Roll of the Dice: Jack of All Trades

Bruce Springsteen wrote “Jack of All Trades” shortly after the U.S. housing bubble of the early 2000s violently burst, but both lyrically and musically it sounds like it could have been written years, decades, or even centuries earlier.

That’s intentional. At a 2012 press conference in Paris, Bruce acknowledged his design:

There are ’30s horns in “Jack of All Trades.” That’s the way I used the music: the idea was that the music was going to contextualize historically that this has happened before. It happened in the 1970s, it happened in the ’30s, it happened in the 1800s. It’s cyclical. Over and over and over and over again. So I try to pick up some of the continuity and the historical resonance through the music.

 “Jack of All Trades” is one of the most carefully constructed songs on Wrecking Ball, arranged for a full string section and tuba(!) section. (When’s the last time you heard a tuba, sousaphone, and two euphoniums on a rock record?)

The horns and strings give “Jack of All Trades” a vintage feel, but Bruce and Ron Aniello layer swoops, loops, and synths underneath to give the song an unplaceable  time-out-of-time feel. The monotonous melody moves at a pace so plodding that it almost sounds at times like the record is artificially slowed–a songwriting device that Bruce uses to convey the notion that his characters are moving slowly and in place. They’re going nowhere.

Bruce was angry when he wrote this song: angry that so many people were losing their homes while a few of the elite prospered from it. That anger simmers below the surface throughout “Jack of All Trades,” almost undetectable until it erupts at the end.

Anger isn’t the dominant emotion of “Jack of All Trades,” however. At its core, this is a song of resilience and hope. Or if not hope, then at least faith.

When we’re first introduced to our point-of-view character, it seems like we’re listening to a song of love and assurance.

I’ll mow your lawn, clean the leaves out your drain
I’ll mend your roof to keep out the rain
I’ll take the work that God provides
I’m a jack of all trades, honey, we’ll be alright

I’ll hammer the nails and I’ll set the stone
I’ll harvest your crops when they’re ripe and grown
I’ll pull that engine apart and patch her up ’til she’s running right
I’m a jack of all trades, we’ll be alright

Our protagonist may not have many (or any) specialized skills, but he can do the basic tasks that people need done. He’s confident enough in his own versatility to reassure his love that he’ll be able to take care of them come what may.

But what may come eventually comes.

The hurricane blows, brings a hard rain
When the blue sky breaks, it feels like the world’s gonna change
We’ll start caring for each other like Jesus said that we might
I’m a jack of all trades, we’ll be alright

Maybe the hurricane is literal. Knowing the context in which Bruce wrote “Jack of All Trades,” more likely it represents the havoc and damage that the housing crisis wreaked on society. Either way, though, our hero has faith. He’s been here before, but this time it feels different.

This time, he thinks, is the time society starts to care about the people at the bottom whose lives are fueling the prosperity of those at the top.

He’s wrong, of course, and with that realization comes a creeping bitterness that now infects the song.

The banker man grows fat, the working man grows thin
It’s all happened before and it’ll happen again
It’ll happen again, yeah, they’ll bet your life
I’m a jack of all trades, darling, we’ll be alright

Like many of Bruce’s best songs, “Jack of All Trades” can be reduced to a single passage. The verse above captures the entire song in four lines. At a casual listen, we might hear that third line as “you bet your life,” but Bruce subverts our expectations by inverting the idiom. There’s a cyclical certainty at work thanks to the gamesmanship of the bankers who ante with human lives.

Now sometimes tomorrow comes soaked in treasure and blood
Here we stood the drought, now we’ll stand the flood
There’s a new world coming, I can see the light
I’m a jack of all trades, we’ll be alright

The phrase “treasure and blood” is loaded with historical resonance. More typically reversed as “blood and treasure” (which is much harder to rhyme), it refers to the tendency of those in power to gamble, spend, and squander lives and money. It dates back in political invective to at least the mid-seventeenth century and surfaces in the writings of John Adams on the eve of the American declaration of independence and of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.

(Bruce chose that phrase intentionally, even though he knew it had fallen out of usage by 2009. But what happens before happens again: not long after the song was released, Donald Trump discovered the phrase and still uses it frequently.)

The use of “treasure and blood” is Bruce’s tip to us that our protagonist is growing increasingly bitter and cynical–and yet, he still has faith that change is coming. He and his partner have made it this far; they’ll survive whatever comes next.

They’ll scrimp, they’ll save, they’ll recycle and reuse. They’ll make ends meet. But that doesn’t mean our hero doesn’t resent the hell out of the hand he’s been dealt. This becomes shockingly clear in the song’s final couplet.

So you use what you’ve got and you learn to make do
You take the old, you make it new
If I had me a gun, I’d find the bastards and shoot ’em on sight
I’m a jack of all trades, we’ll be alright

Even though we’ve felt the explosion building, it still comes as a shock when we hear it. So skillful a songwriter is Bruce, however, that it serves to make his character more sympathetic rather than less. We don’t focus on the anger and thirst for violence; what we feel in this moment is deep empathy and appreciation for how much effort and energy it requires to maintain one’s faith and resilience in a system that seems stacked against us.

Our jack of all trades is a hero because he feels this anger and still persists, not despite it.

No discussion of “Jack of All Trades” would be complete without touching on Tom Morello’s gorgeous guitar solo that closes the song. No one would be surprised by a Morello solo that sounds angry–that’s pretty much his trademark. What’s stunning about Morello’s work in “Jack of All Trades” is how he honors the song by keeping the fury simmering below the surface, infusing his solo instead with resilience and defiant grandeur. It’s absolutely wonderful.

All that careful construction on the studio track makes “Jack of All Trades” a difficult song to translate to the stage, however. Attempts to do so throughout the first legs of the Wrecking Ball Tour often left audiences cold, conversing, or heading to the refreshment stand or restroom, and by the time the tour reached its first anniversary (this was a surprisingly long eighteen-month tour), “Jack of All Trades” was making only sparing appearances.

There have been a couple of occasions, however, when “Jack of All Trades” worked on stage, and worked well.

The first time was the song’s live debut–not at the tour opener, or even at a rehearsal show, but surprisingly on national television. During Bruce’s second appearance on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon in a week, Tom Morello was in tow, so Bruce decided to play one of the two songs on his new album that featured Tom’s distinctive guitar.

“Jack of All Trades” was a surprising choice for such a prime platform, but thanks to the intimacy created by the camera that brought Bruce and the band close up into our own homes, it came across as mesmerizing.

The next times Bruce surprised with a potent “Jack of All Trades” were the last times (to date) that he performed it: in a brand new arrangement at the tail end of his 2016 tour.

The 2016 tour featured the core E Street Band, without the horn section that featured so prominently since 2012. Lacking one of the central elements that made the studio track so powerful, Bruce rearranged “Jack of All Trades” as an essentially solo number, backed by local string sections he hired in each city to bring “New York City Serenade” to life as that leg’s unexpected standard opener.

The arrangement was just novel enough and powerful enough to compel audiences to re-examine the song, and it was beautiful enough for “Jack of All Trades” to become a highlight in a string of shows that were almost all highlights.

It’s been a few years now since we’ve heard Bruce perform “Jack of All Trades,” but his song is just as relevant now as it was then, and I suspect it’ll still be timely when Bruce next takes the concert stage.

After all: It’s all happened before. It’ll happen again.

Jack of All Trades
Recorded: 2011
Released: Wrecking Ball (2012)
First performed: March 2, 2012 (New York City, NY)
Last performed: September 7, 2016 (Philadelphia, PA)

Looking for your favorite Bruce song? Check our full index. New entries every week!