Roll of the Dice: Drive Fast (The Stuntman)

In “Drive Fast,” I had that metaphor of the stuntman (which is always a metaphor of risk) and this idea that we all have our broken pieces. What frightens and what exhilarates and inspires us are often very close together. Those feelings are the essence of what drives us to risk, in life and in love.

 

Everybody’s broken in some way–physically, emotionally, spiritually. In this life, nobody gets away unhurt. I wrote a song about a guy not just finding the fearlessness to do his job, but the fearlessness to risk being with somebody that you love. We’re always trying to find somebody whose broken pieces fit with our broken pieces, and something whole emerges. — Bruce Springsteen, Western Stars

This is my sixth Roll of the Dice entry for Western Stars, and I’m well aware that I’ve already rated three of the previous five among Bruce’s finest songs ever.

I’m about to do it again.

Ask me for my Top Ten Springsteen songs, and the list will vary from day to day. But without exception since Western Stars debuted, I’d name the title track, “Moonlight Motel,” “Hello Sunshine,” and “Drive Fast (The Stuntman)” among them.

“Drive Fast” isn’t the best of the four (I’d give that nod to “Western Stars”), and it doesn’t have the strongest lyrics. (That would be “Moonlight Motel.”)

But it’s my favorite track on the album and a contender (if not the title holder) for the most romantic song in Bruce’s catalog. I swoon every time I hear it.

Let’s take a listen together.

Bruce hasn’t left me much to analyze–his pull quote at the top of this essay (from his introduction to the song in the film version of Western Stars) pretty much says it all. But I’ll give it a shot anyway.

“Drive Fast (The Stuntman)” is very much in keeping with the album it hails from. It features a main character late in life, looking back with satisfaction on his life.

I got two pins in my ankle and a busted collarbone
A steel rod in my leg, but it walks me home
At nine I climbed high into the boughs of our neighborhood’s tallest tree
I don’t remember the fear, just the breeze

Drive fast, fall hard

The verses and choruses in “Drive Fast” are linked by a single line: Drive fast, fall hard.

That line is more than a mantra–it’s a credo. The narrator lives by those words both outward and inward, living and loving to his fullest right now. Tomorrow be damned.

Live your life without caution, though, and you’re bound to break things along the way. That’s a cost our narrator is willing to pay. When we meet him, late in life, his damage is the first thing we learn about him; the second is that his broken pieces are stitched together and holding. He’s intact, and that’s important. When Bruce tells us that his narrator’s previously broken leg still walks him home, he’s also telling us by implication that his previously broken heart still loves.

Like almost all of Western Stars, “Drive Fast” is a song in which nothing actually happens. It’s a character sketch, a four-minute tour through the important moments in a life. The song is a sequence of three vignettes, the first of which takes us back to the stuntman’s childhood, when he first experienced the sensory rush that rewards those who take risks.

This first vignette is the shortest–Bruce gives it only half as much space as the other two, because he uses the first half of the verse to introduce us to the narrator in the present. As a result, the music is critically important here–it makes what would otherwise be an abrupt context switch a graceful one, the equivalent of a cinematic transition to a flashback.

During the first half of the verse, the music is gentle and tentative. Our narrator may have lived an eventful life, but we’ve met him at a quiet, introspective moment. But notice what happens the instant Bruce transitions to his childhood in the third line: Bruce adorns the low piano chords with a single, vivid grace note, mirroring the the narrator’s sensory awakening as he takes his first risk. It’s one of the countless beautiful touches throughout Western Stars that reward the attentive listener.

It’s followed immediately by another: the swell of the strings representing the breeze that greets the narrator from the treetop. It’s such an evocative moment that I swear I feel that breeze every time I reach this moment in the song.

I’ll keep you in my heart
Don’t worry about tomorrow
Don’t mind the scars
Just drive fast, fall hard

When we reach the first chorus, that first line grabs our attention: I’ll keep you in my heart.

It’s a startling moment, because until this point, we don’t even realize that our narrator is singing to anyone other than himself. This is the moment we realize that “Drive Fast ” is a love song, and it foreshadows the romance  to come.

We have years to cross before that moment arrives, however. We’re only at the narrator’s moment of awakening, and the addition of low strings and a subtle bass line in the background represents the stirring of emotions beginning to take form.

We flash forward a decade now, carried by the introduction of Marc Muller’s pedal steel.

