Roll of the Dice: Something in the Night

“The flat night highway rises up and it’s all headlights and white lines… I’ve just pulled a perfect swan dive into my abyss; my stomach is on rinse cycle and I’m going down, down, down… I just feel a need to get rooted somewhere, before I drift into ether… I want to cry, but the tears won’t come. Worse, I want to go in the trunk and get the fucking teddy bear. I feel a deeper anxiety than I’ve ever known. Why here? Why tonight? Thirty-four years later, I still don’t know.” — Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run

There’s darkness, there’s Darkness, and then there’s darkness.

And you’d be hard pressed to find a song in Bruce’s catalog with more darkness than “Something in the Night.”

That pullquote at the top comes from Bruce’s biography, and he places that moment of self-reckoning in the Nebraska/Born in the U.S.A. era.

Perhaps that’s when Bruce first became fully aware of the depression that had been building within him, but it’s almost impossible to listen to “Something in the Night” and not hear (at least with the benefit of hindsight) a subconscious cry for help.

It’s also hard to imagine a more aptly poetic description of depression than the song’s title.

Well I’m riding down Kingsley figuring I’ll get a drink
Well I turn the radio up loud so I don’t have to think at all
And I take her to the floor looking for a moment when the world seems right
And I tear into the guts of something in the night

As anyone who’s made the pilgrimage knows, Bruce sets his song in his adopted hometown of Asbury Park, which is often a giveaway that a song leans towards autobiography.

But don’t pay so much attention to the backdrop that you miss the metaphor. In recent years, Bruce has frequently confessed his early work obsession was a way to stave off his inner demons. It doesn’t take a leap to imagine that the car radio is a stand-in for a concert stage, and that when the narrator floors the gas pedal, he gets the same rush that a rock star gets when he takes the stage. For a moment, the world seems right.

But only for a moment.

Well you’re born with nothing, and better off that way
Soon as you’ve got something they send someone to try and take it away
Well you can ride this road ’till dawn without another human being in sight
Yeah just kids wasted on something in the night

We’re going to need to take a detour at this point, because this verse is significant–not so much for what it represents in the song itself but for what it reveals about the songwriter’s state of mind at the time he wrote it.

Because “Something in the Night” did not start its life as the soul-crushing cry it evolved into.

When Bruce first debuted it on stage in the summer of 1976 (almost a year before he recorded it in the studio), “Something in the Night” was actually a somewhat romantic me-and-her-against-the-world that would have sounded at least as much at home (if not more) on Born to Run than on Darkness on the Edge of Town.

Watch this early performance (only six days after Bruce first debuted it), and you’ll see what I mean.

In its early incarnations (“Something in the Night” changed a lot over the course of its development), the night represented promise, and Bruce’s characters were in search of its secrets. They looked for something in the night; they rumbled over something in the night; they tore into its heart.

In its final version, Bruce’s narrator was alone, wasted on something in the night. He tore into its guts, not its heart. No longer a tempting source of mystery, the darkness now represents oblivion.

So what prompted the transformation?

Well, we can find a clue in the chronology. That “born with nothing and better off that way” verse made its debut on September 29, 1976, at Bruce’s Lawsuit Tour show in Santa Monica–and the name of the tour should tell you exactly where this story is going.

Two days after that August 7th performance above, Bruce’s former manager Mike Appel took Springsteen to court and  won a preliminary injunction preventing Bruce from recording new music until the lawsuit was settled. On September 15th, Bruce lost his appeal and was forced back on the road to make a living.

What became known as the Lawsuit Tour started just eleven days later, and at the second show of the tour, some new lyrics made their debut:

Said she was born with nothing, said she was better off that way
As soon as you got something, somebody comes along and they try to take it away

Although Bruce would demur when asked, it requires credulity to suggest that those lines weren’t informed by Bruce’s anger at the time.

