Roll of the Dice: Oh Angelyne

If you’re looking for the inflection point where economic inequality really took off in the United States, the point at which the top one percent started to become the Top One Percent, look to 1979.

Although the U.S. economy didn’t officially enter recession until the early days of 1980, the decline began when Paul Volcker was installed as the head of the Federal Reserve, with a mandate to tame the rampant inflation that was ravaging America at the time.

Volcker succeeded, but at a steep price: not one but two recessions that ushered in the 1980s and arguably cost President Carter his re-election. As the economy declined, employers began shedding jobs, starting with the individuals who needed them most.

Michael “Mickey” Shave was one of the earliest affected by the economic downturn. Mickey was a construction worker with a wife and two children to provide for, and the loss of his job hit his family hard.

It’s not as if the Shaves were unaccustomed to life’s challenges, though–they were sailing into the wind from the start, in fact, marrying when young Virginia became pregnant during her senior year of high school, at the age of seventeen.

Still, they’d done the right things, the things they were taught to do: get married, settle down, get a job, work hard, and raise a family. In America, if you did those things well, you’d be taken care of.

That all started to change in 1979, though, and America never looked back.

Don’t worry–the story has a happy ending, at least for the Shaves. Mickey and Ginny are still happily married and those early days are likely a distant memory. But not everyone’s story worked out that way, and there was no way to know at the time which way the Mickey and Ginny’s story would go.

That troubled Ginny’s big brother, a rock-and-roll singer-songwriter of some renown. It troubled him enough to write a song about it, in fact. He started working on it during the first half of 1979, writing a story so explicitly true that it would shock Ginny when she eventually heard him perform it for the first time in a sold-out arena. Bruce changed the name of his heroine, though, to provide his sister a semblance of privacy. Instead of Ginny, Bruce named his character Mary, a name he was particularly fond of.

In its early incarnations, the characters and backdrop might have been ripped from reality, but the plot wasn’t. Although Bruce’s unnamed narrator and his girl Mary paralleled the early days of Mickey and Ginny, Bruce’s narrator was so unhappy in his marriage that he pined for another woman, a temptress named Angelyne.

His yearning to escape the girl he’d been saddled with and run off with his fantasy girl consumed him, and in his mind the narrator was always running, running to Angelyne. In this early outtake, in fact, Mary isn’t even mentioned.

I come from down in the valley where mister straight from day number one
They bring you up to do what your daddy done
I’m working for the Jenkins Company, but there ain’t work on account of the economy
???,  don’t need men to put ’em up
Not by me, not by anyone

Oh Angelyne, I’m running to you, I’m running to you
Angelyne, you run on the wire, you walk the line

We meet Mary in this next demo, and this is where it becomes clear that our narrator longs to escape the life he’s made for himself.

Well mister when you’re young
They bring you up to do, yeah, what your daddy done
I worked construction with the Jenkins company
Lately there ain’t been much work on account of the economy
Man don’t need no buildings, don’t need men to build a home
Well a man don’t need me, goodbye me

Oh Angelyne, I’m running to you, I’m running to you
Oh Angelyne, when you’re on the wire you walk the line

I met Mary at ??? High School
I pick her up in my 413
And we drive away from the valley down to where the fields were green
And I got Mary pregnant, man that was all she wrote
Got me a Union card and a wedding coat
Judge, he put it all to rest
No walk down the aisle, no wedding dress

Bruce continued working on the song, building toward a bitter climax that railed against the cruelty of a dream promised but unfulfilled.

I act like I don’t remember, Mary acts like she don’t care
I remember running wild in her brother’s car
Her body tan, tan and dripping wet down at the reservoir
The plan we made, baby, that all fell through
We painted ourselves a dream we couldn’t live up to

Baby all those dreams, they haunt me like a curse
Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true or is it something worse
Is it something true that don’t ever come
Just makes you feel old inside, baby when you’re young

(Bruce would soon realize that three of those last five lines were unnecessary.)

Trapped in a loveless marriage, haunted by the memory of happier days, frustrated at the lot life handed him, our narrator feels cynical and old before his time. He longs to escape to/with Angelyne, although Bruce  never reveals whether his character runs off with her in real life or just in his mind.

Bruce worked on “Oh Angelyne” throughout the first half of 1979, crafting and shaping it but never completely satisfied with it. Two years later, he would tell an interviewer, “[it] took a while. I had the verses, I never had any chorus, and I didn’t have no title for a long time…. I had these verses, and I was fooling around with the music.”

(We can tell from the outtakes that Bruce did indeed have a chorus, but Bruce has always been so prolific a songwriter that his memory can sometimes be unreliable during later interviews.)

But then inspiration hit. On tour the previous summer, Bruce had become fascinated to the point of obsession with the music of Hank Williams. In interviews ever after, he would refer to his original inspiration as Hank’s “My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It,” but it’s hard to believe he wasn’t at least subsequently and substantially inspired by another of Williams’ songs, “Long Gone Lonesome Blues.”

In particular, there’s a striking familiarity in that song’s first verse…

I went down to the river to watch the fish swim by
But I got to the river so lonesome I wanted to die
And then I jumped in the river, but the doggone river was dry

Regardless of which Hank Williams song we credit, Bruce realized what his own song was missing. By late August, he’d transformed “Oh Angelyne,” keeping its central couple and circumstance, but ditching the other woman and replacing her with a metaphor borrowed from Williams.

(Bruce took pity on Angelyne, though, and introduced her to his friend Gary. They clicked.)

Now his song was complete and ready for the recording studio. Bruce’s retitled, transformed “Oh Angelyne” would become an instant classic and endure to this day as one of his greatest recordings and songwriting accomplishments.

We’ll take a deep listen to that song and admire it in detail… soon.

(To be continued in Roll of the Dice: “The River“)

Oh Angelyne
Recorded: February-May 1979 (demos only)
Never released
Never performed

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