Night Beat

by Mikal Gilmore

  In a way, his action foreshadowed the political activism and social controversy that would transform rock & roll during the 1980s. As the decade wore on, Springsteen would become one of the most outspoken figures in pop music, though that future probably wasn’t what he had in mind when he vaulted into “Badlands” on that late autumn night. Instead, Springsteen was simply focusing on a question that, in one form or another, his music had been asking all along. In a way it was a simple and time-old question: Namely, what does it mean to be born an American?

  WELL, WHAT DOES IT mean to be born in America? Does it mean being born to birthrights of freedom, opportunity, equity, and bounty? If so, then what does it mean that so many of the country’s citizens never truly connect with or receive those blessings? And what does it mean that, in a land of such matchless vision and hope, the acrid realities of fear, repression, hatred, deprivation, racism, and sexism also hold sway? Does it mean, indeed, that we are living in badlands?

  Questions of this sort—about America’s nature and purpose, about the distance between its ideals and its truths—are, of course, as old as the nation itself, and finding revealing or liberating answers to those questions is a venture that has obsessed (and eluded) many of the country’s worthiest artists, from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Norman Mailer, from D. W. Griffith to Francis Coppola. Rock & roll—an art form born of a provocative mix of American myths, impulses, and guilts—has also aimed, from time to time, to pursue those questions, to mixed effect. In the 1960s, in a period of intense generational division and political rancor, Bob Dylan and the Band explored the idea of America as a wounded family in works like The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding, and The Band; in the end, though, the artists shied from the subject, as if something about the American family’s complex, troubled blood ties proved too formidable. Years later, Neil Young (like the Band’s Robbie Robertson, a Canadian with a fixation on American myths) confronted the specter of forsworn history in works like American Stars ’n’ Bars, Hawks and Doves, and Freedom. Yet, like too many artists or politicians who come face to face with how America has recanted its own best promises, Young finally didn’t seem to know what to say about such losses. When all is said and done, it is chiefly pre-rock singers (most notably, Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Charley Patton, and a few other early blues and country singers) and a handful of early rock & roll figures—Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis—who have come closest to personifying the meaning of America in their music. In particular, Presley (a seminal influence on Springsteen) tried to seize the nation’s dream of fortune and make himself a symbol of it. But once Presley and those others had seized that dream, the dream found a way of undoing them—leading them to heartbreak, decline, death. American callings, American fates.

  Bruce Springsteen followed his own version of the fleeting American Dream. He had grown up in the suburban town of Freehold, New Jersey, feeling estranged from his family and community, and his refusal to accept the limitations of that life fueled the songwriting in his early, largely autobiographical albums. Records like Greetings from Asbury Park; The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle; and Born to Run were works about flight from dead-end small-town life and thankless familial obligations, and they accomplished for Springsteen the very dream that he was writing about: That is, those records lifted him from a life of mundane reality and delivered him to a place of bracing purpose. From the outset, Springsteen was heralded by critics as one of the brightest hopes in rock & roll—a consummate songwriter and live performer, who was as alluring and provoking as Presley, and as imaginative and expressive as Dylan. And Springsteen lived up to the hoopla: With his 1975 album Born to Run, Springsteen fashioned pop’s most form-stretching and eventful major work since the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But for all the praise and fame the album won him, it couldn’t rid Springsteen of his fears of solitude, and it couldn’t erase his memory of the lives of his family and friends. Consequently, his next work, Darkness on the Edge of Town, was a stark and often bitter reflection on how a person could win his dreams and yet still find himself dwelling in a dark and lonely place—a story of ambition and loss as ill-starred (and deeply American) as Citizen Kane.

  With The River, released in 1980, Springsteen was still writing about characters straining against the restrictions of their world, but he was also starting to look at the social conditions that bred lives split between dilemmas of flight and ruin. In Springsteen’s emerging mythos, people still had big hopes, but often settled for deluded loves and fated families, in which their hopes quickly turned ugly and caustic. In the album’s haunting title song, the youthful narrator gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then enters a joyless marriage and a toilsome job in order to meet his obligations. Eventually, all the emotional and economic realities close in, and the singer’s marriage turns into a living, grievous metaphor for lost idealism. “Now, all them things that seemed so important,” sings Springsteen, in a rueful voice, “Well, mister, they vanished right into the air/Now I just act like I don’t remember/Mary acts like she don’t care.” In The River’s murky and desultory world—the world of post-Vietnam, post-industrial America—people long for fulfillment and connection, but often as not, they end up driving empty mean streets in after-midnight funks, fleeing from a painful nothingness into a more deadening nothingness. It’s as if some dire force beyond their own temperaments was drawing them into inescapable ends.

  The River was Springsteen’s pivotal statement. Up to this point, Springsteen had told his tales in florid language, in musical settings that were occasionally operatic and showy. Now he was streamlining both the lyrics and the music into simpler, more colloquial structures, as if the realities he was trying to dissect were too bleak to bear up under his earlier expansiveness. The River was also the record with which Springsteen began wielding rock & roll less as a tool of personal mythology—that is, as a way of making or entering history for personal validation. Instead, he began using it as a means of looking at history, as a way of understanding how the lives of the people in his songs had been shaped by the conditions surrounding them, and by forces beyond their control.

