Like a great sonnet of old, Bruce Springsteen uses the perspective of the speaker to establish a character that is both part of the story and separate from it. A verse about this father cut from the original song, but available in lyric form further illuminates a story of aging that is both universal and unique to all of us.
Many have remarked that Bruce Springsteen refers to a “fastball” as a “speedball” in the opening verse of “Glory Days,” concluding that the Boss doesn’t know anything about baseball, as if he was the speaker and the song was about his own life rather than simply the singer. In reality, the incorrect word choice is the key to unlocking the other underlying dynamics of a story that is more complex than it seems on the surface. From the title and the anthemic chorus, one can be forgiven for assuming that everyone equally partakes of these “Glory Days,” remembering the exploits of their youth with fondness in the face of age and the seemingly endless disappointments that come with it. Springsteen undercuts this notion by strongly suggesting the speaker himself was not a part of these exploits, and that his telling of the story is not entirely reliable. At the time, he was on the outside, looking in, and it is only with the passage of the years that he has matured, becoming more closely associated with his more popular peers as they have fallen from high school grace into middling existence. “Speedball” is the first of several clues to his social status, or lack of it, how best to interpret the overall work, and how these narrative and character driven principles apply to humanity at large and even other great works. “Glory Days” begins with a simple story of the speaker stopping by a roadside bar:
I had a friend was a big baseball player
Back in high school
He could throw that speedball by you
Make you look like a fool, boy
Saw him the other night at this roadside bar
I was walking in, he was walking out
We went back inside, sat down, had a few drinks
But all he kept talking about was…
A few things become apparent even this early in the song. First, by calling it a “speedball,” it’s obvious the speaker knows nothing about baseball and clearly wasn’t on the actual team. No one who has ever played the sport, or even had a passing acquaintance with it, would make such a mistake. This suggests he was not an athlete, perhaps was more of what we might call a nerd or a geek, and that the use of the word “friend” is likely a stretch as it seems difficult to believe the varsity pitcher would be brothers-in-arms with a person who can’t properly label a single pitch. The description “roadside bar” leads one to believe this isn’t exactly a high end establishment either, conjuring pictures of overweight middle aged men hunched over warm beer, smoking cigarettes (it was the 1980s after all) in a haze of sweat and a film of alcohol. Given the friend was “walking out” as the speaker was “walking in,” we can assume the baseball player is a regular, probably with a beer belly of his own, and spends a lot more time there than the speaker himself, especially when the friend reenters the bar on a whim and has a few more drinks. Tellingly, it is the friend alone that brings up these glory days. The speaker doesn’t say all “we” kept talking about was glory days, but rather it was all “he” kept talking about. It is unclear if we should assume the speaker has no “glory days” to speak of at this point and we will learn a bit more about that as the song progresses, but it suggests at a minimum that the friend is far more trapped in the past than he is. The result is the beginning of an ironic detachment between the speaker and the events he is describing, transforming the meaning of the chorus:
Glory days, well they’ll pass you by
Glory days, in the wink of a young girl’s eye
Glory days, glory days
One has to wonder if the speaker is really saying this with a straight face, or slightly mocking his friend for living in the past. The statement is true on this face and somewhat universal – time moves fast and will pass all of us by at some point – but given the speaker will describe these stories as “boring” later in the song, it seems reasonable to assume there is an implicit sense that he, at least, is living better days in the present. The twangy mandolin driven riff also suggests having a little light hearted fun at another’s expense, as if the entire thing should not be taken entirely seriously. This musical motif, combining elements of Springsteen’s more bombastic anthems with an ironic charm, lends the overall song a relatively unique feel in his catalog. There is no other song quite like it in terms of tone. The chord sequence is straight Springsteen and could be pounded out on glockenspiel the same as one of his arena rockers, but the overall impression is quite different being dominated by the mandolin and sounding more suited to a bar band. The video, in fact, features the band playing in a roadside bar.
The second verse builds on the hidden dynamics of the first. This time, “there’s a girl that lives up the block” and “Back in school, she could turn all the boys’ heads,” suggesting that, like the baseball player, the years have not been kind to her and that the speaker himself only admired her from afar at that time. He doesn’t describe her as a former girlfriend or fling, merely that she was good looking, likely too good looking for him. Times have changed, however, and now, “Sometimes on a Friday, I’ll stop by and have a few drinks, After she’s put her kids to bed.” This is the first chance we get at a glimpse of the intervening years between high school and the present, and Springsteen uses his lyrical skill to tell a story in just a few words. The teenager we can imagine was the prom queen is now a mother of multiple children, and “Her and her husband, Bobby, well, They split up, I guess it’s two years gone by now.” In retrospect, we can imagine the former baseball player, now a regular at the dive bar, experienced something similar, especially when they “just sit around talking about the old times.” The choice of the word “just” is telling on its own, indicating that the speaker finds all this talk of the past at least limiting if not tiring.
