Roll of the Dice: Streets of Fire

Pouring outside. Windy. Windows open. Turn the lights out and perfect setting for “Streets of Fire.” — Anonymous Springsteen Fan

She gets it, that anonymous fan. The rest of this essay is just going to use a lot more words to say the same thing.

Although it’s my practice here to do so, we’re not going to analyze the lyrics to “Streets of Fire” today, because the lyrics are not the point. I’m not even going to print them here; you can look them up if you must.

Because if you’re listening to the words, you’re doing it wrong. “Streets of Fire” isn’t a song you hear. It’s a song you feel, like Jeff Buckley’s performance of “Hallelujah” or R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts.”

And when you feel “Streets of Fire,” you are in the dark. You are in the rain. You are in the wind.

You are in the maelstrom.

There’s never been a solo or acoustic version of “Streets of Fire,” and there almost certainly never will be. And while Bruce has performed it in concert 71 times over the decades and likely will again, no live performance will ever equal that hackle-raising studio track.

Because “Streets of Fire” is a song of despair and self-loathing and alienation and surrender.

And when you experience it in communion with thousands of fellow fans, you simply cannot feel those things.

Because to experience “Streets of Fire” you don’t need to be in the dark, in the wet, in the wind.

You just need to be alone.

And if you let it wash over you while you are alone, you will find yourself transported to the dark, to the wet, to the wind. To the maelstrom.

Because at heart, “Streets of Fire” isn’t a song at all. It’s an ephemera, a bolt of lightning bottled in the earliest days of the Darkness on the Edge of Town sessions.

So don’t listen to the words. They don’t matter.

Just listen to the voice.

Listen to the dirge of Danny Federici’s organ, lugubriously lumbering ever-so-slightly out of step with Bruce’s world-weary first-verse vocals.

Feel the snarl of the E Street Band’s entrance at 0:52 as torpor gives way to bitterness and cynicism.

Feel the hair on the back of your neck stand on end at 1:20 when Bruce taps his inner well and a gusher of despair and anguish spills forth from his vocal cords.

Feel the thrill when an unremarkable guitar solo suddenly transforms at 2:20 with a single bend into a wail and a rail and a gnash at the heavens.

Feel the fury of that third verse, with a vocal rage so intensely and gutturally raw that you don’t even notice that the verse is missing half its lyrics.

And finally, that jaw-dropping, cathartic, eleven-seconds-long “fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrre” at 3:33.

If you study the lyrics and the music, there’s no reason for “Streets of Fire” to work as well as it does. It is wholly unremarkable on paper, and yet it is supernatural on vinyl. Search for covers of it, and you’ll find it scares off almost all contenders. (And for the few who unwisely attempt it anyway, it doesn’t go very well.)

“Streets of Fire” is four minutes of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band dialed into something primal, a place of power in a vinyl groove.

As my anonymous friend recommends, give it a listen the next time it’s dark, wet, and windy outside.

Or better yet: when the storm is inside.

Postscript:

I wasn’t kidding earlier about the third verse missing half its lyrics. Bruce gets about halfway through and then gives up and just bluffs the rest.

If you check out his official web site, or his Songs book, or the liner notes to Darkness on the Edge of Town, Bruce doesn’t even pretend that there’s a second half to the verse. We hear nonsense phrases, something like, “…and don’t look at my face, mumble mumble mumble, ’cause I’m stranded on the wire,” but none of it appears in the official copyrighted lyrics. (And this is why you really don’t want me analyzing the lyrics.)

So I’m always entertained when he plays it in concert (on bootleg mostly–I’ve been lucky enough to catch it live twice), because I know he’s going to have to figure out what to say when he gets to that part, and he usually fakes it or repeats different lines from earlier in the song.

Check out these performances of “Streets of Fire” over the years, and you’ll see what I mean. Bruce just basically fills the space with something to sing.

Now one might think that sometime in the forty-plus years since the song’s release, Bruce might make time to actually finish writing it.

But one would be forgetting: when it comes to “Streets of Fire,” the words don’t matter.

Don’t listen. Just feel.

Streets of Fire
Recorded: June 24 – December 29, 1977
Released: Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978)
First performed: May 23, 1978 (Buffalo, NY)
Last performed: September 11, 2016 (Pittsburgh, PA)

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