After the conclusion of the Magic tour in mid-2008, Springsteen went to work in support of Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency. Springsteen played numerous rallies and speeches, and his November 2 appearance featured the debut of the song “Working on a Dream.” While the campaign didn’t feature anything quite as ambitious as the Vote For Change tour, it met with decidedly better—if you were Springsteen, or a Democrat—results.
In a period of three weeks in January and February 2009, Springsteen had the unique fortune of winning a Golden Globe (for his song “The Wrestler,” from the film of the same name), playing at an inaugural celebration for President-elect Obama (on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial), releasing a new album (Working on a Dream), and performing the halftime show at the Super Bowl. Not a bad way to start a year that would see another mammoth tour, this time with headlining performances at England’s Glastonbury Festival and the Hard Rock Calling concert in London’s Hyde Park.
The latter show, which was released on DVD in 2010, shows a performer clearly at ease with himself. Three months before his sixtieth birthday, he jokes about his age while delivering a performance that would humble most younger rockers: twenty-seven songs, stretching more than three hours from the opening cover of The Clash’s “London Calling” to a closing “Dancing in the Dark,” from the heat of the late afternoon well into the cool of a summer evening. Springsteen left yet another crowd—this one estimated at more than fifty thousand people—utterly sated, hoarse-voiced, and likely barely able to stand.
Just another day at the office for the boy from Freehold. Just another gig. It’s what he does; it’s what he’s always done. From his childhood bedroom in a shotgun house on the wrong side of the tracks, through every two-bit bar in the United States, then into the White House and to Hyde Park, once again, on stage, it’s who he is.
“What will he do next?” has long been the great question when it comes to Springsteen. On June 18, 2011, that question took on a sad weight with the death of Clarence Clemons, age sixty-nine, from the aftereffects of a recent stroke. Clemons was widely regarded as the heart and soul of the E Street Band; his death made headlines worldwide.37
Springsteen left no doubt as to the depth of his loss. In a statement on brucespringsteen.net, he said, “He was my great friend, my partner, and with Clarence at my side, my band and I were able to tell a story far deeper than those simply contained in our music. His life, his memory, and his love will live on in that story and in our band.”
As always, for Bruce Springsteen, it comes down to people, and love, and stories.
1. For the record, there is no such thing as a “straight” biography—such a thing would be a bullet-point list of names and dates without any context whatsoever. Every biography has a point of view, and an agenda, and I’m going to be clear about mine right off the top: this overview of Springsteen’s life is going to attempt to locate, in the details of the man’s life and world, the roots of elements that run throughout his work, while also giving the reader unfamiliar with Springsteen’s background enough context to make the following pages coherent, at the very least.
2. “Pony Boy,” the closing track on 1992’s Human Touch, was a reworking of a traditional lullaby his grandmother used to sing him.
3. The Roxy, Los Angeles, July 7, 1978, as released on Live 1975–85.
4. One of the classic “bits” about his parents was recorded at the Roxy in L.A., July 7, 1978, and included in the Live 1975–85 box set. Late in “Growin’ Up”—one of the vaguely autobiographical songs from his first album—Springsteen drops into a monologue. “I think—I ain’t sure, but I think my mother and father and my sister, they’re here again tonight . . . For six years they’ve been following me around California, trying to get me to come back home. Hey Ma, give it up, huh? Gimme a break! . . . They’re still tryin’ to get me to go back to college. Everytime I come in the house. ‘You know, it’s not too late, you can still go back to college,’ they tell me . . . My father always said ‘You know, you should be a lawyer, get a little something for yourself, you know,’ and my mother, she used to say, ‘No, no, no, he should be an author, he should write books. That’s a good life, you can get a little something for yourself.’ But what they didn’t understand was, was that I wanted everything. And so, you guys, one of you wanted a lawyer and the other one wanted an author, well, tonight, youse are both just gonna have to settle for rock and roll.”
5. How Springsteen avoided the draft is the subject of much discussion, and it forms the subject of one of Springsteen’s most haunting monologues, the introduction to “The River” on the Live 1975–85 box set. He talks, in a heartbroken voice, about the constant struggle with his father, who’d often said, “I can’t wait till the army gets you . . . When the army gets you, they’re gonna make a man out of you.” The story builds in intensity, covering Springsteen’s fear of attending his draft physical, and his eventual failure to be accepted, then coming home and telling his father. “My dad said ‘Where you been?’ I said, ‘I went to take my physical.’ And he said, ‘What happened?’ I said, ‘They didn’t take me.’ And he said, ‘That’s good.’”
6. Godless pinko commie union-boosting bastard that he is, Springsteen isn’t fond of the nickname. I’m not either, and I think this is the only point in this book I use it, save for as ironic effect.
7. The Promise, the 2010 film by Thom Zimny that opened at the Toronto Film Festival before being included on The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story, documents this period of Springsteen’s career with disarming clarity and candor. It’s well worth watching, even for just the grainy footage of a shirtless Springsteen in his living room leading the band through songs that would later appear on Darkness on the Edge of Town.
