Got a Job at the Rendering Factory

Now, most every American knows who Bruce Springsteen is. Even the layman could associate a few things with the pop icon—America, working class, New Jersey, or fire departments might be some of the associations. Few, however, could name any songs from either Nebraska or Ghost of Tom Joad. Commercial success in the music business is a mysterious thing, and one could attribute commercial failure to any number of elements. I’m inclined to think that the “failure” of these recordings (as compared with Born to Run or Born in the U.S.A.) has a lot to do with the bleak, heady, and empathic demeanor of the stories and ideas that comprised the songs, as well as the un-climactic melodies. These recordings are commentaries on the plight of the human condition, of our economic system and the people in it—hardly workin’ man’s anthems. This is not to say that these collections of songs aren’t good, as I believe they are some of his finest work, and so do many others—critics and democrats mostly. But, who are we to judge?

I don’t know who you are, but I know you are reading a philosophy book about Bruce Springsteen, so I take it we have some basic things in common. Indulge me for a moment while I explain where I’m coming from, at least.

I’m probably the only dock worker in Nashville with a philosophy degree—and dock work is just one of the many attractive career paths open to those of us with such a degree. Knowing all of Kant’s cognitive categories or that Socrates drank the hemlock has yet to come in handy while hoisting boxes and crates in a semi trailer on a hot day. I generally keep my book learning to myself, as it tends to put my fellow blue collars on the defensive. But I come from a working class family.

Off the top of my head, I can think of eight men in my family who can drive big rigs. For better or worse, none of them ever cared to crack a philosophy book. What’s more, neither they nor any of my co-workers (even the music lovers) listen to The Ghost of Tom Joad or Nebraska, despite the fact that these records are wholly peopled with working-class folk. By contrast, according to my itunes play count, I’ve listened to both in their entirety at least a half dozen times in the past couple months, playing my favorite songs as many as twenty times. I think there’s insight in this difference between the tastes of someone like me and my beloved fellow blue collars. And I think this difference says something about Springsteen, too.

Driving a forklift for twelve hours can make your back hurt. On that fact, me and my brothers—and Bruce—can all agree. It can earn you a decent wage, but day in and day out, it just plain sucks. In “Straight Time,” the Boss creates Charlie, and Charlie works at the rendering factory—darkness before dinner comes. Charlie knows drudgery and long hours, too, but Charlie ain’t like me and the Boss. He’d as soon tap his boots to Merle Haggard’s “Workin’ Man Blues” over a cold beer in a neighborhood dive than wade through the murky waters of Bruce’s dark records. Charlie’d probably throw ASCAP a quarter to spin “Glory Days.” Charlie might drive a semi; he would never, ever use a semi-colon.

Charlie just wants to escape his job, or so he thinks. Merle and a Pabst Blue Ribbon can alleviate that itch for a few hours. But Bruce wants to know why it itches in the first place. Sure it sucks, but by his own nature, Bruce internalizes its sucking differently than Charlie does. But there are Charlies everywhere, especially at freight docks and rendering factories, while Bruces are little less common.

This is not to say Bruce is more intelligent than any of them—he is more intelligent than some, but there are some very smart fellows running fork lifts, believe me, and if I were ever in a bar fight, I’d much rather have a Teamster in my corner than Bruce. It is to say that Bruce’s way of thinking about the drudgery of a monotonous, hot, and dirty job is different than Charlie’s. Where Charlie might see an incompetent, asshole of a foreman, whose orders he despises, Bruce sees another human cog, trying to find his way and make a life for himself the best he knows how. You see, Bruce dwells on others’ possible perspectives. He’s made a life of it and has a real gift in his empathy and how he expresses it. This is why his songs are so believable, even when they are about experiences that Bruce hasn’t really had. The point is, Springsteen has developed the ability to both empathize and turn that empathy into a symbolic creation, a song. Such is the case in “Straight Time.”

