Notes on Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Independence Day’
1.
Winter 1981–1982. I’d lost my bedroom to my grandmother. We had moved her north from Florida when it became apparent she could no longer be trusted to care for herself. I was only home for about four weeks for winter break, so I spent my nights on the foldout couch in the den.
It was winter so it must have been cold. Honestly, I can’t remember. I was in my second year at Penn State. I was failing. I was disinterested. College seemed wrong. I’d worked the previous summer in a factory in Trenton, watching and admiring the tough men who punched in everyday at 7 and punched out at 4:30. I punched in and out with them, drove with them to the deli for lunch, smoked pot in the parking lot before returning to machines that carved metal into parts for airplanes, cars, tools — I wasn’t really sure. Someone told me we were working on a government contract for the Air Force. I don’t think I ever really knew.
My job was to sweep up the shop floor, to collect rags, to wire brush the parts to clear stray metal bits. I would climb a metal ladder with a bucket of ammonia and squeegee to clean the blackened windows high above the sweating men.
It was hard work, harder work than I’d ever done in my life. It was far removed from what I knew and I romanticized these men, their obvious masculinity, their rough language, which seemed earned, the way (I assumed) they made their own rules and lived in the physical realm.
I’d come home stinking of grease and sweat, shower, and my friends and I would go out. We’d drink at the local bar, play darts, then often ride out to a local park and sit on a small dam that had been built to flood the area and create a pond. They used to stock it and sometimes there would be men collecting their fishing poles and getting ready to leave. We’d smoke cigarettes and pass a joint around, and a second.
I was in full rebellion, but it was never clear from what. I was 19. I knew it all and I let my dad know every chance I got. He worked in New York City at the time, in an office across from Madison Square Garden. He traveled often for work. He gave me plenty of freedom, but he also had expectations for me — expectations that I found constricting. I was the first son, the oldest of three siblings, a smart kid. I was supposed to go to college, get my degree, get a job. I’d enter the work force, wear a suit and tie, make my contributions to adult society, to capitalist society.
Meh.
I wanted to leave school. He wanted me to stay. He wanted me to study something safe — business, perhaps, or accounting — but I changed majors. I wanted to write. So we fought.
We fought about my hair, about the hours I kept, about politics, about my grades. It was absurd and cliché and, as I came to understand much later, a sign of my own immaturity and his inexperience as a father of a teen crossing into manhood.
My dad was an only child of older parents. His father was 38 or 39 when my dad was born, his mother 37. When my dad was 16, his father died. His father worked for a hat company on the manufacturing side. His mother was a bookkeeper. When his father died, my grandmother and father moved from the Bronx to Brooklyn to be near his aunts and uncles and cousins. There were adult men he looked up to, but no father in the house. I can speculate on what that meant, but I can never know and he has never told me.
I do have a sense, however, that being the man of his house — in that old-fashioned 1950s way of thinking — probably influenced the choices he made. He told me once that he considered being a high school history teacher, but opted to play it safe and study business. He spent almost 30 years with the same company, rising from buyer to upper management. It was an accomplishment that warranted respect — something I understand now, but couldn’t in 1981.
So, here I was, a winter night during break, trying to fall asleep on a fold-out couch in the den, listening to Bruce Springsteen on a tape-deck, The River, an album that came out about a year earlier, rocking my head back and forth, singing the rockers that open the record. The pace changes. Song five comes on, a couple of piano notes, a picked guitar, and Bruce singing “Well, papa go to bed now, / it’s getting late, / nothing we can say / is going to change anything now,” and I find myself crying.
2.
Bruce Springsteen says “Independence Day” was the first song he wrote about fathers and sons, and it was a song that came out at a time when my father and I were at cross-purposes. I was a student at Penn. State, but feeling hemmed in by expectations and doing my best to push back. I was the oldest of three in my family, and the assumption was that I’d go to college, finish in four years, get a stable job and do as my father had done — get married, raise a family, be a suburban American, bourgeois man.
That I eventually settled in the suburbs was a bit of an accident, like so many of my choices. At the time, I couldn’t see that the house on the quiet street was a possibility, or even an acceptable likelihood. I had re-invented myself, changing from your typical high school conformist into a bohemian hippie punk. I fancied myself an artiste — a poet, songwriter, pencil artist, film connoisseur, disc jockey pre-hipster hipster. I consumed as much of artistic, intellectual and boho material as I could (along with lots of marijuana, some acid, and rivers of beer), not fully digesting it, seeing myself as existing in opposition to all things bourgeois, but not understanding until much later that this oppositional attitude meant I was still constructing a self-identity through the eyes and expectations of others.
“I could walk like Brando right into the sun,” as Bruce sang on a different song from a different album, and projected a sense of knowing boredom that might make Iggy Pop proud. It was false bravado, of course, but it created tension at home, badly straining my relationship with my dad — who, in my immature mind, had come to stand for every thing against which I was fighting.
It was silly, I see now, but rebellion is a necessary part of growing into adulthood. It is a common trope, cliche even, a staple of art and pop culture — see Michael Cleary’s poem “Boss’s Son” or the TV sitcom “Frazier” — and “Independence Day” is a classic of the genre.
