Roll of the Dice: Prove it All Night

“‘Some of the New York taxi cab drivers, they got a running monologue that they keep going whether somebody’s in there or not… I get in with this cat, and he was complaining about how it seems you gotta prove it all night to your boss, then you gotta go home and prove it to your wife and kids, and it seems like it never stops… you know there’s a big philosophy there.” –Bruce Springsteen, August 22, 1978

´´I remember when my father was 43 years old, he packed up everything we had in the house, put it in a trailer, took my mother and my little sister and went to California. They didn´t have jobs, didn´t know what they were gonna do. I found out that you can wait, you can wait, you can wait and… some things just ain´t gonna ever change. You just gotta prove it all night.” –Bruce Springsteen, the very next night

There are many accounts of what inspired Bruce to write “Prove It All Night,” and they’re probably all apocryphal. On any given night during the Darkness Tour, Bruce introduced the album’s lead single by selecting from a grab bag of origin stories, sometimes contradicting himself on back-to-back nights at the same venue (always with full sincerity).

But even if none of his stories were authoritative, they were still 100% true, because “Prove It All Night” is more than just rock’s most ferocious wedding song; it’s a credo that runs throughout the entire Darkness on the Edge of Town album.

(Side note: I get a lot of flak from fellow fans when I admit to this, but Darkness is the only Springsteen album in his entire catalog that leaves me cold. I mean, exactly how much fatalism does one need on a single album? Every song on Darkness is brilliant on its own, but as an album it’s just too much. But I digress.)

If “Prove It All Night” mines the same earth as the rest of its album-mates, it at least does so with greater lyrical sophistication. On an album mostly devoid of nuance, “Prove It All Night” operates on multiple levels: the earthly, the divine, the here and now, and the long road of life.

It’s been remarked by more than one fan that “Prove It All Night” could be Bruce’s theme song; I agree, for more reasons than might be immediately apparent.

But before we delve into the lyrics, let’s talk about the music for a moment, because “Prove It All Night” is one of those songs where the music came first. The origin of “Prove It All Night” begins with a recording we never heard before 2010. On The Promise, Bruce’s alternate-universe, what-might-have-been double album  of outtakes deemed too thematically distant from the darkness of Darkness, there’s a song called “It’s a Shame.”

“It’s a Shame” was recorded in 1977, but Bruce kept it locked in the vault (it didn’t even escape via bootleg) for more than three decades. It’s one of those hybrid tracks that features modern vocals and horn section overdubs, against a backing track that curiously features some E Street stand-ins. (Max and Garry were absent for the session, so Bob Chirmside (Bruce’s road manager) and Jon Landau (Bruce’s manager) sat in on bass and drums, respectively. In fact, the original session log titled the recording as “Jon’s Jam.”)

We’ll look at “It’s a Shame” in greater depth at a later date; for now, just pay attention to the riff.

That’s the beginning of “Prove It All Night” right there.

Bruce never got around to finishing “It’s a Shame” that year. but he held on to that riff and evolved it into a full-fledged melody. The first version of what is instantly recognizable as “Prove It All Night” (recorded just five months after “Jon’s Jam”) was musically complete but lyrically in utero. In order to have something to sing over the backing track, Bruce borrowed the lyrics from another song he’d debuted the previous summer. See if you can place it.

The borrowed lyrics from “Something in the Night” were almost certainly intended to be a placeholder, but that didn’t stop Landau from pointing out that Bruce might be overusing a certain metaphor. And even though the final lyrics hadn’t been written, Bruce’s response tells us all we need to know to understand the finished song:

“During the record, I think Jon said, ‘What’s all this about these cars?’ I think we were doing ‘Prove It All Night,’ and it had a different first verse. But… the action is not the imagery, you know. The heart of the action is beneath all that stuff.” — Bruce Springsteen to Paul Nelson, Rolling Stone, July 13 1978

Let’s look beneath all that stuff.

On the surface, “Prove It All Night” is a wedding song, or at least a proposal song. Our narrator spends the entire song trying to convince his girl to elope with him, and the subtext starts from the very first line.

