Roll of the Dice: Johnny Bye Bye

“I remember when I was nine years old and my mother had on The Ed Sullivan Show and Elvis came on. I sat there and I said, ‘When I grow up, I wanna be just like that.’ I remember I was sitting at home when somebody called me up and told me that he died. It´s something I still think about all the time… how somebody that had so much and was so alive inside could end up losing so bad and seeming so lonely.”

 

— Bruce Springsteen, September 2, 1981

In March of 1981, Bruce Springsteen was exhausted.

He’d been on the road non-stop for six months, and he needed a break. He’d completed the first U.S. leg of the River Tour on March 5th and was due in the U.K. for the kick-off of the European leg just twelve days later. But Bruce was tired, and something had to give.

Atypically, he cancelled almost three weeks worth of shows and retreated to his home in Colts Neck, New Jersey to rest. And because he’s Bruce Springsteen, he wrote.

He had an outtake from his previous record called “Come On (Let’s Go Tonight)” that didn’t make either Darkness on the Edge of Town or The River–most likely because its melody (and a few of its lyrics) gave way to “Factory.”

But “Come On (Let’s Go Tonight)” was more than just a prototypical “Factory.” It was actually a profound meditation on the difference between wealth and happiness, and how even the most successful entertainer in the world succumbed to his demons in the end. (“Everybody wants heaven,” Bruce wrote, “but nobody wants to die.”)

Riding high on the success of The River and feeling low after near exhausting himself promoting it, Bruce must have been thinking about his musical idol, Elvis Presley, whose tragic death had inspired “Come On (Let’s Go Tonight),” and how fame had become an isolating experience for him. Bruce dusted off his old outtake, wrote a new melody for it, gave his female lead a new dress, and recorded a home demo.

This new version of “Come On (Let’s Go Tonight)” was more uptempo and more urgent than his earlier outtake. (It actually sounded very much like the Nebraska material he’d write only months later.)

It was a stronger song, and one that showed considerable promise. When he returned to the stage a few weeks later, Bruce brought his new song with him. It wasn’t the version he’d recorded at home, though–the song had evolved and now featured a new melody, three new verses, and a new title: “Johnny Bye Bye.”

“Johnny Bye Bye” featured a contemplative, almost pensive melody, but its lyrics ran the gamut from wistfully romantic to brutally tragic.

To understand (let alone appreciate) “Johnny Bye Bye,” we first have to understand a little bit of rock and roll history. In 1960, the legendary Chuck Berry recorded a follow-up to his smash hit 1958 single, “Johnny B. Goode.” In fact, it was more than a follow-up–“Bye Bye Johnny” was a direct sequel.

One of the most recognizable and most covered songs in rock history, “Johnny B. Goode” was the story of a country boy with uncanny musical talent who (with his mother’s encouragement) dreams of making it big.

“Bye Bye Johnny” picks up the story. Still unflagging in her support for her son’s dreams, Johnny’s mother empties her life savings to send her boy out west to become not just a pop star, but a movie star too (not unlike a certain boy from Memphis).

“Bye Bye Johnny” has a happy ending: Johnny makes it big, falls in love, and promises his mother he will send for her soon.

But in real life, Bruce knew, fame and fortune often led to more tragic outcomes. He saw an opportunity to draw both a direct comparison and contrast between the fairy tale of Johnny B. Goode and the ugly demise of Elvis Presley by welding Berry’s song onto his own.

