Roll of the Dice: Seaside Bar Song

“There was a club in New Jersey–it’s still there–called The Osprey. It’s in Manasquan. I had my first drink there, first drink ever. I thought it was the greatest night of my life. And I saw Bo Diddley! I saw Bo Diddley at the The Osprey in Manasquan. There’s a little stage… there’s a bar and a little stage that’s right there. So I went home and I wrote this song.”  —Bruce Springsteen, March 28, 2012

The Stone Pony may be the more famous seaside bar, but The Osprey is the one Bruce Springsteen immortalized in song.

I suppose one could dispute the notion of immortality via a rarely performed 1973 outtake, especially one that isn’t even on most casual fans’ radar. However, The Osprey inspired a lot more than just “Seaside Bar Song”… indirectly, at least.

Let’s take a listen.

The first thing that jumps out at us from “Seaside Bar Song” isn’t its lyrics. It’s that Farfisa riff that grabs us, bores its way into our brains, and absolutely refuses to let go. In later years, we’d learn to expect this kind of earworm from Bruce, but “Seaside Bar Song” was recorded in mid-1973, long before “Badlands,” “I’m a Rocker,” and “Cadillac Ranch.”

Only one other song on the album has such an irresistible riff, and as with “The E Street Shuffle,” Springsteen modeled his hook on an early rock and roll classic. Early studio takes of “Seaside Bar Song” were called “Johnny & The Hurricanes Song,” and it’s not hard to figure out which song Bruce had in mind.

“Red River Rock” was a Top Ten hit single for Johnny & The Hurricanes in 1959, but both the song and riff date much further back than that. A nineteenth-century Canadian folk song called “Red River Valley” first recorded by Kelly Harrell in 1926 bears a familiar melody.

It only takes a few seconds of listening to each song to recognize the through-line that connects the accordion intro from Harrell’s recording to the Farfisa lead in “Red River Rock” to Danny Federici’s riff in “Seaside Bar Song.”

It takes a full minute, however, for Bruce to utter even a single word in “Seaside Bar Song,” and by that time we’re too busy bopping to care. But if we slow down and actually pay attention to the lyrics, it’s amazing how many seeds we can find that would germinate in more well-known songs months, years, or even decades later.

The first thing we might notice is that “Seaside Bar Song” isn’t about a bar at all. Sure, Bruce namechecks his fictional haunt in the second verse, but otherwise we may as well be listening to an early prototype of “Born to Run.” All the elements are here–the highway, the car, the escape, the pledge of everlasting love (at least for tonight), and the promise of someday. We hear the echoes before we’re even two lines into the song.

Well, Billy bought a Chevy ’40 coupe deluxe
Chrome wheels, stick shift, give her gas, pop the clutch
Little girls on the corner like a diamond they shine
Someday, Billy, I’m gonna make ’em all mine

Hey girl, you wanna ride in Daddy’s Cadillac
Because I love the way your long hair falls down your back
Bo Diddley, Bo Diddley’s at the Seaside Bar
We’ll run barefoot in the sand and listen to his guitar

“Born to Run” isn’t the only future song we hear in “Seaside Bar Song.” Bruce would borrow the cadence and car imagery almost a decade later when writing “Open All Night” for Nebraska.

And then there’s the bridge…

You say your mama’s gonna meet you when the morning comes
Yeah, and papa’s gonna beat you because he knows you’re out on the run
I’m gonna live a life of love and tonight you’re the one

Bruce was writing “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” contemporaneously, and as is often the case, we can hear the same themes shining through similar lyrical and musical devices. The entire structure of both songs are similar, in fact. They share a “collage” approach, each song shifting dramatically in tempo and tone at key points without ever losing cohesion. The next passage is a great example, and it also introduces our next and most explicit “call-forward.”

The highway is alive tonight so baby do not be frightened
There’s something about a pretty girl on a sweet summer night that gets this boy excited
The radio man finally understands and plays you something you can move to
You lay back easy, cut loose your drive power,
your girl leans over, says
“Daddy can you turn that radio up any louder?”

A couple of decades down the road, Bruce nicked “the highway is alive tonight” for “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” where he uses it in such a diametrically different context that one is forced to wonder whether we’re meant to imagine the same narrator in both songs, carefree in youth but downtrodden in middle age.

Let’s not wonder for long, though, because like “Born to Run” and “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight),” “Seaside Bar Song” is about the glory of now, of surviving the day in order to embrace the night and all of the promise it offers.

Ah, the juke joints humming, everybody came down
Little Willie and the Soul Brooms laying all his stuff down
Well, don’t let that daylight steal your soul
Get in your wheels and roll, roll, roll, roll

“Seaside Bar Song” is an infectious crowd-pleaser–so much so that it’s surprising to realize Bruce only ever performed it once (that we know of) in the century it was written.

That debut performance was from way back on the Greetings Tour, when Bruce and his band (they didn’t even have a name yet) made a stop in Binghamton, New York. They wouldn’t play it again for almost thirty years–not even when the song became a fan-favorite after its inclusion in Tracks in 1998.

When “Seaside Bar Song” finally did return, it was–appropriately–at the Jersey Shore. Bruce re-debuted it with the Max Weinberg 7 at his 2001 holiday shows, stunning the audience of hardcore fans with an obscure rarity no one could have expected that night.

“Seaside Bar Song” made fourteen appearances between 2001 and 2006, all at the Jersey Shore. It wasn’t until a Philadelphia stop on the Working on a Dream Tour that fans heard it on the E Street stage. That was the night Springsteen revealed the identity of the titular bar.

Once reintroduced to the stage, “Seaside Bar Song” made frequent appearances on fan request signs and a handful of appearances on the Wrecking Ball and High Hopes Tours.

It was conspicuously absent from the 2016 River Tour, however, despite the deep archival setlists that characterized the tour’s last leg. By the time Bruce’s next tour kicks off, it will have been almost a decade since “Seaside Bar Song” was last heard in concert.

As for its namesake: The Osprey still stands on 1st Avenue in Manasquan, seven miles or so south of The Stone Pony in Asbury Park. You won’t catch Bo Diddley playing there, of course, and I’m pretty sure Little Willie and The Soul Brooms were fictional from the start (although it’s such a great classic rock and roll band name that I can’t be completely sure).

But on a summer night at the shore, if you don’t let the daylight steal your soul, you can get in your wheels and roll, roll, roll down to Manasquan, New Jersey, where The Osprey will almost certainly be humming.

Seaside Bar Song
Recorded: June 28 – July 24, 1973
Released: Tracks (1998), 18 Tracks (1999)
First performed: June 13, 1973 (Binghamton, NY)
Last performed: May 13, 2014 (Albany, NY)

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