Roll of the Dice: Wreck on the Highway

“On a rainy highway the character witnesses a fatal accident. He drives home, and lying awake that night next to his lover, he realizes you have a limited number of opportunities to love someone, to do your work, to be a part of something, to parent your children, to do something good.” — Bruce Springsteen, Songs (1998)

The first time we learn about death, it’s something that happens to other people. Not to us, and not to anyone we love. Our child brain understands what death is, but somehow we instinctively feel that we’re protected from it.

When we get a year or two older, we realize that death happens to people we love, too. But we frame it in self-interest: Who will take care of me, we wonder, if Mommy and Daddy die? Later still,  we grapple with the terrible notion of our own finality.

But for many of us, it’s not until we reach or breach the cusp of adulthood that we  understand the true import of death: not only are our days on this earth finite, but so is our opportunity to work, to make a difference in the world, and most importantly–to love.

“Wreck on the Highway” is an intimate look at the moment we realize we can’t take for granted our ability to show our love to the people we care about.

Bruce first wrote that pullquote at the top of this essay in his 1998 book, Songs. At the time, he was referring only to the last song on The River, but during his 2016 tour celebrating that landmark album, he appropriately applied it to the entire album.

I’m glad he did that, because I always had a narrower and more nuanced view of “Wreck on the Highway” than he offered in Songs.

The story itself is as straightforward as Bruce ever gets: a working man drives home at night on a rural highway and comes upon a recent wreck–so recent that our narrator is the first on the scene, and the mortally injured driver still clings to and pleads for his life.

Last night I was out driving
Coming home at the end of the working day
I was riding alone through the drizzling rain
On a deserted stretch of a county two-lane
When I came upon a wreck on the highway

Now there was blood and glass all over
And there was nobody there but me
As the rain tumbled down hard and cold
I seen a young man lying by the side of the road
He cried “Mister, won’t you help me please”

Our narrator calls and waits for an ambulance, which tragically arrives too late. The young driver dies on the scene, and our good Samaritan protagonist is haunted by the house call he knows someone is about to receive.

An ambulance finally came and took him to Riverside
I watched as they drove him away
And I thought of a girlfriend or a young wife
And a state trooper knocking in the middle of the night
To say “your baby died in a wreck on the highway”

Until now, the entire song has taken place “last night,” which explains the detachment we hear in Bruce’s vocals. His character is still in shock, unable to absorb and process what he’d just witnessed.

For the last verse, however, we flash forward in time. Life continues, as it must, and our narrator’s routine resumes. But something has changed: he now understands how fragile life is, and how quickly those we love can be taken from us.

Sometimes I sit up in the darkness
And I watch my baby as she sleeps
Then I climb in bed and I hold her tight
I just lay there awake in the middle of the night
Thinking ’bout the wreck on the highway

And that right there is the subtle difference between Bruce’s lyrics and his explanation of them. Death certainly reminds us of how limited our time on this earth is, but that’s not what “Wreck on the Highway” is really about.

It’s about how brief is the time we get with the people we love.

At any time, it might be us getting that metaphorical knock on the door in the middle of the night. A child, a parent, a lover–sooner or later, they’ll all be taken away from us, unless we leave them first.

It’s a haunting message, one that Bruce delivers against an ethereal, introspective backing track. (Bruce borrows the song’s title and adapts the melody of Roy Acuff’s preachier song by the same name.)

But it’s an important message too, because it reminds us to make the most of the time we have. To hold our babies tight (Bruce cleverly plays on his own then-penchant for infantilizing women so that we might envision either our lover or our child as the “baby” in question) and not miss a minute. Because one way or another, those minutes will end before we’re ready.

“Wreck on the Highway” caps off the final side of The River, which contains a suite of songs that arguably share the same narrator (Bruce has suggested as much in interviews over the years) and a central car motif.

Somber and introspective, it’s the last song from the album one might expect to hear Bruce cover in concert.  Surprisingly though, “Wreck on the Highway” was regularly featured in a quiet, restrained arrangement throughout both the original and reprised River Tours.

It also made a handful of electric piano appearances on Bruce’s 2005 solo acoustic tour.

“Wreck on the Highway” is often cited as a favorite by admiring singer-songwriters, ranking in esteem alongside the songs that would shortly follow when Bruce turned his attention toward recording Nebraska after finishing the River Tour.

One of those admiring artists was John Wesley Harding. Not only did Harding record his own affecting cover of Bruce’s song, he also performed it with the original artist himself–twice, fifteen years apart in intimate, acoustic settings.

For most of us, though, “Wreck on the Highway” remains an elusive rarity, seldom played except as part of a full-album performance of The River.  One might attribute that to its themes of mortality and finality, which seem at odds with the bonds of life and community that are hallmarks of Springsteen’s shows. But attentive fans realize that the real message of “Wreck on the Highway” is to make the most of the time you’re given and embrace the ties that bind.

Isn’t that what Bruce’s shows are all about, too?

Bonus: In January 1980, Bruce assembled the E Street Band for a run-through rehearsal of a work-in-progress “Wreck on the Highway.” If we listen closely to the distant vocals, we can recognize most of the lyrics, but the uptempo arrangement is very different from the one we’d come to know and love by the end of the year.

Wreck on the Highway
Recorded: January – April, 1980
Released: The River (1980)
First performed: October 3, 1980 (Ann Arbor, MI)
Last performed: July 28, 2016 (Oslo, Norway)