Walk like a Man

by Robert J. Wiersema

  Our childhoods were over.

  And in the dark I kissed her, and she kissed me back.

  . . . son take a good look around

  This is your hometown

  1. An audible is a change made to the setlist during a show. “Calling an audible” typically involves Springsteen madly stalking the stage during the closing moments of the previous song and shouting out the title of the song to come. It often results in mass confusion, swift instrument changes and substitutions, and a big goofy grin on Springsteen’s face as the band hits the new song right on the button: no hesitation, no prevarication. I suspect that it’s not so much Springsteen being caught up by whimsy or reading the mood of the crowd: I think he calls audibles to fuck with the band. Except when he’s substituting “My Hometown” for “Incident” in Vancouver: then, I’m pretty sure he’s doing it to fuck with me.

  2. Ah, “Incident on 57th Street.” Or just “Incident,” as the fans call it. This is one of my favorite Springsteen songs: top ten for sure, possibly top five. It’s a grandiose, intricate, operatic epic from Springsteen’s second album, and I cannot get enough of it. It is also the one song I’ve been chasing over more than two decades of concert-going. I’ve never seen it live, though I’ve come close a couple of times. The substitution in Vancouver stings to this day, especially since they got it three nights later in Edmonton. Bastards.

  3. A blur for me, but not for my mother. She recalls coming to a skidding halt, and jumping off her bike and letting it drop at the side of the road to chase the dog away from me. This would have been good for me, but not so good for Jon, still buckled into his seat as the bike hit the pavement.

  4. Chilliwack, you have to understand, was the big city if you were from Agassiz: there were a couple of malls, the big grocery stores, and—yes!—a movie theatre.

  5. Olson was arrested in the summer of 1981 and confessed to the murder of eleven children and youths. He was sentenced to eleven concurrent life sentences, and, designated as a dangerous offender, will likely never be released.

  6. And it wasn’t just the woods, it was the high school as well. Legend had it that Olson had actually been in the school, looking for a telephone, while one of his victims sat outside the library, unaware of her fate. Witnesses claimed she looked like she had been drugged. Whether or not this was true, it was enough to color our lives. I still get a creepy feeling when I look at my graduation group photos, taken at the table where the girl allegedly sat during her last hours.

  7. Desperately trying to impress her, I almost drowned (not once, but twice) over the years that followed. She’s the reason I became a lifeguard.

  It’s Hard to be a Saint in the City

  Album: Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.

  Released: January 5, 1973

  Recorded: July–September 1972

  Version discussed: Recorded July 7, 1978, at the Roxy Theatre

  Album/released: Live 1975–85, November 10, 1986

  ‘IT’S HARD TO be a Saint in the City” is perhaps one of the most significant songs in the Springsteen canon. It sets the tone for his early work, casting a stone of bravado and strut “ that sends ripples out to “Rosalita” and “Jungleland.” It establishes the dynamic of one of his most compelling images (for me, at least): that of our public and private faces.1 And it gave him a career.

  On May 3, 1972, Springsteen walked into CBS Studios in New York to play the most important set of his life, twelve songs to an audience, primarily, of one man: John Hammond, Columbia Records A&R man2 and talent scout extraordinaire, who was the man credited with “discovering,” among others, Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Leonard Cohen, and Bob Dylan.3 Hammond was impressed, and after seeing how Springsteen interacted with an audience at an open mike that night at the Gaslight—a renowned Manhattan folk club—offered him a contract. He’s been on the Columbia roster ever since.

  Hammond and label president Clive Davis seem to have thought they were signing the latest in a long line of sensitive singer-songwriters, and their promotion of Springsteen’s first record, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., was laced with talk of him being a “new Dylan.” One of many, many new Dylans at that time.4

  But Springsteen had The E Street Band as the ace up his sleeve.

