Rock and Hard Places

by Andrew Mueller

  For all the mild sport that I make of those locations in what follows—St. Paul in particular struck me as a plausible facsimile of what it might have been like to visit Leipzig in about 1974—there are no places I enjoy travelling more as a journalist than those that lie a way off the regularly trodden path in the United States. This is, admittedly, partly due to the way in which they compensate handily for my own awkwardness and laziness—which is to say that it’s not like you even have to make an effort to ask questions of the people in these places, as once they perceive even a few hesitant syllables of a foreign accent, you can neither shut them up nor pay for your own drinks. But I’d admire and enjoy that openness and generosity even if I wasn’t working.

  So, I’d like to dedicate this chapter to all the people who shared a drink, their time, and their thoughts with me during this trip. I believe that there is much to be said for the theory that artists tend to attract the audiences they deserve, and on that score Bruce Springsteen has more to be proud of than most. Everyone I met, whatever their ideological inclinations, was astutely attuned to both the essential hope and the crucial melancholy at large in Springsteen’s songs, whether they were songs about the political, the personal or both. They all understood what Springsteen has articulated with greater facility than any other songwriter I can think of: that a decent man, and a great country, are perpetual works in progress.

  “IF ANYONE TELLS you,” says Jon Landau, “that they saw the E Street Band in 1897 or whenever, and they were better than this, don’t believe it.”

  Landau, Springsteen’s long-time manager, producer and confidant, would say that, but he’d know better than most. In 1974, Landau, then a rock critic, went to see a promising New Jersey singer-songwriter, and filed a review declaring said troubador the future of rock’n’roll. Thirty-three years later, it ranks as one of the shrewder predictions committed to print by our erratically reliable trade. We’re backstage at the Palace of Auburn Hills, a venue on the outskirts of Detroit.

  “There’s a spirit about them,” continues Landau. “I think it’s just that they’re still here, still alive, still together—in more or less the same lineup since 1974. Every time out that seems a bigger blessing, I guess.”

  We’re awaiting the start of the third Springsteen show I’ll have seen on this tour, and I remark that it has all been very tight, almost devoid of Springsteen’s trademark rambling between-song soliloquies.

  “He’s edited himself a lot,” agrees Landau. “It’s a really compressed show. I mean, it’s two hours, ten minutes—we used to do a first set that long—but it’s still twenty-two, twenty-three songs. He’s tightened it up a lot. He just wants to play.”

  I explain that Springsteen’s reticence on that front had surprised me, given that the new album, Magic, is as explicitly political a record as he’s made, and also, I’d argue, his most confrontationally pessimistic.

  “Those undercurrents are there, absolutely,” says Landau. “But they work as rock’n’roll songs. And that’s what he’s concentrating on.”

  TWO SHOWS EARLIER, one song into the encore, Springsteen mumbles something about this next one being a request for someone, and exhales that instantly recognisable sigh of harmonica, that riff which really does resemble the sort of breeze capable of blowing a screen door shut. The rest of the introduction of “Thunder Road” disappears beneath a roar of incredulous bliss that could only previously have been equalled in this cavernous hockey rink in the event of a last-second winner. Springsteen smiles, settles down, sings the first verse straight, then approaches the best line he’s ever going to write.

  “So you’re scared,” he growls, “and you’re thinking . . . that maybe . . . ,” he leans back, tilts the microphone stand towards the crowd.

  “We ain’t that young anymore,” 18,000 people chorus.

  They’re not, either. It briefly seems almost cruel of Springsteen to get the crowd to sing this line: it’s safe to say that if you’re in your forties or fifties, as most of those present appear to be, and living somewhere like St. Paul, Minnesota, then your current credentials for channeling the wild-eyed tearaway narrator of “Thunder Road” are questionable. But the moment works, as the barnstorming two-hour show that has preceded it works, because Springsteen has always been smart enough to know that the grandly romantic ideal of American rock’n’roll that he has embodied for more than thirty years has, despite outward appearances of exhilarating simplicity, nuances and quirks that justify the attention he has given it. And, as I’ll discover over the next week or so, his audience are smart enough to know that, too.