Got Out of Prison Back in ’86

“Straight time” is when a prisoner is serving a sentence day for a day. If a straight-timer is serving a one-year sentence, he’ll be there for 365 days. Through good conduct, the same prisoner can perhaps become promoted to double time, which would mean serving half a year. Similarly, when you’re working on the dock, regular time is called “straight time.” Thanks to Teamsters Local 480, if I work a twelve-hour day, four of those hours pay time-and-a-half, which is a nice consolation for sweating my ass off from dusk till dawn.

Charlie’s job at the rendering factory wasn’t his first tangle with oppression, and I’d venture to bet that if there were a chronicle of songs about Charlie, we would find that he never stops feeling oppressed. Right out of the gate, Charlie tells us that he “got out of prison back in ’86.” Come to find out, Charlie has another family member (probably several) who has known crime, too. His uncle “makes his living running hot cars.” But Charlie wants to do right, so he gets married and goes to work.

In prison, Charlie was sick of doin’ straight time. Out of the pen, probably a few years under his belt at the factory, Charlie says he’s still “sick of doin’ straight time.” He doesn’t differentiate between what he’s doing now in his life at the rendering factory and what he was doing in prison. Wow. Within one short verse, the Boss has peered into a very real experience of a very real person and pointed out a very real anxiety by indicating the fact that the possibilities for folks like Charlie are often limited to doing straight time—whether in the pen or on the clock. Bruce believes the door to real freedom is always open (perhaps just barely), but he also thinks that Charlie’s back is to the door, and Charlie is the type to whoop everyone’s ass in the room out of pride rather than turn around and leave the darkness of the windowless bar.

Straight Time

Stepping back from this narrative, we find that “straight time” is not just a couple of words or a term referring to the technicalities of the penal system. Springsteen uses them intentionally to create an experience for us to try to help us see Charlie like he does. By virtue of the unique way Springsteen creates, “straight time” becomes an indication for us, a sign that points to a lack of freedom and to a cycle of drudgery. The phrase also means time spent walking the straight and narrow, staying on the accepted side of the long arm, bending his will to the requirements of the conventional path. And that’s what good songwriters do. They bring us images from the void and make us see things that we haven’t seen before, to associate words with new and unexpected meanings that can enrich our lives. How does he or they do it? The short answer is that they create aural and visual images through music and language through the medium of a song. Let me unpack that last sentence using a philosopher by the name of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980).

Sartre belongs to a school of philosophy generally known as “French existentialism,” having its historical roots in another school called “phenomenology.” Phenomenology is distinguished by its unique methodological approach to understanding human experience. Phenomenology’s method is to take subjective mental phenomena and extract general and essential features that make said experiences possible. That is, these people take a person’s experience (oftentimes their own) of a certain conscious process and reflect upon that process in order to study and describe it, and make general claims about it. This requires reflection upon one’s own experiences of certain phenomena. One could do a phenomenology of peripheral vision, for instance, and reflect upon one’s own experience of peripheral vision and attempt to extract all of the features necessary to have such a capability and experience. This method has less to do with the physiological necessities of an experience (the material construction of an eyeball, retina, and iris) and deals primarily with the conditions and processes of the mind that are necessary to constitute a given experience (such as the factthat the mind and eye focus on one point yet take in perceptual data from areas around it, in the case of peripheral vision). Physiologically, it is possible to give facts about the brain, chemicals, and nerve impulses that serve as the organic means of its functioning. Phenomenologists believe that explaining how the brain physiologically works (for instance, that there are various interacting electro-chemicals) is quite different from explaining how one experiences the world, and they are essentially concerned with unpacking experiences and saying something definite about conscious experience.

