Walk like a Man

by Robert J. Wiersema

  Not that you would know it from the album proper. On Devils & Dust, “Jesus Was an Only Son” is a bit of a dud. It’s listenable, but the musical setting is banal, and Springsteen’s delivery is largely dispassionate, undermining the words and their significance. And this isn’t just an instance where the live version of a song is better (more energetic, more intense) or different (with a recast musical setting, say). In the case of “Jesus Was an Only Son,” the live version is a completely new song.

  Typically, when Springsteen releases a song on a studio album, it remains largely fixed in that form; subsequent live versions might take a different musical approach, or contain minor lyrical variation, 6 but the song is “done.” He’s too much of a perfectionist to give early drafts the imprinteur of official release.7

  It seems there was something about “Jesus Was an Only Son,” though.

  Perhaps it was the lyrics. Perhaps Springsteen felt he hadn’t yet said what he actually wanted to say. Perhaps it was the experience of exploring the song for VH1 Storytellers.

  Whatever the reason, throughout the Devils & Dust tour, “Jesus Was an Only Son” was a highlight, the quietest showstopper in the Springsteen canon.8 Every night, he cracked the song open.

  Early on, as he’d done on Storytellers, Springsteen interrupted the song with spoken word bits between the verses about what it means to be a parent, and what it must have been like for Christ, imagining a life of running a seashore bar in Galilee, preaching on the weekends.9 As the tour progressed, the song accreted meaning. Springsteen took to introducing the song by talking about his family, the Italian and the Irish sides, what it was like growing up in a small town in different shades of faith.10 Within the song, he’d expand on his feelings about both parenthood and sacrifice.

  By the time he hit Seattle and Vancouver in August 2005, the stories that accompanied the song had been developing for months. I had no idea. I’d kept myself largely ignorant of the format and the setlists for the shows, wanting to maintain a sense of suspense right up to the moment Springsteen took the stage.

  Nothing could have prepared me anyway.

  SUNDAY MORNING, a little past nine. There wasn’t a car on the road, and the heat shimmered off the asphalt in gasoline waves as it stretched into the distance. Any dust I kicked up hung in the still air. God, it was hot. First thing in the morning and already my shirt was sticking to me. Again. How many times had I sweated through my clothes in the last twenty-four hours?

  It was August 14, 2005, and I was walking down to my grandmother’s house. She wanted to go to church, so if we were going to have a visit, just the two of us, it needed to be early. She’d baked muffins with fresh blueberries; they were waiting for me. She was waiting for me.

  Cori and Xander were still asleep, snuggled together in the room that used to be Dave’s, before that Mom and Dad’s. Just across the hall from my old room, now given over to storage and garage sale finds.

  My legs were killing me.

  It feels sometimes like I’ve spent my whole life walking down that road. That morning, though, it all seemed different somehow. More real. I’d only had a couple of hours sleep—Greg had dropped me off pretty late after the concert—but I didn’t feel tired, just different.

  As different as everything around me.

  I used to know everyone in all those houses. I was related to a lot of them. My Uncle Bill lived here, my Nanny, my great-grandmother, there, the Michaloskis across the street, the babysitter there. Now they’re just houses, faces closed tight against the world, blinds drawn against the heat and the light of day.

  I still flinch when I walk past the house where that fucking yellow dog used to live. Twenty-five years later, at age thirty-four, I caught myself walking on the other side of the highway, as far over on the shoulder, as close to the lip of the ditch, as I could.

  Sunday morning, and it was so goddamn hot.

  I wasn’t used to the heat any more. I’d spent almost twenty years in Victoria, where even on the hottest days there’s a breeze off the water, a hint of cool to stir the air. This dry, hanging heat . . . I hated it.

  It was the only thing I hated at the moment, though. Which was, frankly, unusual for me.

  Most days, I carried a lot of hate and anger, most of it directed at myself. Things weren’t rosy, and they hadn’t been for a while. I was tired all the time, working too hard and getting further and further behind. I was sick of never having enough money, never having enough time. My first book would be out in a year, and I was mired in revisions. I spent a lot of time wilfully not thinking about it.

