by Jeff Burger
Bruce has never read the book, so I tell him about the key scene where Holden talks to his baby sister Phoebe. Says Holden:
“You know what I’d like to be? I mean, if I had my goddam choice?”
“What? Stop swearing.”
“You know that song, ‘If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye’? I’d like—”
“It’s ‘If a body meet a body coming through the rye’!” old Phoebe said. “It’s a poem by Robert Burns.”
“I know it’s a poem by Robert Burns.”
She was right, though. It is, “If a body meet a body coming through the rye.” I didn’t know it then, though.
“I thought it was ‘If a body catch a body,’” I said. “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”
“Wow,” says Bruce when I finish telling him the story. “That’s wild.”
Three years ago, Bruce Springsteen, a nice boy who loved rock and roll more than anything, was dragged into the ugly and brutal fluorescence of American celebrity. For all his naiveté (that same naiveté that allowed him, for one thing, to love rock and roll so much when everybody else had given up and gotten a job), and perhaps because of it, he bore up under the relentless scrutiny, managing in the process to acquit himself remarkably well during his first big league rock-and-roll tour. In the meantime, his record company made hay from his new celebrity and hustled his Born to Run album to number one on the charts and eventually to platinum sales figures. [The album ultimately did achieve multiplatinum sales status but actually peaked at number three on the US charts. —Ed.] And, so, three years ago, a “superstar” was born; surely, the poet must die.
Darkness on the Edge of Town took eleven months to record. Legal disputes of the kind that tend to accrue to anyone who is suddenly rich and famous occupied the remainder of his over-two-year layoff. But what appears to have really happened during this period is that Bruce Springsteen stood back, took stock of his world both in and, more importantly, out of rock and roll, and focused back on his career with a newly keen and powerful vision, becoming more the artist than ever. This talent no longer overwhelms him on Darkness but is harnessed fully to a coherent, usually incisive, and definitely more mature view of the world. “This album’s stripped down,” Springsteen says, “to run as clean as possible and stay true.”
Paradoxically while it is stripped down, it is also more complete. Where there was once only hope, now there is also warning. Where he once dealt only with youthfulness and “kids,” he now also deals with age (“Racing in the Street”) and parents (“Factory,” “Adam Raised a Cain”). Where everything used to be about movement, the faster the better, now there is a concern with standing still and stiller (“Factory,” “Streets of Fire”). Where a sense of community was all-important, with Spanish Johnny and the Magic Rat and Puerto Rican Jane and Eddie and a whole host of people crisscrossing one another’s lives, now a man stands alone on a hill, having lost everything and everyone, in “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” Where he once put certain things into occasionally inadequate words, now he knows to wail wordlessly. Not that Bruce has forsaken the highway, the kids, the gang, the words, or any of that, just that on this new album these concerns have unfolded to reveal their many facets, their true intricacies and subtleties. “Darkness,” says Springsteen, “is a confrontation with a lot of things. Born to Run had a certain romantic feel. This is more realistic.”
But realistic is a misleading description. There’s nothing cold and hard-edged about Darkness. The realism here is more naturalism or social realism, realism with a purpose beyond the mere representational, something along the lines of what the WPA artist of the thirties employed to inspire the common man from his massive malaise. No doubt, there is a reformer, a helper at work on this record and one who seems especially driven to the task by deep spiritual connections. I ask Springsteen whether he feels religious.
“Yeah, well, but not in the organized way,” he responds. “I was raised Catholic and everybody who was raised Catholic hates religion. They hate it, can’t stand it. It’s funny, I went to a funeral the other day and all my relatives were there and we got to talking about it. It’s a funny thing, they’re all in their thirties, my sister and all, and they all feel the same way I do. But their kids go to Catholic school and to church every Sunday. They’re really under the gun to this Catholic thing.
