Reason to Believe: Bruce Springsteen and his fans
This is an old essay that I thought I’d share, given that we’ll be seeing Bruce Springsteen on Broadway later this week. There are no links…
This is an old essay that I thought I’d share, given that we’ll be seeing Bruce Springsteen on Broadway later this week. There are no links in it — as I said, the essay is older (probably from 2005 or so).
REASON TO BELIEVE: Bruce Springsteen and his fans
“I always believed, well, the fans are there for something. It’s more than a personality cult. They’re there because there’s certain music that — the music they love. There’s ideas that perhaps you have in common.” — Bruce Springsteen on Nightline
The show is loud at this point, pushed to a fever pitch that will carry it through nearly three hours, through the full-bodied sound of the current album, through some chestnuts from earlier days, some reconfigured, made new, re-created. It’s as if he is saying, “There is nothing static in rock and roll,” as if he’s saying “change, transformation is the natural state of the world.”
It is Dec. 13, 2002, and we’re in Albany, N.Y. Bruce Springsteen is winding down the second leg of his American tour, playing one of the last concerts before taking a long break for Christmas. My wife, Annie, and I and a friend had trekked north from our home in New Jersey to see Bruce and the E Street Band — my fifth Springsteen concert, Annie’s fourth.
I’d been following the tour since it kicked off in August, watching the set lists change, grow, take on the complexions of the cities in which he was playing. During the early shows, he played “American Skin (41 Shots),” his mournful and angry response to the Amadou Diallo shooting in New York a few years ago. The song tells three stories — of the policeman who pulls the trigger, of the victim and the victim’s mother — tying them together with the refrain “It ain’t no secret / No secret my friend / You can get killed just for living / In your American skin.” It is a song about race in America that hinges on the prejudices and biases ingrained in all of us, the fears and insecurities — handled sensitively. The song criticizes American society, indicts all of us in Diallo’s death — but New York police took the song as a direct indictment of them and organized a boycott when the song was unveiled in 2000.
This misreading, and the feeling by some fans that the message was inconsistent with what Springsteen was saying on “The Rising,” resulted in the song being dropped from the set list fairly early on in the tour (though there were no public statements that I could find explaining the decision). It was included in the first six stops on the tour and eight of the first 11 shows, but then disappeared from the 2002 World Tour — only showing up on a set list in Cincinnati, where tensions continue to run high nearly three years after the shooting of a black teenager by a white police officer. (It started creeping back onto the set lists in the last month or so.)
Bruce always has been sensitive to his audience. When crowds during the reunion tour in 1999 did not respond well to the songs from “Tracks,” his four-disc box of B-sides and outtakes culled from his nearly 30-year career, he moved away from them, sprinkling shows with an occasional cut and relying instead on a mix of seemingly forgotten album cuts.
This tour has functioned the same way, with a core of songs — about a dozen, mostly from “The Rising” — that were played fairly regularly, though as the tour has worn on, he has relied on that nucleus of tunes less and less, adding cover songs as the situations demand (“Dirty Water” when he was in Boston, “I Walk the Line” to honor Johnny Cash, “My Ride’s Here” for Warren Zevon) and expanding his reach into every single album he’s recorded.
That’s a departure from the approach he had been taking. Starting with the 1999–2000 reunion tour, Springsteen seemed to have no interest in songs from “Tunnel of Love” or “Human Touch” and “Lucky Town,” the two albums he recorded after disbanding the E-Street Band. The reunion tour focused instead on the heyday of the E Street Band — “Born to Run,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “The River” and “Born in the U.S.A.,” with occasional new songs and some other tracks from the first two albums sprinkled in.
That was unfortunate for many reasons, not the least of which is that there is a lot of good music on those flawed discs. I’d always felt that songs like “Leap of Faith,” “Better Days” and others complemented the message of community Springsteen was offering during the recent tour and to see them show up on recent set lists makes sense.
It also meant that Springsteen stayed away from politics — something that has been at the core of his music from the beginning. There have been the occasional political statements — “American Skin (41 Shots)” in Cincinnatti, his dedicating “Born in the U.S.A.” in Albany as a “prayer for peace” and the statement he began reading when the stadium show leg opened at Giants Stadium in July. That was when Bruce started talking about the questions raised about “the forthrightness of our government” in connection with the lead-up to the war in Iraq, saying that “playing with the truth … is always wrong, never more so than when real lives are at stake.”
“The question of whether we were mislead into the war in Iraq isn’t a liberal or conservative or Republican or Democratic question, it’s an American one,” he says in his statement, which has been read at every show on the recently complete stadium leg of “The Rising” tour. “Protecting the democracy that we ask our sons and daughters to die for is our responsibility and our trust. Demanding accountability from our leaders is our job as citizens. It’s the American way. So may the truth will out.”
