Roll of the Dice: Down to the Riverside

“Every chance I got, I returned to stay with my grandparents. It was my true home and they felt like my real parents. I could and would not leave… This was where I needed to be to feel at home, safe, loved…

 

It was a place where I felt an ultimate security, full license and a horrible unforgettable boundary-less love… It made me in the sense that it would set me off on a lifelong pursuit of a “singular” place of my own, giving me a raw hunger that drove me, hell-bent, in my music. It was a desperate, lifelong effort to rebuild, on embers of memory and longing, my temple of safety.”

 

–Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run (2016)

You’re about to listen to a song you haven’t heard before, a previously uncirculated, gorgeously captured, emotionally powerful, magnificent 50-year-old Bruce Springsteen song. But it’s worth a little backstory first.

In the early days of 1972, Bruce Springsteen was thinking about his family.

I mean, he was thinking about them a lot.

He’d just returned from an extended holiday visit to his parents’ house in San Mateo. California, a visit that was supposed to have been permanent (he even earned his first driver’s license while he was there) but ended up lasting only about a month.

He’d been driven west by heartbreak, leaving behind his band and a toxic romance. Looking to start over in a new place, he started by renewing his oldest relationships. Although his relations with his parents had been strained when he was a teen, Bruce was a mature 22 now. Whatever ice had formed over the years thawed during their reunion.

Bruce may have successfully burnished his familial bonds, but he was far less successful finding a way to make living out west. Ultimately, he returned to where “I was who I was, a son of New Jersey, gunslinger, bar band king, small-town local hero, big fish in a little pond and breadwinner.” As we saw a few days ago when we looked at “Confessin’ the Blues,” Bruce went back home in January, resumed his position as leader of the band named after him, and picked up where he left off.

But something had changed.

Bruce may have left his family behind geographically, but emotionally they were still very much with him.

In those first few months following his return to New Jersey in 1972, he recorded “Family Song,” a chronicle of his reunion with and newfound empathy for his parents.

It wasn’t just his parents on his mind, though, because “Randolph Street” also came out of this period. “Randolph Street” was a love letter to his grandparents and a tentative attempt to revisit his great loss when they passed away.

But Bruce never directly faces death head-on in “Randolph Street.” His sixteen-year-old self is the narrator, in a detached state of shock on the day of his grandmother’s passing. We hear Bruce recollect his grandparents in loving detail, and we can hear the pain in his voice as he revisits their final days. But when it comes to his grandparents’ deaths, his songwriting is delicate and circumspect.

Maybe that’s because he saved it all up for a third song born in that period.

Today we complete Bruce’s early trilogy by listening to “Down to the Riverside,” which has never before been publicly available in any form.

Unlike “Family Song” and “Randolph Street,” Bruce doesn’t seem to have ever recorded “Down to the Riverside” in the studio. But he performed it with the Bruce Springsteen Band on February 25, 1972 during their Richmond residency, and that show was captured in stunning soundboard quality by Richmond’s Stillwater Studios.

The recording never escaped into the wild, however. Instead, it was given to John Hammond, and it remained in his private collection until it was auctioned by Sotheby’s to a private collector in June 2014.

On the set list (handwritten, but not by Bruce) that accompanies the tape, the song is listed as “When Grandpa Died,” but the song title “Down to the Riverside” had surfaced a few years earlier in an auction of one of Bruce’s handwritten setlists from the Bruce Springsteen Band era. And when you listen to the song, you’ll clearly recognize that phrase as the proper title to the song.

The auction site noted that the tape came “directly from the collection of John Hammond, perhaps requested in an attempt to ascertain if the performer that he was so taken by as a solo acoustic act,  could  similarly engage a live audience fronting an electric band. He needn’t have worried.”

True that.

Okay, that’s enough backstory. It’s time for that rarest of pleasures: a first listen to a Bruce Springsteen song (even if that song is fifty years old).