  That morning, though, I didn’t really know what I was feeling.

  Open, maybe. Broken open.

  Greg had picked me up in the middle of the afternoon the day before and we’d driven into Vancouver for the show. It was our second show in three days.

  The Seattle show had blown my mind. Waiting for Greg and John to show up that day, I’d been part of a small crowd that thronged Springsteen outside the Key Arena’s load-in area. I hadn’t clambered to shake his hand or pushed anything in front of him to sign; I just hung near the back of the crowd and watched. And I was one of several people yelling for “Living Proof” when Springsteen asked the small crowd what folks wanted to hear.

  He opened with the song that night. A song I never thought I would get to hear live, a song that was so important to me, and he opened with it. On the organ.

  Seattle had been a mind-boggling, anything-can-happen kind of show. That was one of the benefits of it being a solo tour: there was no band to worry about; only one person on stage needed to know the songs.

  Greg and I had both been buzzing about the Vancouver show as we drove into the city, as we had dinner, as we waited for the lights to go down.

  In the fields at the side of the road I walked, the corn was high, the bright green of the sharp-edged leaves faded and heavy with dust. I wondered if it was Jubilee or one of the earlier varieties. If it was Jubilee it probably wouldn’t be ready till close to mid-September, right around the time of the fall fair. If it was one of the earlier varieties, there had probably been some thirteen-year-old kid out in that field a few hours ago, just as the sun was coming up.

  Springsteen had opened the Vancouver show with “Living Proof.” The excitement that had dominated through the Seattle performance gave way, so I could actually listen to the song, hear the words. That first verse, which will always be about Xander to me. The next verses, about questioning your own life: “You do some sad, sad things baby, when it’s you you’re trying to lose.” And finally, the achingly beautiful last verse, with the family curled up together in one big bed, “a close band of happy thieves.”

  I cried.

  The night had been full of moments to take your breath away, to break your heart.

  The way Springsteen seemed to be singing the last verse of “Long Time Comin’” (“I ain’t gonna fuck it up this time”) to someone waiting in the wings, mere moments before he introduced his eldest son, Evan. Evan, about whom “Living Proof” had been written, was touring with his dad for a couple of weeks, playing guitar tech on his summer vacation.

  There was the stark beauty of “The Rising,” Springsteen backlit by a single, powerful spotlight so that his shadow seemed to fall over the whole arena as he sang, and the way he let the “dream of life” refrain build like a mantra, like a prayer.

  There was that moment at the end of “This Hard Land,” when he hit the line “if you can’t make it stay hard, stay hungry, stay alive,” and the house lights came up and the audience sang along. That one fragment as powerful as the whole of “Born to Run,” for the same reasons.

  There was the moment he sat down at the piano and started to play “The Promise,” another song I never thought I would hear live. And hearing him start to sing “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” right after “Blinded by the Light”? I think that’s why my throat was hurting, why I could barely speak that morning.

  A train went
by; the tracks ran along the far side of the cornfields. It churned up clouds of dust in its wake.

  Growing up there, you got used to the trains. My grandmother used to greet one of her friends who worked on the passenger trains by leaning out her front window, waving two white napkins.

  The sound of a train in the distance will always make me feel wistful, and make me feel at home: it’s a cliché because it’s true.

  The night before, when Springsteen had started to talk about his family and the neighborhood he grew up in, I’d thought I was ready. But I had been undercut at every turn. “Living Proof,” with its evidence of both a state of grace and hope for a future. Springsteen’s son Evan, hearing his father’s promise not to fuck up again. “Real World,” a song not of defiance but of strength and acceptance.

  Everything was about me, the whole show. Just as it was about every other person in that arena.

  “Jesus Was an Only Son” destroyed me. It left me weak, and weeping in my seat. There was so much truth there. So much to consider. Parents, children. Men, women. Home, community. Responsibility, sacrifice.

  When I was a kid, walking down to my grandmother’s, I’d sometimes stop at Mrs. Clarke’s place. It was just past the halfway point, and I’d ask to use her bathroom, but mostly I stopped because she usually had a cookie or a candy for me to take on my way.