“I quit that stuff when I was in eighth grade. By the time you’re older than thirteen it’s too ludicrous to go along with anymore. By the time I was in eighth grade I just lost it all. I decided to go to public high school, and that was a big deal. If you got up in eighth grade class and said that next year you were going to Freehold Regional it was like … ‘Are you insane? You are dirt! You are the worst! You’re a … barbarian!’” He gives a short laugh.
I tell him that what I wanted to get at is where the idea for a song like “Adam Raised a Cain” came from.
Springsteen explains: “I did read the Bible some. I tried to read it for a while about a year ago. It’s fascinating. I got into it quite a ways. Great stories. Actually, what happened was I was thinking of writing that particular song, and I went back trying to get a feeling for it.”
Elsewhere Bruce has mentioned The Grapes of Wrath (speaking of social realism and religious allegory) as having been a source of inspiration for Darkness. He readily volunteers that the movie was “one of the big influences” but waxes a bit guilty when asked about the book. “I haven’t read it yet,” he says, adding quickly, “but I’ve got it in my suitcase. I have got it.
“The movie affected me a lot. It brought up a lot of questions I didn’t think about before. There’s the great part where he’s coming back from prison and he finds that little guy hiding in the closet. Little guy says, ‘They’re coming.’ ‘Well, who’s coming?’ ‘They’re coming. Taking away all the land.’ And then the guy comes on the tractor and it’s their friend. They ask him, ‘Who’s doing this?’ And the tractor guy just says, ‘Well, I got my orders from this guy and it goes back to him.’
“To me, it’s like, Where do you point the gun? There’s no place to take aim. There’s nobody to blame. It’s just things, just the way. Whose fault is it? It’s a little bit of this guy, a little bit of that guy, a little bit of this other guy. That was real interesting to me … And it was great that when that movie came out it was a very popular movie.” As I write, Darkness is an immensely popular record.
Darkness on the Edge of Town is not a tour de force like Born to Run. That could never be, because the things on Darkness and in Bruce Springsteen have become too complex, too ambiguous. The album is a transitional piece, in two ways. It is transitional as far as content in that it is a questioning of the old values and a broadening towards the new; it is transitional as far as Springsteen’s career goes because it marks a full ripening of his artistic powers and the emergence as well of a serious social conscience.
Bruce is telling me why he likes touring. “Home never had a big attraction for me. I get excited staying in all these different hotels, in a whole lot of rooms. I’m always curious what the wallpaper’s gonna be like. Do I have a big bed or a little one? And what’s this funny painting? Always a sense of transition.” Darkness is a transitional record because Springsteen is devoted to the transition that is living.
I was on the road three days and nights with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, and that’s about as good a time stand in which to hold a resurrection as I can think of. The problem is, I
don’t know who exactly was more resurrected, Bruce and the band or me. Southside Johnny once spoke glowingly of Bruce in terms of “charisma.” But charisma has the odor of the secular. After what I saw, heard, and felt, I’m looking for a word that’s something more in the religious price range. And maybe three confirmed miracles.
No sweat. It’s one hundred degrees in Houston in July. The death toll from the Texas heat has topped twenty persons and is still rising, and Bruce Springsteen is not sweating at the intermission of his titanic three-hour show. Now, some among our rock stars would approach such an accomplishment from the obvious direction—e.g., no effort, no sweat. But not Springsteen. “I’m jumping around and there’s oceans of sweat coming off arms and face and all of a sudden … no more sweat! I feel my face, bone dry. I guess I just got no more. Weird.”
And then he went out for another hour and a half.
Having not seen Springsteen and the band perform for nearly two years, what initially strikes me my first night on the road—besides the fact that the new songs sound great, besides the fact that he does superior versions of both “Fire” and “Because the Night,” besides the fact that the band is as tight and expressive a rock-and-roll unit as I’ve ever seen, besides the fact that Clarence has achieved such elegance, such authority onstage and on the sax that he more than fills his billing as “King of the World,” besides all that and much, much more—is simply the fact that the set is so grueling and the tour is so long. No sweat, no wonder.