I’ve been working real hard trying to get my hands clean
We’ll drive that dusty road from Monroe to Angeline
To buy you a gold ring and a pretty dress of blue
Baby just one kiss will get these things for you
A kiss to seal our fate tonight

I could write an entire blog post around the repeated metaphors throughout Darkness on the Edge of Town, and the washing of hands would certainly be one of them. “Racing in the Street” spells it out, but in “Prove It All Night,” Bruce trusts the listener to realize that our narrator is doing more than just cleaning himself up for his proposal–he’s also trying his best to get himself on the straight and narrow, to atone for past sins, and to build a good life for himself and his future wife.

The road is another common metaphor from that period (any Springsteen period, really). It represents a lifespan, in this case the shared life journey our two lovers will hopefully embark on together.

The ring, of course, is an obvious wedding totem. Interestingly, though, her wedding dress is blue, not white. This is an important detail: we now know that neither of our characters is innocent.

Let’s stop for a moment and take that verse back in. I find that “Prove It All Night” is lyrically under-appreciated, and I attribute that to its plain language. But look at how artfully Bruce uses those three simple lines to introduce us to two characters with checkered pasts without need of any detailed exposition whatsoever:

I’ve been working real hard trying to get my hands clean
We’ll drive that dusty road from Monroe to Angeline
To buy you a gold ring and a pretty dress of blue

They may not be the most memorable lines on the album, but they are among the best-crafted.

The kiss that promises to seal their fate is their wedding kiss, the one that symbolizes and begins their marital journey. Bruce uses the kiss as the first step in “proving it all night,” and there is of course an intended consummatory reading of that.

A kiss to prove it all night, prove it all night
Girl there’s nothing else that we can do
So prove it all night, prove it all night
And girl I’ll prove it all night for you

But the title refers to more than that first night–it stands for every night. It stands for life. When our narrator sings “Prove It All Night,” he’s pledging to remain true and prove his love and fidelity for the remainder of their days. Or rather, nights–this is the Darkness album after all, and the nocturnal setting is just one more symbol of the hard lives led by these characters.

Bruce never outright states that our characters live on the wrong side of the law, but he certainly implies that our protagonist stands ready to do whatever it takes to survive in a hard world, even if he hasn’t already done so to date.

The middle third of the song is its heart. If we’re looking for the message in “Prove It All Night,” this is where we’ll find it:

Everybody’s got a hunger, a hunger they can’t resist
There’s so much that you want, you deserve much more than this
But if dreams came true, ah, wouldn’t that be nice
But this ain’t no dream we’re living out through tonight
Ah girl you want it, you take it, you pay the price

To prove it all night, prove it all night
Prove it all night, girl, and call the bluff
Well prove it all night, prove it all night
Girl I prove it all night for your love

We can of course read this literally; Bruce has taken care to establish his hardscrabble characters so that this sounds like dialogue they would exchange. And while the lines work either in context of that one night or a shared life, this section transcends both: this is also Bruce speaking directly to us about the elusiveness of dreams, the cost of ambition, and the steadfast focus required to achieve them both.

Keep in mind that Bruce wrote “Prove It All Night” immediately after a costly legal battle that barred him from the studio and swept him from the pop culture radar right at the moment he’d arrived there. He clung to his principles in order to preserve his independence, but he did so at great risk. When Bruce recorded “Prove It All Night,” there was no guarantee that he’d be able to pick his success up where he left off, but he was willing to pay the price (or at least call the bluff).

On both a literary and metatextual level, “Prove It All Night” is a you-and-me-against-the-world song, and he is “me” and we are “you.”

Baby tie your hair back in a long white bow
Meet me in the fields behind the dynamo
You hear their voices telling you not to go
They made their choices and they’ll never know
What it means to steal, to cheat, to lie, what it’s like to live and die

The song’s final verse echoes an earlier Springsteen get-out-of-Dodge song, but unlike “Thunder Road,” there’s no wind of escape to blow back our heroine’s hair–she’ll have to do it herself. And there’s no guarantee  that victory awaits them once they start their shared journey. We’re not even sure whether or narrator is addressing his intended in these final lines, or whether he’s revealing his own doubts and insecurities.

