Roll of the Dice: Rockaway the Days

There’s a strange but genuine tradition in rock and pop music: the car crash song.

Its emergence and ascendance roughly paralleled the actual automotive fatality rate as it rose throughout the early decades of rock and roll, but it continues to this day despite safer vehicles and roads.

Bruce Springsteen has made several contributions to this macabre genre, not all of which have yet seen the light of day.

Fittingly, Bruce’s first entry was “Wreck on the Highway,” a hat tip to what was perhaps the original car crash song, Roy Acuff’s 1942 song by the same name. (“Thunder Road” gets honorable mention for its title homage to Robert Mitchum’s 1957 car crash single, a choice that makes me question whether Bruce’s narrator was truly pulling out of there to win, but that’s a topic for a future Roll of the Dice article.)

But in the Nebraska/Born in the U.S.A. era, Bruce seemed particularly fixated on the idea of a fatal car accident while on the run from the law–a counter-metaphor to the way he’d always used the open road to symbolize escape and potential.

A couple of months ago, we took a look at Bruce’s unreleased Nebraska outtake, “Losin’ Kind,” which itself was sort of an early attempt at “Highway 29,” so remarkably similar are the two songs. “Losin’ Kind” also bears a lot of similarity to “Highway Patrolman”; Bruce’s themes were so strong and fluid during that particular era that entire scenes, characters, metaphors and morals make their way across many of his songs, both released and unreleased.

But while “Highway Patrolman” allows Frankie to escape unscathed and “Losin’ Kind” spares its narrator after a very close call, Bruce gives no mercy to Billy, the main character in his 1984 Born in the U.S.A. outtake, “Rockaway the Days.”

“Rockaway the Days” features a lead character who is very much the losin’ kind, but Billy is a much darker character than Frank. We can see his fate coming right from the opening lines.

Billy got out of prison but he wasn’t right
Some like to drink or gamble, Billy liked to fight
He trekked back to his home state of Maryland
Went to his mom’s mobile home where she took him in, alright

We can see where this song is going, alright. Within seconds, we know that Billy is a violent ex-con–and that may not be his only vice, because here comes the chorus:

Rockaway the days, rockaway the nights
Gimme something to last me, baby, ’til the morning light
I ain’t lookin’ for trouble, I ain’t looking for a fight
Honey, rockaway these days, rockaway these nights

Bruce’s chorus is sublimely subtle, conveying a lot through implication rather than information. The word “rock” is delightfully (and ironically) malleable, which offers Bruce the opportunity to play on three separate meanings: 1) to get moving with vigor and energy, as in “let’s rock and roll”; 2) to self-console or self-medicate when experiencing distress or trauma through body rocking; 3) a common slang term for and form of cocaine, which had become part of American slang in the early 1980s.

Through the deliberate use of the word “rock,” Bruce imbues Billy with a vulnerability we might not otherwise notice. Yes, he’s violent, but that isn’t his intent. He’s experienced trauma, and even though we never learn whether it was a root cause of his jail term or a consequence of it, we know that Billy isn’t looking to cause trouble–he just can’t keep his violent urges in check, even with chemical assistance.

But if drugs can’t help him quell the best inside him, maybe love can:

Well at a picnic one Sunday, Billy met Mary Dove
Mary looked at Billy, Billy fell in love
Billy swore to Mary he’d always love her so
They were married in the valley where the river flows, alright

We know this isn’t going to end well, but it’s worth pausing here for a moment to allow Billy his fleeting comfort while we notice Bruce recycling one of his favorite character names and metaphors: Mary and the river. We just took a deep dive into the significance of that particular metaphor, so I won’t rehash it here. But Bruce’s selection of Mary as the name of Billy’s love interest is almost certainly a deliberate attempt to call our attention to the river as a wellspring of hope and dreams.

Let’s continue, because Bruce is about to pick up the pace of the action.

At a roadside bar, Billy argued with a young man
And he settled that argument with a razor in his hand
With blood on his shirt, back to Mary he did run
She sighed, “Billy, oh Billy, what have you done?”

He ran to his ma’s trailer but the lights were dim
He pounded on the door, she wouldn’t let him in
Up the road to a neighbor’s house he drew near
They said, “Billy go away, we don’t want no trouble ’round here”

Billy stole a car and headed out on the road
Pocketful of pills and his brain on overload
Seen some lights in his rearview mirror, panicked and gave her the gun
Wrapped himself ’round a telephone pole way out on 101

There are a few things we should notice here. First and most obviously, Bruce has abandoned the verse/chorus format of the song, chaining three verses in a row (with more to come) without a “rockaway” chorus. That’s intentional, because as soon as Billy settles his argument with a razor, there’s no consolation for him from anyone or anything.

Mary turns her back on Billy, as do their neighbors. Even Billy’s mother won’t take him in, a maternal rejection that Bruce will revisit years later in “The Hitter.”

With nowhere else to turn, Billy hits the road to escape, hopped up on pills to calm himself down–pills that don’t work, at least not when he notices the police on his tail.

I’ve seen analyses of “Rockaway the Days” that suggest that Billy had a literal gun, and that Mary was in the car with him, but I don’t believe that either is the case. To me, it’s clear that “gave her the gun” is Bruce’s way of saying that Billy simply floored the gas pedal to flee the cops, which is how he came to wrap himself around a telephone pole as in “Losin’ Kind.”

Before we get to the tragic aftermath, though, take notice of another deliberate device: Bruce drops the “alrights” that punctuate the end of his early verses, because of course things are no longer all right. I point that out because of what happens next:

Well Billy got cut out by the highway patrol
Just lay there with the cars passing on slow
Sheriff told Billy’s ma that Billy died
She buried his body by the riverside, alright

After Billy’s ma buries her son, Bruce reintroduces the “alright,” suggesting that there’s some measure of relief that comes with her tragedy. Her son’s troubles and circumstances had obviously been weighing on her psyche for some time. Still, that relief comes at the price of loss and heartbreak, which is why Bruce reintroduces the chorus at this point, as Billy’s mom asks for something to help ease her pain.

Billy’s mom is our point-of-view character for the remainder of the song; it’s her voice we hear waxing philosophical in the final verse (with an opening couplet very similar to Bruce’s lyrics in “Man at the Top” — see what I mean about how fluid Bruce’s lyrics were back then?)

Well rich man want the power and the seat on the top
Poor man want the money that the rich man got
Honey, tonight I’m feeling so tired and unsure
Come on in, Mary, shut the light, close the door

As we take our leave of our cast, Billy’s mom offers her daughter-in-law shelter and solace. What happens from here we never learn, but we hope they’re able to help each other rock away the days and nights until their mutual pain and loss subsides.

Bonus: Bruce has never performed “Rockaway the Days” live, but he sort of half-played it once. At his legendary acoustic 1986 Bridge School benefit performance, Bruce played an acoustic version of “Seeds” that featured a completely different melody from the officially released version on Live 1975-85, less angry but more infectious with an irresistible riff.

Bruce gave no explanation for the one-off arrangement, and he never played the song that way again.  Only after Bruce’s 1984 recording of “Rockaway the Days” was released on Tracks in 1998 would the jigsaw pieces fall into in place.

Rockaway the Days
Recorded: January 12, 1984
Released: Tracks (1998)
Never performed

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