#4 A Night With the Jersey Devil by Bruce Springsteen, Robert Jones, Gene Vincent

You have to watch the video to this song!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp1_Enbw_Es

Springsteen did this video as a Halloween internet surprise last year. It’d be easy to dismiss this song as a fun holiday indulgence. However, like many of Springsteen’s songs, this one deals with the eternal, unavoidable connection between father and son. Like Adam Raised A Cain, blood passed on from generation to generation passes on the mistakes and sins as well “of someone else’s past”.

The Jersey Devil is the child whose father’s sins have come to be his own. His father didn’t kill his spirit, he just sent him down a road of living as a tortured soul. Whatever he suffered at the hands of his father leads him to an isolated life where he’s searching for love, but he destroys everyone close to him. Even his mother couldn’t save him from his enslavement to his father’s burdens.

The power that parents have on who their children become is overwhelming. By not facing and dealing with their own demons, parents pass on something that is sometimes irreparable in their children: shame, fears, anger.

The Jersey Devil finally finds love – “her name is Baby Blue”. This reference to Dylan’s song It’s all over now Baby Blue brings to mind a girl on the verge of womanhood. She leaves behind innocent things and faces a new world of uncertainty. A relationship with the Jersey Devil, a man stricken by his and his father’s past, is bound to take any piece of pureness she may have left. He will “sip on [her] blood like wine”. He will take whatever he can from her to help him survive. It will sustain him but drain her.

And the chain continues…

For Complete Lyrics Visit:
http://www.brucespringsteen.net/songs/ANightWithTheJerseyDevil.html