8. Springsteen wrote and recorded more than seventy songs during the Darkness sessions, with a mere ten appearing on the album.
9. In excusing the absence of “The Promise” from the album, Springsteen says, simply, that he was “too close” to it.
10. Nowhere is this more plain than in “Backstreets,” which, most nights, broke off in the middle for an extended monologue, part story, part genesis of a new song, “Drive All Night,” which would appear on The River two years later. That interlude, referred to by fans as “Sad Eyes,” was transcendent, show after show: it feels like it’s coming straight from the man’s soul, and the mere thought of it brings a tear to my eye.
11. Springsteen introduced the song by saying, haltingly, “This is a song . . . this is called ‘The River.’ This is new. This is for my brother-in-law, and my sister.” The song was written for and inspired by his younger sister Ginny, who got pregnant when she was seventeen, as the female character does in the song.
12. It is a record matched by only two other albums, Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814.
13. Sandford, in Springsteen: Point Blank, argues convincingly for a number of factors at play, including infidelity, neglect, conflicting careers, and others. I’m not going to quibble with his conclusions, so if you’re interested, you’re best off reading his book.
14. That’s a sweeping generalization, I know, and I’m something of an exception to this rule. I actually prefer my heroes to have feet of clay, human foibles, and skeletons in their closets. I don’t take the delight in it that some writers, like Sandford, seem to, but there’s something oddly comforting about flaws and weakness.
15. Springsteen, to his credit, denies this.
16. Springsteen announced the tour, and his participation in it, on stage during a global radio broadcast of the Tunnel tour date in Stockholm that July, before playing a stunning, moving version of Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom.”
17. It’s also the finest rockabilly song about cunnilingus ever written by a global superstar in his forties.
18. From his introduction to “The Wish,” November 8, 1996.
19. Composed by Bruce Springsteen and Roy Bittan.
20. I realize
I should have considerable moral quandaries about bootleg recordings of Springsteen shows, but performances like the Christic benefits, and the debut of “Real World” in particular, make those questions moot. Quite simply, the world would be a poorer place were there no record of these performances. Yes, they are that good.
21. The band on the world tour of 1992–93 is still referred to by many fans as, simply, “the other band.” You have to curl your lip slightly to say it correctly.
22. In fact, it is—as of this writing—Springsteen’s last top ten single.
23. And those who heard or saw it on bootleg.
24. The Greatest Hits album was neither a commercial nor a critical slam dunk. It was pleasantly, and politely, received, but anyone envisioning a chart-topper was disappointed. Worse still, the new songs were widely regarded as pale in comparison to such classics as “Born to Run,” “Atlantic City,” and “The River.”
25. He made a couple of further concert appearances with the E Street Band, including a filmed gig at Sony Studios, and the opening ceremony concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. But these had the feeling of obligation rather than passion. Curiously, he also spent almost a month on the road with Joe Grushecky and the Houserockers, playing sets which mixed originals from both men.
26. Reportedly Springsteen, an inveterate movie junkie, was first inspired by John Ford’s film of the novel, though he later read the book as well. Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass, by journalist Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael Williamson was another key inspiration.
27. Fans refer to the Joad tour as the Shut the Fuck Up Tour.
28. Yes, “is”—I’m listening to the show as I write this, through the miracle of bootlegging.
29. Which drew a deafening roar of approval from the audience.
30. He has performed it since, but it’s among the rarer songs in his catalogue.
31. Well, once you know to look for it.
32. This rapprochement had at least as much to do with a shift in the son as it did with any change in the father, which is often the way of these things. A turning point seems to have come, for Bruce, in the late 1970s, around the time he wrote “Independence Day,” with its critical line “I guess that we were too much of the same kind.”
33. Springsteen credits these trips with increasing his awareness of the problems along the Mexican border, and cites them as one of the influences for the songs on The Ghost of Tom Joad.
34. This move to arenas for the Devils & Dust tour was another of those decisions that some fans saw as sacrificing art on the altar of commerce.
35. Interestingly, the album and tour fared much better in Europe than in the United States. Springsteen actually cut short the projected American tour, and toured Europe twice with The Sessions Band. It’s no accident that the official DVD release of the tour was recorded in Dublin and not Duluth.
36. The song picks up, stylistically and thematically, from The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle’s “Wild Billy’s Circus Story,” which was highlighted by Federici’s accordion playing. Springsteen also supported the Danny Federici Melanoma Fund by donating all the proceeds from a digital ep entitled Magic Tour Highlights, which included the performance of “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” from Federici’s last concert.
37. I was alone in a hotel room in Vancouver, reading over the page proofs for this book when I heard the news. I spent the next few hours listening to some of Clemons’s greatest moments on my cell phone and communing with fans on Twitter and Facebook. They say a grief shared is a grief halved, but I don’t know if that’s true.
WALK LIKE A MANA MIX-TAPE
Side One
“Rock and roll saved my
life when I was a teenager.
It’s still saving it now.”
