Walk like a Man

by Robert J. Wiersema

  14. There was something utterly messed up about that tape. In order to conserve resources and make for a better playing experience (i.e., no lengthy silence at the end of one side), the geniuses at Columbia had decided to change the running order to balance the two sides of the cassette. As a result, I didn’t actually hear Wild and Innocent the way it was intended—with that gorgeous second-side suite of “Incident on 57th Street,” “Rosalita,” and “New York City Serenade” until at least a decade later, when I bought a copy on CD. Of all the second sides in rock history, that one might just be the finest.

  15. Ah, bootlegs. Live concert recordings or purloined studio tracks, pressed on crappy vinyl in dubious European locales.

  16. Cleverly, his nickname was “Dutch.”

  Born to Run

  Album: Born to Run

  Released: August 25, 1975

  Recorded: 1974–75

  IT COULD BE ARGUED1 that Bruce Springsteen’s career revolves around two poles. I’m not talking about his music, I’m talking about his decades as a performing artist, and the public awareness of his music. It’s an oversimplification, of course, but what Springsteen’s career comes down to, for the vast majority of listeners, are two songs and the albums to which they give their names: “Born to Run,” and “Born in the U.S.A.”

  As I’ve mentioned, Born in the U.S.A. and its first single, “Dancing in the Dark,” broke upon a largely unsuspecting MTV generation in 1984. The move from arenas to stadiums, international superstardom, the attempted political co-opting of his message: this was Springsteen in the mid-1980s.

  A decade earlier, though, there wasn’t even a hint of this future. Following the release and disappointing sales of his second album The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, Springsteen’s career as a major-label artist2 hung precariously in the balance. His next album was a make-or-break proposition, and the pressure brought out the best and the worst in him.

  Springsteen and the touring version of The E Street Band, which then included David Sancious on keyboards, Ernest “Boom” Carter on drums, and Suki Lahav on violin, recorded the lead-off single, a song called “Born to Run,” between gigs over a period of almost six months in mid-1974.

  Let me repeat that: they recorded the single—one song—over a period of almost six months.

  The process, which is documented to thrilling effect in the Wings for Wheels documentary included in the Born to Run: 30th Anniversary box set, was excruciating. Springsteen adopted a Phil Spector-esque wall of sound approach to the song, layering instrumental track after instrumental track until everyone in the production booth lost track of how many guitars were appearing at any given time.3 And yes, that is a glockenspiel you hear. Springsteen had a sound in his head—as he so often seems to—and he wasn’t relenting until he captured it on tape. It was only after Jon Landau was brought into the fold as a somewhat detached observer and advisor that Springsteen was finally able to let go.

  When the song was finished in November 1974, Mike Appel “leaked” an almost finished version to a few influential deejays in loyal Springsteen markets (Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, New York). Not only did they take to the anthem, but its popularity brought songs from the first two albums back to the airwaves, and started the ball of hype rolling.

  That hype would explode the following summer, when the release of the album was greeted with simultaneous Time and Newsweek magazine covers, radio broadcasts of live shows, and arduous touring.

  Despite a backlash—the inevitable questioning of record company machinations, the skepticism (“Is it really as good as all that?”), and Springsteen’s own discomfort with being in the spotlight anywhere other than on stage4—the album clearly did what it was supposed to: it made Bruce Springsteen a star.

  But what of the title track itself? You’ve heard it so many times, but when was the last time you actually listened to it?

  Musically, the song is at the same time stunningly beautiful and a bit of an overproduced mess.5 Dense and heady, layered and propulsive, it is practically the archetypal rock anthem.

  “Born to Run” is, self-consciously, a song of defiance and escape. It was released at the pinnacle of Springsteen’s early “romantic” period, which was marked by larger-than-life characters (with great nicknames), epic storytelling, and dense soundscapes. The streets of smalltown New Jersey were too small to contain the lives and the dreams of his characters, and they blew out of the place with their car radios blaring.