In Houston, it occurs to me that Springsteen’s rap in the middle of “Growin’ Up” is sort of the glue that binds them. He talks about the days when he and Steve were playing around Asbury, waiting to be discovered, how they can’t figure out what the missing X factor is and how the ex-manager of the Byrds and the ex-manager of so and so have all said they’ll come down and see them and so forth. Eventually, Bruce winds it around to Clarence descending from a spaceship to make the band complete. Space travel aside, it’s clear that this is pretty much the way it was with this band (indeed, what band didn’t count on the helping hand of the friend of a friend of an ex-manager sometime?), and that reciting the story, remembering their humble beginnings, their shared past, provides a sense of—if you’ll pardon me—roots. That, along with love.
As if to confirm my theory, Bruce later tells me another story about the early days when they first traveled to Boston and were staying in the attic of a friend’s house where there were only four mattresses. “So every night after the gig we had to try and figure out whose turn it was to sleep on the floor.” He laughs. “But it really didn’t matter. The guys were great. They’re guys who you can go through that sort of stuff with. It was never a down. Me and Steve would always sit back and say, ‘As bad as this is right now, it will never be as bad as it was before we made an album or got a break.’ Who are we to complain? This is Easy Street. I’m lucky number one. So are all those guys. A bunch of lucky jokers. It’s a lot of work, but you’re doing something you like. We always considered ourselves to be way in front with the whole ball game.
“I know what it’s like not to be able to do what you want to do, ’cause when I go home that’s what I see. It’s no fun. It’s no joke. I see my sister and her husband. They’re living the lives of my parents in a certain kind of way. They got kids, they’re working hard. They’re just real nice, real soulful people. These are people … you can see something in their eyes. It’s really something. I know a lot of people back there …”
The picture looms vivid in his mind, so does what can only be described as his mission. “That’s why my album, a big part of it, is the way it is. It’s about people that are living the lives of their parents, working two jobs … It’s also about a certain thing where they don’t give up. I asked my sister, ‘What do you do for fun?’ ‘I don’t have any fun,’ she says. She wasn’t kidding … I’m just really thinking about a whole lot of things.”
He thinks for a moment, looking at his hands. “A whole lot of stuff went down on me in the last year or two and then I was around home a lot and there was a lot of stuff going on with the people I was friends with back there, and I see it from all sides. Which is why I can’t go out onstage at night and not try and bring it home. Because … what an ingrate? What a spit in the face of everything that is anything? I could never do that. I’d rather get thrown off the bus. They should throw me off the bus at sixty miles per hour. ‘You don’t belong in the bus!’ It’s funny when I read something I say about this stuff. I always sound like some kind of fanatic, some kind of zealot. But I think there’s things that people take for granted. How can you take it for granted? I stick too close to the other side to know what’s real about this side. And I still got too many people who are close to me who are still living on that other side.”
The Bruce Springsteen tour rolls on into New Orleans in a sort of time-warp trip from Houston, a forbidding city of the future, into this forbidden city of the past. “Who you got in here?” the cop who lolls about the lobby of our French Quarter hotel asks the desk clerk watching the unusual activity. “Bruce Springstein,” drawls the clerk, adding in his mind no doubt, “You know, that Jewish fellow from up north.” Bruce Springstein? That’s right, or at least that’s how they’ve got him on the guest manifest.
Music. It’s everywhere. If any place, American music was born here, right down the block from the hotel at what is now called Jackson Square and what was once called Congo Square because that’s where all the blacks and their music were auctioned into slavery. Musicians. There’s probably more per square foot in New Orleans than any other place in the world. (Just ask the white man at the biggest oldies shop.) Always a horn blowing somewhere in the heat.
It’s not quite the twentieth century here. It’s not quite reality. Maybe it’s the movies, but it’s not faked. Around the corner, the Good Friends Bar has amended its factory-printed sign with some hand-lettering: “Under new management—Same old customers.” No future, only past, in New Orleans. In the middle of Bourbon Street, a scrawny black kid dances a little circle, metal taps taped onto his raggedy sneakers. I take that back: no future, only New Orleans here. An existence outside of time.
