Roll of the Dice: Roulette

On December 30, 1978, Three Mile Island Unit 2 began commercial operation near Harrisburg in western Pennsylvania. Eighty-eight days later, the nuclear reactor suffered a partial meltdown when its cooling system malfunctioned, releasing deadly radiation into the atmosphere. To this date, the Three Mile Island incident remains the most significant accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power history.

The radiation leak happened on the day of the meltdown, March 28, 1979, but it wouldn’t be discovered until two days later. When word of the leak got out, local residents were advised to stay indoors “indefinitely” but were not evacuated.

Confusingly, however, Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh advised all pregnant women and small children within a five-mile radius of the accident to leave the area. The mixed messages created civic distrust and caused a panic, and within days over 100,000 residents had fled the area.

News of the reactor meltdown gripped not just local residents but the nation and the world in fear.

I vividly remember my family glued to the somber newscasts that week. I was ten years old and lived about a hundred miles from the accident site, and no one really knew or trusted at the time what distance was considered safe. Nowhere in Pennsylvania felt particularly safe, and New Jersey seemed a bit too close for comfort, too.

Those of us who lived in the area paid very close attention to official updates, and there was a distinct sense that the people in charge either didn’t know or weren’t admitting exactly how concerned we should be.

Bruce Springsteen shared that distrust, and within a few days of the accident, he’d already written a song about it. He recorded the acoustic home demo below while the news was still playing out on television screens across the country.

Bruce continued working on his song that week, and on April 3rd–just four days after the governor’s alarming press conference and evacuation order/non-order–he assembled the E Street Band in the studio to take a crack at a still in progress but much more developed version.

Bruce’s song was called “Roulette,” after the way state officials were taking chances and placing bets on the safety of its residents. “Roulette” captured the sense of fear, panic, and distrust that was prevalent in the immediate aftermath of the accident–distrust bordering on paranoia.

Even in its earliest full-band version, “Roulette” kicks off with a terrifying drum entrance by Max Weinberg on the tom-toms and a suspenseful guitar riff lifted from Magazine’s “Shot by Both Sides.”

The final version of “Roulette” became the first song recorded for the album that would become The River, and while it wouldn’t make the final cut, its punk spirit and live energy set the tone for much of that record. No less than ten confirmed mixes were created, and the three official releases of the song (on the B-side of the 1988 single for “One Step Up,” the 1998 Tracks box set, and the disc of outtakes on the 2015 The Ties That Bind box set) are all different mixes of the same recording.

With such urgency, relevance, power, and detail, it’s surprising that it took almost a decade before fans heard “Roulette” either on disc or on stage. (It was released on vinyl and debuted in concert during the same week in February 1988.)

That’s likely because Bruce was never fully comfortable with the visceral paranoia that informed its creation. “I may just have gotten afraid,” he told Mark Hagen in a 1999 interview for Mojo. “It went a little over the top, which is what’s good about it. In truth it probably should have gotten put on. It would have been one of the best things on the record and it was just a mistake at the time.”

He’s not wrong, on any count: “Roulette” is very much over the top, but it’s that authentic fear and distrust that makes the song resonate so strongly.

The song takes off in mid-flight: our narrator–a Riker’s Island fireman (Bruce seems to have transplanted the setting to someplace a little closer to home)–is fleeing town. Our narrator packed his family and their belongings so quickly that the yard is still filled with toys and their home unprotected.

We left the toys out in the yard
I took my wife and kids and I left my home unguarded
We packed what we could into the car
No one here knows how it started
Well suddenly everything was just so out of control
Now I want some answers, mister, I need to know
I hear all the talk but I don’t know what you’re saying
But I think I got a good idea of the game that you’re playing

Roulette, that’s the name
Roulette, that’s the game now
Roulette, I don’t believe what they’re saying
Roulette, everybody’s playing

He’s fleeing, but he doesn’t know what from, or why. He wants answers, but none are forthcoming. Most of all, though, he wants to hear something he can trust. All he gets, though, are empty reassurances, mixed messages, and the distinct sense that their lives and health are nothing but a game of chance to the people in charge.

As the verse builds towards the first chorus, suspicion and distrust give way to frustration, and in the second verse outright anger.

