“I wanted to be the reasonable voice of revenge for what I’d seen [my father’s] life come to.” — Bruce Springsteen to Terry Gross, Fresh Air, December 26, 2016
Sometimes, though, he simply offered his father a voice of release.
If Darkness on the Edge of Town infused his father’s frustration into a collection of working-class characters trapped in dead-end lives, The River at least provided a few moments of cathartic celebration, with characters determined to make the most of their fleeting evening and weekend hours.
Because when you can’t stand the weekdays, you live for the weekends. And nowhere in Bruce’s catalog is that Friday night jubilation more present than in “Out in the Street.”
Even if we only listened to the backing track, we’d feel the freedom of “Out in the Street,” because this is one of the tracks where the music came first. Bruce recorded his first take with the E Street Band in January 1980, and even with its almost entirely bluffed lyrics, we still can sense what he was trying to communicate.
There are two interesting side notes regarding that instrumental work in progress: first, it goes by the name “I’m Gonna Be There Tonight,” although I’m pretty sure Bruce never actually utters those words. (I’ve listened pretty intently.)
Second, Max is having some timing challenges. There was a period of time when Max was struggling to keep a steady, reliable pace, and it was most apparent on “Out in the Street,” which Weinberg called “one of the worst bits of drumming I’ve ever done” in a 1982 issue of Modern Drummer. If the finished track below doesn’t reveal that, it’s because we’re listening to a spliced composite to ensure a steady beat. (And we can still hear the tempo fluctuations if we listen to them.)
But there’s something charming and maybe even fitting about the looseness of “Out in the Street.” This is a song about letting loose at the end of a working week, and one of the sweetest freedoms of the weekend is not having to do anything perfectly.
“Out in the Street” is literally a Friday night song. The action picks up at 5pm, with a narrator who wastes no time grabbing his girl and hitting the town.
Put on your best dress baby, and darling fix your hair up right
‘Cause there’s a party, honey, way down beneath the neon lights
All day you’ve been working that hard line
Now tonight you’re gonna have a good time
Bruce gives his characters only the barest of backstories: he’s a dockworker (and apparently an Easybeats fan); she’s… well, his girl.
I work five days a week, girl, loading crates down on the dock
I take my hard earned money and meet my girl down on the block
And Monday when the foreman calls time
I’ve already got Friday on my mind
That hat-tip was deliberate. “When I wrote [“Out in the Street”],” Bruce told interviewer Molly Meldum in 1995, “I was trying to copy one of my all time favorite songs, ‘Friday On My Mind‘ by the Easybeats. I have always loved that song. The structure on that is just incredible, and it had that unbelievable exhilaration when they broke into the chorus. You know, its Friday and you are out of school or out of work and you’re just out there!”
But the blank canvas characterization is deliberate, too. If his characters don’t sound like anybody, then they can be everybody. And that’s the magic trick at work in “Out in the Street”: by the time we reach the build toward the first chorus, we are the narrator, and we feel that explosion of freedom and joy as if it’s our own. We are out there!
When that whistle blows, girl, I’m down the street
I’m home, I’m out of my work clothes
When I’m out in the street, oh oh oh oh oh, I walk the way I wanna walk
When I’m out in the street, oh oh oh oh oh, I talk the way I wanna talk
When I’m out in the street, when I’m out in the street
It helps that “Out in the Street” is a track in which both music and lyrics operate in concert, even synergy. Unlike “Hungry Heart” (which immediately precedes it), there’s no mistaking what this song is about.
The song is so infectious, in fact, that it’s easy to miss the specter of authority that hovers over the second half of the song in the form of patrolling police officers, as if to remind us that for the characters Bruce writes about, this kind of freedom is fleeting if not wholly illusory.
When I’m out in the street, girl, well I never feel alone
When I’m out in the street, girl, in the crowd I feel at home
The black and whites they cruise by
And they watch us from the corner of their eye
But there ain’t no doubt, girl, down here
We ain’t gonna take what they’re handing out
When I’m out in the street, oh oh oh oh oh, I walk the way I wanna walk
When I’m out in the street, oh oh oh oh oh, I talk the way I wanna talk
Baby, out in the street I don’t feel sad or blue
Baby, out in the street I’ll be waiting for you
Fleeting though it may be, our pair makes the most of it while it lasts, strutting through one of the all-time great E Street bridges (with one of Clarence’s best solos).
When the whistle blows, girl, I’m down the street
I’m home, I’m out of my work clothes
When I’m out in the street, oh oh oh oh oh, I walk the way I wanna walk
When I’m out in the street, oh oh oh oh oh, I talk the way I wanna talk
When I’m out in the street, oh oh oh oh oh, pretty girls, they’re all passing by
When I’m out in the street, oh oh oh oh oh, from the corner we give them the eye
Baby, out in the street I just feel all right
Meet me out in the street, little girl, tonight
Meet me out in the street, meet me out in the street
And that coda: Stevie Van Zandt gets a rare, momentary vocal spotlight as he and Bruce (and Roy) call and respond until Bruce steps back for a moment to let his best friend have the mic to himself. It’s late (very late) in the song, but it introduces a key element to “Out in the Street” that Bruce would bring to the fore on stage: community.
Community and connection are at the core of Bruce’s live performances of “Out in the Street,” and more often than not he deliberately sequences it to coalesce the audience’s energy at a key moment in the show. On the River Tour, it was often early in the set, with Bruce and Stevie’s interplay the clear highlight.
By the next tour, though, Steve had left the band, He was supplanted at the center mic by new member Patti Scialfa, better suiting the song’s guy-and-his-girl story. But watch what happens after their already powerful chemistry plays out: Bruce brings the rest of the band down to the front of the stage in synchronized unison, subtly but powerfully underscoring the song’s themes. We are here, and you are here, and we are coming together.
Bruce dialed up the community with each tour “Out in the Street” appeared on, arguably peaking on the Reunion Tour as the literal centerpiece of the set, with each band member (including the returning Little Steven) getting a spotlight moment at the mic.
When Bruce recorded “Out in the Street,” it marked a departure: he was still writing about disaffected outsiders, but now he was bringing them together. In years to come, he’d lean into that theme of community and connection, but never with quite so much infectious and youthful brio.
To date, Bruce and the E Street Band have taken their audiences out in the street almost 700 times. “Out in the Street” hasn’t missed a proper E Street tour since it was first released, and it’s not likely to ever miss one going forward. It mainlines the essence of the E Street Band experience in a way few other songs in Bruce’s catalog can.
We’ll be meeting out in the street for a long time to come.
Out in the Street
Recorded: March 21, 1980
Released: The River (1980), The Essential Bruce Springsteen (2015)
First performed: October 3, 1980 (Ann Arbor, MI)
Last performed: August 30, 2023 (East Rutherford, NJ)
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