  Somebody else lives in Mrs. Clarke’s house now; she died a few years ago.

  Somebody else lives in Charlie’s house now too. He died a while back.

  Walking that highway, it’s a walk into the past, and into the future.

  But none of that mattered as I turned into the gravel driveway: my grandmother was waiting. And I knew that when I opened the door at the base of the back stairs, the air would be full with the smell of baking.

  After the show, Greg and I were subdued. Sure, we went to a seedy bar: traditions must be observed. But we left pretty quickly.

  We stopped at a Denny’s just off the highway for pie and coffee.

  There was a group of rowdy drunks across the restaurant, but we ignored them.

  We were subdued. It’s not that there was no post-show rush, it was just . . . different.

  In the Circle, we talked about the show. We talked about our kids. We talked about our wives, our parents, our pasts, our hopes, and what we had lost along the way. We talked about our lives. There was no anger or rancor, just understanding and a hint of quiet sadness.

  When Greg dropped me off at the house I grew up in, I undressed in the dark. My shirt had finally dried out, and I dropped it where I would be able to find it in the morning.

  Xander was in bed with Cori, so I curled in behind him. He was cool and soft. I buried my face in his hair, my arm over him, my hand on Cori’s side. I lay there in the dark, in the bedroom that had once been my mother and father’s. There was a train in the distance, and I listened to my family breathe.

  I also figure that if our choices are given weight and meaning by the things that we sacrifice, and you choose some part of life, and you give up something else, I always figure Jesus had to be thinking about what he was going to lose. He must have been thinking, that Galilee . . . really nice this time of year. A little bar down by the beach, where they surely need somebody to manage the place. And Mary Magdalene, she could tend bar. You don’t have to quit the preaching. You can just save it for the weekends. And they could have a bunch of kids. And get to see the sun fall on their face. And get to see the air fill their lungs at night when they’re sleeping. And get to see the next day. And the next day. And the next day. And the next day . . .

  1. Danny Federici on accordion and keyboards, Garry Tallent on bass, Soozie Tyrell on violin, and Patti Scialfa on background vocals, with Gary Mallaber on drums.

  2. The title track returned to the set during the reunion tour as a blazing rocker, taken to a blistering, joyous extreme in several live versions featuring Tom Morrello from the political noise-rockers Rage Against the Machine sitting in on guitar. The words “holy fuck” don’t really do these versions justice.

  3. “Devils & Dust” was one of the newest songs on the album. It surfaced for the first time at the soundcheck for the Rising tour show in Vancouver in early 2003 and was the talk of the pit line that day. “All the Way Home,” at the other extreme, was written for Southside Johnny in 1991. “Long Time Comin’” and “The Hitter” were both performed on the Ghost of Tom Joad tour in 1995 and 1996 (in fact, “The Hitter” lends its name to one of the best bootlegs from that tour, The Hitter in Syracuse.)

  4. “I ain’t gonna fuck it up this time” says as much with eight simple words—one of them an obscenity—as do whole songs on Human Touch. The line destroys me every time I hear it.

  5. The song is beautiful, but also interesting from a stylistic perspective: the story unfolds in reverse, beginning with the body of an immigrant washed up on shore after several days in the river, and ending with the optimism of that same immigrant looking across the water at the land of plenty so agonizingly close.

  6. Probably my favorite of these is the shift in “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” from “I lost my money when I lost my wife” to “I lost my faith when I lost my wife,” which works better as a stand-alone and leads far more powerfully into the next line, “these things don’t seem to matter much to me now.”

  7. This doesn’t apply to collections like Tracks or The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story, which are deliberate assemblages of such drafts. Also, Springsteen has historically had little problem with road testing and honing material before releasing it: the 1978 tour was highlighted by new songs like “Point Blank,” “Independence Day,” “Sherry Darling,” and “The Ties That Bind,” which wouldn’t be released until The River.