He was being fairly even-handed — perhaps too even-handed — but the statement signaled a change in thinking that culminated in a rousing, political set when he returned to the New York-New Jersey area for three shows at Shea Stadium in New York City.
I was there for the Oct. 1 show, during which Bruce ran straight into the belly of the political beast, jokingly calling for the impeachment of President Bush and using his playlist to offer a more explicit critique of Bush’s America than he’d offered at the earlier shows I’d attended. It featured the return of “American Skin (41 Shots), a cover of Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain” (“Long as I remember the rain been comin’ down / Clouds of myst’ry pourin’ confusion on the ground / Good men through the ages, tryin’ to find the sun / and I wonder, still I wonder, who’ll stop the rain”) and the angriest version of “Born in the U.S.A” I’ve ever heard.
Bruce and the band came out to a strobe-lit stage as samples from President Bush’s infamous weapons of mass destruction speech played and then kicked into “Souls of the Departed,” a song that opens with the story of an American soldier assigned to “go through the clothes of the soldiers who died” in Basra during the first Gulf War,” who sees them in his dreams and closes with this chilling verse: “Now I ply my trade in the land of king dollar / Where you get paid and your silence passes as honor / And all the hatred and dirty little lies / Been written off the books and into decent men’s eyes.”
“Waiting on a Sunny Day” from “The Rising” is generally played as a party song, featuring a call-and-response in which Bruce asks the crowd to sing “A little bit louder if you’re from Long Island” or Queens or wherever it is he’s playing. At Shea, however, he took it a step further, singing “Sing a little louder if you want to impeach the president,” catching the crowd by surprise (he came back to the same line during “Mary’s Place,” asking the crowd to replace Bush with “someone who knows what he’s doing,” i.e. Clarence Clemens”).
Then came the full-band version of “Johnny 99” from the acoustic “Nebraska,” as pointed a critique of American capitalism as could be offered. The song, a country-flavored folk blues, is about a man down on his luck who kills a clerk during a robbery. Johnny is sentenced to “Prison for 98 and a year and we’ll call it even Johnny 99.” The song was transformed by the full-band backing, part rock-a-billy, part country-bluegrass, part hard-rock rave-up — it was pure Bruce, a hard-edged indictment of the American economic model: “Now judge judge I had debts no honest man could pay / The bank was holdin’ my mortgage and they was takin’ my house away / Now I ain’t sayin’ that makes me an innocent man / But it was more ‘n all this that put that gun in my hand.”
And then there was “Born in the U.S.A.,” played during the second encore after his paean to Asbury Park, “My City of Ruins.” Bruce steps to the microphone and makes what has become his stock speech about Iraq, raising catcalls and boos from the crowd. As he finishes his speech, the band kicks hard into “Born in the U.S.A.,” Bruce biting off the lyrics, spitting bullets and generally taking no prisoners.
What was striking about the show was the disconnect between Springsteen’s political sentiments and those of the crowd — from the boos and pro-Bush chants to the desire of the guy behind me who seemed to think Bruce wouldn’t play “Born in the U.S.A.” because Bruce is “against the war,” until, of course, he did and he did it as a protest, which is what the song was always meant to be.
This response spilled over onto New Jersey radio the next day, with callers to New Jersey 101.5 — an oldies/talk radio station with a conservative bent — bashing Springsteen for becoming political and taking on the president. They wanted to hear music, they said, and have a good time — Bruce should just keep his politics to himself.
I witnessed a similar disconnect back in December during the Albany show I attended (apparently, it was repeated at many of the shows on the tour, but has since faded). Springsteen had just finished tearing up the stage with a torrid version of “Night” from “Born to Run.” He asked the audience for some quiet so he could strike a more somber mood. Then came the open chords of “Empty Sky,” a mournful meditation on the Sept. 11 terror attacks that does not shy away from the immediate anger that most of us felt that day. The Pepsi Arena was quiet, thousands singing along — until Springsteen came to the refrain at the end of the first verse, “I want a kiss from your lips / I want an eye for an eye,” when the quiet was shattered by a loud cheering.
“Empty Sky” is an angry song, one that lives in that horrible moment, that imagines the immediate response of the families who lost loved ones when the towers crumbled. But its anger is couched in sparse, quiet, sorrowful music, a melody and arrangement that emphasizes loss and mourning over anger, a song — both on record and live — that is part of the disc’s (and tour’s) message of healing and rebirth. (As he was about to play “Born in the U.S.A.,” a song critical of our treatment of Vietnam veterans and critical of the war, he said: “I wrote this song 20 years ago about Vietnam. Tonight, I want to play it as a prayer for peace.”)
