Sunday Pages: "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)"

A song by Bruce Springsteen

Dear Reader,

I came late to Springsteen.

Born in the USA, the album that catapulted Bruce to superstardom, dropped in June of 1984—the final weeks of fifth grade. I had only just received a tape deck and some cassettes six months earlier. I was into Duran Duran and Eurythmics. Songs about prison lifers whose brothers died in Vietnam, or the drunken reminisces of past-their-prime townies, or road-worn guys on the dimly-lit dance floor desperate for love, went right over my 11-year-old head. I didn’t understand the fuss.

Plus, I lived in New Jersey. Everywhere I looked, normally staid grown-ups were going crazy for the intense blue-collar guy from down the shore, with his bright white t-shirt and dungarees, who struck me, in my grade school ignorance, as somehow uncool. My aunt had the album; she’s the one who called and called and called to get concert tickets but never got through. During the Born in the USA mania in the Jersey suburbs, I felt like a casual baseball fan during the Mets’ World Series run of 1988; I got swept up in the hoopla, and root-root-rooted for the home team, but deep down, I didn’t really care who won.

This changed when I went to college. My buddy Keith—he was from Bergen County—made it his mission to initiate me into the Cult of the Boss. “Listen to this,” he said one day in the car, putting on “Jungleland.” That was really all it took. Keith hipped me to the canonical Springsteen: the first six albums, but especially the second, third, and fourth—The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle, Born to Run, and Darkness on the Edge of Town. At last, I saw—we might even say I was blinded by—the light. And like all converts, I became fanatical. There are few artists I unequivocally love, and Bruce Springsteen is one of them. He is wisdom, he is truth, and he is also, somehow, New Jersey.

There is one specific emotional note Springsteen hits, over and over again, that no other artist quite captures. It is the urgent need for movement—a propulsiveness—mixed with desire, hope, faith, love, reassurance, and, most of all, joy. “We have to go right now,” he’s saying, “because the world is just about to crash down all around us, but don’t worry, I love you, and I got this.” He believes he can be the savior, and you want to believe it too—even if you suspect that this might be bluster and bravado, that his belief in himself is misplaced, that he only talks a good game.

In “Thunder Road,” he’s trying to persuade Mary to get in the car and leave with him. “It’s a town full of losers; I’m pulling out of here to win.” In “Born to Run,” Wendy is the object of his desire, and this time, his let’s-go pitch is steeped in passion:

Wendy, let me in, I wanna be your friend,
I wanna guard your dreams and visions.
Just wrap your legs round these velvet rims,
And strap your hands ‘cross my engines.

And: “I wanna die with you, Wendy, on the street tonight / In an everlasting kiss,” a line too intense for most mortals to pull off.

In “Badlands,” the appeal is more generalized, but there is the same urgent need to keep moving, to keep fighting, to right the wrongs:

I wanna find one face that ain’t looking through me.
I wanna find one place,
I wanna spit in the face of these badlands.

But nowhere is this sentiment more powerful than on “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight).” This is the proto-“Thunder Road,” the progenitor of “Born to Run,” the entire Springsteen experience condensed into one exuberant, faith-in-humanity-restoring seven-minute track. We are in what is now familiar territory: he is outside, in the car, engine running, ready to roll, trying to convince a love interest, our eponymous Rosie, to run off with him.

But unlike Mary or Wendy, who only have to decide whether or not to go, Rosalita must contend with her parents. Her mother and father don’t approve of our narrator. They have forbidden her to see him. She is Rapunzel, trapped in the tower. So she must make a hard choice.

The world outside is colorful, populated by characters with names like Little Dynamite, Sloppy Sue, and Weak Knee Willie—her friends, too. Fun is all around. But the Springsteen character cannot really enjoy himself until his beloved is with him. And it’s not enough to sneak her out through the back entrance. He wants her to openly defy her parents:

Windows are for cheaters, chimneys for the poor,
Closets are for hangers, winners use the door.
So use it, Rosie—that’s what it’s there for.

(Given the use of “closet” and the “come out tonight” in the parenthetical part of the title, we can also read the song as an appeal for Rosie to “come out” to her parents; we assume the narrator is a man, because he sounds a lot like Bruce Springsteen and refers to himself as “Daddy” and says “I want to be your man,” but we don’t really know for sure. He explores these ideas more fully in Born to Run’s “Backstreets.”)

The conflict comes to a head in the middle of the song. He knows that her parents disapprove of him, and he also knows it’s because they think he’s a broke loser musician who won’t amount to anything:

Now, I know your mama, she don’t like me
Because I play in a rock and roll band,
And I know your daddy, he don’t dig me,
But he never did understand.
Your papa lowered the boom, he locked you in your room,
I’m comin’ to lend a hand.
I’m comin’ to liberate you, confiscate you,
I want to be your man.
Someday we'll look back on this and it will all seem funny
But now you’re sad, your mama’s mad,
And your papa says he knows...

So prideful, so wounded, he can’t even bring himself to give this voice; the backing vocals tauntingly complete the sentence: “…that I don’t have any money.”

Ah, but here’s the twist! He knows what they think of him—and he’s come prepared! The whole reason he’s there now, at that moment, is to play the recently-acquired trump card:

Well, tell him this is his last chance
To get his daughter in a fine romance,
Because a record company, Rosie,
Just gave me a big advance.

This is the sort of sentiment we tend to find in rap music: I came from nothing, you didn’t believe in me, I succeeded because I belong, now I’m rich, fuck you. I think of it as the “Rosalita moment,” the singular instant when our fortunes change instantaneously for the better, where we level up: the ultimate glory day. Don’t we all want to know what that feels like?

From there on, the song is lifted by his manic buoyancy. By the time the next verse comes, he’s soaring so high he can’t even maintain the tune. He’s singing one note, practically screaming, like he’s banging on the vocal-chord piano; even his own melody can’t contain him:

Well, hold on tight, stay up all night,
Cuz Rosie, I’m comin’ on strong.
By the time we meet the morning light,
I will hold you in my arms.

The last few minutes of the song are pure, unadulterated joy—a veritable freight train of “fuck yeah!”—perfectly articulated by the ebullient saxophone of Clarence Clemons. It is incredibly intense—which is why the band closed with the song for so many years (after this, there is nothing left to play), and also why they stopped playing it live (it must be emotionally exhausting). I’m not a smoker, but every time the last notes of “Rosalita” fade out, I feel like I should light up a cigarette.

The day I went back to work after the quarantine—July of 2020, I think it was—I played “Rosalita” in the car. I was sad about leaving home, but also happy to return to normalcy. I cranked the volume to the max and sang along as loud as I possibly could, cathartic tears rolling down my cheeks. I save that song for moments when I really need the jolt. I can’t handle that level of intensity every day. Bruce Springsteen can not only handle it, he can channel it. We are blinded by the light; he is the sun.

We never find out if Rosalita “comes out”—just as we don’t know the fate of “Thunder Road” Mary or “Born to Run” Wendy. Probably none of them leave the house. But in the end, it doesn’t matter. “Rosalita” is not about her going with him; not really. Rather, it’s about him realizing, at last, that he is worthy of asking.

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ICYMI

The Gen Z activist Victor Shi was our guest on The Five 8:

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Photo credit: the cover of the second Bruce Springsteen album, cropped.