the songs: lyrics, music samples, comments

An ordinary guy without big-time aspirations, the song´s protagonist is something of an anti-hero. A sixty-nine Chevy waiting outside the Seven-Eleven store; his partner Sonny who helped build the car "straight out of scratch"; and the triumph of blowing them all out of their seats; this is what the guy can grab from life´s scanty offerings when he races in the street. He is one of those (typically Springsteen) characters whose attempts to escape the clutch of everyday life seem doomed from the beginning. It is hardly a surprise that in the end even love fails him and that his girl cries herself to sleep at night.

Still, this racer is not run off the tracks so easily. When his baby is sitting on the porch, blankly staring into the night, he regains his spirit: Calling out pleadingly to "all those shut-down strangers and hot rod angels / rumbling through this promised land," he asserts that he and his baby will ride to the sea together tonight, to wash their sins off their hands, and then go racing in the street.

In terms of its topic - the Cadillac -, this up-tempo rock ´n´ roll song may well be prototypically American. Industrial America´s number one commmodity awaits the American working man at the end of his long day, always gleaming; he may drive her home, drive her to his girl, or just drive her, anyway.

Still, the praise of the Cadillac may be as double-edged as the metaphor of the Amarillo, Texas Cadillac Ranch. There, several specimens of the American dream´s chrome version are buried halfway in the ground. Perhaps James Dean and Burt Reynolds, emissaries of U.S. pop culture, will meet at this national monument not for fun and not quite voluntarily; perhaps they will also meet there for the very last time. To be sure, the protagonist´s love of Cadillacs and of Amarillo vanishes in the course of the song. In the last verse, he pleads to his girl that she may not let him be taken to the Cadillac Ranch, and in the end a certain long and dark, shiny and black automobile even pulls up to his house and drives off again with his "little girl."

But should one take the song so seriously, anyway? Springsteen himself considers Cadillac Ranch "just fun to play" at live shows. Stadium audiences who have sung along the chorus with roaring passion may well agree.

No sunset, no hills rolling under fiery Western skies, no Promised Land. This is the very last road trip: right to death row. The story of the deadly ride of Charles Starkweather, the mass murderer, and his teenage girlfriend has already been told in Terrence Malick´s 1973 movie Badlands. In Nebraska, the killer himself does the singing, from behind bars, at midnight, awaiting his execution. The gloom of deserted highways and of the Midwest´s gray and endless plains lingers throughout the song, and when the murderer is finally asked to give a reason for his deeds, he simply answers, "Well, sir, I guess there´s just a meanness in this world."

This lucky guy heads out on the road twice. First, he drives down to Darlington County from New York with his buddy Wayne, in a joyful quest for work and women. Staying in Darlington County for a couple of days, he finds a girl, courts her, and climbs into his car a second time to drive off with the pretty one. Wayne, the buddy, has got lost in the meantime. He reappears only at the end of the song, when it is already clear that the buddy has been traded in for the lover. Wayne´s arrest finally sets the protagonist free to follow the call of sweet romance.

Apart from these serious matters, Darlington County, of course, has all the ingredients that make a good old American road song: an 800-mile ride, no cops to be seen; rock´n´roll music "blasting off the T-Top"; a chorus of numerous "sha la la"s; and the girl who is willing to come along on a ride to - well, where?

"Well a great black river a man had found ... Man now I live on the streets of Houston town." At the end of the first verse already, one man has become rich while another one has ended up sleeping in his car. American economy has found another victim.
This polemic against capitalism, however, is not just a vague, commonplace one. The places, the people, and the circumstances of their plight are specified,and the song is given a concrete historical dimension: the southern migration of the Northeast´s white working class during the 1970s and 80s. The protagonist and his wife and kids leave their home because of economic crisis in the postindustrial North. Texas oil lures them south, to seek the sweet soda rivers of Houston.

Like many of Springsteen´s wanderers, they find themselves disillusioned and embittered; with seeds blowing up the highways of Texas, the song ends on a note of senselessness and futility. The last verse is a warning to other would-be migrants by one who knows: The South, after all, has little to offer, and migration is only the beginning of new difficulties .

Decades after the Dust Bowl migration depicted in John Steinbeck´s The Grapes of Wrath, the highway is alive again, teeming with American society´s underdogs. Times have not changed much since Steinbeck´s thirties; still, whole families have to sleep in their cars or seek shelter at campfires. They are cast out onto the road by the same forces of progress that set Steinbeck´s migrants on their westward course, only in the nineties economic hardship comes under the guise of the "new world order."

The will to endure is the most outstanding quality Springsteen´s drifters share with Steinbeck´s Okies. Struggling for material survival, they are searching for the spirit to carry on when the Promised Land is out of sight and the highway is bound to become their home. They may have just found it at the end of the song, when the "ghost of old Tom Joad" has joined the singer at his nightly campfire.