Roll of the Dice: The Angel

“[The Angel] was written in fifteen minutes, and that’s one of my favorites because it’s one of the most sophisticated things I’ve written.” — Bruce Springsteen to Jerry Gilbert, ZigZag, August 1974

“What the hell was I talking about in that song?” — Bruce Springsteen, April 22, 1996

For an important song, “The Angel” gets very little love.

It’s derided by critics and fans alike, and even the artist seems content to ignore it. Originally self-touted as one of his best songs (there was never a point at which “The Angel” wasn’t a contender for his first album), Bruce has played it in public only three times across five decades. Even “Mary, Queen of Arkansas” has had five times as many outings as “The Angel.”

And yet, “The Angel” is a genuinely significant song. If we want to chart the songwriting path that led Bruce to his landmark “Born to Run,” we start way back in the autumn of 1971, when Bruce auditioned for future manager Mike Appel with “Baby Doll,” and “Song for Orphans.”

Appel thought both songs sucked, but he saw enough potential in Bruce to challenge him to write more songs and then come back and see him again. Bruce accepted the challenge and wrote furiously over the weeks and months that followed. He reported back to Appel in February 1972, and although “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” is the song that famously captivated Appel enough to take Bruce on as a client, Bruce demoed at least seven other songs for Appel that day, two of which would make it onto Bruce’s first album. One of them was “The Angel.”

“The Angel” was also one of a dozen songs that Bruce recorded for John Hammond the day after Appel famously bulldogged him into auditioning Bruce in May of 1972.  Amazingly, that early recording of “The Angel” survives, and although Bruce’s solo piano performance can’t compete with the more confident yet delicate David Sancious performance that graces the official track, there’s no question that Bruce’s make-or-break vocal for Hammond is far superior to the final version.

Hammond signed Bruce to CBS  shortly after that, on June 9, 1972.  Within three weeks, Bruce had reassembled The Bruce Springsteen Band (minus Steve Van Zandt, still a couple of years away from re-entering the story) and started recording his debut album.

“The Angel” was one of the first songs they recorded, in an arrangement that’s essentially a solo Sancious performance. (Richard Davis, who played on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks album that Bruce revered, accompanied Sancious on the upright double bass late in the song. Davis would reprise his double bass duty on “Meeting Across the River” for Bruce’s third album.)

In the early 1970s, Bruce had a fascination with seamy street scenes and sordid characters; several of his songs from that pre-label period were little more than the musical equivalent of a mural, or at best a character study. (See “Hollywood Kids,” for example.)

“The Angel” is very much in this vein, a portrait rather than a story, about a Hell’s Angel biker whose bravado may mask some inner insecurity.

The angel rides with hunchback children
Poison oozing from his engine
Wieldin’ love as a lethal weapon
On his way to Hubcap Heaven
Baseball cards poked in his spokes
His boots in oil he’s patiently soaked
The roadside attendant nervously jokes
As the angel’s tires stroke his precious pavement

“The Angel” is often derided as at best pretentious, at worst as crude. But there’s much to admire and appreciate here as well; Bruce isn’t altogether wrong when he deemed it one of his more sophisticated songs.

Bruce’s melody is contemplatively sad, almost poignant–at contrast with his easy riding protagonist. As for the Angel himself, it’s clear that Bruce is taken with the idea that such an innocent appellation could apply to such a menacing  character. That irony is the central conceit of the song, and it really is a sophisticated notion for a 22-year-old songwriter.

“The Angel” is about a man who fancies himself as threatening, but there’s an innocence about him as well that Bruce momentarily reveals when he notes the baseball cards in the cycle’s spokes, as if the biker was a child on a paper route rather than on his way to Hubcap Heaven.

(Hubcap Heaven, by the way, was and is a real place that Bruce was very much familiar with. Officially, it’s called the Hubcap Farm, and you can find it in Farmingdale, New Jersey. For all the fans who devote hours of research, exploration, and debate to determining the location of Greasy Lake, Hubcap Heaven is a surprisingly easy yet little-known Springsteen landmark to visit.)

