Roll of the Dice: Point Blank

Film noir, (French: “dark film”) style of filmmaking characterized by such elements as cynical heroes, stark lighting effects, frequent use of flashbacks, intricate plots, and an underlying existentialist philosophy. (Brittanica.com)

Bruce Springsteen’s songbook is filled with songs inspired by film noir, but “Point Blank” is far more than just a hat tip–it’s the musical equivalent of film noir itself, from opening notes to dramatic ending.

Smoky, moody, and entirely nocturnal, “Point Blank” is among the darkest and starkest songs in Bruce’s catalog.

Musically, “Point Blank” dazzles. In Bruce’s strongest, subtlest arrangement on record since “New York City Serenade,” every E Street Band member shines: Roy owns the spotlight, inviting us to a seedy nightclub long before the lyrics reveal it, while Danny’s organ draws us down into despair; Max’s restraint underscores Bruce’s dispassionate vocals; even Clarence’s metronomic triangle is critical, conveying the monotony of our femme fatale’s life in order for Roy and Danny to soar above it.

But it’s Bruce’s guitar that elevates the track to brilliance, a shadow counter-melody that intertwines with the main melody and yet clashes at the same time. The effect conjures a love affair destined for dissolution, a dance between two intrinsically connected characters who are never quite in sync, and the clash between present plight and fairy-tale past.

Against this gorgeous backing track, Bruce delivers a vocal that is so restrained, so controlled, that in the few moments when he deliberately allows himself to succumb to his narrator’s emotion, the effect is devastating. This is one of his very best vocals on record.

“Point Blank” is sometimes characterized as a song about literal death and dying, but I’d argue that’s too shallow a read. “Point Blank” isn’t about dying but rather about not living. In a break with Bruce’s usual habit of hiding a song’s heart in its bridge, Bruce gives away the game in the very first verse:

Do you still say your prayers little darling, do you go to bed at night
Praying that tomorrow everything will be alright
But tomorrow’s fall in number, in number one by one
You wake up and you’re dying, you don’t even know what from

That’s the song right there: you wake up and you’re dying.

Our leading lady isn’t leading the life she wanted, but rather than take action she simply prays for things to get better. Her prayers go unanswered, though, while the calendar pages continue to turn.

Life is finite. In a very real sense we start dying from the day we’re born. It’s a truism that each passing day means we have fewer tomorrows left, and when Bruce’s narrator says, “you don’t even know what from” he’s telling his lost love: You’re wasting your life. Take control of it.

Well, they shot you point blank
You been shot in the back, baby, point blank
You been fooled this time, little girl, that’s a fact
Right between the eyes, baby, point blank
Right between the pretty lies that they tell

The chorus is obviously a metaphor. Our heroine isn’t literally dead, but she is emotionally dead. She’s given up. Notice where she’s been shot: first in the back, meaning she didn’t see it coming. Then right between the eyes, suggesting she’s surrendered. And that last “lies” line is more than just an internal rhyme–it tells us that the murder weapon was betrayal. Someone hurt her, and she shut down.

In true film noir style, the body of the song takes place in flashback. Our narrator fills us in on his love’s tragic backstory:

You grew up where young girls they grow up fast
You took what you were handed and left behind what was asked
But what they asked baby wasn’t right
You didn’t have to live that life
And I was gonna be your Romeo, you were gonna be my Juliet
These days you don’t wait on Romeos, you wait on that welfare check
And on all the pretty things that you can’t ever have
And on all the promises

That always end up point blank
Shot between the eyes, whoa, point blank
Like little white lies you tell to ease the pain
You’re walking in the sights, girl, of point blank
And it’s one false move and, baby, the lights go out

The first half of this verse roots our nameless cipher’s passiveness in her abbreviated childhood. Forced to grow up too quickly, taught to accept and submit, as an adult she elicits our sympathy.

She elicited something more from our narrator. He obviously fell for her, although we never learn why. (Perhaps he has a savior complex.) At some point, however, his determination and devotion gave way to frustration at and judgment of her unwillingness to free herself from a self-imposed prison.

All of this is setup for the extended dream sequence that is the heart of “Point Blank,” stretching the verse well beyond its expected border in a way that commands our attention.

Once I dreamed we were together again, baby, you and me
Back home in those old clubs the way we used to be
We were standing at the bar, it was hard to hear
The band was playing loud and you were shouting something in my ear
You pulled my jacket off and as the drummer counted four
You grabbed my hand and pulled me out on the floor
You just stood there and held me and you started dancing slow
And as I pulled you tighter I swore I’d never let you go
Well I saw you last night down on the avenue
Your face was in the shadows but I knew that it was you
You were standing in the doorway out of the rain
You didn’t answer when I called out your name
You just turned and then you looked away
Like just another stranger waiting to get blown away

As a songwriter, Bruce uses this device sparingly, but when he does (as in “Downbound Train“) the effect is mesmerizing. Like a dream, some details are vivid; others are ignored, and the background is a blur.

But the details aren’t important here. We’re meant to focus on the foreground, but instead we fixate on Bruce’s vocal as he strains mightily to maintain his composure, his emotional armor starting to buckle.

Go to the four-minute mark, and listen to the way Bruce delivers the line “your face was in the shadows, but I knew that was you.” The love, longing, loss, sadness, empathy, and frustration that Bruce conveys through a single one-syllable word–you–breaks my heart every time I hear it. If there’s such a thing as having a favorite syllable in a singer’s catalog, that’s my pick right there.

Bruce blurs the dream into a chance encounter so seamlessly that we question whether it was truly his ex-love that the narrator sees out in the street, or whether it’s simply his mind playing tricks on him. Either way, the effect is the same: our two lovers are unrecognizable to each other in the present but inseparably connected through their pasts.