My initial reaction to the cheers was surprise — were these people listening to the song? Had they listened to the disc? But I realized that they were reacting like so many — still unable to let go of their anger, finding solace and support anywhere they could. Their anger colored their response to the music, obscured for them the overall message Springsteen was offering with “The Rising.”
And this is the issue, ultimately, with Springsteen: His fans see him as their own blank canvas on which to paint their own lives. In their eyes, Springsteen the singer, the performer, merges with his fans, becomes what it is they themselves need him to be.
Since bursting upon the national consciousness in 1975 with “Born To Run,” an album the critic Greil Marcus said “turned the dreams and failures two generations have dropped along the road into an epic” (Rolling Stone, Oct. 9, 1975), Springsteen has embodied all the hopes and dreams, the anguish and anger and joy of a generation facing the uncertainty of the last quarter of the 20th century. He is their spokesman — our spokesman — and our reactions to him
What is odd about this, however, is that it seems to manifest itself in an unwillingness to listen to what Bruce is actually saying. So what we end up with is a series of misreadings and misrepresentations — Springsteen as hyper-patriot a la Reagan, Springsteen as spokesmen for the police, Springsteen as good-time rocker, Springsteen as super-American.
The incidents pile up — the cheering for “eye for an eye” being only the latest example of a thread that has run through Springsteen’s career for nearly two decades — at least since “Born in the U.S.A.,” if not longer.
I remember leaving a 1985 concert in Syracuse, a show in which Bruce waved what I would call an ironic flag, using it connect with an American ideal — but one that he very definitely believed had been lost. The tour and the album it was meant to support can be seen as both a success and a failure — there were huge crowds and sell-outs of both indoor and outdoor arena, with some crowds numbering nearly 100,000. The album was a smash on the charts, reaching number 1 and generating seven Top 10 singles.
But despite its sales figures, “Born in the U.S.A.” can be seen as one of Springsteen’s least successful albums because of the storm that followed. Springsteen, across 12 songs, sang of working-class angst, of the pain of growing older, of becoming a man. It was an album of withering commentary on the state of America and the failures that too many members of Springsteen’s generation were facing.
But there was a twist. The music was bright, bold, its sound borrowed from the toss-off rockers on “The River” (“Ramrod,” “I’m a Rocker”), organically growing from a rock-and-roll tradition in which darker sentiments are set to the big beat. That the beat ultimately overshadowed everything Springsteen was trying to say cannot be ignored when looking back at the album, at the fact that people refused to see the forest of Bruce’s words for the trees of his rock and roll must be factored into any analysis of the record.
I remember its release in 1984, thinking it a great rock record, thinking it the perfect antidote to the “Morning in America” nonsense being put forth by Ronald Reagan and his band of merry conservatives and as the year wore on I was shocked that an album that was so obviously a critique of American society during the Reagan years could be read by anyone as an endorsement.
“Born in the U.S.A.” opens with the anthemic title track, a song that tells the story of a working-class kid forced to do what so many working-class kids were forced to do in the 1960s: serve in Vietnam. The song is massive in its sound, Springsteen’s guitar and keyboard attack set atop a booming bass drum — a rhythm controlled, almost march-like.
“Born down in a dead man’s town / The first kick I took was when I hit the ground / You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much / Till you spend half your life just covering up // Born in the U.S.A.”
He gets in “a little hometown jam” and is sent to Vietnam, where he is “”to go and kill the yellow man.” He comes home, having lost a brother in Khe Sahn, and finds he can’t find a job and finds himself “ten years burning down the road / Nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go.”
From there, the album is a collection of songs focusing on disappointment — “This whole world is out there just trying to score / I’ve seen enough I don’t want to see any more” (“Cover Me”), “well time slips away / and leaves you with nothing mister but / boring stories of glory days” (“Glory Days”) — and the loss of youth — “Darlington County” and “Working on the Highway” with their tales of good times gone bad (both tell the story of men in their 20s, unable to give up the good times, still interested in younger girls, who ultimately pay for their inability to grow up — “Wayne handcuffed to the bumper of a state trooper’s Ford”).
The album closes with one of Springsteen’s most revealing songs, “My Hometown,” one of only three ballads on the 12-song album — the riveting “Downbound Train” and “I’m on Fire” are the others. It is a history of Asbury Park in four verses, a small seaside city ripped apart in the 1960s by race riots, a city designed in Springsteen’s milieu to stand in for small-town America: “Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows and vacant stores / Seems like there ain’t nobody wants to come down here no more / They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks / Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back to your hometown.”
