Anti-Climacus

Nat Hentoff's liner notes for The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan include the following quote from Dylan himself on "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall":

Every line in it is actually the start of a whole song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn't have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one.

Dylan's description is true of his song, but there may be no song of which it's truer than "Thunder Road." It's Bruce Springsteen in precis, a woman and cars and freedom and desperation (and the last two may be the same). The standard comparison is with "Racing in the Street" on Darkness at the Edge of Town, where all hope for escape as been extinguished, but I think that underestimates the extent to which, thematically, that possibility is already included in "Thunder Road."

What's always interested me most about this song is its succession of great lines. Lyrics are distinct from poetry in that lyrics need only to make a certain kind of emotional sense. If they present a succession of images without a story, that's not inherently a mark against them, whereas poetry often requires sense or plot or a resonance beyond the immediate sensation of the words themselves. Put another way, "get it on, bang a gong, get it on" is a great lyric but would be absolutely terrible poetry. Put yet another way, lyrics in rock music are poetry if poetry is only what occurred in the wake of modernism's failure (ie if poetry is only the poetry that has been written since 1940).

What we mean we when describe someone as a good lyricist is usually something different. Dylan can compile strange and arresting images or tell a story, but not both. Springsteen's great gift is as an editor of his own material, which means he has the ruthless ability to strip away whatever is unnecessary from his own music and lyrics until it expresses precisely what he wants it to. There are no accidents in his work, or at least none in his first ten years of writing and recording. This is also why he's the most articulate spokesperson for rock and roll: he understands and can explain why certain musical combinations work and others do not.

Now, there are two (approximate) schools of thought on language, one which values complicated sentence forms and advanced terminology, and one which prefers, at all instances, the simple to the complex. (This, incidentally, is why almost everyone's amateur poetry is bad: people think it must be filled with 'poetic sentiments' which require big words rather than describing their thoughts, feelings, and ideas in simple language properly fitted to their articulation of it. The result is often like one of those student papers where they believe they can make it sound more intelligent by replacing their original words with those taken from a thesaurus.) I generally prefer simple description to quasi-poetic, especially in music: the latter ends with "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" or Rush. So I should really hate the lyrics to "Thunder Road":

You can hide 'neath your covers and study your pain
Make crosses from your lovers, throw roses in the rain
Waste your summer praying in vain for a saviour to rise from these streets

...and yet somehow I don't. Though the delivery matters, the imperative comes from the source Dylan identified: each line could be the start of its own song (perhaps not every line, but a very, very large percentage of them), and almost all of them have the same sense of urgency--not surprising, given that the lyrical conceit is his attempt to get a girl to drive away with him.

(And some of those lyrics resonate: "So you're scared and you're thinkin' that maybe we ain't that young anymore...")