  This drive to comprehend history came to the fore during the singer’s remarkable 1980-81 tour in support of The River. Springsteen had never viewed himself as a political-minded performer, but a series of events and influences—including the near-disaster at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor, and his subsequent participation in the No Nukes benefit, at New York City’s Madison Square Garden in September 1979—began to alter that perception. Springsteen had also read Joe Klein’s biography of folk singer Woody Guthrie and was impressed with the way popular songs could work as a powerful and binding force for social consciousness and political action. In addition, he read Ron Kovic’s harrowing personal account of the Vietnam War, Born on the Fourth of July. Inspired by the candor of Kovic’s anguish—and by the bravery and dignity of numerous other Vietnam veterans he had met—Springsteen staged a benefit at the L.A. Sports Arena in August 1981, to raise funds and attention for the Vietnam Veterans of America (a group whose causes and rights the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars had steadfastly refused to embrace). On one night of the Los Angeles engagement, Springsteen told his audience that he had recently read Henry Steele Commager and Allen Nevins’ Short History of the United States and that he was profoundly affected by what he found in the book. A month earlier, speaking of the same book, he had told a New Jersey audience: “The idea [of America] was that there’d be a place for everybody, no matter where you came from . . . you could help make a life that had some decency and dignity to it. But like all ideals, that idea got real corrupted. . . . I didn’t know what the government I lived under was doing. It’s important to know . . . about the things around you.” Now, onstage in Los Angeles, getting ready to sing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” Springsteen spoke in a soft, almost bashful voice, and told his largely well-off audience: “There’s a lo
t in [the history of the United States] . . . that you’re proud of, and then there’s a lot of things in it that you’re ashamed of. And that burden, that burden of shame, falls down. Falls down on everybody.”

  IN 1982, AFTER the tour ended, Springsteen was poised for the sort of massive breakthrough that people had been predicting for nearly a decade. The River had gone to the top of Billboard’s albums chart, and “Hungry Hearts” was a Top 10 single; it seemed that Springsteen was finally overcoming much of the popular backlash that had set in several years earlier, after numerous critics hailed him as rock & roll’s imminent crown prince. But after the tour, the singer was unsure about what direction he wanted to take in his songwriting. He spent some time driving around the country, brooding, reading, thinking about the realities of his own emotional life and the social conditions around him, and then settled down and wrote a body of songs about his ruminations. On January 3, 1982, Springsteen sat in his home and recorded a four-track demo cassette of the new songs, accompanied for the most part only by his ghostly sounding acoustic guitar. He later presented the songs to producer Jon Landau and the E Street Band, but neither Landau nor the musicians could find the right way to flesh out the doleful, spare-sounding new material. Finally, at Landau’s behest, Springsteen released the original demo versions of the songs as a solo effort, entitled Nebraska. It was a work like very few in pop music history: a politically piercing statement that was utterly free of a single instance of didactic sloganeering or ideological proclamation. Rather than preach to or berate his listeners, Springsteen created a vivid cast of characters—people who had been shattered by bad fortune, by limitations, by mounting debts and losses—and then he let those characters tell the stories of how their pain spilled over into despair and, sometimes, violence. In “Johnny 99,” he told the story of a working man who is pressed beyond his resources and in desperation, commits robbery and impulsive murder. Johnny doesn’t seek absolution for what he’s done—he even requests his own execution, though more as an end than a payment—but he does earn our compassion. Just before sentence is passed, Johnny says: “Now judge I got debts no honest man could pay/The bank was holdin’ my mortgage and they was takin’ my house away/Now I ain’t sayin’ that makes me an innocent man/But it was more’n all this that put that gun in my hand.” In “Highway Patrolman,” Springsteen related the tale of an idealistic cop who allows his brother to escape the law, recognizing that the brother has already suffered pain from the country he once served.

  There was a timeless, folkish feel to Nebraska’s music, but the themes and events it related were as dangerous and timely as the daily headlines of the 1980s—or of the 1990s, for that matter. It was a record about what can occur when normal people are forced to endure what cannot be endured. Springsteen’s point was that, until we understood how these people arrived at their places of ruin, until we accepted our connection to those who had been hurt or excluded beyond repair, then America could not be free of such fates or such crimes. “The idea of America as a family is naive, maybe sentimental or simplistic,” he told me in a 1987 interview, “but it’s a good idea. And if people are sick and hurting and lost, I guess it falls on everybody to address those problems in some fashion. Because injustice, and the price of that injustice, falls on everyone’s heads. The economic injustice falls on everybody’s head and steals everyone’s freedom. Your wife can’t walk down the street at night. People keep guns in their homes. They live with a greater sense of apprehension, anxiety, and fear than they would in a more just and open society. It’s not an accident, and it’s not simply that there are “bad’ people out there. It’s an inbred part of the way that we are all living: It’s a product of what we have accepted, what we have acceded to. And whether we mean it or not, our silence has spoken for us in some fashion.”