In fact, we never even find out whether these two make it to the altar, whether they blow town, or if she even accepts his proposal at all. “Prove It All Night” ends without resolution. For most of us, there’s no winning or losing, we just go on playing the game.

For the next few years, Bruce would dwell on this theme almost to obsession, writing in one of his most memorable lines, Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse? It would take many more years before Bruce allowed himself to realize and express through his work that it could actually be something better.

Even if we never reach our destination, there’s satisfaction in the journey itself; even if it never comes true, there’s fulfillment to be found while working on a dream. (Bruce’s 2009 title track is very much a sequel (or possibly an answer) to “Prove It All Night.”)

So whether in reference to love or ambition, we renew our dedication each day and we prove it through the night, just so that we can have a chance to do it again the next day and the day after that. If we’re lucky, we go a little further and we grow a little stronger each day; and if not, we just keep at it.

There’s nothing else that we can do.

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I’ve focused primarily on Bruce’s lyrics for “Prove It All Night,” but on stage it’s all about the guitars.

Even in the studio track, there’s a seriously impressive guitar solo mid-song–one of Bruce’s finest on record, in fact. The entire E Street Band impresses in “Prove It All Night,” but freed from the time constraints of a 45rpm single, “Prove It All Night” expands into a Steel Mill-worthy guitar showcase.  On the Darkness Tour, Bruce prefaced the song with an instrumental piano and guitar introduction that was often longer than the song itself.

Over the course of the tour, the introduction and mid-song solo grew in length, power, and confidence, and “Prove It All Night” quickly became the show’s centerpiece, with nightly performances that became legendary in later years.

When Bruce retired that introduction (which really should have its own name, so different and unrelated it is from the song itself), that arrangement became known as “Prove It All Night ’78.” It wouldn’t be heard from again for more than three decades.

The song itself would endure, though, featuring on every tour since its debut with the exception of Tunnel  of Love (ironically),The Ghost of Tom Joad, and The Seeger Sessions.

Bruce even played it on his 1992-93 tour with his short-lived touring band…

…and in a beautiful acoustic one-time-only arrangement in Buffalo during his solo acoustic tour in 2005:

All the while, though, what fans really craved was the return of the ’78 introduction. Thirty years down the road the E Street Band was at the peak of their powers, and fans dreamt of what that legendary arrangement might sound like on the modern stage.

At first, fans voiced their wish on private message boards and fan sites; but when Bruce started taking sign requests on a regular basis, it wasn’t long before signs for “Prove It ’78” started to appear–first sporadically, then regularly.

Bruce ignored them for as long as he could, even throwing cold water on the notion when a fan asked about it during a call-in appearance on E Street Radio:

“You’re one of the ’78 piano intro guys! There are clones of you in various places throughout the United States. … It was just a device that worked nicely at the time. If you’d like to hear it again, that’ll probably never occur, my friend. But it was good while it lasted.” 

But in 2012, Bruce finally relented, and on May 17, 2012 in Barcelona, this happened:

It darn near cracked the Springsteen corners of the Internet in half. It wasn’t a one-off, either–Bruce and the band have played that arrangement (interchangeably with the original album arrangement) on every tour since. (I’ve been lucky enough to get it three times in the last eight years.)

But regardless of whether it takes its ’77 form or ’78 one, “Prove It All Night” remains one of Bruce’s signature songs–a call, a pledge, and a reminder that while hard work isn’t the only path to success and while persistence doesn’t guarantee it, they’re the only things that keep you on the road toward it.

Prove It All Night
Recorded: September 12-16, 1977
Released: Darkness on the Edge of Town (1977), The Essential Bruce Springsteen (2003)
First performed: May 23, 1978 (Buffalo, NY)
Last performed: September 3, 2023 (East Rutherford, NJ)

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