  Springsteen has said that the best line he’s ever going to write wasn’t just about him, but about America (his best lines are never just about him, and always about America). When Springsteen wrote the best line he’s ever going to write in particular, and 1975’s Born to Run album in general, he was evoking America’s Vietnam hangover, the national unease born of having been led by a government of creeps and incompetents into a stupid war, for lousy reasons, and losing. His new album, Magic, musically resembles Born to Run more than any of the others in between, and is released in 2007, into an America which is uneasy about having been led by a government of creeps and incompetents into a stupid war, for lousy reasons, and losing, morally if not militarily.

  So, following the Magic tour through the least glamorous leg of its first North American stretch—St. Paul, Minnesota; Cleveland, Ohio; Auburn Hills, Michigan—is more than just going to three rock concerts. It’s seeing something of the country that Springsteen has been singing about for three and a half decades, the country whose people still fill arenas to sing those songs back at him. Magic debuted atop the Billboard album charts. The touts outside St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center are asking, and getting, US $200 a ticket. Thousands of people who’ve grown up with—or become less young with—Bruce Springsteen still want something from him: something that lives, perhaps, in the line after the best line he’s ever going to write: “Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night.”

  If Alexis de Tocqueville was alive today, he’d go to some Springsteen shows.

  “IS HE BIG in Britain?” asks Pam.

  God, yes, I tell her.

  “Really?’

  Huge. Vast. Could sellout a year of Tuesdays at Wembley if he felt like it.

  “Wow,” she says. “What do you think British people see in him?”

  An excellent question. The romance, I think out loud, the possibility—that thrill of an open road and an uncharted, unconstrained future which you’re not going to get anyplace where you know how far it is to Newport Pagnel services. We’re at the Eagle Street Grille, across the road from the Xcel Energy Center, where Springsteen will be playing a few hours from now. It’s a great bar, a glorious realisation of every American cliche: big windows letting in a perfect autumn afternoon, brewery logos in neon, bartenders who ask how you are in a manner that suggests they care, homages to local sports outfits lining the walls, especially the Minnesota Wild ice hockey team, whose rink Springsteen is borrowing. There are, also, bracing reminders that our American cliches aren’t what they once were: graffitied farewells from a couple of regulars bound for Iraq, and one photograph of a uniformed American soldier in some foreign field, embraced in a black wooden frame. The staff play it safe with the music: the Born to Run album segues into Born in the USA.

  The place is filling with Springsteen fans, of which Pam and her husband, Brian, from nearby Minneapolis, both in their mid-forties, are two. She’s a social worker with a smile that could illuminate a coal shaft, he’s a health clinic director with a greying goatee. Pam got into Springsteen when she heard him on the BBC World Service when her family lived in Sweden in 1975. Six years later, she was at college in Madison, Wisconsin, when Springsteen came to town with The River.

  “I had my dad’s Amex card,” she remembers. “Strictly emergencies only. So I bought tickets for twenty of my friends—fifteen bucks each.”

  I get the i
mpression that Brian’s fondness for Springsteen began as a condition of marriage, but it’s grown into something genuine enough. He saw Springsteen in St. Paul in 2004, when Springsteen appeared with Neil Young and R.E.M. on the Vote For Change tour—an attempt to excite people about voting for John Kerry, the baffled mannequin inexplicably fielded that year by the Democratic party as a presidential candidate. Brian is what’s known in current American political parlance as a “liberal”; something he feels obliged to whisper somewhat guiltily. He frets about what America is turning into, and about what the rest of the world thinks it’s turning into.

  “But I still like what Bruce represents,” he explains. “That great, optimistic naivety.”

  Which is the nigh universal appeal of America, right there. The country’s history is essentially a series of sensational failures to be impeded by the question, “Gee, what could possibly go wrong?” No other country would have had the damnfool idea of planting democracy in Baghdad; no other country would have had the damnfool idea of parking men on the Moon.

  “We’ve always been naive,” says Brian, “and I think it’s a good thing—well, mostly—but I think that’s changing. I see it in our kids. They’re cynical, weary about things.”

