Roll of the Dice: Independence Day

“I grew up in this little town, and as I got older, I started looking around me and it didn´t seem like there was any way I was gonna get out of there. Because I looked back at my father, and the only time he´d ever gotten out of that town was to go to World War II. And then when he came out of the army, he got married and he settled down and went to work in a plastics factory. And his father had done the same thing.

 

It seemed that the one thing that we had in common was that we didn’t have enough information. We didn’t have enough knowledge about the things and the forces that were controlling our lives. And I watched my old man end up a victim and he didn´t even know it.” — Bruce Springsteen, May 7, 1981

 

“When I was sixteen or seventeen, it was hard for me to understand what [my father’s] life was like. How he’d gotten married so young. When I was living at home… he wasn’t much older than I am right now, and he’d been working in this factory for ten years already. He had to put up with all the humiliation the world puts you through living like that. When I moved away when I was eighteen, I was sure that I was never gonna miss him. And for a long time I never did.

 

It took us 30 years just to be able to tell each other that we loved each other. And it’s just silly to wait that long. If you got folks at home, you oughta try talking to them sometime. They probably need it, you know.” — Bruce Springsteen, May 8, 1981

 

There’s a famous optical illusion called “My Wife and My Mother-in-Law.”

You’ve probably seen it: Cartoonist William Ely Hill created it in 1915. When you look at it, you can either see the face of a young woman or an old one. You can see them both, but not at the same time–your perception window only allows you to bring only one or the other into focus.

Research suggests that which one you see first has a lot to do with which one you most relate to: youth or age.

“Independence Day” is a lot like that.

Bruce wrote two songs in “Independence Day”–one of youthful rebellion and escape, and another of empathy and love. Which one you hear first probably has a lot to do with which one you most relate to.

Bruce wrote “Independence Day” for Darkness on the Edge of Town (and played it throughout much of that tour), and as such it holds true to that album’s theme: the determination to slip our shackles, escape our circumstances, and realize our full potential.

But he released it on The River, and it exemplifies that album’s theme, too: the importance of family, fidelity, and the ties that bind.

“Independence Day” bridges the two albums. In a single song, we can hear the frustration of “Adam Raised a Cain” and “Streets of Fire” along with a tenderness Bruce had only hinted at before. To those who listen for it, “Independence Day” is one of the most revealing love songs in his catalog.

“Independence Day” is a song of farewell. It’s the last conversation–for a while–between father and son, as they sit facing each other in their living room, desirous but unable to bridge the gap between them, both aware that the gap is necessary for their relationship’s survival.

Well Papa go to bed now, it’s getting late
Nothing we can say is gonna change anything now
I’ll be leaving in the morning from St. Mary’s Gate
We wouldn’t change this thing even if we could somehow

There’s a bit of role reversal at play in the opening line: the son offering the line typically uttered by the father. “It’s getting late” holds deeper meaning here, though. It’s not just the end of the day–it’s the end of the narrator’s childhood, and the end of a certain stage of their relationship.

“This thing” is the path our narrator is set upon: leaving home and finding his way in the world. But it’s also their relationship itself. It’s too late, they realize, for anything to alter the course of the former, although we can sense from the narrator’s rueful vocals (if not the lyrics) that he wishes he could at least change the latter.

The music also plays a storytelling role here. It opens with the establishment of the song’s simple riff, played by Danny Federici on the organ with childlike innocence. Together with Bruce’s acoustic guitar, they create a pastoral soundscape, a small-town American gothic backdrop that renders the song timeless.

There’s a sense of fatalism at work throughout “Independence Day,” established in the very first couplet. But in the second verse, Bruce infuses a vein of defiance, firmly (and a bit on-the-nose) rooting the song in his Darkness songwriting period.

‘Cause the darkness of this house has got the best of us
There’s a darkness in this town that’s got us too
But they can’t touch me now and you can’t touch me now
They ain’t gonna do to me what I watched them do to you

In fact, at least in lyrics we hear echoes of the opening and closing tracks of Darkness on the Edge of Town, but whereas those tracks are self-centered anthems of actualization, the narrator of “Independence Day” is more focused on what he’s leaving behind than on where he’s going.

We never get a hint of what’s drawing him away from home–there’s no dream, no mission, no job, no girl. He’s running away, not toward–something Bruce makes explicit in the second chorus. And what he’s running from is an existential threat: if he doesn’t leave now, he’ll end up defeated and broken like his father, consigned to a “Factory” life.

So say goodbye, it’s Independence Day
It’s Independence Day all down the line
Just say goodbye, it’s Independence Day
It’s Independence Day this time

In title and chorus, Bruce plays off of the American holiday of Independence Day, a time of celebration over a hard-won rebellion. But there’s no celebration in this song… and in fact, it’s not even clear from Bruce’s pleading vocals whether his choruses are addressed to the father or the son. (I suspect the latter.)