Now, I will admit that I am biased. If you are one of my regular readers, you know of my particular fondness for the Bruce Springsteen Band. They were basically a prototypical E Street Band; only Clarence and Danny had yet to join. The band’s sound was bluesy, jazzy, and (when the paycheck was  big enough that they could afford a horn section) sometimes bright and brassy.

Most of the Bruce Springsteen Band’s repertoire was uptempo. Much of it was lyrically light, even bordering on pop. “Down to the Riverside,” however, is a notable exception, a slow-motion retelling of Frederick Springsteen’s dying day, a contemplative reminiscence in a delta blues mold.

The band plays with restraint from the ruminating, lost-in-thought introduction through most of the song, but that doesn’t mean the performance is anything less than powerful. We hear fine guitar interplay between Bruce and Steve throughout, and there’s an emotional undercurrent that simmers, simmers, simmers… until Bruce finally lets his grief wash over him via an emotional guitar solo and plaintive harp solo. And for a Mad Dog, Vini Lopez plays with remarkable sensitivity and empathy, matching Bruce’s shifting moods and building power throughout.

As for the lyrics, they speak for themselves. Other than the title phrase, there’s not a trace of metaphor and none of the wordplay that would characterize most of his songwriting that year. The power of Bruce’s lyrics is in their plainness.

It’s time. If you have headphones, put them on so you can best experience the clarity and warmth of this half-century-old recording. Let’s take a listen to The Bruce Springsteen Band performing “Down to the Riverside.”

If you’ve read Born to Run or heard Bruce speak of losing his grandparents, you already knew the story. You just hadn’t heard it told this way.

I remember back when I was just a small boy
On the night that my grandpa died
It was three o’clock, it was three o’clock in the morning
All of a sudden my eyes they popped open wide

It was mama, my sweet mama
She said, “Aw, won’t you come with me son”
It was three o’clock, she told me grandpa he’s dead
Oh and the doctor he says that he can’t come

Well now, my mama she took me, she took me by my hand
And she said, “don’t worry son, but we have to pass through grandpa’s room”
Mama, grandma she was crying, by my side she said he was such a good man

(Bruce stumbles over that entire line–“Mama” was clearly a mistake that he instantly realized and corrected, but it threw him off his game for a few seconds after.)

Don’t you know he was too

She said, “He was sitting up in bed, alive just like you and me
When all of a sudden he just slumped back down”
She said “it’s three o’clock and oh the reverend’s here
And grandpa, grandpa he has gone down”
She said, “Grandpa’s gone down to the riverside one last time”
She said, “Grandpa’s gone down to the riverside just one last time”

Well mama, she took me by my hand
She took me into her room and said, “You and sister can sleep here tonight”
And I was just about to stop crying and close my eyes and go to sleep
When I heard something giving a young boy a fright

I swear I heard them angels singing
And it’s sounding like it was coming from my grandpa’s room
Ah and the church bells, the church bells they were ringing
To shine a little light, to shine a little light on this gloom

I heard the voices, they’re coming from, I heard ’em sing…
They said, “Swing low sweet chariot
Coming for to carry me home”
They said, “Swing low sweet chariot”
Coming to carry Grandpa home

I will admit to tearing up when the song shifts from blues to uplifting spiritual. It’s a move both subtle and striking, and most importantly skillful–it opens up the song and fills the darkness with sunlight and grace. It’s my favorite moment of the song.

‘Cause grandpa’s gone down to the riverside one last time
Grandpa’s gone down to the riverside one last time
Oh, grandpa’s gone down to the riverside one last time
Oh, grandpa’s gone down to the riverside one last time

And there we have it: the only known recording of Bruce’s breathtakingly intimate “Down to the Riverside.” It wasn’t the first time he played it, nor would it be the last (it would surface in his set as late as April), but at least now we finally know what it sounds like.

For me, at least, it was worth the wait.

Down to the Riverside
Never recorded
Never released
First performed: February 5, 1972 (Richmond, VA)
Last performed: April 1972 (Freehold, NJ)

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