But I digress.

Let’s get back to the song, because we’re about to get to the part where Bruce hints at glory still to come.

Well, the interstate’s choked with nomadic hordes
In Volkswagen vans with full running boards dragging great anchors
Followin’ dead-end signs into the sores
The angel rides by humpin’ his hunk metal whore

It’s only a hop and a skip–not even a jump–from the interstate’s choked with nomadic hordes to the highway’s jammed with broken heroes, and I’d argue that the imagery of the angel weaving effortlessly in and around the endless procession of VW vans (with a grace only elevated by the delicate, almost slow-motion melody) conveys a far more visceral freedom than “Born to Run” does.

(“The Angel” isn’t the only 1972 song to evince the DNA of greatness to come. Check out “Jesse” for early evidence of yet another.)

The crude “hunk metal whore” metaphor is both apt (the angel is almost fetishistic toward his bike) and an ironic contrast to the intentionally nameless woman he’s about to pick up.

Madison Avenue’s claim to fame
In a trainer bra with eyes like rain
She rubs against the weather-beaten frame
And asks the angel for his name
Off in the distance the marble dome
Reflects across the flatlands with a naked feel off into parts unknown
The woman strokes his polished chrome
And lies beside the angel’s bones

Note that the woman asks the angel for his name; not only does he not provide it, he doesn’t ask for hers either. She’s not the love interest in the story. Even though this last verse is clearly and intentionally laced with double entendre (in another early instance of a someday classic line, Bruce somehow manages to make wrap your legs ’round these velvet rims and strap your hands across my engines even more overtly sexual having Madison Avenue’s claim to fame rub against the angel’s frame and stroking his polished chrome), Bruce deliberately avoids pronouns that would indicate whether the sexual connotations refer to the biker or the bike.

“The Angel” ends here, on an unsettled note. We expect more–if not a story, at least a set-up. But Bruce has said all he set out to say, painting a picture of a man fixated on living up to a self-image, obsessed with the instrument that will take him there, and peripheralizing if not ignoring those who would attempt to penetrate or distract from the illusion.

Wherever could he have come up with the inspiration for that?

We know Bruce played “The Angel” at least once, shortly after its release in early 1973. No recording survives (if there ever was one), so we don’t know how his audience received it. But we know that Bruce didn’t play it again for almost a quarter-century–and when he did revive it (by request from a fan who snuck his way into Bruce’s soundcheck in London), he sounded so self-consciously sheepish that if not for the shock value it would probably have been considered the evening’s lowlight.

Bruce wouldn’t attempt “The Angel” again for another 13 years, and this time he didn’t have a choice: promising a complete, start-to-finish performance of his debut album for the first and only time ever, Bruce at least had a chance to consider how he wanted to approach it.

He chose the original album arrangement, with guest artist Joyce Hammann on viola in place of Richard Davis’s double bass. Roy Bittan’s piano accompaniment is just as sensitive as Sancious’ original version, but it’s Bruce’s vocals that were the breathtaking surprise. There’s no sheepishness in his reading below, only a nostalgic tenderness, as if singing about an old friend or a former self–either way, someone long gone but fondly remembered.

That night–November 22, 2009–was the last time Bruce played “The Angel” in public to date. That entire tour-finale night felt like a chapter closing; a premonition that would prove true in ways we couldn’t and wouldn’t wanted to have imagine at the time.

Bruce would continue to reach far back into his catalog (and even earlier) in the years to come, but that perfect performance of “The Angel” felt like a farewell and a fond send-off from a once-desperate, hungry songwriter to a song that had long since served its purpose.

The Angel
Recorded: June 27 – October 26, 1972
Released: Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (1973)
First performed: February 14, 1972 (New York City, NY)
Last performed: November 22, 2009 (Buffalo, NY)

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