  Live, the song is the moment in every concert where everything comes together. The houselights go up, and the crowd becomes part of the show.6 It’s a ritualized gesture toward community, the breaking down of the wall between performer and audience. When Springsteen calls out “Tramps like us, baby we were born to run,” that “we” is all ten, twenty, fifty thousand of us.7

  On the Tunnel of Love tour in early 1988, Springsteen stripped the song down to its fundamentals. Stepping to the center of a dark stage for his first encore, with a harmonica rack around his neck and cradling an acoustic guitar, Springsteen launched into a monologue about an unnamed song he said had “changed a lot over the years.” The song had once seemed to be about escape, but now it seemed to him to be more about searching. Running to, not running away from.

  In its acoustic form, “Born to Run” has a mournful quality unimaginable in the full-band version. There is a weariness to the lyrics, a desperation. It’s a song haunted by loss and regret, and when the narrator cries out, “I want to know if love is wild, Girl I want to know if love is real,” the words are no longer exultant. Rather, they seem like a plea to the universe, a desperate last grasp to find meaning. What lies out there at the end of the road? Where are these people going? What will they find?

  The absence of answers hangs in the air.

  WHEN YOU BECOME a parent, you immediately start to question your life and your past actions. Would I urge Xander to follow in all of my footsteps? Never. Getting high in a hillside cemetery on a summer night? Not for my boy. Losing the bulk of his first year at university drunk, as a coping mechanism? Please no.

  You spend time questioning your own parents and their decisions, too. What, for example, possessed my mother to allow her seventeen-year-old son to buy scalped tickets and accept a ride from a complete stranger to a Springsteen show in a foreign country, hundreds of miles from home?8

  It was spring 1988. Springsteen was on the Tunnel of Love tour,9 and Peter and I were a month away from graduating from high school. The tour wasn’t coming to Vancouver, but it was going to hit Tacoma, just south of Seattle. I was hardcore at that point (or at least I thought I was), and there was no way I was going to miss it.

  CFOX, one of the Vancouver radio stations, had chartered some buses to take people down to the show, but the tickets were ridiculously expensive, too rich for my blood, by far. So I spent days poring over classified ads in the Vancouver Province, looking for scalpers’ tickets to the sold-out show, running up a huge long-distance bill and X-ing out ads when I discovered the tickets were already sold. I figured I would get tickets first, then worry about how we were going to get to the Tacoma Dome, almost two hundred miles away.

  Both of those questions resolved themselves when I lucked into an informal scalper in Richmond, a Vancouver suburb. Dan10 worked at a record store, and he had ended up with a couple of extra tickets. He was going to the show himself, and he seemed like a nice enough guy, so I asked (ah, naive bloom of a smalltown boy) if he’d be willing to give us a ride to the show.

  He said yes.11

  I can’t remember exactly how I sold the idea to my mother. Peter’s response when I asked him recently how he presented the plan to his mom? “I think I lied.”

  We met Dan at the record store where he worked. Almost immediately, we knew he was the coolest guy we had ever encountered. Dan worked in a record store! Dan had a girlfriend! Dan had his own apartment! Dan had his own car!12

  We hung around in the record store, searching in vain
for bootlegs while Dan finished out his shift. It was drizzling as we walked across the parking lot to his car, a little Honda that was sporty and sleek and everything that a guy like Dan would have.

  We barely even registered the hole in the roof.

  In the same way, it would take us a bit to notice that the rest of Dan’s life wasn’t quite what we’d imagined. His apartment? A crappy one-bedroom, the sort of apartment in which someone can die one day, and it’s only a matter of hosing off the vinyl couch and putting a new plastic cover on the mattress before the place is back on the market the next.13

  Dan’s car? Falling apart, with a roaring, whining engine and a funky smell inside that we couldn’t quite identify. And yes, that hole in the roof, patched with plastic and duct tape.

