Used to Be a Cop by the Drive-By Truckers: a Policeman's Desolation Blues
Speaking of cinematic, “Used to Be a Cop” by the Drive-By Truckers from 2010 feels like an entire film compressed into seven wending, snaky minutes. I can see the narrative unspooling in my mind as the song progresses. It has to contain one of the harshest, most three-dimensional character depictions of any song in rock history. Patterson Hood’s tangy voice on this track is just right and Mike Cooley’s guitar offers the desolate air of a Western shootout.
This is a song about a man who used to be a police officer, but he lost his job and his badge–we don’t find exactly what happened, but he confesses that he was “too jumpy,” so we can imagine. Someone lived and someone else was victimized–history is told by the “winners,” even if in this case both parties lost. Now our hero reaches for his holster at night, but he is unarmed, unmanned. He also lost his wife and family. His wife divorced him as a result of his mental state–illness? PTSD (he was shot and grazed by a bullet that he keeps in a box)? She thinks he fidgets too much–again, too jumpy. Too hopped up on adrenaline. The song also alludes to possible substance abuse–he used to party until he coughed up half a lung. Now he is old and unemployed and divorced, looking back with a sense of bitterness, with a sense of fateful loss. This is a ballad of a man who has lost everything. He is a walking disaster.
In the second half of the song we additionally learn that the ex-cop lost his house, his car and the respect of his children, who won’t even look at him. He takes on a Job-like resonance. The only salvation for him was his job as a policeman–it was the only thing that he was good at, but he had a bad temper and the shakes (alcohol and/or drug abuse?). But to me the most haunting lines in the song go back to the image of him circling his old house looking inside the windows, remembering what he used to have. It could be a frightening stalker depiction but that only half resonates here: he is an empty shell, looking backward at what he lost. His resentment is sprawling–not focused merely on one person or event.
“Used to be a Cop” is, at its heart, a melancholic song, surely, and we wonder what, if anything the ex-cop clinging-to-the-past might lead to. Nothing productive, that’s for sure. He is at a dead end in his life lacking a sign leading forward. In a sense the way the chickens come home to roost in this song echoes the ways in which social decay and crime psychologically bleed into the everyday lives of any given community.
“Used to Be a Cop” is, in many respects, the flip side to sentimental songs like Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days,” in which we reflect back on the good ole days of high school baseball. In the Drive-By Truckers iteration we are not left with gauzy memories of glory so much as a solid place in society that went awry. Perhaps at times we think of the police as faceless enforcers, for better or worse. Maybe they solve crimes and protect us; maybe they exacerbate and initiate injustice–or perhaps (likely) both of these truths coexist. “Used to Be a Cop” paints a painful portrait of an individual who was once on the front line but who now cannot be trusted. Yet he still lives and breathes. What becomes of him next? We are only left to wonder. He even lacks his identity in the song’s title, the “I” elided completely. Hope only exists in the past here.