Bruce lifted Berry’s first verse verbatim (Berry would eventually receive a co-writing credit), starting off his hero’s journey with all of the idealism and promise of youth:

Well she drew out all her money from the Southern Trust
And she put her little boy on a Greyhound Bus
Leaving Memphis with a guitar in his hand
On a one-way ticket to the promised land

…and followed that with his original two verses from “Come On (Let’s Go Tonight)”:

Now hey little girlie with your red dress on
There’s a party tonight down in Memphis town
I’ll be going down there if you need a ride
Come on, come on, let’s go tonight

How many have fallen with their dream denied
Now tell me baby are you lonesome tonight
‘Cause the man on the radio says Elvis Presley died
Come on, come on, let’s go tonight

It’s an abrupt change of setting and context, and it comes without explanation. Only at the end of the last of the two new verses that end the song do we make the connection:

Down in Dixie tonight the sky is hard and black
Come on up over the ridge one long white Cadillac
They stand on the roadside waiting in the heat
Bound together forever in the promise of an endless sleep

Well they found him slumped up against the drain
With a whole lot of nothing running through his veins
Well bye-bye Johnny, oh Johnny bye-bye
You didn’t have to die, you didn’t have to die

There are actually two references to the dangers of fame-fueled excess at play in “Johnny Bye Bye.” The Elvis reference is the obvious one, because he’s name-checked in the third verse and has his death scene re-enacted in the final verse.

But notice the “long white Cadillac’ reference, too–that’s a nod to another of Bruce’s musical heroes, Hank Williams, who died of a heart attack in his Cadillac while drunk and high on his way to a performance, following years of substance abuse and depression.

(Update 7/14/2022: Thanks to readers Clive Vernon Parkinson and Mark Stricherz for setting me straight on the fact that Elvis’ funeral procession prominently featured a white Cadillac–so my Williams reference was probably a wishful connection rather than an accurate one!)

Success brought down Hank, and it brought down Elvis. Bruce saw the parallel between his idols and Berry’s fictional character, and drew a lesson from it–a lesson he shared subtly and powerfully by simply name-checking Johnny (after namelessly introducing him via Berry’s opening verse) and tragically bemoaning, you didn’t have to die.

“Johnny Bye Bye” was the only new post-River song that he debuted on that tour, and he played it throughout the remainder of his 1981 gigs. Once he completed the recordings that would eventually become his Nebraska album the following year, Bruce took a crack at recording “Johnny Bye Bye” in the studio, but that audio does not circulate.

In early 1983, however, Bruce made another attempt, once again recasting the musical accompaniment (this time almost rockabilly) and recruiting Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg to join him on what would otherwise be a solo track. Lyrically, Bruce tightened the song, eliminating a verse to bring the song in well under two minutes.

That version of “Johnny Bye Bye” appeared on the B-side of the single for “I’m on Fire,” and Bruce played it throughout the fall and winter of 1984-1985.

There’s yet another officially released version of “Johnny Bye Bye” — the one that appears on Bruce’s 1998 Tracks box set. That version is essentially the same one as the “I’m on Fire” B-side, but it features a drum machine instead of Max’s live drumming. (Max is not credited on the Tracks version.)

That version doesn’t appear to be officially streamable on-line, however, so I can’t feature it here. But trust me: you’re not missing anything.

And there’s even another version of “Johnny Bye Bye” with yet another additional verse, recorded in March 1983, but this one was never released.

For a song that he tinkered with so incessantly and performed on stage 71 times, it’s surprising that “Johnny Bye Bye” disappeared from Bruce’s set lists in the middle of the Born in the U.S.A. Tour, never to return.

Perhaps he was secure in his own lesson by then and no longer needed to remind himself each night. Or maybe he simply grew more accepting. In a 2016 Rolling Stone interview, Brian Hiatt asked Bruce if Elvis haunted him “as an example of exactly where you didn’t want to end up.”

Bruce replied: “I don’t know… Everybody makes their maps, and people will look at the one I wrote and there will be things they’ll want to follow and things they won’t want to follow. I got so much from Elvis as an inspiration, and I admire that voice so deeply right until the end.”

He paused and added: “And everybody struggles.”

Johnny Bye-Bye
Recorded: January 1983
Released: I’m on Fire (1985), Tracks (1998)
First performed: May 13, 1981 (Manchester, England)
Last performed: April 3, 1985 (Melbourne, Australia)

Looking for your favorite Bruce song? Check our full index here. New entries every week!