  NEBRASKA ATTEMPTED TO make a substantial statement about the modern American sensibility in a stark and austere style that demanded close involvement. That is, the songs required that you settle into their mournful textures and racking tales and then apply the hard facts of their meaning to the social reality around you. In contrast to Springsteen’s earlier bravado, there was nothing eager or indomitable about Nebraska. Instead, it was a record that worked at the opposite end of those conditions, a record about people walking the rim of desolation, who sometimes transform their despair into the irrevocable action of murder. It was not exulting or uplifting, and for that reason, it was a record that many listeners respected more than they “enjoyed.” Certainly, it was not a record by which an artist might expand his audience in the fun-minded world of pop.

  But with his next record, Born in the U.S.A., in 1984, Springsteen set out to find what it might mean to bring his message to the largest possible audience. Like Nebraska, Born in the U.S.A. was about people who come to realize that life turns out harder, more hurtful, more close-fisted than they might have expected. But in contrast to Nebraska’s killers and losers, Born in the U.S.A.’s characters hold back the night as best they can, whether it’s by singing, laughing, dancing, yearning, reminiscing, or entering into desperate love affairs. There was something celebratory about how these people faced their hardships. It’s as if Springsteen were saying that life is made to endure and that we all make peace with private suffering and shared sorrow as best we can.

  At the same time, a listener didn’t have to dwell on these truths to appreciate the record. Indeed, Springsteen and Landau had designed the album with contemporary pop style in mind—which is to say, it had been designed with as much meticulous attention to its captivating and lively surfaces as to its deeper and darker meanings. Consequently, a track like “Dancing in the Dark”—perhaps the most pointed and personal song Springsteen has ever written about isolation—came off as a rousing dance tune that had the effect of working against isolation by pulling an audience together in a physical celebration. Similarly, “Cover Me,” “Downbound Train,” and “I’m on Fire”—songs about erotic fear and paralyzing loneliness—came off as sexy, intimate, and irresistible.

  But it was the terrifying and commanding title song—about a Vietnam veteran who has lost his brother, his hope, and his faith in his country—that did the most to secure Springsteen’s new image as pop hero and that also turned his fame into something complex and troubling. Scan the song for its lyrics alone, and you find a tale of outright devastation: a tale of an American whose birthrights have been torn from his grasp, and paid off with indelible memories of violence and ruin. But listen to the song merely for its fusillade of drums and its firestorm of guitar, or for the singer’s roaring proclamation, “BORN in the U.S.A./I was BORN in the U.S.A.,” and it’s possible to hear it as a fierce patriotic assertion—especially in a political climate in which simpleminded patriotic fervor had attained a new and startling credibility. Watching Springsteen unfurl the song in concert—slamming it across with palpable rage as his audience waved flags of all sizes in response—it was possible to read the song in both directions at once. “Clearly the key to the enormous explosion of Bruce’s popularity is the misunderstanding [of the song ’Born in the U.S.A.’],” wrote critic Greil Marcus during the peak of Springsteen’s popularity. “He is a tribute to the fact that people hear what they want.”

  One listener who was quite happy to hear only what he wanted was syndicated conservative columnist George Will, who in the middle of the 1984 campaign that pitted Walter Mondale against Ronald Reagan attended a Springsteen show, and liked what he saw. In a September 14, 1984, column that was read by millions, Will commended Springsteen for his “elemental American values” and, predictably, heard the cry of “Born in the U.S.A.” as an exultation rather than as pained fury. “I have not got a clue about Springsteen’s politics, if any,” Will wrote, “but flags get waved at his concerts while he sings about hard times. He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seem punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: ’Born in the U.S.A.!’ ”

  Apparently, Reagan’s
advisors gave a cursory listening to Springsteen’s music and agreed with Will. A few days later, in a campaign stop in New Jersey, President Ronald Reagan declared: “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts. It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.”

  It was an amazing—even brain-boggling—assertion. Reagan’s tribute to Springsteen seemed about as stupefying as if Lyndon Johnson, during the awful uproar over Vietnam, had cited Bob Dylan for his noble influence on America’s youth politics, or as unnerving as if Richard Nixon, with his strong disregard for black social realities, had honored Sly Stone for the cutting commentary of his 1971 classic, There’s a Riot Goin’ On. Clearly, to anybody paying attention, the fierce, hard-bitten vision of America that Springsteen sang of in “Born in the U.S.A.” was a far cry from the much-touted “new patriotism” that Reagan and many of his fellow conservatives claimed as their private dominion. And yet there was also something damnably brilliant in the way the president sought to attach his purposes to Springsteen’s views. It was the art of political syllogism, taken to its most arrogant extreme. Reagan saw himself as a definitional emblem of America; Bruce Springsteen was a singer who, apparently, extolled America in his work; therefore, Springsteen must be exalting Reagan as well—which would imply that, if one valued the music of Springsteen, then one should value (and support) Reagan as well. Reagan was manipulating Springsteen’s fame as an affirmation of his own ends.