At nineteen I was the king of the dirt down at the Remington draw
I liked the pedal and I didn’t mind the wall
‘Midst the roar of the metal I never heard a sound
I was looking for anything, any kind of drug to lift me up off this ground

At the age of nineteen, our narrator is now cleaning up at the races. He doesn’t care about the prize money, though–he’s in it for the rush. Adrenaline is his drug, and he’s an addict. We know in this moment that he’ll spend his life in search of the next rush.

The strings are very much in the foreground now, and the pedal steel is more active as well. Combined with the propulsive percussion (notice the cymbal crash the moment the narrator takes flight), we feel as alive as the narrator himself.

A piano-centric bridge carries us forward in time again to the moment we’ve known was coming since the first line of the first chorus. As we arrive at the moment of emotional truth, another cymbal crash signals the foreground instruments to pull back so as not to distract us from the moment.

Our narrator is now literally a stuntman, on the set of a movie where he meets his great love.

We met on the set of this B picture that she made
She liked her guys a little greasy, ‘neath her pay grade
We headed down to Baja in the desert, we made our stand of it
Figured maybe together we could get the broken pieces to fit

Bruce often brings up his “broken pieces” metaphor in interviews and monologues. It’s clear that at some point along the way (probably with the help of therapy), he realized that we all break, and we hide those broken pieces as best we can. Love–whether romance or friendship–is at heart a matter of trust. Its durability, longevity, and fidelity are largely the result of our ability to reveal our own broken pieces and accept our partner’s damage.

So when Bruce’s narrator introduces the last line of that verse with a tentative “figured maybe,” it’s actually a moment of significant bravery.  It’s also how we know that these two characters–who we’ve only just met–have fallen deeply in love. This is the moment to which the entire song has been building, and all of the musical elements that accompanied the stuntman’s adrenaline rush at nine and nineteen come roaring back along with a drumroll that propels us into a final, extended, delirious chorus.

In the first iteration of this last chorus, Bruce switches up the lyrics and reveals the stuntman’s vulnerability as he now pleads for his love to keep him in her heart rather than the other way around; he reciprocates in the second go-round. We dwell in these moments, and we realize that this his great romance. His life of dare and risk has all been preparation for this one love, and he is all in.

Now the instrumental bridge returns and carries us back to the present. Although we skip over many years, the return of that romantic motif tells us that those years were happy ones, and although it’s never confirmed that this romance lasted, we somehow know it has without being told.

We ‘re back where we started now, and Bruce re-introduces us to the stuntman in the present. The last two lines of the song are the same as the first two, but they carry more meaning now.

I got two pins in my ankle and a busted collarbone
A steel rod in my leg, but it walks me home

Are the stuntman and his leading lady still together? Did she pass away recently or leave him years ago? Bruce leaves it up to us to decide (I know what I think), but while it’s natural for us to wonder, it’s also beside the point of the song.

By ending where we began, Bruce is telling us that his character has lived a life. It hasn’t been easy, even after learning to love. (We never learn when he breaks those symbolic bones, but we’re left to surmise that it was sometime between his romantic stand in the desert and this moment far in the future.) If we live and love to our fullest ability, if we embrace every moment that life gifts us with, we’ll break things. But we can patch broken things, and we can learn to live with them and love with them.

That last line of the song–a steel rod in my leg, but it walks me home is every bit as beautiful and meaningful and powerful as any Bruce has ever written, and it’s a lovely ending to the most romantic song on his warmest album.

Bonus: While Bruce hasn’t performed “Drive Fast (The Stuntman)” in public yet, he did perform it in front of an intimate audience in his barn in the film version of Western Stars.

Throughout the film, the live performance pales in comparison to the album. (Western Stars is probably the only album I’ll ever be able to say that about, so carefully is it crafted.) But “Drive Fast” is very nearly an exception.

There’s something about Bruce’s face during the performance that mesmerizes–he’s so very inside his character in this performance that I almost forget I’m watching Bruce Springsteen and not the stuntman himself.

Watch for the moment when our nine-year-old hero climbs his tree. The lighting in that moment is masterful and deliberate. It recreates the character’s moment of emotional dawn, and Bruce’s eyes in that moment say far more than his voice can. It’s probably my favorite moment in the entire film.

Drive Fast (The Stuntman)
Recorded: 2010-2018
Released: Western Stars (2019)
First performed: April 2019 (Colts Neck, NJ)
Last performed: April 2019 (Colts Neck, NJ)

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