Morning in America, indeed.
And yet, too many of his fans had difficulty seeing beyond that massive flag. As I was leaving the show, I talked with the people filing out around me about the energy, the power, about how it left me drained and stunned — when someone said he thought it as great that there was someone like Bruce out there who could be so patriotic, who wasn’t afraid to wave the flag and show his love country.
My reaction was a bit different and I wondered how he could have missed the darker hues of songs like “Johnny 99,” “Atlantic City” or “Racing in the Streets.”
The Syracuse show came about four months after President Ronald Reagan attempted to link himself to Springsteen during a campaign stop in Hammonton, N.J.:
“America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside our hearts,” Reagan said. “It rests in the message of hope so many young people admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.”
Springsteen quickly responded, telling Rolling Stone that he disagreed with Reagan on labor rights, the environment, civil rights and Vietnam veterans: “You see the Reagan re-election ads on TV — you know: ‘It’s morning in America.’ And you say, ‘Well, it’s not morning in Pittsburgh. It’s not morning above 125th Street in New York. It’s midnight, and like, there’s a bad moon risin.’”
The reaction, however, was one he did not necessarily expect. (I remember reading that Springsteen had been dissatisfied with the 1984–85 and that this dissatisfaction resulted in the release of “Live 1975–1985.” As the story goes, Bruce heard a demo of a four-song run — “Born in the U.S.A.,” “Seeds,” “The River” and “War” that put the music back in the context he intended, couched the anthemic “Born in the U.S.A.” in the more critical vein for which he was aiming.)
Part of it was Springsteen’s own fault — the flags and banners created a huge feeling of patriotism that overwhelmed the singer’s criticism of late-American capitalism. As Conservative columnist George Will wrote in a column in September 1984: “I have not got a clue about Springsteen’s politics, if any, but flags get waved at his concerts while he sings songs about hard times. He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seems punctuated by a grand, cheerful, affirmation: ‘Born in the U.S.A.!’” (Jim Cullen, “Born in the U.S.A. — Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition,” HarperPerennial, 1997)
But where Will saw elation, was actually anger. Bruce was singing about Vietnam vets being out of work, with “nowhere to run” and “nowhere to go.” He was singing of men who refused to give up their youth, who still wanted to play as boys and paid the price for ignoring their responsibilities (“Darlington County” and “Working on the Highway”).
Jim Cullen, in his book “Born in the U.S.A. — Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition” (HarperPerennial, 1997), says Springsteen as symbol was ripe for the picking by the Reaganites that fall.
“Springsteen’s good-guy image and unabashed patriotism, then, seemed to make him a perfect fit for the Reaganites,” he wrote. “Indeed, given the extent to which the Republican Party had appropriated God and Country by 1984, it seemed possible to fit some of the best ideas and traditions of American history under a GOP banner (George Will’s column on Springsteen is a case study of this process in action). As far as they were concerned, Springsteen was a conservative Republican that fall.
“Many people, even those with only a passing familiarity with Springsteen’s music, regarded this effort to capture Springsteen as, at best, misguided. More committed fans reacted with outrage. Springsteen’s biographer Dave Marsh later wrote that Will’s column “was such a perversion of what Springsteen was trying to communicate that it constituted an obscenity.” Few in the years since would have reason to disagree.
“In a very real way, however, both Will and Reagan were right: Springsteen really was, and is, a conservative as well as a republican. But he’s not a conservative republican (lowercase “c” and “r”) in the Reagan sense of the term. Rather, he’s the conservator of an older, more resonant republicanism that shaped and built a nation.”
It is this element, this connection to our better selves and his willingness to defend it, that allows Springsteen fans to see what they want in the Boss, to take his words and make them say what they want to hear.
When Springsteen started performing “American Skin (41 Shots)” on the 2000 tour, he was attacked by the New York City police union (Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, wrote a letter to union members that said it was “an outrage that (Springsteen) would be trying to fatten his wallet by reopening the wounds of this tragic case at a time when police officers and community members are in a healing period.”) and savaged in a column in the New York Times by John Tierney: “During their year of vilification, culminating in a trial in an Albany courthouse with a mob outside chanting for their heads, the officers became figures you might expect Bruce Springsteen to sing about: working-class guys trying to do their jobs while oppressed by larger social forces. You might not have expected him to play to the mob.”
Again, critics of Bruce failed to listen — as did some supporters who wanted the song to be a direct indictment of police brutality, ignoring an opening verse that shows a panicked police officer “kneeling over his body in the vestibule / Praying for his life.”
