The piano intro is a cascading, crescendoing epic all by itself. The exquisite, almost jaunty riff that continues throughout the song is a flawless distillation of the entire album's message of deep-chested yearning yoked with desperate joy, a plaintive invocation of forlorn adoration and the unquenchable catharsis of speed and love and darkness. The rest of the instrumentation is equally flawless. Somebody in that studio knew how to use a goddamn organ, that's all I'm saying. Springsteen's immortal vocals accompany the throbbing wall of bass and drums to a cataclysmically powerful guitar solo that weeps and shudders from the deepest recesses of the human spirit. And if that wasn't enough, the lyrics are devastating enough to move the hardest heart to anguish:
Blame it the lies that killed us, blame it on the truth that ran us down / You can blame it all on me, Terry, it don't matter to me now / When the breakdown hit at midnight there was nothing left to say / But I hated him, and I hated you when you went away...
It's hard to fathom, much less express, how much pure humanity is bound up in these six minutes and thirty-one seconds. This is beyond genius.
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