As we enter the denouement, Bruce’s lyrics lose their rhyming integrity, suggesting an emotional turmoil that belies his controlled vocals.

Point blank, right between the eyes
Whoa, point blank, right between the pretty lies you fell
Point blank, you been shot straight through the heart
Yeah, point blank, you’ve been twisted up till you’ve become just another part of it
Point blank, you’re walking in the sights
Point blank, living one false move, just one false move away
They caught you in their sights
Point blank, did you forget how to love, girl, did you forget how to fight
They must have shot you in the head
‘Cause point blank, bang bang, baby you’re dead

Our narrator is almost keening here, but he regains his steel (and rhyme scheme) in the final, tragic couplet. He’s written off his ex-lover now; she’s dead inside, and dead to him. We end on a final cinematic flourish and a long (thirteen seconds!) fade to black.

Start to finish, “Point Blank” is a masterpiece. It wasn’t always, though–like many of Bruce’s songs, he crafted, shaped, and iterated “Point Blank” over time, in this case over the course of a full year.

What sets “Point Blank” apart from most other songs in Bruce’s catalog, however, is that he applied his craft in full public view.

Bruce debuted a work-in-progress version of “Point Blank” on stage in Los Angeles mere weeks after he claimed to have composed it at a Boston soundcheck during the Darkness Tour.

Although the melody is clearly recognizable, and the first verse is in fairly final form, this first version of “Point Blank” differs significantly from his final version: there’s a bridge that would be excised from the final song, and lyrics that suggest that the narrator’s love interest is more a hostage to a chemical dependency than her own passivity.

Hearts full of anger, eyes filled with hate
You see them on the street, you try to turn your eyes away but little girl, this time it’s too late
You hear their voices at night as you lock the door
There’ll be no sleep tonight for baby she don’t believe them lies anymore
And she stumbles into the morning trying for her usual fix
But baby them old distractions they just ain’t got the kicks no more
And so you pack your pistol and you go out looking for someone
But just, just stuck in the middle, girl you don’t know where to aim the gun

Most importantly, though, the arrangement is more aggressive and Bruce’s vocals more passionate–despite the fact that in this version there doesn’t even seem to be a connection (past or present) between the two characters. It’s clear Bruce was working his way toward a destination but had some distance to go yet.

Bruce seems to have realized this, because “Point Blank” didn’t surface again for more than two months. When it did, the arrangement was in its more familiar and restrained incarnation. The bridge was still present, however (it would remain throughout the tour), and while the lyrics had shaped up a bit, they were still far from their final form.

By the end of the tour, Bruce and the band had settled into the song, playing it regularly and evolving it subtly each night, as in this beautifully captured performance in Houston.

Based on how close “Point Blank” was at that point to its final album arrangement on The River, one might assume that Bruce was at least satisfied with the song’s musicality, choosing instead to focus on refining the lyrics.

But that apparently wasn’t the case,  because when Bruce took the band into the studio to work on “Point Blank” six months after that Houston performance above, he’d taken the song in an entirely different direction as a straight-up rocker.

Interestingly, Bruce bluffed most of the lyrics beyond the familiar first verse, suggesting that he had already dismissed his earlier, harsher lyrics but hadn’t yet written replacements. He continued to work on the lyrics in this arrangement, and in this next take we can hear the dream sequence starting to take shape.

Bruce found the lyrics he was looking for in “Party Lights,” another song he’d written and recorded for The River.

Bruce took the first two verses of “Party Lights”…

I know the girls well they grow up fast where you come from
You left behind what was asked and you were married baby oh so young
Now that little girl of yours looks like she’s growing up overnight

He was gonna be your Romeo, you were gonna be his Juliet
These days you don’t wait on Romeos, you just wait on that welfare check
While other girls your age are out with lovers taking in the night

…and transplanted them into “Point Blank” as its new second verse. Once the final dream sequence verse was complete, so was the song, which Bruce recorded (shortly after he’d completed it), released on his fifth album, and performed throughout his 1980 tour.

Still, Bruce never forgot his brief flirtation with that alternate arrangement. In 1995, Bruce surprised his California fans when he tour debuted “Point Blank” in a new acoustic arrangement that clearly evoked his abandoned rock version.

In all its many arrangements, however, there was always one notable omission. Despite the emotional, evocative power of Clarence Clemons’ saxophone, Bruce had never deployed it in one of his saddest songs.

Bruce rectified that on the Reunion Tour, placing The Big Man in the spotlight for an extended, sorrowful introduction to “Point Blank.”

Post-reunion, “Point Blank” returned to its original arrangement, although oddly Bruce reverted to his original 1978 “baby the lights go out” ending rather than the “bang bang, baby, you’re dead” album ending.

During the revival of the River Tour in 2016, Bruce introduced a dramatic, cinematic overture and restored the “bang bang” ending, creating what many (or at least I) would consider the definitive version of “Point Blank.”

I consider that to be the definitive arrangement, but does Bruce? Time will tell, I suppose, but given his endless tinkering with it, I’m guessing we’ve yet to hear the final form of “Point Blank.”

Bonus: In 2005, Bruce debuted yet another arrangement for “Point Blank,” this time as a solo number on the electric piano. I include it here as a curiosity, because musically… well, let’s just say that “Point Blank” demands a tenured professor at the piano, and Bruce is an associate at best.

Point Blank
Recorded: Late 1979 – Early 1980
Released: The River (1980)
First performed: July 7, 1978 (West Hollywood, CA)
Last performed: July 28, 2016 (Oslo, Norway)

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