But “American Skin (41 Shots)” is typical of Springsteen, of his attempt to connect with the people who have been left outside as the American dream has faded. From the strumming of the guitar that opens “Blinded by the Light” on “Greetings from Asbury Park” to the churchified “My City of Ruin” that closes “The Rising,” Springsteen has been exploring the impact that broken promises have had on our lives and our neighbor’s lives.
Yes, the first two albums may seem to be about wild and innocent youth finding their voice and expression as adulthood nears, but they also are about the desperation that the maturation process creates for a class of teens who see nothing good coming in the future, just dead-end factory jobs or no jobs at all. “Fourth of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” is very much of the same piece as “Backstreets,” despairing and desolate stories of good times coming to a close. With its repeated refrain we were hiding on the backstreets getting louder and deeper, becoming stretched and bent, “Backstreets” (ultimately my favorite Springsteen track) is as succinct a statement on lost youth and the uncertainty of what is to come as you will find in rock and roll music.
And this desolateness remains a theme, this sense that we work all our lives “for nothing but the pain” is central motif of his music. Think of his “daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain”: “Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life, / The working, the working, just the working life.” Or the murderer in “Nebraska,” who offers no remorse: “At least for a little while sir me and her we had us some fun.” Or the two Mexican brothers in “Across the Border” who come to America for a better life, but who die in the desert, victims of the drug trade. In many ways, these are the characters who populate Springsteen’s musical landscape, men and women with few opportunities, who seek out whatever options they can find for themselves to escape. Some find their way to “The Promised Land,” others “waste away / Down in the Jackson Cage.”
As bleak as this landscape can be, Bruce seems also to give his fans that little light of hope, that seed of faith in a future that is just across the river, that sense that “everything that dies someday comes back.” That’s what keeps Bruce fans connected, this sense that “at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe.” It’s why the story of “The Rising” has such resonance and why much of the tour, I think, left the overtly political off the agenda.
The story goes like this: Bruce Springsteen was sitting in his house in Monmouth County, N.J., eating breakfast on Sept. 11 when he saw the news report of the attack on the World Trade Center. He drove to a bridge near his house where he could see the towers and watched them come down.
Like all of us, he told Time magazine in the summer of 2002, he was shocked by the events. But unlike most of us, he turned those events into art.
I remember catching Springsteen on the “America — A Tribute to Heroes” telethon that ran the Friday after the attacks. He played a new song that seemed to have been written for all of New York and all of America. “My City of Ruins,” written for Asbury Park, takes the form of a church hymn, opening with lines that seem to be directly commenting on Sept. 11: “There’s a blood red circle / On the cold dark ground / And the rain is falling down.” The song takes us through nearly deserted streets as the congregation chants “Rise up, come on rise up” and the narrator asks, “How do I begin again?”
The performance that night, for me at least, signified in a nutshell everything Springsteen has to offer his fans. It was a haunting performance, Bruce on acoustic guitar with the E Street Band offering only backing vocals like a choir, one in which the sparse descriptions of a city literally in ruins were set against an intensifying sense of hope as the narrator prays, for hope, for faith, for love, for strength, by its swelling sound, repeating “With these hands” over and over as if to emphasize that it is up to us to make things right.
That message of hope was central to the early shows on “The Rising” tour. When I saw him in Albany, he opened with a rousing, incandescent rendition of “The Rising” and continued to turn up the volume and the energy level with “Lonesome Day.” These songs explode with the passion of a man seeking, searching for answers, a man who thought he knew, “but didn’t really know that much.” “Lonesome Day” is a perfect song to open an album of imperfection, an album on which you can hear him struggle to reclaim his rock voice as he grapples with the insanity of a mad world, an album that, despite its implied subject, still reaches out to the world, to make connections, still believes deeply in all of our humanity.
This always has been the center of Springsteen’s approach, this connection to life, to love, to the people around him. It is why it is easy to believe the stories you hear about the inspiration for the album — that Springsteen was at the beach a couple of days after Sept. 11 when a man drove by, rolled his window down, yelled, “We need ya!” and drove off.
“And I thought, well, I’ve probably been a part of this guy’s life for a while, and people wanna see other people they know, they wanna be around things they’re familiar with,” Springsteen told Rolling Stone. “So he may need to see me right about now. That made me sense, like, ‘Oh, I have a job to do’” (Rolling Stone 903, Aug. 22, 2002)
That’s what “The Rising” is about, what all of his music ultimately is about and why we keep coming back for more. It is that job, that familiarity, the striving for normality during trying, difficult and mystifying times. It is what creates such devotion among his fans, this sense that he is one of us, that he feels what we feel.