Roll of the Dice: Devil’s Arcade

The saying dates back at least to the fourteenth century in English, and possibly a thousand years before that in other languages: An idle mind is the devil’s playground.

In 2007, Bruce Springsteen updated the metaphor for modern times and crafted one of his most stunningly layered and deeply romantic songs around it.

Bruce likes to close his albums on notes of hope, faith and optimism, and “Devil’s Arcade” fits that bill nicely.

(Before anyone comments: yes, I know “Terry’s Song” is also on the disc following “Devil’s Arcade.” But it’s listed as a bonus track for a reason: it’s not part of the album’s narrative. The physical disc may end with “Terry’s Song,” but the album ends with “Devil’s Arcade.”)

“Devil’s Arcade” is  immediately arresting. It commands our attention and holds it through a carefully crafted arrangement, a precisely engineered soundstage, and (in the song’s second half) a disorientingly syncopated rhythm.

Unusually (although certainly not uniquely), Bruce narrates “Devil’s Arcade” in a female voice, one that belongs to the devoted lover of a soldier wounded and traumatized by his experiences in combat. Our only insight into the soldier’s state of mind is through our narrator’s desperate attempts to connect with him, and to use that connection as a lifeline to tether him to the present and to their shared life. “Devil’s Arcade” is too quickly classified as a war song, but it isn’t. It’s a love song.

Bruce’s female, second-person narration is an exceptionally powerful and sophisticated songwriting device. In Bruce’s similarly-themed 1983 outtake, “Shut Out the Light,” Bruce uses first-person narration to take us into the traumatized mind of a returning soldier. In the second-person “Devil’s Arcade,” we feel the soldier’s dissociation just as powerfully as in “Shut Out the Light,” but Bruce also and simultaneously creates deep empathy for the soldier’s lover as well. That’s the difference a quarter-century of additional songwriting craft makes.

We’ll delve into Bruce’s lyrics momentarily, but we first need to acknowledge the importance of his music. Perhaps more than in any other song in his catalog, Bruce uses music as part of his storytelling–more than one might realize at a casual listen.

Bruce actually uses his musical score to create a secondary narrative from the perspective of the soldier himself. Try this: Go back to the top of this article and listen to the song again, but make sure you do so with headphones on.

Notice how the song starts with twenty seconds of tranquil, domestic but distant keyboard tones in our left ear. These are the sounds of our home, family, and daily life. At the twenty-second mark, ominous guitar distortion creeps into our right ear. These are the memories of war and battle that haunt us. Bruce has sonically placed us in the head of the soldier, unable to fully connect with his home life or shake the invasion of his war trauma.

Like the soldier, we are literally caught between these two worlds. But at the thirty-second mark, something magical happens: a cello (played by Daniel Laufer, whose contributions also infuse “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” and “Your Own Worst Enemy” — the cello is a remarkably essential element on Magic) takes center stage in the soundscape.

Laufer’s cello establishes the narrator’s theme as if in a soundtrack; each time we hear it, it represents the narrator announcing her presence and asserting her love as a beacon for her lover. Her presence breaks through (but does not completely drown out) the noise in both of our ears and creates a powerful and instant connection.

We’re now forty seconds into the song. Not a word has been spoken or sung, and yet we already know so much. Bruce maintains the stereo soundstage throughout “Devil’s Arcade,” ensuring that we remain in the soldier’s head despite the fact that he’s not the one narrating.

As the first verse begins, notice the difference from the overture: the electric guitar in our right ear is melodic rather than discordant; there’s an easy, almost lazy percussion, and the love theme is front and center. This is a flashback to more innocent times.

Remember the morning we dug up your gun
The worms in the barrel, the hangin’ sun
Those first nervous evenings of perfume and gin
The lost smell on your breath as I helped you get it in
The rush of your lips, the feel of your name
The beat of your heart, the devil’s arcade

Our lover takes us back to our earliest days together, when our love was new and our connection was electric and all-consuming.

Even so, there’s ominous foreshadowing. The shared experience of digging up our gun is meant to represent an act of trust, a shared confidence, the establishing of intimacy–but it also represents the introduction of the violence that will soon exert its influence on our life.  And of course, the imagery of worms and a “hanging” sun are not just vividly remembered details but also symbols of death.

But those things lie await in the future. In the moment, only love matters–both emotional and physical. We make love, and during the act we notice no other details than each other’s.

The phrase “devil’s arcade” first appears at the end of this verse, simultaneously implying that our lovemaking is secret and illicit, while suggesting that the seeds of our love create an opportunity for the devil to do his work.