  His girlfriend?14

  Dan’s girlfriend was waiting at his apartment, and she was upset. The kind of upset that quickly turned into crying. She didn’t want to go to the show. Peter and I stood in the hallway while Dan and his girlfriend fought. And fought. And fought. But finally she relented, and we all piled into the car, headed for the border.

  In the backseat, I exchanged a look with Peter. A cautious smile. It was happening. Our plan was coming together, and we were on the road. Nothing could stop us now.

  “You’re gonna need to hold that down,” Dan said as we were about to merge onto the freeway.

  “What?” asked Peter, who was sitting behind him.

  “The plastic,” Dan said, without turning around. “It’s gonna come loose once we get on the highway. Just roll down the window and hold it down.”

  Peter, to his credit, didn’t balk. Out loud, at least. The look he shot me, though, as he rolled down the window and hooked his arm out into the rain to hold down the patch over the hole in the roof was . . . Well, it’s not the first time he’d looked that pissed off at a mess I’d gotten us into. And it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

  We hadn’t been driving for five minutes when Dana reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a small plastic bag of pot, rolling a joint in her lap with practiced dexterity.

  When you grow up in British Columbia, there’s always pot around.15 It wasn’t like today, with dope smoking more socially acceptable than cigarette smoking, but nonetheless pot was always around in the shadows. I had smoked it myself, of course, and been around others who were smoking, but there was something about Dana and the way she rolled and lit that joint that was different.

  In my experience, smoking a joint was either sacred or clandestine: you passed it around a circle,16 or you toked deep and fast before you got caught.17 Either way, there was nothing casual about it, and Dana was nothing if not casual. She smoked the joint like it was a cigarette, passing it occasionally to Dan. I was too stunned when he reached the joint back between the seats toward me to do anything but shake my head.

  I glanced at Peter. His eyes were wide, with a clear message: “Do something!”

  “Um . . . ,” I started. “Are you sure you should . . .”

  “Oh yeah,” Dan said, slowly. “I’m totally fine for driving.”

  “No, I mean . . . we’re going into the U.S. and . . .”

  Dana stared at me and Dan glanced back over his shoulder.

  “We have to cross the border.”

  I don’t know if you’ve spent much time with people who are smoking weed—and I suspect it’s different now, especially in Canada, with the increased social and legal acceptance of marijuana18 —but there are few things funnier than the moment when marijuana-induced paranoia comes head to head with an impending encounter with an authority figure.19 Particularly an American authority figure. With a gun and a badge.

  Dan and Dana went from chill to stoned freak-out mode in the space of less than a second. They both cranked their windows down as fast as they could, and Dana chucked the joint across Dan and out the driver’s side. The baggie of weed went out her window, sailing toward the ditch as she began waving her hands, trying to fan out the skunky smoke. “Roll down your windows!” Dan shouted frantically from the front.

  “My window’s already down,” Peter deadpanned, his hand still pressing the plastic firmly over the hole in the roof.

  We did our best not to laugh.

  We made it through the border without any hassles whatsoever, but Dan and Dana sulked all the way to Tacoma. They didn’t even notice when Peter let go of the plastic and pulled his hand back into the car.

  Thankfully, we weren’t sitting with Dan and Dana, and the four of us split up when we got to the Tacoma Dome. Peter and I wandered around outside for a while, spending too much money on t-shirts, before we went inside and took our seats.

  From the opening moments of the show, we were transfixed. The band entered one by one to the sound of a carnival waltz, buying tickets at a mock ticket-takers stand before taking their positions on stage and kicking into “Tunnel of Love.” It was powerful and stirring at levels we didn’t fully understand.

  During the intermission, which followed a first set longer than most full rock concerts, we saw Dan and Dana walking determinedly toward us from wherever they had been sitting.

  Dan shifted his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot as he said, “We’re leaving.” Dana looked smug and self-satisfied.

