Roll of the Dice: Straight Time

“This is a song about a fellow who gets out of prison and is working hard to sort of integrate himself back into his family and into the world at large. But a change like that is a hard thing to do, because all your old habits end up feeling like your friends. Sometimes those very old habits, it’s how we define ourselves, how we feel like we know who we are. Whether it’s true or not, whether they kill us or not.”  –Bruce Springsteen, December 3, 1995

“Straight Time” was one of the first songs Springsteen wrote for The Ghost of Tom Joad, at least a year before he even had a vision for the album. He recorded it, listened to it once, and then shelved it. “Basically, I threw it away,” Bruce told Bob Costas in a 1995 interview, crediting Jon Landau for recognizing and advocating for its worth.

The roots of “Straight Time” date back much further, though–all the way back to a 1978 neo-noir crime film of the same name starring Dustin Hoffman, and a pair of noir-ish, Nebraska-era outtakes.

We took a look at “James Lincoln Deere” and “Richfield Whistle” last week. If you missed them, I recommend checking them out to appreciate how they both informed and influenced “Straight Time.”

The Ghost of Tom Joad is often thought of as a solo album, and about half the songs on it are indeed one-man performances. “Straight Time,” however, features a full band–one that plays with such subtlety and restraint that you’d be forgiven for thinking it a solo tune, too.

Danny Federici is the only other E Street resident on the track; the rest of the players are new to the scene. Soozie Tyrell makes her debut appearance on the violin, and Jim Hanson makes his first of only three on the bass. Garry Mallaber is only slightly more familiar–he’s the drummer on every Lucky Town track, and he makes a return engagement here.

Musically, “Straight Time” is gentler and more reflective than either of the 1982-83 solo efforts that contributed their DNA to it. Bruce crafted a much subtler set of lyrics, too, rejecting both the cold-blooded murder of “James Lincoln Deere” and the hero’s resistance to temptation in “Richfield Whistle.”

Yet we can clearly see the elements he poached from each. As with James Lincoln and James Lucas, Charlie is an ex-con doing his best to keep his nose clean and make ends meet. In 1995, Bruce wrote with much more economy than he did in 1982, and he accomplishes in just three lines what it took him two full verses to do in the earlier outtakes. (The 1978 film Straight Time probably helped. Bruce’s exposition is remarkably similar to the movie.)

Got out of prison back in ’86 and I found a wife
Walked the clean and narrow just trying to stay out and stay alive
Got a job at the rendering plant, it ain’t gonna make me rich
In the darkness before dinner comes sometimes I can feel the itch
I got a cold mind to go tripping ‘cross that thin line
I’m sick of doing straight time

In the second half of the first verse, Bruce solves a problem that plagued “James Lincoln Deere” and “Richfield Whistle”: both earlier songs featured protagonists that seemed too virtuous (as virtuous as an ex-con can be, at least), making their inevitable concession to temptation seem sudden and forced.

In “Straight Time,” Bruce reveals that Charlie feels the pull of temptation from the start. As he’d explain on stage and in interviews, we all have bad habits that are hard to break, because when something becomes habitual, it becomes part of our very nature. Charlie feels the itch to improve his circumstances via less-than-ethical means, and he finds it increasingly hard to resist scratching–especially when his uncle (playing the role of Sill in “James Lincoln Deere”) comes calling.

My uncle’s at the evening table, makes his living running hot cars
Slips me a hundred dollar bill, says “Charlie you best remember who your friends are”
I got a cold mind to go tripping ‘cross that thin line
I ain’t making straight time

Charlie is already bending toward resuming his life of crime. His uncle just makes it that much harder to resist. “You best remember who your friends are,” he tells Charlie, but the words might as well have been spoken by his own vices.

For most of us–those of us who haven’t spent years behind bars–the idea of a convicted criminal throwing away their second chance might escape our understanding. Bruce understands it, though, and he explains:

Well eight years in, it feels like you’re gonna die
But you get used to anything, sooner or later it just becomes your life

The human mind adapts to its environment. Spend enough time in even the worst of circumstances, and eventually those circumstances take on the comfort of familiarity. Sooner or later it just becomes your life, and you become the person who lives it.

This is Charlie’s internal struggle: can he reinvent himself through family, community, and work, or will he inevitably re-embrace the self he hoped he’d left behind in prison. It doesn’t help that even his own wife seems braced for the inevitable.

The kitchen floor in the evening, tossing my little babies high
Mary’s smiling but she watches me out of the corner of her eye
Seems you can’t get any more than half-free
I step out onto the front porch and suck the cold air deep inside of me
I got a cold mind to go tripping ‘cross that thin line
I’m sick of doing straight time

You can’t get any more than half-free, Charlie tells us. His body–his physical half–tries its best to play the family man, but his inner life is neither straight nor narrow.

In the last verse, Bruce hints that old habits are about to re-assert themselves, as Charlie emotionlessly saws off a shotgun. We never learn why, but such weapons are counter-productive for hunting.

In the basement, hunting gun and a hacksaw
Sip a beer and thirteen inches of barrel drop to the floor

Come home in the evening, can’t get the smell from my hands
Lay my head down on the pillow and go drifting off into foreign lands

For the moment he resists temptation, but only for the moment. His day job is already grisly. Unable to rid his hands of the smell of death, we can only wonder where his thoughts go when they drift off into slumber.

Bruce employs one of his favorite narrative devices in “Straight Time,” dropping the final chorus we’re conditioned to expect. As a result, the song feels as unresolved as its protagonist’s moral struggle. He leaves us with a sense of foreboding: perhaps the reason Charlie no longer sings of being sick of doing straight time is because he’s stopped fighting.

In “James Lincoln Deere” we meet a narrator who becomes a murderer out of financial desperation. In “Richfield Whistle,” a petty thief ultimately (but we suspect temporarily) stops short of crossing that line.

In “Straight Time,” there’s no such transformation. Charlie knows exactly who he is from the start, and the question isn’t if but when.

On vinyl, “Straight Time” is performed by a skillful ensemble. In concert, Bruce has only ever performed it solo. He played it nightly throughout the Ghost of Tom Joad Tour, often introducing it in terms that suggested he identified more than a little with the notion of old habits dying hard. (It’s fallaciously tempting to invest significance in Bruce choosing 1986–the year the newlywed rock star’s mega-stardom peaked–as the year his character got out of prison and found a wife.)

Since the conclusion of the Joad Tour, “Straight Time” has made only a single appearance, a decade later on Bruce’s next and last acoustic tour. Abstracted from the thematic set lists that gave it context and power in the mid-nineties, “Straight Time” felt rushed and removed from the sense of dread and destiny with which Bruce imbued it in earlier outings.

Bruce hasn’t played “Straight Time” in public since, and perhaps that’s for the best. It’s a gem of a song, but one that shines best in its original setting.

Straight Time
Recorded: April-June 1995
Released: The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995)
First performed: November 21, 1995 (New Brunswick, NJ)
Last performed: June 22, 2005 (Copenhagen, Denmark)

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