“I had a gal in New Jersey who broke my heart, ripped it to shreds, trampled on it, and sent it to me COD in a paper bag. So I was out of there on the first ride west, no looking back. I was going to build a new life in California, three thousand miles away from the pain. But it didn’t take long before my luck ran out and my money ran out. And it just wasn’t gonna happen.” — Bruce Springsteen, Western Stars (2019)
In the waning days of 1971, Bruce Springsteen left New Jersey, headed west and didn’t look back.
He’d finally wrested himself away from a toxic relationship with “a drug-taking, hell-raising wild child who played by nobody’s rules” (as he put it in Born to Run), the same girlfriend who recruited “a few grade B-level rock stars” to discover Bruce and then slept with them. When I saw Bruce tell that anecdote on Broadway, the audience laughed. Bruce stared at the audience for a moment before admonishing with dead seriousness: “It’s not funny.”
I’ve never been able to uncover any information about the girl who crushed Bruce’s heart. Most books on Bruce make no mention of the relationship; a few refer to Bruce simply experiencing “girlfriend troubles.” Only when Bruce started sharing in his autobiography, Broadway show, and Western Stars film, did we start to understand the impact of the experience.
I haven’t even been able to figure out her name. But I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it was Marie.
“Marie” was one of the songs Bruce wrote in early 1972 upon returning to New Jersey, unable to make a living in California, and it was one of the songs he recorded that April as publishing demos at Laurel Canyon.
Like the obviously autobiographical “Family Song,” also written and recorded during that period, Bruce’s “Marie” character study seems awfully similar to his descriptions of his ex-girlfriend.
His lyrics are unusually harsh, his narrator clearly portrayed as a victim–raped, skinned, cut and carved.
Marie, she comes to me in the twilight
When the wind blows down ‘cross the river, so cold the fishermen cry
She rapes me in a rage of rainbow violence
‘Till my bare nerves, they sing like the strings of a violin
And the room seeps into a savage silence
Soaked in colors, red as blood, blue as night
And Marie she skins me alive, carves her initials in my side
Lures me with her purr, then cuts me with her knife
And the horses pound like thunder, they bolt like lightning on her range
She feels she’s going under and she zeroes in the rain, she’s so strange
His melody is pensive, brooding, almost an afterthought. “Marie” sounds very much like therapy for a broken heart.
Still, “Marie” contains much evidence of Bruce’s rapidly developing craft: the beautiful “so cold the fishermen cry,” the alliterative “rapes me in a rage of rainbow violence” and “seeps into a savage silence,” the violin metaphor. There is much to admire here.
The second verse isn’t quite as strong as the first imagery-wise, but what it lacks in subtlety it makes up for with some impressive internal rhyming. (I particularly like berserk fairy/concrete prairies.)
Well, Marie, you know, she’s the queen of all the stallions
And I’m her prince of mules and one of her principal fools
Marie, she’s got the claws of a falcon
And she’s perched upon my shoulder, and slowly digging in
But she can be so strange sometimes
Oh, like at night when the coyotes whine or when the neighbors come to dine
Marie, she skins me alive, burns her initials in my hide
And then leaves me all alone branded to the bone
And my heart pounds like her horses stampeding on the range
Marie knows all the sources and she shoots me with her pain
And for her, I take it, Lord, down in my veins
And I watch her dance like some berserk fairy all across the concrete prairies of
Bleeker Street
Marie, she can be so strange
But she’s the only lonely cowgirl on my range
The torture continues: claws digging, initial burning and branding. But it’s the last lines that make an impact, as Bruce suddenly switches to drug metaphor.
And I do believe it’s only metaphor–Bruce has been quite clear that he’s never taken serious drugs. But I also believe it’s not a coincidence that he employs it. It’s one of the first ways Bruce describes that ex-girlfriend even today, and I can only imagine that being a bystander to and victim of her under-the-influence actions left some lasting scars.
To be clear, I’m only speculating (as I often do) on the meaning and context of “Marie.” But when we consider the song’s provenance, it’s hard to conclude that it isn’t at least informed by his recent romantic troubles if not directly inspired by them.
The ex-girlfriend disappeared; Bruce implies if not states that he never saw her again. “Marie” disappeared, too. Never recorded for an album or performed live, it remains an early artifact on bootleg, or perhaps locked away in Bruce’s vault.
The real-life Marie would soon make one more injection into Bruce’s songwriting, however, and this one would actually make it on to his debut album.
But that’s a dice roll for another day.
Marie
Recorded: April-May, 1972
Never released
Never performed