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What? How can you leave now?”

  He shrugged. “We’re just gonna go. Come on.”

  Peter and I were pretty much at Dan’s mercy. We were two hundred miles from home and he had the car. We had next to no money, save what we had saved for our bus fare back to Agassiz from Vancouver the next morning.20 We didn’t have any choice but to follow him.

  The thing is? It took you longer to read the above paragraph than it took me to say no. Far longer. I said no without even thinking about it.

  Dan looked stunned.

  Peter looked even more stunned.

  “We’re staying,” I said.

  Dan and Dana wandered away, shaking their heads. Peter stared at me. “How are we going to get home?”

  “Fucked if I know,” I said, as the lights went down for the second set.

  There’s lots I don’t remember about that show, but the highlights stuck with me: “Roulette,” the long-lost song Springsteen wrote in the wake of the Three Mile Island incident; a raging “Light of Day” to close out the show; “Sweet Soul Music” in the encores; “Ain’t Got You” blending seamlessly into “She’s the One.”

  But there are two things I recall clearly.

  The first was Bruce and Patti: the chemistry between them was palpable, even across the length of an arena. Constant eye contact, sultry expressions, an electric sense that anything could happen; Springsteen’s marriage was clearly over.

  The second was what happened in the encores. When Springsteen sang “Born to Run” in that stripped down, pleading, searching version, something broke inside me, cracking the walls I had built up around myself.

  I was seventeen. I’d soon be leaving home. I was finishing school and going away, across the water to the University of Victoria. I had chosen UVic to put as much distance as I could between myself and everything I knew without getting on a plane.

  I was terrified.

  “Born to Run” had once inspired me to dream of blowing the dust and shit-smell from my little town off me as quickly as I could. But the reality had changed. I knew what I was running from, but what was I running to?

  When I glanced over at Peter, as the song was ending, he looked devastated, sad and desperate, deeply uncertain and confused.

  He looked like I felt.

  The rest of the encores passed in a blur; they were designed to. Every Springsteen show has its own dynamic, but the plan seems to be the same: to wring every last bit of energy from the audience before releasing them into the night. I screamed myself raw, begging for just one more song.

  Peter and I staggered out into the spring night, shredded by the concert but oddly subdued. That version of “Born to Run” . . . W
e were both carrying it with us.

  And outside, we ran smack dab into our conundrum.

  “So, how are we gonna get home?” Peter asked.

  “I have no idea,” I said, trying to see around the throngs of fans spilling out of the building.

  “You have no—”

  “Come on,” I said, leading him through the crowd, up a hill into the parking lot.

  I had seen the buses on the rise from the doors of the arena. A small army of near-identical charters, all with their engines running. Peter and I had to try two or three before we found one of the coaches that had been rented by cfox for the night.

  We threw ourselves on the mercy of the driver, recounting our tale of woe: the dope smoking, the poor condition of the car, and, perhaps most damningly, the decision to leave a Springsteen concert early.

  After a quick consultation with a woman with a clipboard, the bus driver waved us aboard.

  I was unconscious before the bus was even finished loading. The next thing I knew I was stumbling, sleep-clumsy, into a parking lot in downtown Vancouver at about three am.

  Peter and I walked for hours, not going anywhere because there was nowhere for us to go. We talked about the future, about what we figured was going to happen next for each of us. We talked about how excited we were, and how scared. We found an all-night restaurant, where we split an order of fries and gravy.

  We sat in that restaurant as the sun came up. Nobody in the world knew where we were. Nobody was worrying about us. And we were fine.

  It felt like what I had always imagined being a grown-up would feel like.

  Baby this town rips the bones from your back

  It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap

  We gotta get out while we’re young

  ’Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

  1. Watch me, I’m about to do it.

  2. This being the 1970s, before the rise of the indie rock underground, you were either a major-label artist or you were in a bar band, playing on the weekends within an easy drive of your house. There was no in-between.