  8. The Devils & Dust tour was one of Springsteen’s most controversial, and it had nothing to do with the music. Unlike the Ghost of Tom Joad tour in 1995, which had played intimate theatres—at a time in his career when Springsteen was somewhat out of fashion—the 2005 tour was booked into arenas. Not, generally, full-size arenas; arenas that had been curtained to create more intimate spaces, but arenas nonetheless. The fans were, as one might expect, apoplectic, and they had a point. Having seen two of those shows, though, I can honestly say that Springsteen conquered the caverns. Of course, the fact that I was in the tenth and fourth rows might have something to do with that perception.

  9. Storytellers included what must be a tremendous understatement for Springsteen: “Once you’re a Catholic there’s no getting out. That’s all there is to it.”

  10. Later in the tour, a fan—who I know passingly in that Usenet newsgroup way— actually made up a map of Springsteen’s neighborhood based on the story, using poster board and a Sharpie. If I recall correctly, Springsteen saw it in the audience one night, and took it from her, and proceeded to use it as a visual aid for the introduction not just that night but for the remainder of the tour.

  BONUS TRACK: Atlantic City

  Album: Nebraska

  Released: September 30, 1982

  Recorded: January 3, 1982

  Version discussed: “Atlantic City,” Performed by The Hold Steady1

  Album/released: War Child Presents Heroes, February 16, 2009

  THINGS TEND TO come full circle, if you step back far enough to see it.

  Case in point: Bruce Springsteen.

  Springsteen is a product of his age. He’s spoken at length about the influence of The Beatles, and about how his life changed—as did the lives of so many in his generation—upon seeing the Fab Four on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time. He’s described the opening notes of Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone as “that snare shot that sounded like somebody kicked open the door to your mind.” He is a child of his time.2

  He is steeped in the music of the British Invasion—not just The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, but also The Animals and The Kinks—and in mid-sixties pop and soul. He came by his fondness for Elvis Presley through his mother’s a
doration, and his abiding passion for singers like Smokey Robinson and Sam Cooke is readily apparent. (“Mary’s Place,” from The Rising, for example, is clearly inspired by Cooke’s “Meet Me at Mary’s Place”). Springsteen has never made much of any inspiration he may have received from Van Morrison (aside from his early work with Them), but Morrison has staged decades of temper tantrums about being ripped off by the Boss; some of the songs on The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle lend credence to his argument. Influences like Hank Williams and Johnny Cash can also be heard in Springsteen’s music.

  In time, Springsteen himself has become an inspiration. Putting aside his direct influence on fellow travelers like Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, who came of age with Springsteen and for whom Springsteen wrote such songs as “The Fever” and “Hearts of Stone” (and with whom he shared the talents of Miami Steve Van Zandt), you can easily trace his influence on such rockers as U2 (in his typically understated fashion, Bono said of Springsteen, upon his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, “Bruce has played every bar in the U.S.A., and every stadium. Credibility— you couldn’t have more, unless you were dead. He’s America’s writer, and critic.”) and The Clash (the late Joe Strummer wrote of Springsteen in 1997, “His music is great on a dark & rainy morning in England, just when you need some spirit & some proof that the big wide world exists the D.J. puts on ‘Racing in the Streets’ & life seems worth living again . . . life seems to be in cinemascope again.”).3 Most interesting to me are the second generation of bands and songwriters to be inspired by Springsteen—my demographic cohort, the performers who came of age with Springsteen-as-superstar, with Born in the U.S.A. and what followed.

  The work of Counting Crows, for example, seems to grow organically out of an immersion in the music of Bruce Springsteen and Van Morrison. (Just think what Morrison would have to say about that.) Their first album, August and Everything After (which I consider to be one of the finest albums of the last twenty-five years) is steeped in that influence, with songs like “Round Here” echoing the existential anxiety of Darkness on the Edge of Town and their break-out single “Mr. Jones” giving the idea of rock and roll as salvation a radio-friendly sheen. “Rain King” strikes the delicate balance between defiance and surrender that runs through much of Springsteen’s work, and in concert the song opens up to include snatches of Springsteen lyrics alongside the original words.4