Springsteen then repeats the intro to the chorus, using a similar technique:
She says when she feels like crying
She starts laughing, thinking ‘bout
Glory days, yeah they’ll pass you by
Glory days, in the wink of a young girl’s eye
Glory days, glory days
Once again, the speaker is listening to stories of someone else’s glory days, strongly leading one to conclude that he either has none of his own, or none worth mentioning. Further, these memories are transformed into a sort of defense mechanism. The former beauty is older with children, divorced, and living as a single mom, stuck at home on a Friday night and looking for any relief she can find. The experience of adulthood is overwhelming enough to make her want to breakdown in tears, but more positive memories of a carefree past, one where she was likely the center of attention on a Friday night, serve as a necessary relief, allowing her to laugh at her current state. The speaker’s own opinion is hidden from view as usual, but it’s clear that we should assume he was not part of her glory days, and it is only in adulthood that he has joined the social circle, maybe even entirely out of the woman’s desperation for company.
This becomes even more apparent in an unreleased verse that was not part of the final song. The focus suddenly changes from the speaker’s peers to his father, who worked “twenty years on the line, And then they let him go, Now everywhere he goes out looking for work, They just tell him that he’s too old.” For the first time in the song, the speaker references his own past, but instead of high school he is nine years old, when his father was a proud working man at the Ford plant in Metuchen, NJ. Today, however, he is more like the baseball player with one crucial difference:
Now he just sits on a stool down at the Legion Hall
But I can tell what’s on his mind
Glory days, yeah goin back
Glory days, aw he ain’t never had
Glory days, glory days
It’s unclear if we can take this as strictly true, as if the speaker’s father had no glory in his life, only regrets, but it does establish a spectrum of individuals aside from connecting the smoke filled Legion Hall with the roadside bar. His acquaintances from high school now live in the past. His father seems to have no past outside of work, though we know this cannot be strictly true for a man who married and had children. The speaker is somewhere in the middle, living in the present, but continually pulled into the past by his own father and the other people he associates with. The ironic detachment from earlier is enhanced with more feeling and meaning, as the song builds to a climax. The speaker watches this all, and we understand that he sympathizes with both friends and family, but it’s unclear what he truly feels about it until the final verse:
I think I’m going down to the well tonight
And I’m gonna drink till I get my fill
And I hope when I get old I don’t sit around thinking about it’
But I probably will
Interestingly, the speaker seems to deny his age, placing him once again in the middle of the spectrum. Though he must be in his thirties, perhaps Springsteen’s own age in 1984 when Born in the USA was released, he believes he is too young for glory days, or perhaps believes he is living them now. There is also the possibility he is simply “waiting on a moment that just don’t come” to quote from Springsteen’s “Badlands.” All interpretations are accurate, and we should not be surprised that the speaker remains unclear about this social status and life in general. Few willingly admit they spend their lives on the outside looking in. Regardless of the truth, and the truth is undoubtedly unclear given the missing verse about this father, the speaker is resigned to the fact that one day in some distant future, he will also spend more time in the past than the present, even if he has to make those stories up, “Yeah, just sitting back, trying to recapture, A little of the glory, yeah.” Further, he will do this even knowing the reality of his peers and his father, and the sad truth that “time slips away and leaves you with nothing, mister, But boring stories of glory days.” Here, Springsteen performs a triple trick that illustrates the deftness of his songwriting skills. First, the song comes full circle and the speaker imagines the day when he will be telling these boring stories himself, perhaps to his own children. Second, the focus of the song expands to humanity as a whole, for time slips away from all of us and ultimately leaves us with nothing. In a sense, at this point in the song, we’re all going down to that well tonight right along with him. If we’re lucky, we’ll have some glory days to look back on. If we’re unlucky, we’ll be like his father. Third, the closing verse further illuminates the speaker’s own life. If his glory days are either in the present or the future, they are not in the past, justifying our supposition from the beginning that he was not the jock or the popular kid in high school. He hears these stories now from those that wouldn’t have given him the time of day back then. He finds them boring, but still he listens because, over time, he’s become a part of the peer group he was excluded from in his younger years. This alone might be enough of a thrill. We cannot know for sure.
Whatever the case, a close reading of the song reveals more than its simple title will suggest. Like a great sonnet of old, Springsteen uses the perspective of the speaker to establish a character that is both part of the story and separate from it. We experience these events through his point of view, and the choice of words, sometimes even the lack of a choice, and scenes to describe reveal details of the speaker’s own life and personality. The result is a far richer and more complicated experience, creating a sort of mirror effect. The speaker is the mirror, we see his friends and family, only indirectly through reflection. It’s a testament to Springsteen’s songwriting that most of this hinges on the choice of “speedball” rather than the correct “fastball.”
GLORY DAYS
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 