  The band’s presence on the record is noticeable but restrained, nowhere more so than on “Saint.” It’s definitely a rock song, complete with a great Clemons sax line, but there’s something oddly tasteful about it. The E Street Band sounds tight, but almost polite.5 There’s nothing in that song, or on the album,6 to hint at just how intense and overwhelming the band could be live. They were burning it up on stage (case in point, their 1975 appearance at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, now officially available on DVD7), but little more than background on the record. The band’s power later comes through in spades on the version of “Saint” from the Live 1975–85 box set, recorded at the Roxy in L.A. in July 1978 and released with a stunning amount of publicity just in time for Christmas 1986.8

  It’s hard to avoid getting swept up by Springsteen himself, but listen to how unhinged the band is, racing through what was originally a relatively sedate, relatively acoustic song.9 This is the sound of The E Street Band vintage 1978, playing as if their lives depended on it. As tight as James Brown’s Fabulous Flames, as raw and urgent as The Clash, this is the band at its absolute peak.10

  For me though, it’s mostly about the words. Check out those lyrics. You can almost picture the narrator, can’t you?11 He’s suave, he’s cool, he’s hard and confident; he’s got the whole city at his feet. Cock of the walk, a prince among men. As Springsteen has said of Clarence Clemons many times over the years, “You want to be him, but you can’t.” You’ve probably never met someone quite as cool as the narrator of “It’s Hard to be a Saint in the City.”

  You’ve certainly never heard anyone extolling his own cool to quite this extreme, at any rate.

  And really, that’s the key. If you’re truly cool, you don’t talk about it—you let other people do that. That’s one of the hallmarks of being cool, isn’t it? This guy can’t shut up about it.

  And then Springsteen hits you with the punchline: he’s not all he claims. He’s “just a boy out on the street.”

  The song, save for that one line, documents the construction of a mask, a façade. It’s the first of Springsteen’s façade songs, and once you’re aware of the theme, and of Springsteen’s personal experience with hiding in plain sight as a child and teenager, you have to wonder: if he’s trying that hard to create an alternate persona, what’s that boy trying to hide? Who is he trying to fool?

  I WAS NEVER a popular kid. Not from day one.

  I was sheltered from it for a while: for grades one and two I went to McCaffrey school, a two-room schoolhouse with maybe fifty students. We were a relatively close-knit group, and everyone seemed to get along pretty well. That was where I learned to read, and where I started to write, making up stories in my head to explain the terrible pictures I attempted to draw.

  The transition to third grade was jarring: we moved en masse to Kent Elementary, which went up to grade six. Damn, those were some big kids. In a big school. And me . . . with, really, nothing to offer.

  It’s easy, growing up in a small town, to develop an inferiority complex if you can’t play sports and you aren’t interested in watching them.12 You’re essentially cut off from the mainstream culture. More so if you’re a bookworm, the sort of kid who sits on the bus jotting notes into notebooks and writing stories at lunchtime. Even more so if you’re a shy kid in purple corduroy pants.13

  I was, as they say, out of my element.

  Which would have been bad enough. I could have been one of those kids nobody notices, the ones who fade into the wallpaper, people you don’t remember until they show up at your high school reunion, beautiful and tanned and rich. I could have been one of those kids.

  But no, that would have been too easy.

  I didn’t want to be wallpaper.
If I couldn’t fit in, I was going to stand out.14 So I embraced what I had.

  I had always been a smart kid, but I started to let my classmates know it. I always had an answer, and a cutting remark, and an attitude. I became arrogant, condescending, and self-righteous. In order to avoid anonymity, I made myself insufferable.15 I can admit that now.

  But you know what? Nobody deserves the treatment I got. No one.

  I was beaten up in the schoolyard. I was harassed on the bus and walking down the halls. I was jumped both when I was dreading it and when I least expected it.

  And it wasn’t just the kids. There were teachers who were almost as bad. Partway through grade four, I fell while running backward in gym class, and something snapped in my arm. The teacher refused to consider that anything was wrong, and scorned me for crying. I showed up the next day in a cast: I had broken my wrist.

