In 1983, Bruce Springsteen recorded a song called “Brothers Under the Bridges ’83” about a pair of fourteen-year-old boys who dream of the freedom and adventure that await them at eighteen.
In 1995, he revisited his fourteen-year-old narrator–now thirty–in a song called “Brothers Under the Bridge ’95,” and he put both songs on his 1998 box set collection of unreleased songs, Tracks.
By all accounts I’ve ever read, the two songs are unrelated. But they are very related. They are bookends, and one cannot fully appreciate the depth and nuance of either song without the reflection cast by the other.
In between the two songs, a war happened. And a life happened.
Our narrator from “Brothers Under the Bridges” did his best to soldier on, returning home from war to the girl we’d only just met in the last line of the earlier song and starting a family. But he didn’t come back alone–he brought his trauma back with him, and it ate away at him until he found himself divorced from his life, from society, and living homeless and remote in the San Gabriel mountains, out of reach of both the law and anyone he ever knew and loved.
Until the daughter he fathered upon returning home comes to the homeless camp in the mountains in search of him and some answers. “Brothers Under the Bridge” is the tale he tells her.
Our narrator has been to Vietnam and back, and while we do not linger on his wartime experiences, they hover just as they foreshadow in Bruce’s earlier song.
Saigon, it was all gone
The same Coke machines as the streets I grew on
Down a mesquite canyon we come walking along the ridge
Me and the brothers under the bridge
All we hear our narrator reflect on from his Vietnam experience is how similar Saigon felt to the town he grew up in–a seemingly trivial but significant detail. He was unable to dehumanize the enemy; he feels a commonality that made his actions–which we never learn–feel unforgiveable, at least to himself.
Years later, he walks with a different band of brothers–veterans like himself cast out, cut out, or cut off from society, living instead on their own under a bridge in the mountain canyons.
Their campsite is remote, an hour’s walk to even a road. The winding canyon is so overgrown that the campsite can’t be reached by authorities, even by helicopter. They live in isolation, severed from a society they don’t feel a part of, and all they want is to be left alone.
Campsite’s an hour’s walk from the nearest road to town
Up here there’s too much brush and canyon for the CHP choppers to touch down
Ain’t looking for nothing, just wanna live
Me and the brothers under the bridge
Come the Santa Anas, man, that dry brush’ll light
Billy Devon got burned up in his own campfire one winter night
We buried his body in a white stone high up along the ridge
Me and the brothers under the bridge
Had enough of town and the street life
Over nothing you end up on the wrong end of someone’s knife
Now I don’t want no trouble and I ain’t got none to give
Me and the brothers under the bridge
Their lives are not without danger, however. The dry canyons are prone to brushfire when the winds blow, and at least one of our narrator’s “brothers” has already perished, burned by his own campfire and buried anonymously.
This wasn’t the life he’d dreamed of at fourteen, and this wasn’t the community he’d longed to be a part of. But just as the bridges represented the dream and freedom of adulthood in the earlier song, it represents its price and toll here. Despite the dangers, however, this is the life our narrator chooses to live, and his daughter wants to know why. Her father doesn’t have the answers, at least not that he can voice.
I come home in ’72
You were just a beautiful light in your mom’s dark eyes of blue
I stood down on the tarmac, I was just a kid
Me and the brothers under the bridge
Come Veterans Day, sat in the stands in my dress blues
I held your mother’s hand when they passed with the red, white and blue
One minute you’re right there and something slips
Measured in real time, he wasn’t in Vietnam long. He was still a kid when he returned, his daughter just a glimmer in her mother’s eyes.
But his wartime experiences aged him and ate away at him. Until one day–one Veterans Day–it ate through him. On that day when he couldn’t help but relive what he’d tried to leave behind, it ate through him, and something… slipped.
“Brothers Under the Bridge” was already a candidate for Bruce’s subtlest song. He writes with delicate and sparing detail, taking us inside the mind of a Vietnam vet unable to face what he’d seen and done but also unable to forget. But that ending–that unresolved final verse that just drifts into nothing as our narrator loses himself in thought and memory–that ending ranks among the most haunting Bruce has ever written.
“Brothers Under the Bridge” was recorded by the same musicians who recorded “The Ghost of Tom Joad” (with the addition of Soozie Tyrell, whose understated violin adds warmth and color). Marty Rifkin is the standout player on this track, his pedal steel and dobro infusing the song with its nostalgic Western texture.
The two songs were recorded within a day of each other, and in both sound and setting, “Brothers Under the Bridge” would have been a perfect fit for Bruce’s 1995 album. It must have been a hard decision to leave it off. Still, Bruce performed it ninety times throughout his 1995-1997 acoustic tour, as if it were born of and part of the album even if it was cast off and forgotten by it. Perhaps there’s irony to observe there.
After his acoustic tour ended, so did Bruce’s performances of “Brothers Under the Bridge.” It was too quiet, too gentle a song to translate to an arena stage; when he tried it very early on the Reunion Tour, an overly appreciative Barcelona crowd threatened to overpower the song’s fragility.
“Brothers Under the Bridge” remained unplayed since that night in 1999 until it finally returned late in the High Hopes Tour in 2014, cast in a full-band arrangement that didn’t try to recreate the original studio track but instead leveraged the talent and range of the expanded E Street Band to breathe new life into it, particularly via Tom Morello’s anguished guitar solo and Curt Ramm’s elegiac trumpet.
Bruce hasn’t performed it since, and he’s never performed its 1983 prequel even once. Yet this unique pair of outtake bookends represents some of his finest songwriting from two of his most distinctive periods, and they deserve greater recognition and appreciation.
Brothers Under the Bridge ’95
Recorded: May 22, 1995
Released: Tracks (1998), 18 Tracks (1999)
First performed: December 16, 1995 (Boston, MA)
Last performed: May 1, 2014 (Tampa, FL)
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