PATTERSON HOOD of Drive-by Truckers,
live in Seattle, 2008
Rosalita
(Come Out Tonight)
Album: The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle
Released: September 11, 1973
Recorded: June–August 1973
Version discussed: Video Recorded at the Arizona Veterans
Memorial Coliseum, Phoenix, July 8, 1978 (Darkness tour)
ONE OF THE keys to a good mix-tape is to start off strong. And it doesn’t get any stronger than this: “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” is perhaps the Springsteen concert warhorse. For a decade, it was the finale of virtually every show, six to eight minutes of rock and roll defiance and communion, a melodic, exultant cry against the people—his girlfriend’s parents, in particular—who didn’t believe in the narrator’s musical dreams, plus a triumphant whoop at getting the fat advance from the record company, which finally proves his worth. It’s difficult not to hear it as a personal song, although the lyrics don’t mesh up against what we know of Springsteen’s life. That doesn’t matter, however: the song rings true, whether it’s actually true or not.1
For me, “Rosalita” is where it all started.
In the spring of 1984, I was thirteen years old. My parents had separated, and my brothers and I were living with my mom, seeing my dad for dinner once a week and spending every second weekend at the place he shared with Sue, who would later become my stepmother.
One of the great things about my dad’s place was that he had a satellite dish. Not one of those demure, dinner-plate-sized numbers you see affixed to urban apartment buildings and houses these days. His dish was a backyard monstrosity, eight feet in diameter. From the looks of it, my dad could have coordinated a nuclear first-strike from his recliner. Instead, we watched movies on hbo, Cinemax and The Movie Channel. We got addicted to professional wrestling and badly dubbed kung fu movies on one of the Atlanta superstations.
And we watched MTV.
To a chubby, glasses-wearing loner and scapegoat like me, growing up in a town of less than four thousand souls with neither a bookstore nor a record store (let alone a movie theatre or mall), those videos were literally a message from the beyond. There was a whole world out there, just out of reach, and it was being beamed into my life in three-and-a-half-minute chunks, twenty-four hours a day.
Let’s not overlook one salient fact, though: the early eighties was a shitty, shitty time for music. I’ve grown to appreciate New Wave and the New Romantics as an adult (I’ll even confess to a grudging fondness for Duran Duran, if pressed), but back in the day it was all skinny ties and synthesizers and pretty boys on sailboats. Nary a guitar nor an intelligent lyric in sight. Sure, I liked David Bowie, but he didn’t speak to me, at least in his then-contemporary “Let’s Dance”/Serious Moonlight stage.
That all changed in the spring of 1984.2
In the run-up to the release of the first single from Springsteen’s forthcoming album, MTV pulled out all the stops. I remember constant coverage, a contest (Be a Roadie with Bruce!), and “Rosalita.”
There are dozens of fantastic versions of “Rosalita,” but for me the definitive version is the grainy video that MTV played incessantly that spring. Filmed in Phoenix, Arizona, on July 8, 1978, during the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour, it was a Saul on the road to Damascus revelation for me. You’ve got to see it to believe it.3 It is, to my mind, everything rock and roll is, and everything it can be. And really? Everything it should be.
The song starts with a crash, Springsteen slamming into the opening guitar chords, Clarence Clemons’s saxophone wailing. The E Street Band is tight, navigating its way through hairpin changes, up-tempo, down-tempo, Springsteen playing his band-mates as surely as he plays his guitar. He stalks the stage, he jumps, he drops, he slides: this is a blood and guts performance, all the more impressive when you realize that there was nothing special about the concert. It was just another gig for Springsteen in the summer of 1978.
What comes across most strongly, however, is Springsteen’s unfettered joy: he’s entirely in the moment, and the power he brings to the song can barely be contained to the stage or the screen.
In the “Rosalita” video, Springsteen is messianic, and a goof, and a true believer, all at the same time. It’s almost impossible to look away as he digs into the verses, as he engages in a cross-stage face-off with the Big Man while standing atop Roy Bittan’s piano, as he introduces the band. It’s mesmerizing, and it makes you glad to be alive.4
Throughout the performance, girls dodge security to tackle Springsteen at the microphone stand, to steal kisses. The video ends with him being piled upon by a group of women at the edge of the stage. With the help of security he manages to drag himself away, emerging from a full-on kiss with a dazed, pleased, what-the-fuck-just-happened look that says it all.
Seeing the video as a thirteen-year-old, I felt my brain explode. This wasn’t the twee synth profundity of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, or the mock-operatic aspirations of Iron Maiden: this was honest, and true, and it made me feel. Really feel.
I watched that video as often as I could. MTV operated on a system of repeats every few hours, and when the time came around I would chase my brothers off the TV and take over the living room, turn the stereo up as loud as it would go, and lose myself into total rock-geek bliss. Even when I wasn’t watching the video, I couldn’t shake the song. I’d catch myself singing the chorus, making up words for the bits I didn’t know. I sang myself hoarse on “Rosalita.”
I remember vividly being sent down to my grandmother’s basement to get ice cream for dessert, and her yelling down the stairs, wondering what was taking me so long. I had surrendered to an air-guitar attack, my arms flailing wildly, making all the right rock star moves.
I air-guitared that motherfucker to death that spring.
Walk like a Man Page 5