‘The Promise’: Bruce Springsteen’s rejected inverse sequel to ‘Thunder Road’
Like many people in the UK, I have often thought of Bruce Springsteen as the ultimate American artist. And by that, I mean ultimate in the definitive sense as opposed to the greatest. That is not to besmirch ‘The Boss’, his epic balladry certainly has its place – as singalong night closers or cinematic injections on a long motorway drive he’s hard to beat – but purely by perception, the fact that the songs ostensibly seem to be clad in double denim and dripping red, white and blue blood, means that some of the duality and depth to his songwriting beneath this false all-American facsimile has been lost.
Alas, Springsteen can’t have too many complaints about this. He might probe at society and the disposition of modern humans with all the same acerbic wit and wisdom as someone like Bob Dylan, but his lexicon of open highways, Cadillac straddling album artwork and penchant for sleeveless plaid shirts, taints his work with a one-track aura of Americanism. Thus, from afar, as a Brit, you might look at his work and purvey it as a man singing about speeding along dusty highways that cut through the belly of a vast continent in a throbbing muscle car to bright new horizons and burning sunsets, and think: ‘Where does my trundling Corsa fit into this picture? The closest I can get to this sort of romanticism is travelling at a steady 69mph to Leeds to see if any call centres are hiring!’
For the most part, this misconception about his lack of universality has been fuelled by labels pitching him to the same commercial market that he has questioned in song. The rejection of his anthemic track ‘The Promise’ is the perfect paradigm for this. The song remains one of the greatest ever culled tracks, and sadly, it also illuminates a hell of a lot about Springsteen’s songwriting that many critics get wrong.
‘Thunder Road’ is undoubtedly a masterful opening track. But it is also Springsteen at his most predictable. The stirring imagery of a young couple breaking the shackles of mundanity in a settled relationship by (as Nick Cave says) rekindling those dreams it takes a lifetime to destroy and driving out of a “town full of losers” in a bid “to win,” is certainly affecting and thumps Born to Run off to a flyer, but it also seems self-referential in a negative sense. Clearly, Springsteen picked up on this himself, so he looked to pair it with an antidote.
‘The Promise’ is the inverse of ‘Thunder Road’—rather than look at lonely highways as vessels to bright new futures, he looks at them as a sign of the isolated estrangement possible in big old America akin to Jack Kerouac’s famous quote: “A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.” In this version of the song, the promises that highways offer are all false, and the American Dream is a lie that adds up to one big nightmare for many unless you wake up to reality. As our downtrodden protagonist purrs: “The promise was broken, cashed in a few of my dreams.”
Using the same chords and structure as ‘Thunder Road’, Springsteen made the duality of chasing down dreams very clear. This mournful inversion is, if anything, even more affecting than its adrenalised twin because it seems to have more commercial-free sincerity to it. It provides a haunting counterpoint to the American dream that would’ve sat beautifully on Nebraska – for my money, quite possibly Springsteen’s best album. However, his label somewhat missed the point with it and thought that people would dismiss it as a half-baked reheating of a classic. Thus, it was culled and kept off records until his offcuts boxset.
Springsteen has always exposed the Achilles’ hell of the American Dream, it’s just that we haven’t always heard it. With ‘The Promise’ he leans a little closer to the British disposition of dejected acceptance, and it makes for a masterpiece that sifts his image towards something a bit less commercial, which is exactly why Columbia Records culled it.
