I don’t remember the first time, exactly, that I heard Bruce Springsteen’s “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy).” I’m sure it was pretty early in my career as an obsessive Springsteen fan, though, because I remember expecting to hear some uplifting bombast a la “Born in the USA”—me not having realized yet that there was nothing particularly uplifting about that little ditty, which was fast becoming more familiar from used car ads and tinny campaign-bus PA systems than it was from the radio.
So, I didn’t much like it at the time. Then, as my bossophilia became more pronounced, I spent several years basically taking it on faith that it was great before eventually getting sort of sick of it—it’s the one track from The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle that I’ll routinely skip.
But with Independence Day coming up, I started thinking about the song in the context of the holiday—surely, sez I, not for nuthin’ is the thing set on the 4th—and I started to see some of the things that have always bothered me about the song in a new light. Now I’m pretty sure that it’s one of the great songs about the American experience of the early 1970s.
At first (or fortieth) listen, “4th of July” isn’t that different from anything else on the album—full of tumble-tongued streetwise snapshots of colorful, violent, romantic characters out on the weekend. But Springsteen makes it clear that it’s a dying way of life: the cops are busting the bums and fortune-tellers, bringing order to the threadbare chaos. And naturally, Bruce is thinking of leaving; the theme of escaping this dying way of life is all over the album, of course, but elsewhere the mood is either joyous (“Rosalita”) or elegaic (“New York City Serenade”). Here, on the other hand, Bruce seems plain exhausted. His voice, fatigued and sometimes tuneless, meanders from verse to verse, bereft of passion, commitment. Danny Federici plays the organ like a carny on quaaludes. Even the passionate-shepherd-to-his-love bit that animates most of the best songs in the early Bruce catalog—”Rosalita,” “Thunder Road,” “Born to Run”—feels stock, rote, salutary. He can barely muster the energy to drag himself over the syllables, and he carefully sidesteps any language that would imply that he wants anything long-term out of this paramour: “For me this boardwalk life is through / You ought to quit this scene too,” he mutters noncomittally. Yeah, you should totally quit. No, you don’t have to do it right now. Maybe you should think about it for a while. A ride? Well, yeah, I would give you a lift, but, see, I’ve gotta get up early tomorrow.
And what I’m starting to love about this song is the way that Springsteen sets this tale of personal exhaustion against a backdrop of national exhaustion and malaise. The song opens with fireworks over Little Eden, “Forcin’ a light into all those stoney faces / left stranded on this warm July.” I love that the faces are “stranded”—the fireworks, then, become symbols of isolation, not independence.* And all those isolated individuals don’t much want their condition exposed—the light is “forced” into their faces. For these folks, the fireworks that are supposed to celebrate freedom, patriotism, all those big ideas that the 4th just get subsumed into the “aurora” that’s “rising behind us,” indistinguishable from the cheap, gaudy glare of the boardwalk, from the lights that promise thrills and romance but deliver only disappointment and regret. A sham. It’s actually kind of the perfect song for America circa late 1973—with the US having just pulled its last troops out of Vietnam, with Watergate becoming bigger news by the day. And, sadly, it’s a pretty apt song for America circa 2005, too.
My suggestion: keep a copy of The Wild, the Innocent in your car; whenever you hear Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” this weekend, blast “Sandy” at full volume. It’s a great way to meet new friends and open up a dialogue about the intersection of art and politics!
- These are the lyrics as reproduced in Songs, and it’s how they’re sung. Most of the online lyrics databases, including the official one at Brucespringsteen.net, say “Fourth of July” instead of “warm July.” I don’t know why.
Fantastic analysis of this song. I went through two periods of thinking about it, myself: the first involving actually dating a girl named S., and wanting this to be some kind of a wonderful ballad. It’s far too complicated for that and I just didn’t get it at nineteen.
Years later, and becoming a Bruce fan, I grappled with it again, and found a kind of beauty in its tumbledown facade. You’re dead right in saying, this song is about the end of something, whether real or imagined, as the narrarator makes clear when he tells Sandy to “[l]ove me tonight [—] for I may never see you again.”
I highly recommend the Daniel Wolff’s book, “4th of July (Asbury Park), which was released—when else?—on July 4 this year. It describes the entire history of Asbury Park, the rise, fall, and deeper fall.
Springsteen wrote Sandy after racial riots had ravished what was left of AP, and with lines like “This boardwalk life for me is through,” he’s planting the theme of escape that would be more fully realized in his next album—specifically, Thunder Road (“it’s a town full of losers and I’m pulling out of here to win”) and Born to Run (“Baby this town rips the bones from your back/It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap/We gotta get out while we’re young”).
Because over the years, Asbury Park in many ways has embodied the challenges affecting the entire country, your premise is right on.