I grew up here on this street
Where nothing moves, just a strange breeze
In a town full of worthless memories
There’s a shadow in my backyard
I’ve got a house full of things that I can’t touch
Well all those things they won’t do me much good now
I was a fireman out at Riker’s, I did my job
Mister, I’ve been cheated, I feel like I’ve been robbed
I’m the big expendable, my life’s just cancelled null and void
Well what you gonna do about your new boy

Roulette, you’re playing with my life
Roulette, with my kids and my wife
Roulette, every day the stakes get bigger
Roulette, a different finger on the trigger 

Our narrator has done his best to live the right way; he got up every morning and went to work each day as a public servant. But in the wake of the accident, he’s got nothing to show for it but exile from a contaminated home. There’s no promised land on the horizon, and he demands answers from the state’s “mister” — the authorities on whom his family’s safety is dependent, who seem to take neither urgency in nor accountability for the situation.

If any one thing about “Roulette” was responsible for its exclusion from The River, it was likely the final verse, which veers away from the visceral emotion that carries the song through its first verses and chase scene bridge and dives headfirst into a police state like something out of speculative fiction.

Down by the river that talks
The night speaks in searchlights and shortwave radios squawk
Well the police patrol the streets
But I’ve left behind the man I used to be
Everything he believed and all that belonged to me
I tried to find my way out to somewhere where I thought it’d be safe
They stopped me at the roadblock they put up on the interstate
They put me in detention but I broke loose and then I ran
They said they just want to ask me a few questions but I think they had other plans
Now I don’t know who to trust and I don’t know what I can believe
They say they want to help me but with the stuff they keep on saying
I think those guys just wanna keep on playing

Despite its melodrama, though, the final verse of “Roulette” has some of Bruce’s rawest, punkiest vocals on record. All of the verses are constructed such that the lyrics never quite fit–Bruce is forced to stumble and tumble headfirst through them, a deliberate songwriting decision that conveys the narrator’s panic.

But the second half of the final verse (extended by two lines to milk the moment) is absolute desperation. Our narrator is lost in his paranoia, and we sense that last thread–the one that’s been fraying throughout the song–is about to snap.

Roulette, with my life
Roulette, with my kids and my wife
Roulette, the bullet’s in the chamber
Roulette, who’s the unlucky stranger
Roulette, surprise, you’re dead
Roulette, the gun’s to your head
Roulette, the bullet’s spinning in the chamber
Roulette, pull the trigger, feel the click
No further danger

“Roulette” ends on an unsettling note, its titular metaphor fully revealed as Russian roulette, and it’s our narrator’s turn to spin. No further danger–that final line echoes the unconvincing reassurance of the state authorities but implies a gruesome irony. As Max’s pounding tomtom heartbeat fades us out, we’re unsure whether we’re out of danger because we won… or because we lost.

Bruce played “Roulette” regularly throughout the Tunnel of Love Express Tour, debuting it on stage just two days before it appeared in record stores, but he wouldn’t play it again until very late in the Reunion Tour, as a one-off in Hartford.

It made a pair of cameos at the tail end of the Rising Tour, too.

“Roulette” seems to make an appearance or three in every E Street Band tour, in fact–just enough to still be considered a true rarity (it’s only been played fifteen times in the last twenty years) but frequently enough to remain hopeful if it’s still on your chase list.

Bruce never released “Roulette” on an official album, relegating it instead to outtake box set collections. Still, it’s importance as a milestone in Bruce’s career can’t be understated. Not only was it the first song recorded for The River, it also established an edgier, timelier, and more topical turn in his songwriting that he would lean into over the years to come.

As for the incident that inspired the song, over the next six months anti-nuclear protests grew in frequency, size, and urgency not just in America but around the world. In September, the movement peaked in a New York City rally that drew more than 200,000 people–lured in part, no doubt, by a concurrent “No Nukes” concert series at Madison Square Garden.

Bruce headlined two of those concerts, but despite his continued concern for the cause, the new song that signaled his support didn’t make its debut that night. It would still be a few years before Bruce would seem comfortable performing such topical material. That time was coming, though, and it would mark an inflection point in his career.

Roulette
Recorded: April 1979
Released: One Step Up (B-side, 1988),Tracks (1998), The River: Outtakes (2015)
First performed: February 25, 1988 (Worcester, MA)
Last performed: July 5, 2016 (Milan, Italy)

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