Sartre believes that experience is centered on our processing of images. In his essay, “The Imaginary” (1940), Sartre makes it his task to explain the imagination. Now, before you go and start thinking about the “imagination” as something Walt Disney or Hunter S. Thompson (perhaps with the aid of serious drugs) has, it is important to know that what Sartre is talking about here is much more basic than an extraordinarily creative imagination. One needn’t put together a Mickey Mouse cartoon or be an absurdly funny gonzo journalist in order to relate to Sartre’s theory. Sartre is speaking generally of human consciousness, and we all have imaginations. He believes that all consciousness is a spontaneous imaginative act. If our minds are on, they are filled with images. Any image that the mind generates is called “intentional.” For Sartre, intention does not have anything to do with our willing the image into existence, but rather it simply refers to the image that is the focal point of an act of perception or thinking. Although we often think of images as visual, they are often not. For instance, we can imagine the smell of a cake baking, the feel of your lover’s lips, or the timbre of Bruce’s voice. These are not visual images, but they are images in Sartre’s sense of the term. Sartre’s phenomenology is an explanation of how our consciousness alters and creates images in order to constitute our total experience of the world. For our purposes, I am going to focus mostly on Springsteen’s lyrics and the visual images involved in them. Unfortunately, that allows only a cursory glance at how the aural images (such as Bruce’s music alone) aid in presenting an overall image for the listener.

For most every Bruce song, there is a “concept.”⁵⁴ In the songwriting world, people call these “song ideas,” but we’ll reserve that term for something else. Usually, these concepts are centered upon a chorus, and often these choruses hinge upon a hook line, which is often the title of the song. This “hinging” has to do with the title’s being the conceptual focal point of the entire song. In our example, “Straight Time” is the title. Now, what is so special about the title of a good song? Well, a good song puts forth a concept that is a unique way of imagining the hook line, for instance, the way Bruce makes the correlation between straight time in prison, straight time at the rendering factory, and time spent on the conventional side of the law. These are three different uses of the phrase, but Bruce has united them in his song. This unification is special. He has made a rich association that moves beyond the ordinary use of the phrase, and this new metaphoric combination points us to Charlie’s unending cycle of drudgery.

For Sartre, Springsteen has given us a “sign” with his title. If you think about a physical sign, for instance a stop sign, Sartre’s notion of sign and the notion of a song concept as a sign becomes clearer. Imagining a stop sign, the mind sees a red octagon with white letters spelling “STOP.” By virtue of cultural habit, we’ve come to know the sign to indicate that we should bring our vehicle to a halt. I say “cultural habit” because stop signs need not be red or octagonal. That we recognize the sign as an indication of stopping our vehicles is all that matters. artre speaks of this:

I approach these large black lines printed on a placard nailed above a door of the station. These black lines suddenly cease to have their own dimensions, color, place: they now constitute the words ‘Assistant Manager’s Office’. I read the words on the placard and I now know that I must go in here to make my claim.⁵⁵

Sartre believes that when we see signs that we recognize, our mind recognizes letters, reads, and then goes on to the object or action that the signs indicate. Therefore, a sign directs the mind to constitute a certain image. The unique case of “Straight Time” (and most all good songs) is that upon listening and understanding the song, the song title or concept becomes a new sign that we must interpret and attach to an object, just like we would a stop sign. When we first hear a song, we don’t have the luxury of habit tell us what it indicates, as we do with a stop sign. We must engage the song with our imaginations and let it affect us. “The essential role of signs,” says Sartre, is that they “must enlighten and guide us” (p. 26).

Through the filter of Sartre, Bruce’s “Straight Time” can be understood on various levels. First and most basically, we understand two English words that indicate something, namely “straight” as meaning something that is not crooked and “time” which refers to duration and change. Secondly, the cultural definitions of this phrase indicates a way in which a prisoner is serving his sentence, day-for-a-day, as well as getting paid hour-by-hour at a day job, and trying not to return to a life of crime. Third and most importantly for Springsteen, the phrase is a new and innovative sign that brings the cultural definitions together and posits them as a means to understanding perpetual drudgery.

Best Remember Who Your Friends Are

That’s all fine and good, but Charlie don’t give a shit about Sartre. Sartre’s suspicious and French and looks to have hygiene problems.⁵⁶ What Charlie does give a shit about is that he’s out of jail now, but he’s still in prison, working his crummy job at the crummy rendering factory.

