Roll of the Dice: Randolph Street

The “radio man” is coming. That’s how my grandfather is known… I am simply the young protégé grandson of the “radio man.”

 

[My grandparents’] house was old and soon to be noticeably decrepit. One kerosene stove in the living room was all we had to heat the whole place.

 

My grandparents fell into a state of poor hygiene and care that would shock and repel me now… But I loved them and that house.

 

The grinding hypnotic power of this ruined place and these people would never leave me. I visit it in my dreams today, returning over and over, wanting to go back. It was a place where I felt an ultimate security, full license and a horrible unforgettable boundary-less love.

 

Soon… my grandfather would be dead and my grandmother would be filled with cancer.

 

One night at the age of three, Pam left my parents’ room and for the only time in her young life climbed into my grandmother’s bed. She slept there all night, lying beside my grandmother as she died. In the morning, my mother checked on my grandma and she was still. When I came home from school that day, my world collapsed. Tears, grief, weren’t enough. I wanted death. I needed to join her. Even as a teenager, I could not imagine a world without her.

 

 — Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run

The early pages of Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography conjure a place of awesome power and influence over his young life: the decrepit home of his paternal grandparents, Fred and Alice Springsteen, at 87 Randolph Street in Freehold, New Jersey.

Given that we are reading the words of an aged, lifelong storyteller known for imbuing his tales with meaning and symbolism derived from a lifetime of experience and reflection… well, one would be forgiven for wondering whether Bruce was as impacted at the time as he recollects today.

That is, until we’ve listened to “Randolph Street,” Bruce’s unreleased demo from the spring of 1972.

Half therapy and half love letter to his late grandparents, “Randolph Street” is a breathtakingly real and intimate departure from the dense, fantastical tales he was writing at the time. (For example, “If I Was the Priest” and “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” were first recorded around this time as well.)

Bruce’s beloved grandmother passed away on December 17, 1965. Bruce recorded “Randolph Street” more than six years later, but the love, loss, and longing are still fresh in his vocals.

Bruce’s lyrics are uncharacteristically (for the time) straightforward, and they line up with his later recollections and autobiography neatly–so much so that they leave little room or need for analysis.

I remember yesterday
When I’d sit and watch the hound dogs play
Howling at the China moon
Now yesterday is the busted balloon

The metaphors in “Randolph Street” are few and simple, but powerful. Even at the age of 22 (when he recorded the song, but he was likely even younger when he wrote it), Bruce recognized the ability of a single moment to shatter–or in this case pop like a balloon–the innocence of childhood. As Bruce would write more than four decades later, the death of his grandmother was the moment his world collapsed.

Life was young and things were easy
Days were short, nights were warm
Times were good, hate was shallow
Love was crazy and I had it in my marrow
I swear that I’ve seen your face
Somewhere back in that time and in that place
Do you remember?

The old house stood like World War II
With just two rooms and a hall to be used
The lady was lean, just slightly unclean
With a heart of cold silver and gold

Until he published Born to Run in 2016, I’d always wondered what Bruce meant when  he referred to his grandmother as “just slightly unclean.” The pull quote at the top of this essay cleared that up for me, along with some additional detail in Chapter Two.

The kitchen smelled of kerosene
The ceiling hung down unveiling rotted beams
And the man, they said his work it could’ve hung in the Louvre
But now he sits around all day because his left arm won’t move
He was a master of the art of electricity
He lectured on tubes and circuitry
He was self-employed, but he could never see
His way into the light

He had a room full of switches and dials and lights
And a head full of clouds and eyes full of sight
And when it got dark I could hear his heart beat
Like a mother in the night

She stood like a guardian ready to give everything up
If I asked for a sword and her blood in a cup
But there was just a time when I asked for too much
She sighed because she could not give it

Alice Springsteen was fiercely and famously devoted to her grandson, as Bruce has related time and again. So my educated guess is that the “time when I asked for too much” was  Wednesday, March 28, 1962, the day Bruce’s grandfather died in his sleep.

We used to sit beneath the tree
Just the lady, the radio man, and me
And I think it was the winter of ’63
When the man went away and let us be
It was early on an August day
That the lady decided she too must go away
Her heart it seems could not pay
The price for what her body was buying

Bruce was a bit off in his date recollection–his grandfather actually passed away in the winter of ’62 (technically the second week of spring, but late March can often be indistinguishable from February in New Jersey), and his grandmother early on a December day. It’s not uncommon, though, for the emotional impact of an event to be more indelible than its chronological date.

I come home from school and I found the note
I went into the kitchen and lit the old stove
With senses set on overload
I turned on the TV

Spent the rest of the afternoon
Watching all my old cartoons
And through the hall and across the porch
As the sun surrendered like a crying torch

Alice Springsteen died in her sleep, her granddaughter by her side. Her final gift to her sixteen-year-old grandson was one last day of innocence: Bruce had to cross the room where she lay lifeless on his way out of the house. By the time his younger sister woke beside their dead grandmother, Bruce had already left for school, unaware of his loss until he returned from school that afternoon.

Bruce has written and spoken of his shock and grief upon learning of his grandmother’s death. Perhaps his younger self found it hard to revisit that moment in “Randolph Street” and so he underplayed it; or perhaps he really did spend the afternoon drowning out the chaos around him with cartoons, in shock and unable to process what had happened.

Either way, though, the final metaphor of his unresolved lyric says it all: the hearth in his life had been extinguished.

This year more than any other, we’ve all been reminded of the brevity and fragility of life.

For those of us fortunate to have had a parent, grandparent, or other adult role model play a formative role in our lives, we know either the grief that Bruce felt upon losing his grandmother or the fear that we might someday soon.

“Randolph Street” reminds us to treasure the moments we still have with them, remember the ones we don’t, and take every measure we can to protect them right now.

Every balloon busts sooner or later, and every torch goes out.

Mask up, everybody.

Randolph Street
Recorded: April 1972
Never released
Never performed

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