Two Faces: Western Stars

I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known
                                                       — Tennyson, “Ulysses”

Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
                                                       — Tennyson, “Ulysses” (toward the end)

“Western Stars” is a song about someone living in the past: a portrait of an aging, washed-up star of Hollywood Westerns, who still hangs on to enough shreds of fame to keep him in commercials and free drinks. That much we can all agree on. (And by “we” I mean me, Ken, and Bruce Springsteen, who weighed in on the meaning of the song in his Western Stars feature film.)

Where opinions get divided, though, is on the question of how we’re supposed to feel about it. Is the song, as Springsteen suggests in the film, an admiring portrait of someone who may be past his prime but still knows who he is? Or is it something darker, more akin to “Glory Days,” a portrait of someone taking refuge from the present in an idealized dream of the past?

Ken has already written a great analysis of the song from the first viewpoint, the optimistic one. And now he’s very kindly offered me the chance to present the opposite take: “Western Stars” as a day in the life of a depressed and lonely alcoholic.

Ken points out that “Western Stars” has much the same beginning as “Dancing in the Dark.” And like “Dancing in the Dark,” it slips something by you. It plays with what you think you know, what you think you’re hearing.

The first time you hear the lyric “I get up in the evening,” there’s a little jolt of surprise, of a cliché being overturned. Only on a second listen do you hear the line as the literal truth: the daily grind of a character who works nights, goes to bed in the morning, gets up after dark.

“Western Stars” has a similarly slippery beginning. “I wake up in the morning,” Bruce tells us, “just glad my boots are on.” And because his character doesn’t see anything odd about waking up with his boots on, it’s easy to miss what a weird image this is. It’s easy to hear it as a metaphor for waking up in one piece, ready to greet another day. But stop a moment and think about it literally, as a character detail, and the whole song changes.

In real life, who wakes up with their boots on? Someone who passed out fully clothed the night before, that’s who. Who wakes up in the morning glad their boots are on? Someone who passes out with their boots on so often that they’ve come to think of it as normal.

And with that, a part of the story snaps into focus. This is a character who wakes up hung over and spends the day getting progressively drunker, to finally pass out and do it all again the next day. And we’re about to follow him through his day, find out how and why he got here. (Think of it as the Springsteen version of The Hangover or Dude, Where’s My El Camino?)

First stop, the set of a Viagra commercial.

On the set, the makeup girl brings me two raw eggs and a shot of gin
Then I give it all up for that little blue pill
That promises to bring it all back to you again.

The long-suffering makeup girl brings our star his first drink of the day, a combined breakfast and hangover cure. And then he goes out on the set and shills for Viagra. There’s some cynicism in that last line; he knows he’s selling false promises – of youth, romance, second chances – along with the pills.

The chorus comes in:

Ride me down easy, ride me down easy, friend
Tonight the western stars are shining bright again.

This is a patchwork chorus, assembled from the classics. The opening line comes from Billy Joe Shaver’s 1973 song “Ride Me Down Easy,” a song that envisions God as a jockey, a rider taking a horse for a gentle ride after a long and tiring race.

The phrase “western stars” has a double, or even a triple meaning; the stars that hang over the American West (reminiscent of Woody Guthrie’s “California Stars,” a painfully nostalgic late-career song, released posthumously), the vanished stars of Hollywood Westerns, and lastly, the Tennyson poem “Ulysses,” the same portrait of Odysseus in old age that gave us the title “Hungry Heart.”

In other words, there is a staggering amount of Past packed into that chorus. And yet, with the strings rising gently behind it, it sounds hopeful. The singer sounds as if he expects the past to return, the western stars to resurrect themselves, as if he’s just waiting for everything to come back to life.

Next stop, the canyons above Sunset, where the song begins to feel cinematic. The camera pans out to show us the Hollywood of classic noir: a violent place where the veneer of civilization is thin. We watch a coyote carrying off a chihuahua: a predator with its completely outmatched prey. A similar scene plays out at the Whiskey Bar, where the narrator chats up “a lost sheep from Oklahoma,” – another prey animal – who is out of place enough to order a mojito and young enough to know him only as the actor from a commercial.

Mellowed by whiskey and flirtation, the narrator falls into a reverie about the one part of his life that he still loves: the days when he goes rodeo riding out in the desert. Yet even here, there’s an overwhelming sense of nostalgia.

East to the desert where the charros, they still ride and rope
Our American brothers cross the wire and bring the old ways with them.

This is another way of trying to relive the past, then: different from Viagra but just as tempting.

Up till now, the musical backing has been restrained.  But now, as the drinks and the reminiscence take effect, the orchestra surges in behind Bruce. The strings swell, swoopy and syrupy and nostalgic. The chorus returns, stronger and more triumphant than before, driving us toward the end of the night, toward whatever it is that the singer is chasing.

And then we’re back at the bar, and it’s time for another drink. “Once I was shot by John Wayne,” the singer tells us, conversationally, and we can see him turning toward us on his barstool. “Yeah, it was toward the end.” One of several lines that ring through the song like the tolling of a bell: Yeah, it was toward the end. These days there ain’t no more. Bring it all back to you again.

Now we know who the “friend” of the chorus is: it’s us. We’re the anonymous stranger buying this man drinks while he tells his John Wayne story for the thousandth time. This is what “ride me down easy” means; this is what the singer is asking of us.

He’s not at home in the present, where he’s a washed-up actor, an old man hawking pills and credit cards. He lives his real life in a Western movie that’s playing out in his mind. But he needs a way into that movie; he needs the alcohol to cushion things; he needs an audience. The word “friend” here is grimly ironic: his “friend” is always a stranger, someone to whom his story is new.

So we buy him drinks, and he toasts “the cowboys – riders in the whirlwind,” and the strings get ever swoopier as he slides further into his dream. The line between life and the movies disappears; he’s no longer just an actor; now he’s also the cowboy, the hero, the guy riding up on a horse in a cloud of dust. And as he drifts away from reality and takes refuge in his mind, his mind rewards him with a last glorious vision: the riders on Sunset, “smothered in the Santa Ana winds.”

The orchestra crashes back in, the strings swoop and soar, dramatic and stirring. He’s reliving his glory days, and we’re right there with him, caught up in the sudden beauty of his vision. This is what he’s been chasing all day. This is what it means for the Western stars to be shining bright.

But then the day ends. Our hero passes out. The music drops to almost nothing, the vision fades, and we’re left back where we started.

I woke up this morning, just glad my boots were on.