Roll of the Dice: Outlaw Pete

The past is never the past. It is always present. And you better reckon with it in your life and in your daily experience, or it will get you. It will get you really bad. It will come and devour you, it will remove you from the present. It will steal your future and this happens every day…

 

In other words, your past is your past. You carry it with you always. These are your sins. You carry them with you always. You better learn how to live with them, learn the story that they’re telling you. Because they’re whispering your future in your ear, and if you don’t listen, it will be contaminated by the toxicity of your past.

— Bruce Springsteen to Mark Hagen, The Guardian, January 18, 2009

Well the Maximum Lawman run down Flamingo chasing the Rat and the barefoot girl
And the kids ’round here look just like shadows, always quiet, holding hands

 

In the tunnels uptown, the Rat’s own dream guns him down as shots echo down them hallways in the night
No one watches when the ambulance pulls away or as the girl shuts out the bedroom light…

—Bruce Springsteen, “Jungleland”

Epic in length, audacious in arrangement.

A larger-than-life cast of characters against an orchestral, cinematic backdrop.

It’s both romantic and tragic, and it will haunt you long after the final notes fade.

It’s one of Bruce Springsteen’s finest moments on record.

I speak, of course, of “Outlaw Pete.”

Were you expecting “Jungleland,” maybe?

Like the 1975 classic that closed his landmark Born to Run album, “Outlaw Pete” is a rock and roll fable of epic proportions, and Bruce was rightfully proud enough of it that he opened another landmark album with it in 2009.

Because despite its derision by much of E Street Nation, “Outlaw Pete” is comparable and every bit as good as “Jungleland.”

Maybe even better.

Because while the earlier song ranks among Bruce’s finest songwriting accomplishments, and although it astounds in its musical power, lyrical eloquence, and emotional resonance, “Jungleland” is at its core… vacant. It’s the rock equivalent of West Side Story, with all of the rumbles but none of the romance. (We’ll discuss this more at length in a future Roll of the Dice entry next year.)

“Jungleland” is grand, but it holds no depth and offers no commentary on the characters it chronicles. It’s a stylized, almost choreographed rock opera about young souls living in and for the moment, and on that count it succeeds. It’s the kind of song only a young man could write.

“Outlaw Pete” is a song only an old man could write.

Bruce wrote “Outlaw Pete” as he approached the age of sixty, but he based it on a book that came out when he was just a baby. Adele Springsteen used to read Brave Cowboy Bill to her infant son, and it made an impression, sparking a lifelong fascination in her son with the legend and lore of the American West.

As Bruce aged, his fascination with the West grew. And as his fascination with the West grew, so did his fascination with aging. His Working on a Dream album was the first of a trilogy of albums in which he explored the experience of growing old, and “Outlaw Pete” sets the stage for the trilogy as if an overture.

On its surface, it’s a fantastic fable, almost a children’s story–and the “almost” was dropped five years later when artist Frank Caruso helped Bruce turn it into an actual painted book. (When asked how suitable the tale really is for children, Bruce replied, ““If Bambi is for kids, this is fine. If Lion King is for kids, this will be fine also.”” )

But underneath its cowboy veneer, “Outlaw Pete” mines classic Springsteenian themes he’d been exploring since Nebraska and taps a vein of wisdom and perspective that only comes with age and experience.

And he does it against a Morricone-inspired, carefully crafted backing track (the E Street Band recorded it in several pieces, stitched together into a cohesive whole) full of Western tropes, classic riffs, dense orchestration, interstitial Beach Boys homages, and one killer, climactic Steve Van Zandt guitar solo.

It is breathtakingly effective.

“Outlaw Pete” is the story of a man who tries his best to outrun his past, and for a while, he’s successful. But what Bruce realized in the years since he introduced us to Frankie in “Highway Patrolman,” Wilson in “Darlington County,” and Bill in “Cautious Man,” is that if stories last long enough, the past always catches up.

It’s my wont to summarize the song in these essays, but in this case the author himself does it pretty well. In that same interview with Mark Hagen, Bruce described Pete’s motivation:

“He moves ahead. He tries to make the right moves. He awakes from a vision of his death and realizes: Life is finite. Time is with me always. And I’m frightened. And he rides west where he settles down. But the past comes back in the form of this bounty hunter, whose mind is also quickened and burdened by the need to get his man. And these possessed creatures meet along the shores of this river where the bounty hunter of course is killed, and his last words are: ‘We can’t undo the things we’ve done.'”

That’s a pretty good synopsis of the main events of “Outlaw Pete.” When we meet Pete, he’s just a babe, introduced to us “John Henry“-style– so brash in his youth, invincibility and notoriety that he shouts his name as if the wind would carry it forever, daring all who hear him to forget him.

He was born a little baby on the Appalachian Trail
At six months old he’d done three months in jail
He robbed a bank in his diapers and his little bare baby feet
All he said was “Folks, my name is Outlaw Pete.”
I’m Outlaw Pete, I’m Outlaw Pete, can you hear me?

By the time Pete becomes a young adult, however, his romantic rebel veneer has been stripped away. Bruce writes in realistic detail now, and there’s a dawning self-awareness in Pete of his impact on others. And he begins to question who he is.