In the second verse, our sense of duty calls us to combat:

You said heroes are needed, so heroes get made
Somebody made a bet, somebody paid
The cool desert morning, then nothin’ to save
Just metal and plastic where your body caved
The slow games of poker with Lieutenant Ray
In the ward with the blue walls, a sea with no name
Where you lie adrift with the heroes of the devil’s arcade

We enlist in the military out of idealism, but our lover is more cynical than we are: she recognizes the war as a rich man’s creation, one that’s paid with the lives of those who had nothing to do with its origin. We serve, but we accomplish little, and ultimately we’re wounded severely enough to remove us from the battlefield. We heal and recuperate (physically, at least) at a field hospital, haunted by the memories of the friends we couldn’t save. Able to do little but think and play listless, pointless card games, our idleness and impotence provides fertile ground for our demons to stake their claim.

You sleep and you dream of your buddies Charlie and Jim
And wake with a thick desert dust on your skin

We drift into memory at this point, during a deliberately chaotic instrumental bridge. The narrator’s love theme rides above Max Weinberg’s syncopated drums (representing the firing weapons on the battlefield), desperately trying to keep us rooted in the here and now, but the battle within our psyche isn’t so easily won. The theme climbs in register, but the guitar of war in our right ear climbs as well, becoming increasingly urgent and ultimately breaking through into the foreground. 

We return to the present now.

A voice says “don’t worry, I’m here”
Just whisper the word “tomorrow” in my ear

It’s tonight. It’s any night and every night.

Our lover’s voice breaks through the tortured chaos of our war memories and brings us back to the present. She reassures us that she’s here, and we reassure her that we are, too–and we promise to still be here in the morning.

Because after each and every dark, haunted night, there’s a morning flooded with light and promise. And that light, that promise–they keep us going, from one moment to the next. We’re never quite sure in any one moment whether we’ll be able to make it to the next one, but faith keeps us moving.

Well, not faith exactly, but something like it.

Trust, maybe. Devotion. A mutual promise–that at the end of each day, she will be there to guide us through the nights if we promise to continue facing them.

A house on a quiet street, a home for the brave
The glorious kingdom of the sun on your face
Rising from a long night as dark as the grave
On a thin chain of next moments and something like faith
On a morning to order a breakfast to make
A bed draped in sunshine, a body that waits
For the touch of your fingers, the end of the day
The beat of your heart, the beat of your heart
The beat of your heart, the beat of your heart
The beat of your heart, the beat of her heart
The beat of your heart, the slow burning away
Of the bitter fires of the devil’s arcade

At the “end of the day” line, notice how the rhythm quickens along with our pulse. Night is here, and the beat of our heart is both our terror at what waits as we descend into the dark and our reassurance to our love that we’re still here despite it.

And although Bruce brings the song to a terrifying climax, we end on a note of hope and reassurance: each night is a battle, but it’s one we’re slowly winning. Each morning we wake to is a morning that carries us one more day distant from the theater of war, one step further away from the devil’s arcade. And indeed, that’s how “Devil’s Arcade” ends–with the sounds of war receding into the distance until all that’s left are our entwined heartbeats.

It’s a long and arduous journey, but we’re going to make it. Together.

Bruce constructed his Magic Tour set lists around a five-song sequence that closed almost every show through the spring of 2008. Together, “Devil’s Arcade,” “The Rising,” “Last to Die,” “Long Walk Home,” and “Badlands” created core tour themes of sacrifice, heroism, betrayal, resistance, and defiance, and until the tour began loosening as spring turned to summer, “Devil’s Arcade” served as an important anchor.

In all, Bruce performed “Devil’s Arcade” 73 times on that tour–but never since, not even once.

That’s probably for the best. Like most (if not all) of Western Stars, “Devil’s Arcade” is a studio recording that can’t be equaled or bettered in a live performance. The sonic stereo engineering is an essential part of the storytelling, one that doesn’t translate to an arena.

Nevertheless, the E Street Band’s nightly performances of “Devil’s Arcade” were impassioned and dramatic, featuring brooding, extended introductions by Danny Federici (until his untimely passing) and outros even more dramatic and terrifying than the studio version’s.

Watch this complete performance of “Devil’s Arcade” from early in the tour, and you’ll understand why it was a nightly highlight.

Devil’s Arcade
Recorded: March-April 2007
Released: Magic (2007)
First performed: September 24, 2007 (Asbury Park, NJ)
Last performed: June 16, 2008 (Dusseldorf, Germany)

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