Despite the fact that he had a great song idea when he came up with “Straight Time,” Springsteen had to fill up the song with lyrics and a story to guide us to the understanding of his concept. ⁵⁷ For a song to work (that is, for a song to guide others successfully to an understanding of the song concept) the lyrics must have the potential to make the song concept present for us. The verse and chorus lyrics should lead the listener to generate in his or her own consciousness the song’s concept. Bruce does so precisely by giving a shit about Charlie, and Sartre can explain the way the Boss affects his listeners, so I guess Springsteen should care about him, too—except that Bruce doesn’t seem to need any help in performing this particular bit of magic.

According to Sartre, the mind naturally manipulates images depending on the context in which those images are given. In the case of watching an impersonator, the mind will manipulate the perceptual images. When we watch Dana Carvey, given that we know Dana Carvey is a popular comedian who often does imitations, we are naturally going to assume that we will get an imitation at some point. We anticipate this. Perhaps the imitation will be of Mr. Rogers, perhaps it will be of Jimmy Stewart, or perhaps it will be of Jimmy Stewart doing Mr. Rogers. When we watch and listen to Carvey, the mind readies itself for this, and when Carvey slips us something different from his natural face (if he even has a natural face—for all I know he’s impersonating Dana Carvey), we almost involuntarily begin processing the imitation he is doing. It actually is voluntary, but the habit is deeply set, so it kicks in without any perceived effort from us.

Now, Dana Carvey looks nothing like Jimmy Stewart. In order to “make us see” Jimmy Stewart, he radically caricatures Jimmy Stewarts face. During Carvey’s imitation, we get his best impression of Stewart’s bulging eyes during the climax of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; we get the most yokel-ly representation, as when Stewart comes back to reality in It’s a Wonderful Life. These radical manifestations do not really look like Jimmy Stewart. I would be surprised if someone recognized Carvey as Stewart with the sound off. However, coupled with very believable vocalizations, we’re willing to overlook all of the discrepancies of likeness between Carvey and Stewart. Once consciousness has been guided to interpret the imitation and then to recognize Jimmy Stewart, we ignore the discrepancies and see and hear only those that remind us of Stewart. Once consciousness has recognized Stewart, it takes all of the facial and bodily manipulations that do resemble Stewart’s actions and brings them together with all of Carvey’s other representations during the skit. That is, once consciousness shifts and recognizes Stewart, it ignores all things not-Stewart and unifies all things Stewart in Carey’s performance. Sartre calls this affectation of consciousness the “expressive nature” (p. 29). The main point is that by virtue of an expressive nature, consciousness can ignore discrepancies and posit connections in what it perceives in order to unify these images into a single image of Jimmy Stewart. The process is spread out in time. The mind also retains the past moments and protends (anticipates) those to come; all these perceptions and connections generate a unified image of Stewart.

Sartre’s notion of “imitation consciousness,” which I have just described, can be used to explain Springsteen’s method of affecting us with his song “Straight Time.” While listening to Bruce’s work, consciousness also posits and ignores details in order to create a unified understanding of the song and its character. We all know “Charlie” in about the same way we know Jimmy Stewart, even if we have never actually met either. There are lots of Charlies, and we already know how to “recognize” one such. Creating the essential details is the way in which Springsteen leads us to his song concept. When we recognize Charlie, we are in a position to understand what “straight time” is to him. Stylistically, Bruce is singing in first person, as if he’s Charlie. Now, we know Bruce Springsteen isn’t Charlie any more than Dana is Jimmy. We knew it before we pressed play, and it doesn’t take the mind long to get over this discrepancy. Once we have done this simple work, we can accept another discrepancy—that is, that Springsteen is singing in a vernacular that is not natural to him. I’m sure that Bruce has read enough books to realize that “ain’t” ain’t a real contraction, because it doesn’t quite join two words together. But Charlie mightn’t realize this. Further, he ain’t one to give a shit either way. Springsteen’s colloquialisms help us connect the dots between verse and concept.

