February 16-April 26, 1980
Released: The River (1980)
First performed: October 3, 1980 (Ann Arbor, MI)
Last performed: November 16, 2019 (Asbury Park, NJ)

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