The song offers one side of a conversation between father and son on the eve of the son’s “independence,” a flight we are told from constant battle.
Now I don’t know what it always was with us
We chose the words, and yeah, we drew the lines
There was just no way this house could hold the two of us
I guess that we were just too much of the same kind
The song implies an argument, perhaps a pleading by the father, and an acknowledgement that “Nothing we can say is gonna change anything now” and they “wouldn’t” — implying choice — even if they could. Springsteen, as he often does, expands this beyond the father-son relationship to the community at large and, as he does so, he captures the consequences of failed relationships as people leave “their friends, their homes,” and “walk that dark and dusty highway all alone.”
The song struck a nerve with me, somehow capturing the essence of the difficulties I was having with my father. I had come — probably without real cause — to feel as the song’s speaker did that “the darkness of (our) house (had) got the best of us,” that the darkness, the chasm that had formed, could not be bridged. For me, the key lines were these:
But they can’t touch me now
And you can’t touch me now
They ain’t gonna do to me
What I watched them do to you.
That was to be my mantra, that I would make my own way, that I would forge my own path. I wasn’t going to compromise. I wasn’t going to give in. I would resist becoming a cliche. Of course, I failed to get that my rebellion, framed in this way, made me a cliche. What I didn’t understand — and what we probably can’t until we’re much older — is that compromise is a fact of our existence, that it is the price we pay (to quote a different Springsteen song) for living in a world with others. The compromises are not acquiescences, but rather necessary responses, tactical actions that promote our survival. We compromise because we love and because we strive to protect the people we love.
Springsteen’s speaker gets that, even if he doesn’t fully understand. He knows his father has things he wanted to say, but that he couldn’t. He just wasn’t capable of uttering what needed to be said, and the speaker admits to — and apologizes for — his own failures of communication. “Won’t you just say goodbye it’s Independence Day / I swear I never meant to take those things away.”
“Independence Day” continues to resonate for me, though for different reasons — for nostalgia, to a degree, but also because, like Springsteen, I find other meanings in the song that were hidden to me when I first heard it 36 years ago. These new resonances came into clearer view as I listened to Springsteen introduce a live version of the song from a recording of his March 3 show in Milwaukee. Springsteen explained that “Independence Day” was his first father-and-son song, adding that it was a young-man’s song written by someone who couldn’t have comprehended the compromises he would need to make as he grew into adulthood, compromises necessary for his and his family’s survival. The song’s speaker assumed, as I certainly assumed, that he could escape the expectations that hover above him, that control him.
I used to bristle when my dad would tell me as he offered unwanted advice that “it’s for your own good,” or “you’ll understand later.” I’d respond with a roll of the eyes — yes, a cliche — that was supposed to imply “I know better” or “I need to find out myself.” How could he know what I was dealing with. He’d given up, gone corporate, suburban, bourgeois. How could I know, at 18, 20, 22, that both of us were right. I had to learn on my own, though what I needed to learn had little to do with his advice. I had to learn — or relearn — that compromise was integral to being part of something bigger.
3.
I hadn’t intended to write an essay about this. My goal initially was to write a poem that responds to the son in “Independence Day” — either from the father’s point of view or from the son’s, but much later in the son’s life. In some ways, Harry Chapin had already done this in the maudlin “Cats in the Cradle” (six years previously) as he describes a son growing into adulthood, making the same choices and same mistakes as his father.
Chapin’s song, however, couches its commentary in a sense of inevitability, contained in the refrain “when you coming home dad / I don’t know when / but we’ll get together then.” This sense of inertia — meant as irony, as critique, perhaps — obscures that choices have been made. The son in Chapin’s song learns from the father and follows in his footsteps — almost literally.
But what of those choices, and the compromises they imply?
Chapin’s argument — if there is one — appears to be that life moves on in an unbroken cycle, that the sins of the father will manifest themselves as sins in the son, that these compromises perpetuate the cycle. That is a young man’s argument — Chapin was 31 when it came out, the same age Springsteen was when “Independence Day” was released — made before the full mass of life weighs on us.
I’m sitting in the kitchen as I write this. I’m watching a squirrel bounce from branch to branch and the last of the rain fall. Springsteen plays in the background. Summer has ended, the pool is closed, and I should be grading papers, or cleaning — the floors are shaggy with dog hair. I have responsibilities to others — to my wife and to the dogs I have brought into my home, to my parents who are getting older, to my brother and sister, to my nieces and nephews, to the rest of my extended family, to my students, to my editors, my readers and my art, to the world beyond my doors. These responsibilities often conflict, often sit in opposition to each other. I am forced to choose and, as I get older and my priorities shift, the choices change.
At 19, the world is open, full of possibility. The choices we make seem to have few consequences. What we often do not realize is that each decision we make forecloses some of that boundless opportunity, makes access to some paths difficult, if not impossible. This, the essence of compromise, can seem like defeat to the 19-year-old, the 25-year-old, even the 30-year-old. But compromise and defeat are not the same thing.
Am I, as I turn 54, where I expected to be when I was 20? No. Does it matter, and should it? No.