  And no other country, returning to Pam’s original question, could have produced Springsteen. No British artist would presume to assume the same role—of conscience, of flame-keeper, of a kind of national uncle (Magic is, to a large extent, a gentle warning as to the consequences if its audience doesn’t pull itself together). Any British artist who did tempt hubris thus would exit the stage beneath a barrage of unfresh fruit (the difference is discernible in other media, as well—imagine the reaction from British fans of The West Wing to a programme which attempted to imbue Downing Street with similarly noble tones).

  “To me,” says Brian, “he’s just the best of what America could be. Should be.”

  ST. PAUL IS, at first glance, as completely un-Springstonian as might be imagined. All that might be said for its downtown in that respect is that if you did decide to go racing in the street, you could do so safe in the knowledge that you wouldn’t hit anybody—and, if you did, they might well expend their dying breath on whispering “thank you.” The buildings along the eerily empty sidewalks are devoid of advertising, because there’s nobody on the streets to advertise to.

  The citizenry are indoors, it turns out, plodding between muzak-haunted car parks and climate-controlled office blocks on a network of enclosed above-street bridges called the Skyway—the Minneapolis equivalent of which was immortalised in the eponymous ballad by The Replacements. In an instructive—if personally infuriating—illustration of the way in which inner cities all over America have outsourced themselves to circulating strip malls, doing something as prosaic as buying a two-dollar notepad in which to chronicle one’s ennui necessitates thirty bucks’ worth of taxi-rides to the nearest Wal-Mart.

  Making St. Paul an epicentre of rock’n’roll fury is, then, going to be a task akin to applying defibrillators to a stuffed and moth-eaten moose, but it takes Springsteen and his E Street Band about ten seconds to make St. Paul feel like the only place you’d want to be right now. The first thing visible when the lights dip is a wheezing, spotlit steam organ rising from the rear of the stage. Under cover of this diversion, the black-clad EStreet band emerge into darkness. “Is anybody,” demands the centremost silhouette, “alive out there?” (if Springsteen had also been taking in the sights earlier, a fair question). The stage floods with light, and Springsteen unloads the garage-rattling riff of “Radio Nowhere,” the song that has opened every night of this tour. It sounds hungry, feral, fantastic, and at its close there’s barely a hammering heartbeat’s pause before the band pile onto “No Surrender” like it’s a home-run ball rattling around the bleachers. They pull it back for the last verse, letting the words echo: “There’s a war outside still raging/ You say it ain’t ours anymore to win/I want to sleep beneath peaceful skies in my lover’s bed/With a wide open country in my eyes/And these romantic dreams in my head.” Absolutely essential Springsteen: that total fearlessness about being obvious.

  The E Street band are eight, tonight; saxophonist Clarence Clemons, keyboardists Roy Bittan and Danny Federici, guitarists Nils Lofgren and Steve Van Zandt, drummer Max Weinberg, bassplayer Garry Tallent, violinist/guitarist/singer Soozie Tyrell. Absent is guitarist/singer/ Springsteen’s missus Patti Scialfa (she takes occasional nights off to spend time with their three children). The set is bare to the point of barely existing: an overhead lighting rig with video screens each side, and no backdrop, exposing the stage to the seats behind it, and lending the crowd in those seats the appearance of a white gospel choir (with exceptions in single figures, the only black people I see at three concerts are Clarence Clemons or venue staff, an indication of the bewildering way in which much American culture is divided by race—bookshops regularly have separate “African-American” shelves, as if skin colour is a literary genre).

  Springsteen doesn’t speak until five songs in, when he pauses to introduce the title track of Magic. It’s a song, he says, about the last six years, about lies turned into truth, truth into lies. “It isn’t really about magic,” he concludes. “It’s about tricks.” It’s also the bleakest vision he’s ever committed to record: it’s a mighty long way down from “We’re gonna to get to that place where we really wanna go/And we’ll walk in the sun” to “The sun is sinking low/There’s bodies hanging in the trees.” Later, before “Living In The Future,” there’s some muttering about rendition, illegal wiretapping, the demise of habeas corpus, the Constitution, and that’s the last of the evening’s chat. Either he thinks the songs say it all, or he’s attuned to the possibility that not everybody here agrees with him (Minnesota is more relaxed with America’s politico-entertainment complex than most, though—this is the state that elected Jesse Ventura governor, and from which Al Franken is seeking nomination as a Democratic candidate for the US Senate).