So, in the first verse, Charlie is out of prison and doing his best to get by, but he hates his lot in life. He hated it before prison, during, and now after. In the second verse, Charlie’s carsmuggling uncle is there, and good uncle “slips” Charlie a hundred dollar bill and says, “Charlie, you best remember who your friends are.”

By virtue of consciousness’s expressive nature, it reads between the lines, and we just know Charlie has the itch so bad that he’ll end up helping his uncle chop a Seville or cop a Coup de Ville. Bruce didn’t explicitly tell us this, but we know it. And we also can gather that thieving is a one way ticket out of the rendering factory, and probably a one way ticket back to prison. We now have a description of how Springsteen did it.⁵⁸ And, voila, the mind is guided to see that “Straight Time” is all about a never-ending battle of oppression.

Eight Years In, It Feels Like You’re Gonna Die

The title of this section is from the “bridge” of our song—that is the part where the music changes—and, like the concept in “Straight Time,” it, too, is beautifully ambiguous. “In” could refer to prison or work or marriage or sickness, or so many other ways of being “in.” Not to get too dark here, but life bombards us with problems. Human beings must eat, drink, co-operate, shelter ourselves “in” order to live. We must do this day in and day out, or else we perish. We’re “in” a hell of a mess. The figurative “dying” Charlie speaks of here is the soul tax of laborious boredom, and Charlie’s mistake is that he ties this feeling to his job instead of realizing that life itself is the ultimate penal colony that he must address.

Albert Camus (1913–1960), who was Sartre’s existentialist nemesis de plume, speaks of something similar in The Myth of Sisyphus. Camus’s book is an interpretation and commentary on the Greek myth in which Sisyphus, as punishment for aggravating Zeus, is forced to serve eternally in the underworld by schlepping a rock up a hill. Upon every try, Sisyphus loses grip of the rock only to have it tumble down the hill. Hoist, climb, sweat, drop, watch miserably, repeat infinitely. Camus likens Sisyphus’s plight to life in general and refers to it as the “absurd reality” of life. We make the bed to mess it up. We work to eat, we eat to live, we live to work. We have kids, then we work to provide life for others, and then they live to work. Throw the many forms of suffering in the mix, and things begin to look infinitely bleak, which is why Camus says, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”⁵⁹

Everyone reading this chapter has, up to now, chosen that life is good enough to keep living, else you wouldn’t be among us, but few really address the problem of life the way Camus believes it ought to be addressed. Why is it that you get up out of bed every morning? Just to eat? Just to work? Just to live? Camus says many people live out of the habit of living.

So we know of some rocks Charlie has attempted to carry: prison, the rendering factory, whatever landed him in prison in the first place, and whatever keeps him on the straight and narrow, for the moment. And now he’s about to help his uncle and leave that rendering factory behind. But we know that Charlie is just dropping one rock to pick up another, but despite what he imagines, neither he (nor anyone else) can get rid of the hill. We seem to have our choice of rocks, but the hill is the hill. Best get used to it and do as Camus does by attempting to enumerate reasons that the hill is worth climbing.

Charlie has what a friend of mine refers to as “shit hooks.” To really nail this colloquialism in everyday conversation, it’s necessary to employ it in the following way: “Here comes ol’ shit hooks,” or even better, “Shit hooks is what he got.” Wherever he goes, whatever town he moves to, whatever job he has, Charlie always seems to find and drag his shit with him and pick up more along the way. Just because he changes one rock for another, he approaches the hill with the same set of hooks, with last attempt’s waste on them. I know plenty of troubled folk who move to another town to seek “a new life” only to find that after the new has worn off, it’s still life and they’re still tailed by all they drug with them. They rarely, if ever shed their hooks and approach the hill with open eyes and clean hands.