  I did make it worse for myself, in some ways. I never hesitated, for example, to lie. And lie boldly. In third grade, shortly before St. Patrick’s Day, I claimed that I had kissed the Blarney Stone, having grown up in Ireland as I had. It took my teacher, Miss Guthrie, about fifteen minutes to confirm that I was full of crap, which knowledge she proceeded to eviscerate me with in front of my class, without mercy. I can’t really blame her16—she was a teacher, and teaching moral behavior was probably part of her code—but it was the worst thing that could have happened from a Rob-getting-his-ass-kicked point of view.

  That was the low point, until the beginning of grade four.

  Grade four . . . I shiver just thinking about it.

  Mid-August, two weeks before school went back, my mother and I took a trip to Chilliwack. In the course of a single afternoon, I visited the dentist and the optometrist. I got glasses and braces the same day.

  I’ll let that sink in before adding that was the summer I started to grow hair in fun places, and discovered just how fun those places could be.

  Cut ahead to the first day of school. New glasses, new braces, in the first bloom of puberty? I was like chum in a tank too full of sharks. I got ripped apart.

  And that lasted for four years.

  It’s easy to be glib about it now. Time blunts the pain and the reality. You can explain it away and make excuses. You can create punchlines. But it wasn’t easy. In fact, I barely survived.

  At the end of grade six, my classmates and I moved to the high school. Grades seven through twelve. Damn, those were some big kids. In a big school. And me . . . with, really, nothing to offer.

  Everything that had been wrong in elementary school was worse. And there were new horrors: lockers to be slammed against or into; bigger bullies, and more of them; isolated corners of a (relatively) huge building to be savaged in.

  And gym class.

  Even worse, though, were the change rooms. Mandatory showers after gym class. When I imagine Hell, it looks an awful lot like the boys’ change room at Agassiz Secondary.17

  Through it all, I put up a front. I created someone else, so that no one would see how I was hurting. How this was killing me.

  Thirteen is too old to be crying yourself to sleep every night.

  And it’s too young to be standing in the bathroom thinking that maybe the razor blade wouldn’t hurt that much as you ran it up the inside of your wrist (not across . . . you want to do it right).

  No one knew how I hurt, and how much I wanted to die. And no one knew how much I wanted to kill. The stories I wrote back then would have me arrested today. But I confined my bully-cide and school burnings to the page.

  And no one ever knew.

  I created a mask, one that looked a lot like me. This persona, this arrogant, self-righteous, infuriating Rob? That was the part of me people hit.

  Nobody could touch the real me.

  And you know what saved my life?

  Since you’ve been reading this far, it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

  Rock and roll.

  Heavy metal, to be specific. Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden. I never really got into Judas Priest, but I wore the t-shirts.

  Really, it was all about the t-shirts.

  There is nothing like heavy metal for the consummate outsider. It’s the music of misfits, of clumsy kids and the socially disjointed. There’s a heroism to it, honor among the down and out.

  In 1983, in Agassiz, when you wore a Black Sabbath Mob Rules t-shirt, the one splattered with blood and decorated with post-massacre body parts, you were self-identifying as an outsider. When you put on an Iron Maiden Piece of Mind shirt, the one with the pie slice cut out of the brain, you were pledging allegiance to the world of not-fitting-in. You had officially hit the point where you didn’t give a fuck, and you didn’t care who knew it.

  So I started growing my hair, and I wore the t-shirts, and something stunning happened. The beatings stopped. The persecution stopped. The pain stopped.

  Within a few weeks, a lot of the older kids were calling me Ozzy.18 I was greeted as people passed. I was high-fived. And some of those older kids stood up for me now when the bullies started in on me.

  The trouble was, that don’t-give-a-shit heavy metal kid wasn’t me. The real me was still locked somewhere inside.

  When I think about those days, I remember the ass-kickings and the torment. I remember the taunting, the incessant laughter.19 And I remember feeling so, so alone.

  But I did have friends. One friend in particular.

  Peter.20

  Peter moved to Agassiz from Sardis, a suburb of Chilliwack, the summer before grade four. I met him on the first day of school. He was a tall, gangly kid, glasses and a funny haircut, from a strict German family. He wore his shirts buttoned to the very top, and we sat together near the back of Mr. Fraser’s class.