  The setlist betrays Springsteen’s determination to make Magic heard. Though he would know what people have really hired babysitters for, eight songs from Magic appear tonight. They’re surrounded by capricious choices from the canon: “Incident On 57th Street,” the Bo Diddley shimmy of “Working On The Highway,” “Night,” “She’s The One,” all delivered with that inimitable E Street Band wallop, that sound that feels something like being crushed by an avalanche of the collected works of Motown, The Beach Boys, Elvis Presley, Phil Spector, The Band and Bob Dylan. Best of all is “Reason To Believe,” the spectral sign-off of 1982’s crepuscular acoustic lament “Nebraska,” rebuilt as a colossal Skynyrd-ish boogie, Springsteen distortedly declaiming its terminal throes into the harmonica microphone, like a radio preacher being tuned in through a thunderstorm. During the five-song encore, a woman down the front waves a sign announcing “I lost 100 pounds just to dance with the Boss,” but the 2007 “Dancing In The Dark,” subtly de-80sed by Tyrrel’s violin, is uninterrupted by a solicitation for a partner from the floor, however svelte. The finale sees Bittan and Federici emerging from behind their keyboards and donning accordions for a raucous “American Land,” the shout-out to America’s waves of immigrants that sprouted from The Seeger Sessions. Lest anyone miss the point behind this glorious Pogues-ish tearup, the lyrics—“The hands that built this country we’re always trying to keep out”—scroll up the video screens.

  Afterwards, in a nearby sports bar, I get talking to John and Joel, who might have been dispatched as a neat personification of what this corridor of America I’m following Springsteen along once was, and what it now is: John, wearing a Minnesota Vikings top, drives a cement truck; his good friend Joel, in a golf shirt embroidered with a corporate logo, does something in IT, and John joshes him about the apparently impressive amounts of money he makes. I guess that John in particular was unbothered that Springsteen didn’t labour his political themes overly.

  “Yeah, I was pretty pleased about that,” he says. “I pa
id a hundred bucks for a ticket, I want to see a rock’n’roll show, not the news.”

  “Redneck,” says Joel.

  “Liberal,” retorts John.

  Here’s a thing, I ask John. If you do drive a truck—or, indeed, have any sort of proper job—how does it sound when a guy who is, if not necessarily through any fault of his own, uproariously rich, sings about you?

  “Bruce wasn’t always a millionaire,” notes John. “And hell, he still puts everything into it. I mean, he’s working up there.”

  CLEVELAND’S GORGEOUSLY MASTHEADED city newspaper, The Plain Dealer, calls it “Super Sunday.” “For a single, shimmering day,” declares the front page, “we are the centre of the (pop) cultural universe.” Not only is Springsteen in town, but the Martha Graham Dance Company are doing a matinee at the Ohio Theatre, Australian child-amusers The Wiggles are playing the University and the local NFL team, the Browns, are at home to the Seattle Seahawks. The article goes on to suggest a schedule by which it might be possible to attend all four. “You,” the front page continues, “a lover of high art, simplistic 90-second singalongs, working-man anthems and beer-soaked blood sport, want to experience each and every one . . . you’ll need serpentine reflexes and a reliable car to pull it off, but it can be done.”

  Cleveland has had to grow a sense of humour: it’s a town people joke about. The Cuyahoga river, which flows through the town, was once so polluted that on June 22, 1969, it caught fire. R.E.M. would amplify the shame with a song named after the congealed waterway, on which they regarded Cleveland and suggested, “Let’s put our heads together/ And start a new country up.” Ian Hunter wrote the anthem “Cleveland Rocks,” and he may have been joking, but it earned him a hefty exhibit in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, a depressing mausoleum situated on Cleveland’s Lake Erie shore (induction ceremonies are held in New York, because nobody wants to come here). And, since This Is Spinal Tap, Cleveland’s name is reflexively invoked whenever a rock band, or anyone associated with one, gets lost backstage, anywhere in the world.