He’s a teetotaling Yankee whose songs these days have more in common with the rural West than the South. But when he talks about rock and roll as if it were some spirit creature that takes possession of a man, or, indeed, when he is playing on a stage like a man possessed, it is clear that he belongs in New Orleans, this musician/poet/Catholic/fallen-away Catholic/religious seeker/religious person (?)/exhortator/mad dancer and raspy-voiced shaman Bruce Springsteen, along with his E Street tent show. Does he even know where he is? It’s hard to tell. But of the three shows I saw this tour, this one is the best.
Hallelujah! The biblical wailing of “Adam Raised a Cain” becomes a voodoo chant here. The fever and “The Fever,” a song he has added in Houston, burn white-hot, turning the soaking air to steam. The jungle drums and jungle sound effects of “Not Fade Away”/“She’s the One” bounce off Jackson Square and echo back to the coastline of Africa. Like the spontaneous Dixieland parades that can spill down Bourbon Street at a moment’s notice, Bruce and Clarence spill off the stage and up the aisles into the reaching and exultant crowd, a rock-and-roll parade. Then there’s “The Rap.”
Bruce Springsteen, as usual, steps out in the middle of “Growin’ Up” to talk. In Houston, he told a sci-fi-horror-movie story about things that aren’t really spooky; tonight, he invokes the real thing, and it goes something like this:
“When I was a boy, there were two things in my house that my parents didn’t like. One was me. The other was the guitar. ‘That goddam guitar!’ my father used to say. I think he thought all the things in my room were made by the same company, ‘That goddamn guitar. The goddamn stereo. Those goddamn records …’ Anyway, one day my parents called me downstairs for a talk. And they sit me down at the kitchen table with ’em and they start telling me it’s about time I start getting serious with
my life. ‘And don’t tell me about that goddamn guitar!’ my father says. See, my father wants me to be a lawyer and my mother wants me to be an author. ‘Be a lawyer,’ my father tells me, ‘then you’ll be all set. Lawyers own the world!’ Now, my mother’s Italian and my father’s Irish—and I’m stuck here in the middle—so they decide I should go around the corner and have a talk with the priest about my life. ‘And don’t say anything about the goddamn guitar!’
“OK, I go around the corner and I walk up the steps to the rectory and I ring the bell and after a while the priest comes out. ‘I’m Mr. Springsteen’s son,’ I say to the priest, ‘and he told me I should come over to you and have a serious talk about what I’m gonna do with my life.’ The priest, he thinks for a minute, and then says to me, ‘Have you tried praying, my son? I think you should speak to God about this.’
“So I go home and I’m thinking about how I’ve got to speak to God and how to find him and then I call up the Big Man, Clarence, ’cause he knows everybody. I say, ‘Listen, I got to talk to God about my life. You know where I can find him?’ ‘Sure,’ he said to me, ‘I spoke to him last night. He’ll be up on the hill by the cemetery tonight.’ Great.
“That night I go over to the hill by the cemetery and it’s real dark and I’m climbin’ the hill and climbin’ until I’m almost at the top and I stop and I’m lookin’ all around. Then I look up at the sky and I say, ‘God?’”
Perfectly timed, right on the mark, out of the cavernous rapture of the audience a New Orleans kid yells in response: “What?” And Springsteen cracks up. Still laughing, he tosses back, “God’s in the cheap seats tonight … Listen, God, if I’d’ve known I could’ve at least gotten ya a backstage pass or something.” The crowd whoops. The shaman is back in control.
Springsteen says, “‘God? You there?’” At which point, Danny Federici hits an eerie, piercing electronic note that ricochets around his speakers like a bolt from heaven. Springsteen crouches in the spotlight in awe and in alarm. “‘God, ya gotta help me. My mother wants me to be an author, and my father wants me to be a lawyer and they told me to go to the priest and he told me to come to you and all I want to do’”—he pauses reverentially—“‘is play my guitar … !’”