Roll of the Dice: My Best Was Never Good Enough

“Well, I tell you,” I drawled. “I tell you the way I look at it, a man doesn’t get any more out of life than what he puts into it.” 

 

“Umm,” he said, fidgeting. “I guess you’re right, Lou.”

 

“I was thinking the other day, Max; and all of a sudden I had the doggondest thought. It came to me out of a clear sky–the boy is the father to the man. Just like that. The boy is the father to the man.”

 

The smile on his face was getting strained. I could hear his shoes creak as he squirmed. If there’s anything worse than a bore, it’s a corny bore. But how can you brush off a nice friendly fellow who’d give you his shirt if you asked for it?

 

— Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

In 1952, Jim Thompson published one of the darkest and most harrowing crime novels ever written. The protagonist of The Killer Inside Me is a small-town sheriff, but we soon learn he’s the antagonist as well.

On the surface, Sheriff Lou Ford is an upright, dedicated lawman with an annoying penchant for peppering his patter with tropes and clichés. In truth, it’s all an act intended to disarm and distract from Ford’s inner sociopath, who becomes more and more dominant as the story progresses, as in this scene from a 2010 film adaptation.

I won’t spoil the ending in case you’re inspired to read the book, but let’s just say The Killer Inside is not a happy story. It is, however, a gripping and highly regarded tale, praised by luminaries like Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick and inspiring two film adaptations and even a graphic novel serialization.

The Killer Inside made an impression on Bruce Springsteen, who was fascinated by how a dark and twisted character could hide behind sugary platitudes.

The year was 1995, and the cable news era was in its infancy. It was maturing rapidly, though, thanks to the rise to prominence of CNN during the first Gulf War, and society was starting to reckon with the notion of the 24-hour news cycle and the oversimplification of complex political and societal problems that came with it.

Against that backdrop and inspired by Thompson’s novel, Bruce wrote and recorded “My Best Was Never Good Enough,” and sequenced it as the closing track of his next album, The Ghost of Tom Joad.

“It was my parting joke,” Bruce wrote in Songs, “and [a] shot at the way pop culture trivializes complicated moral issues, how the nightly news ‘sound bytes’ [sic] and packages life to strip away the dignity of human events.”

But you probably wouldn’t detect all that from the song’s lyrics.

Rather than mine the societal and political veins that run throughout the rest of the album, Bruce instead crafted a relationship song, albeit a dysfunctional one.

Bruce’s narrator is romantically involved with what Thompson would call a corny bore.

“Every cloud has a silver lining, every dog has his day.”
She said, “Now don’t say nothing if you don’t have something nice to say
The tough now they get going when the going gets tough.”
But for you my best was never good enough

“Now don’t try for a home run baby if you can get the job done with a hit
Remember a quitter never wins and a winner never quits
The sun don’t shine on a sleeping dog’s ass,” and all the rest of that stuff
But for you my best was never good enough

Our unnamed, off-screen love interest speaks only in pep talks and platitudes, and over the course of the brief song we realize that each adage is directed at our narrator, who never seems to measure up.

At first she sounds encouraging, but we soon sense more condescension than faith. By the end of the second verse, Bruce’s use of “all the rest of that stuff” tells us that our narrator has started to see through his partner’s veneer.

Realization swiftly turns to resentment, as our narrator peppers his mocking speech with expletives and his significant other swipes clichés from a slow-witted movie hero.

“If God gives you nothing but lemons then make some lemonade
The early bird catches the fucking worm, Rome wasn’t built in a day
Now life’s like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get
Stupid is as stupid does,” and all the rest of that shit
Come on pretty baby call my bluff
‘Cause for you my best was never good enough

By the end of the song, our narrator has had enough. He stands his ground and tells his girl: What you see is what you get. Take it or leave it.

He’s bluffing, of course–he’s not about to leave, at least not yet. But he’s taking a stand and daring his love to recognize and accept him for who he is rather than who she wants him to be.

So there we have it: inspired by a landmark 1952 crime thriller, aimed at a increasingly desensitized society, and couched as a dysfunctional romance.

That’s a lot for a barely two-minute song comprised entirely of aphorisms, but you know what they say:

Still waters run  deep.

My Best Was Never Good Enough
Recorded: March – August 1995
Released: The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995)
First performed: November 21, 1995 (New Brunswick, NJ)
Last performed: November 16, 2005 (East Rutherford, NJ)

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