Roll of the Dice: Richfield Whistle

Earlier this week, we took a listen to Bruce Springsteen’s unreleased Nebraska-era work-in-progress, “James Lincoln Deere.”

Springsteen’s 1982 acoustic home demo featured a protagonist driven to cold-blooded murder by unemployment and a brutal economy. “James Lincoln Deere” was too heavy-handed to earn an official release, but Bruce wasn’t ready to give up on his protagonist just yet.

He revisited him a year later, giving James a new surname (Lucas), a new wife (Pat), and a new instrumental arrangement. The setting is the same, though, as are the economic circumstances and exposition.

However, by the end of the second verse, “Richfield Whistle” establishes itself as a much stronger and greyer song, telegraphing the more nuanced songwriting we’d see from Bruce in the years ahead.

Let’s take a listen.

The early verses are very similar to “James Lincoln Deere,” but the few changes are significant. James is still Remington-born, and he still finds himself in Richfield Prison. But whereas James Lincoln ends up behind bars for the cruel crime he commits late in the song, James Lucas has already served his sentence by the time we meet him.

My name is James Lucas
I was born in Remington
And paroled from Richfield Prison
In the winter of ’81
I was free and on the streets of Indiana
I’d just turned 32
Same man with nowhere left to run
No different, sir, than you

Released from prison for good behavior, Jimmy marries Pat and does his best with his wife to make ends meet. Unlike Jimmy and Terry, who “got by all right on the money that we made,” Jimmy and Pat worked just as hard only to fall further and further behind.

Me and Pat, we married in the spring
Moved in with her Ma and Pa
On our wedding night she sighed, “Jimmy,
We can have anything we want.”
It was for those things we wanted
We worked as hard as two people could
But somehow in the end, mister,
This didn’t do no good

To fully appreciate the evolution in Bruce’s songwriting, it’s important to understand the very different character portrait Bruce draws with almost the exact same words. At this point in the two songs, James Lincoln is a 22-year-old newlywed  making a decent living and easily resisting the overtures of his criminal brother-in-law. By contrast, James Lucas is a reformed ex-con (for what, we never learn), doing his best to stay on the straight and narrow but finding his honest job to be insufficient for feeding his family.

What happens to good people when outside forces make it impossible to survive when you play by the rules? It’s a question that obviously fascinated Springsteen; he’d ask it again and again as recently as “Swallowed Up (In the Belly of the Whale.)”

James Lucas almost immediately starts making moral compromises, rationalizing and justifying as he skims from his decent but wealthy employer.

The prison got me drivin’ delivery
For Mr. Wills over in Ridgeside
Well, I started loadin’ a little extra
And I’d sell it on the side
I didn’t like what I was doin’
I didn’t lose no sleep at night
Mr. Wills, he was a rich man
He’d been a rich man all his life

Jimmy knows he’s doing the wrong thing, but he doesn’t recognize he’s on a slippery slope. One moral compromise leads to another, a classic noir theme that Bruce later employed in songs like “The Big Muddy” and “The Line.”

Inevitably, Jimmy is found out. His boss confronts him but has mercy on him, simply firing him when he also could have had him arrested.

I was on the loading dock one evening
When I heard the warehouse phone
The dispatcher said, “Jim, they wanna see you
In the front office ‘fore you go home.”
All Mr. Wills said was, “I don’t understand.
I could send you back to Richfield fast.
If you needed some extra money, Jim,
All you had to do was ask.”

Now jobless, Jimmy and Pat argue, and Jimmy drives off with only a bottle and ten dollars to his name. He stops at a quiet liquor store along the highway and gets out. Because Bruce is careful to tell us that Jimmy left the motor running, we tense up. Whatever’s about to happen, we know it requires a fast getaway.

Well, that night me and Pat, we had a fight
I was out drivin’ ’round in the rain
With a fifth of gin and a half-tank of gas
And ten dollars to my name
I passed a deserted liquor store
Way out on Highway One
I turned and pulled into that parking lot
Got out but I let my motor run

Over the course of the song, Bruce has steadily and deliberately planted seeds: we know that Jimmy is an ex-con, we know he resorted to theft even after his parole, we know he’s jobless, desperate, angry, and probably under the influence.  At this point, it seems we are clearly in “Johnny 99” territory.

But here comes the curveball.

Well, I stood lookin’ in the window
For a long, long while
When I walked in the man behind the register
He looked at me and smiled
“That’s some weather we’re havin’ out there.
Can I help you find somethin’, friend?”
I didn’t answer, I just stood there
Then I turned around and went

Jimmy walks into the liquor store with every intention of robbing it. Something stops him, though. Perhaps it’s the decency of the proprietor; maybe it’s the voice of his former boss in his head: all you had to do was ask. Or maybe he simply recognized who he was becoming.

Whatever the reason, Jimmy turns away from temptation and returns home.

I don’t know how long I sat in my driveway
My shirt was covered in sweat
The house was dark when I went in
Pat was lyin’ awake in bed
She hit the light, I was standin’ in the doorway
She said, “I was worried, where you been so long?”
I felt her arms around me
She said, “Jimmy, I’m so glad you’re home.”

Jimmy made the right call, but it wasn’t an easy one. He and Pat are still in dire straits, and he knows he’ll be called upon to make that same decision day after day after day. Bruce will return to this theme–the eternal struggle with one’s inner demons–again and again, in songs like “Cautious Man” and “Straight Time.”

Jimmy goes to bed, but lays awake in the night thinking, like the protagonist of “Wreck on the Highway.” As he drifts off finally to sleep, he hears the prison whistle–still fresh in his memory–warning him that Richfield still waits for him should he succumb to temptation.

Richfield Prison stands on a high hill
Where the county line runs out
And there’s a whistle that blows every time a man comes in
Or a man gets out
At night we lay wrapped in each other’s arms
Listenin’ to the rain
I heard that Richfield whistle blowin’
Just blowin’ in my dreams

It’s an unsettling ending, one that sticks with us much longer than the resolution of “James Lincoln Deere.” Ultimately, neither song would be released, but both would directly influence an officially released gem more than a decade later.

We’ll take a listen to that one in a few days.

Richfield Whistle
Recorded: April 24, 1983
Never released
Never performed

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