Driftin’ Off to a Foreign Land

In regard to the trifles of living, no woman, no Chevy, no Thunder Road, no Atlantic City, no new job, and no heist can transport us to a place where sorrows and drudgery disappear. Pre-’82 Springsteen is partly good, and I’m a sucker for it, in all its teenage splendor. But in regard to Camus’s question, it yields only a youthfully naive answer. The answer it offers seems to be the result of having only carried the rock once. Early Bruce tells us simply to pick up a shinier rock. In “Straight Time,” all bets are off, and older Bruce recognizes (probably after several trips up the hill with various rocks he found along the way) that the hill is the problem we must spend our lives dealing with.

In the 1947 issue of The Nation, Sartre’s essay, “Americans and Their Myths,” describes the cultural landscape that details America’s peculiar hill,

There are the great myths, the myths of happiness, of progress, of liberty, of triumphant maternity, there is realism and optimism—and then there are the Americans, who . . . grow up among these colossal statues and find their way as best they can among them. . . . But there are also these people, who, though conventionally happy, suffer from an obscure malaise to which no name can be given, who are tragic through fear of being so, through that total absence of the tragic in them and around them.... There are the thousand taboos which proscribe love outside of marriage—and there is the litter of used contraceptives in the back yards . . . there are all those men and women who drink before making love in order to transgress in drunkenness and not remember. There are the neat, coquettish houses, the pure-white apartments with radio, armchair, pipe, and stand—little paradises; and there are the tenants of those apartments who, after dinner, leave their chairs, radios, wives, pipes, and children, and go to the bar across the street to get drunk alone. (The Nation, October 18th, 1947).

Early Springsteen simply grabs the keys to these “myths of happiness” and lays rubber down a stretch of road. That’s where the songs end. Later Springsteen has to deal with gas stations, flat tires, and faulty water pumps. And, let’s face it, we’ll be buying tires the rest of our lives. So, Bruce, how in the world do we get free? I mean, I wanna conquer the hill and build one of them mansions of glory, you know?

I’ve listened to Bruce and am old enough to know that no pop star can get you off the hill. There simply is no “top of the hill.” If the oppression of your home town, of a shitty job, or of financial strains were the actual problem, do you really think Bruce would still be putting out records? This hill goes on forever, or at least until we die. And Bruce knows this. So then, how do we deal with the hill, Bruce?

If we look at his music and his life, I think we can say something about how Bruce believes this is possible. Early Bruce was filled with beat poetry about himself like “Blinded by the Light” or of his early notions of escape as in “Thunder Road.” It seems that folks like Charlie are still under the impression that the Thunder Road can lead us to freedom, and then, presumably, eternal happiness. But by creating, knowing, and communicating the character of Charlie, Springsteen shows us that eternal happiness (on earth, at least) by Charlie’s standards is but a dream we drift off to in our warm beds after we’ve jacked, stripped, and sold the car.

It’s difficult to say how he truly lives his domestic life, but in his art, Bruce seems to answer Camus’s question by embracing the hill in the labor of brotherly love. He carries his rock right next to Charlie and empathizes in the fact that they’re both carrying rocks. He also sees that Charlie is carrying the same rock the Boss carried back in ’72 (or whenever Bruce was still wet behind the ears). The Boss engages the hill and most everyone on it he comes across. He finds their rocks interesting, too, and he talks with them on their way up. If Charlie happens to drop his rock in the middle of the conversation, Bruce says a musical prayer for him and then keeps truckin’ up the hill, focuses on Billy or Johnny, or Mary instead.

The Boss also asks us to listen to his music, and I’d be surprised if out of all his records, he’s not most proud of either Nebraska, Ghost of Tom Joad, or Devils and Dust, all three of which demand to be engaged as stories about dragging rocks and dropping them. See, I like to engage these stories and these people that Springsteen puts out there. I see Charlie through Springsteen’s eyes, or at least, Springsteen makes me see my Charlie. These collections of songs demand that we engage “in” them, or else we won’t “get” the songs. It takes work and effort, and the melodies and tags don’t just find their way into your brain, like “Glory Days.” And I believe we can really see what Bruce is up to when we recognize that “Glory Days” only requires that we look at the shiniest parts of our own rock, and “Straight Time” requires that we look at the hill and everyone on it.