  We hit it off immediately, two geeks at the back, and our friendship has never flagged, despite the thousands of miles between us. He’s still tall, and he’s still got glasses, but he’s grown into that gangliness.

  Peter suffered a lot of the same persecution I did,21 but he developed coping strategies that kept him largely from the brunt of it, an approach that largely boiled down to “not being there.” He lived in town, so he’d arrive in the morning just before the bell, he went home for lunch every day, and he disappeared right after school.

  Smart lad, that Peter.

  The dynamic we had then is pretty much what we continue to have. He’s the wise one, and I’m the smart-ass; he hangs back and I plunge in, persona-first. I’m the one who gets into trouble, and he’s . . . well, he’s right there with me. Your friends, your true friends, are the ones you wake up in jail with.22

  Those days were ahead of us, though. Grades four through eight? Well, we survived. That’s about as much as can be said.

  The devil appeared like Jesus through the steam in the street

  Showin’ me a hand I knew even the cops couldn’t beat

  I felt his hot breath on my neck as I dove into the heat

  It’s so hard to be a saint when you’re just a boy out on the street

  1. In Songs, the 1998 book that collects Springsteen’s lyrics with commentary from the songwriter, he describes it as one of several songs from his first album that serve as “twisted autobiographies.”

  2. In music industry parlance, A&R refers to “Artists & Repertoire,” the person or division in a record company charged with finding new talent and fostering that talent through the early stages of their career. An A&R person is generally expected to stay abreast of trends and current tastes, with an eye to finding, always, the next big thing. John Hammond was one of the best.

  3. Dylan was actually referred to as “Hammond’s folly” in the Columbia corridors, until he became, well, Bob fucking Dylan.

  4. Springsteen, as one might expect, chafed at the comparison.

  5. Or possibly constrained by the limitations of 914 Sound Studios.

  6. Or on any Springsteen album, really. It’s been said of the Grateful Dead that they were really two bands, and if you wanted to get it you had to
see them live. The dichotomy isn’t quite as extreme with Springsteen and the E Street Band; there are songs in the studio catalogue that give a sense of the band’s power in a live setting, but nothing really captures it. You really do have to see them live to get it.

  7. Note the “officially” here. There are some great, great bootleg recordings of shows and radio sessions pre-Hammersmith, if you know where to look, including one of the all-time best Springsteen shows, from the rightly celebrated Bottom Line gigs of August 1975.

  8. The Live box set is a fantastic artifact, and you can’t possibly quibble with what it contains: forty tracks of live Springsteen, at a time when only a handful of live recordings had been officially released. However. It’s also one of those releases that has fans wondering, to this day, “What the fuck were they thinking?” For starters? They cut the “Sad Eyes/Drive All Night” passage from the recording of “Backstreets.” One of the most haunting, intense moments in Springsteen history, and they cut it?

  9. Completely acoustic, if you go back to the original Hammond demos.

  10. So strongly do I feel about the 1978 tour that I considered at one point attempting to collect bootlegs of every show. Why, you might ask? Tell you what: listen to Pièce de Résistance, Live at the Roxy, Summertime Blues, and Live in the Promised Land and see if you still need to inquire. I think you’ll see the wisdom of the plan.

  11. If you’re like me, you can picture the narrator. “Saint” was used to great effect in John Sayles’s film Baby, It’s You, as background for a breathless first glimpse of the tough male lead, the Sheik, played with slicked-back, leathered glory by Vincent Spano. Try as I might, I can’t shake that image. It doesn’t, however, detract from what I’m about to say.

  12. To paraphrase a great Tragically Hip song, no, I didn’t give a fuck about hockey. And in Agassiz, they’d never heard anyone say that before.

  13. I’m not going to tell the story of the purple cords. It’s an involved, painful tale of hand-me-downs and church rummage sales, set to that infernal swish-swish-swish noise. I haven’t worn cords of any color since third grade, the scars run so deep. But catch me on a night when I’ve had too much to drink and maybe I’ll tell you the story. Because there’s nothing I like more when I’m drinking than making people cry.