At twenty-five a Mustang pony he did steal
And he rode her ’round and ’round on heaven’s wheel
Father Jesus I’m an outlaw, killer and a thief
And I slow down only to sow my grief
I’m Outlaw Pete, I’m Outlaw Pete, can you hear me?

As we reach our first bridge, we can’t look away from Pete’s cruel and callous legacy–and neither can Pete.

He cut his trail of tears across the countryside
And where he went women wept and men died

Finally, one night, Pete has a moral awakening, a crisis of conscience–and he leaves his life behind. Unable to put right the pile of wrongs he’d amassed, he turns his back on it. He rides deep into the West, falls in love with a girl who only knows him for who he is now, and starts a family. And in his family, he finds redemption. For a time.

One night he woke from a vision of his own death
Saddled his pony and rode her deep into the West
Married a Navajo girl and settled down on the res
And as the snow fell he held their beautiful daughter to his chest
I’m Outlaw Pete, I’m Outlaw Pete, can you hear me?
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?

An exultant instrumental break carries us to the song’s true turning point, the second bridge–in which an older and wiser songwriter reminds us that stories don’t end until their characters do.

Out of the East on an Irish stallion came bounty hunter Dan
His heart quickened and burned by the need to get his man
He found Pete peacefully fishing by the river, pulled his gun and got the drop
He said, “Pete, you think you’ve changed but you have not.”

Pete’s past finally catches up with him in the form of a bounty hunter commissioned to avenge the victims of Pete’s former life. Because we’ve spent all this time with our anti-hero Pete, we’re conditioned to receive Dan as the bad guy. But he’s not–through a certain lens, he’s actually the good (if not merciful) guy.

He cocked his pistol, pulled the trigger and shouted “let it start”
Pete drew a knife from his boot, threw it, and pierced Dan through the heart
Dan smiled as he lay in his own blood dying in the sun
And whispered in Pete’s ear, “We cannot undo these things we’ve done.”
You’re Outlaw Pete, you’re Outlaw Pete, Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?

Unaware, uncaring, and unbelieving of Pete’s change of heart, Dan fires words at Pete that draw more blood than bullets ever could: You only think you’ve changed. You’re still the same person. You can’t undo your sins. You can’t undo your past. And as Pete proves him right by slaying him in self-defense–another by-product victim of his life of crime–Dan twists the only knife he has left: You’re Outlaw Pete. Not Pete. Outlaw Pete. You’ll always be an outlaw. Do you hear me? 

Pete is haunted by Dan’s dying words, and once again his instinct is to run from them. And he does–for forty days and forty nights. Running, running from his past and his sins. Until he reaches a breaking point, where he loses the will to run any further.

For forty days and nights Pete rode and did not stop
Till he sat high upon an icy mountaintop
He watched the hawk on a desert updraft, slip and slide
Moved to the edge and dug his spurs deep into his pony’s side

And in one final cinematic sweep, Bruce gives Pete a Thelma & Louise send-off against a second instrumental section that descends to earth along with our hero. A quiet epilogue closes the book on the tale of Outlaw Pete:

Some say Pete and his pony vanished over the edge
And some say they remain frozen high up on that icy ledge
The young Navajo girl washes in the river, skin so fair
And braids a piece of Pete’s buckskin chaps into her hair
Outlaw Pete, Outlaw Pete, Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?

In the end, Pete outruns his past in the only sure way possible. He leaves behind his family–the only ones who will ever really remember him, the only ones who cry for him through Little Steven’s anguished, heartbreaking guitar solo. Pete’s notoriety soon fades, and he is remembered more for the way he died rather than the way he lived.

“Outlaw Pete” is a complex morality play, with themes that transcend the personal and apply to the political. Bruce wrote his song at the tail end of the Bush administration, appalled at how far his country had fallen (but unaware of how far it had still to go ).

We cannot undo the things we’ve done–words that should haunt us as a country but don’t, which is precisely what Bruce warns us about. The past will catch up to us. We can and should try to atone for our past sins, but we can never undo them and never outrun them.

All we can do with our past is reckon with it. Because otherwise it will come for us, remove us from our present, and steal our future. Just like it did for Outlaw Pete.

If “Outlaw Pete” met a mixed reception from E Street Nation in its album form, it was often treated with outright apathy in concert. A regular set list staple throughout the Working on a Dream Tour, “Outlaw Pete” usually featured early in the set, where its change-up pacing and novel length often threatened to sap the show of the kinetic energy Bruce had generated with his opening “Badlands.”

In Europe however, where his audiences ironically had a greater fascination and appreciation for American Westerns than his own fellow countrymen did, “Outlaw Pete” receive a warmer response.

Still, Bruce was asking a lot of his audience, and he seemed to realize that by the end of the tour, where it had all but disappeared from the set, never to be seen again afterward.

Never but once, that is: at the second of a pair of postscript shows to his High Hopes Tour in 2014, Bruce surprised the audience at his Pittsburgh show with Joe Grushecky by playing a one-time-only acoustic version of “Outlaw Pete” that stripped away its Hollywood trappings and revealed more clearly its powerful message and tragic outcome. Even if the original arrangement has always left you cold, the final minute and a half of the video below will stick with you for a long time to come.

Outlaw Pete
Recorded: 2007-2008
Released: Working on a Dream (2009)
First performed: March 23, 2009 (Asbury Park, NJ)
Last performed: May 23, 2014 (Pittsburgh, PA)

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