The verses are all about the father, though–and it’s clear that even though he’s desperate to escape his father’s fate, our narrator feels their bond, as immutable as in “Adam Raised a Cain.” That’s not a coincidence: the two songs share the same narrator, the first two chapters of Bruce’s “Daddy Trilogy” that he would complete years later with “Walk Like a Man.”

Now I don’t know what it always was with us
We chose the words and, yeah, we drew the lines
There was just no way this house could hold the two of us
I guess that we were just too much of the same kind

Well say goodbye, it’s Independence Day
It’s Independence Day, all boys must run away
So say goodbye, it’s Independence Day
All men must make their way come Independence Day

As in many of Bruce’s most emotional songs, he lets Clarence say with his saxophone the things his characters can’t find the words for. His solo in “Independence Day” is warm, nostalgic, rueful, and loving–the promise of a someday that our narrator can’t allow himself to contemplate in the moment.

In the final verses, Bruce makes it clear that it isn’t just familial forces driving the son away–there are societal and possibly economic forces, too.

Now the rooms are all empty down at Frankie’s joint
And the highway she’s deserted, clear down to Breaker’s Point
There’s a lot of people leaving town now, leaving their friends, their homes
At night they walk that dark and dusty highway all alone

Well Papa go to bed now, it’s getting late
Nothing we can say can change anything now
Because there’s just different people coming down here now and they see things in different ways
And soon everything we’ve known will just be swept away

There’s a wave of social change washing over the town, and our narrator knows he can either rise above it or drown in it. I’ve never been certain how I feel about Bruce’s inclusion of these verses. On one hand, it dilutes the father/son dysfunction with external forces; would the son be leaving home if the town was carrying on as it had been throughout his life? But it also helps us imagine the scene from the father’s point of view: we suspect he knows his son has to leave because we trust that fathers want the best for their sons.

We all want the best for our children, the way our parents wanted the best for us. But the paradox of parenthood is that we compromise their promise to us for our promise to our own kids. That’s something most of us don’t realize until we’re parents ourselves. Bruce Springsteen did, though, and that empathy imbues the final lines of “Independence Day” with a poignant, throat-catching final chorus.

So say goodbye, it’s Independence Day
Papa now I know the things you wanted that you could not say
But won’t you just say goodbye, it’s Independence Day
I swear I never meant to take those things away

I was twelve years old when I first listened to those lines; I was a parent the first time I really heard them.

The things we want that we cannot say. Every parent has those things, I suspect, and every child comes to someday sense them, though we try our hardest for them not to. The compromises we make in life, in love, in work to provide our kids the opportunities we chose to forgo for them.

I was young and I didn’t know what to do when I saw your best steps stolen away from you.

We compromise, and we learn to live with those compromises. And in doing so, we begin to understand our own parents a bit better, and for the first time we wonder: who would they have been if not for us?

That’s the awful epiphanic beauty of those final lines of “Independence Day”: the guilt of the child for stealing the dreams of the parent, and the realization that the only way to make it right is to make the sacrifice worthwhile.

So we leave.

And we do our best to honor our parents’ compromises until our time comes to pay it forward.

When I was twelve, all I heard in “Independence Day” was defiance and the thrill of liberation. Now, all I can hear is the apology. The apology, the gratitude, and the love.

“Independence Day” is a song that only deepens in meaning for me as I age and watch my children start their own lives and families, hoping they make the best of the brief window we’re given before we become supporting players in someone else’s movie. Rare is the art that affords so much refraction through so many lenses. Thank you, Bruce.

And thank you, Dad.

Other than the two River Tours, where it featured regularly, “Independence Day” has remained a relative rarity over the years–never wholly absent but certainly very elusive.

When it does turn up, it’s apt to be clad in a new but always understated arrangement, like in this performance from 1996, Bruce’s last before his father passed away…

…or in this tender arrangement from the Reunion Tour, shortly after.

My favorite performances, though, are when Bruce plays it alone at the piano. “Independence Day” is one of his most intimate songs, and when he plays it alone, even he sometimes is overcome with emotion.

Bonus #1: The original recording of “Independence Day” featured a longer instrumental coda, which was abridged for the final album version. Here’s that original uncut track below, almost a minute longer than on the album.

Bonus #2: I love this intimate solo guitar performance from the documentary accompanying the anniversary box set for The River. It’s annotated with Bruce’s comments over the song in a few spots, but it’s lovely all the same.

Independence Day
Recorded: Autumn 1977 – April 1980
Released: The River (1980)
First performed: July 7, 1978 (Los Angeles, CA)
Last performed: August 23, 2016 (East Rutherford, NJ)

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