Over the weeks that followed, “Something in the Night” grew progressively darker and angrier. By the end of October, Bruce was singing lyrics like:

And now all them folks out on the island, they lock their doors and take their children by hand
And put on your red dress behind that seat, tonight the devil will walk these streets like a man
Bring along my switchblade in case that old fool wants to fight
I’ll take him, I’m gonna take him, I’m gonna take him out at the parking lot somewhere in the night

The 1976 leg of the tour ended shortly after that, and when it resumed in February 1977, “Something in the Night” was re-arranged in its close-to-final form, its lyrics still filled with anger but now also with resignation. His narrator had given up:

Well God’s angels can tear this town down and blow it all into the sea
Well I don’t give a damn, yeah that’s alright with me
But the street’s a living soul, there’s nothing here in sight
Just mutations that gone wrong something in the night

We have a new bridge and final verse, too (although Bruce had added them in late ’76), and these would survive to the final version:

Nothing is forgotten or forgiven when it’s your last time around
And I got stuff running ’round my head that I just can’t live down

When we found the things we loved, they were crushed and dying in the dirt
We tried to pick up the pieces and get away without getting hurt
But they caught us at the state line and burned our cars in one last fight
And left us running burned and blind chasing something in the night

There’s a new vein of self-loathing in Bruce’s lyrics, along with hints that our narrator was the one who crushed his loved ones. (There’s a curious switch from first-person singular to plural narration here, as if the narrator can’t quite bring himself to claim sole ownership.)  “Something in the Night” had surrendered to despair, and it says a lot about Bruce’s outlook at that time that he frequently opened his shows with this version.

I realize I’ve focused exclusively on Bruce’s lyrics so far; that’s because there’s so much to unpack in the lyrical evolution of “Something in the Night.” But even if it means settling for short shrift, I can’t completely omit discussing Bruce’s marvelous final arrangement.

It took a while to get there, of course. Bruce worked his way through several more romantic arrangements (some with a beautiful horn accompaniment) on his way to the final song, but that’s because the song was in search of its message as well.

When “Something in the Night” took its definitive turn toward the dark, so did its musical arrangement, with the E Street Band conjuring a brooding, simmering, rumbling, and finally exploding eruption of an introduction, all accompanied by Bruce’s wordless howls that convey even more anguish and emotion than the finale of “Jungleland.”

When the verses begin, “Something in the Night” proceeds at a pace somewhere between torpor and dirge, with Danny and Roy coloring outside the lines while Max plods. The band finally coalesces in the bridge (a moment of clarity for the narrator represented by an absence of ornamentation) before dropping out altogether for the final verse, save for Max’s listless but relentless beat. Relentless, that is, until that glorious, intentionally skipped beat at the end, a dramatic falter that suggests the narrator is very close to the precipice.

Now: how much of all this was Bruce consciously reaching for at the time? That’s something I can’t answer.

Bruce has denied writing “Something in the Night” about his contemporaneous legal troubles, and maybe that’s so. He’s also on record as having not been aware of his depression until years later, and I’ve no reason to doubt that either.

But when you create art, sometimes it’s shaped by the things you want to say, and sometimes it’s shaped by the things you need to say–even if you haven’t yet realized them. Tracing the evolution of “Something in the Night,” I can’t help but believe that it started out as the former and ended up the latter.

Bruce’s lawsuit was finally resolved on May 28, 1977, and he wasted no time getting back to the studio. Just three days later, recording sessions began for what would become his fourth album, and one of the first songs he recorded on that very first day was “Something in the Night.”

That take appears on the final album, and although Darkness bears the name of a song cut a week later, “Something in the Night” is the song that established its theme.

Bonus: Although not exactly an ultra-rarity, “Something in the Night” has appeared only infrequently since the Darkness Tour. When it does, however, it’s always a showstopper, and choosing a performance to highlight is a tough task. If pressed, though, I’ll go with this atmospheric performance to an appropriately empty theater in 2009, recorded as part of a full-album set for inclusion with The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story.

There’s something about the darkness, the emptiness, and of course that album-perfect arrangement (down to that all-important skipped beat) that perfectly suits the song.

Something in the Night
Recorded: June 1, 1977
Released: Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978)
First performed: August 1, 1976 (Red Bank, NJ)
Last performed: September 3, 2023 (East Rutherford, NJ)

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