This is not a love song

 

Running from birth

I’m not going to write a formal review of the Springsteen autobiography, there are hundreds of those available pretty much anywhere you care to look. I do need to say something, however, about how deeply I was affected by reading it.

Born to Run is a magnificent book. I’ve read more than my fair share of works on the subject of Bruce Springsteen – many of them very good indeed – but all pale in comparison to this first-hand account of the life (and more importantly the mindset) of one of Rocks greatest legends.

It’s being described in the superficial mainstream media as a “tell-all” which serves only to trivialize what is, in fact, a masterful and lyrical account of the life of a proverbial everyman who broke the mold (though, certainly not without consequences) and escaped the stifling confines of his blue collar world. In doing so he also had a not inconsiderable hand in shaping the way America sees itself.

So what did I personally get out of the book?

There are certain events that occurred in Springsteen’s life that mirror aspects of my own. We both had fathers who were emotionally withholding and borderline abusive. How we differ is in the way we allowed this to shape the men we became.

Springsteen used his father’s internalized voice as the engine room and driver of his creative life. His desire to prove wrong his father’s poor opinion of him propelled the young musician – like some anxious skyrocket – into the stratospheric world of fame and success.

That is not what I did.

I too internalized my father’s voice (stepfather to be exact, my real father having abandoned us when I was small). However, for whatever reason, I was never able to turn that negative energy into rocket fuel. Instead, I pushed the voice down until I could barely even make it out and tried to get on with my life.

Ignored is not the same as negated, however, and the black energy would manifest as acts of self-sabotage whenever I came close to anything like success.

It was fascinating to read Springsteen’s account of his own trajectory, his single-minded pursuit of uncompromising greatness exemplified in the marathon concerts fueled by white hot anxiety and flat out fear. His fear literally made him fearless and that fearless  determination to achieve launched one of the greatest musical careers of all time.

The soaring brilliance of this accomplishment cannot be overstated. I’ve been to his hometown, it is a place with almost no propensity for greatness. To have escaped the gravitational pull of Freehold, New Jersey and then used that very same gravity to slingshot his music into the orbit of the great American legends (Dylan, Elvis, James Brown) was a labor that Hercules himself might have considered a smidge ambitious.

As I implied at the beginning, these things tend to exact a cost. For Springsteen, the cost of the long-delayed reckoning with his haunted past was an emotional breakdown and subsequent epic bouts of clinical depression.

This is another point of intersection between Springsteen’s life and my own. I too suffered a breakdown followed by several years of crippling depression. I found my way through those trials (and if I could have just five minutes with the Boss, I’d impress upon him just what a boon acupuncture can be in treating deep-seated depression) and became a better person for having made the journey.

It gave me a feeling, not unlike assuagement to realise that even people of Bruce Springsteen’s stature are no more immune to these tidal forces than are we lesser folk. And to see him write so openly about it (much as I try to do here) was extremely heartening. It’s so important for people going through difficult times to see that others have walked that path before them.

So that’s what I took away with me from Born to Run. My hero has feet of clay (which is the way I tend to like ’em) but a generous heart and spirit (though that clearly was not always the case). I was happy to discover that the man is not so very different (a little more human perhaps) to the impression we all have of him.

©2016

The whole world walking pretty

 

Tear drops on the city
Bad Scooter searching for his groove
Seem like the whole world walking pretty
And you can’t find the room to move
Well everybody better move over, that’s all
I’m running on the bad side
And I got my back to the wall
Tenth Avenue freeze-out, Tenth Avenue freeze-out

Springsteen, Tenth Avenue Freeze-out

 

As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m reading the Springsteen Autobiography, Born to Run at the moment. I’ve been taking it slow, absorbing as much as possible and really enjoying every single page. For the true fans, it’s a goldmine of information (for the less starstruck, there’s some fantastic writing to be found between its covers).

Today I came upon a piece of information that really stunned me but before I get into that, let me first take you back to Jersey girl’s and my last trip to New York together. We’d intended to do the High Line walk, but there is so much new construction going on in that part of Manhattan these days that we soon abandoned the racket in favour of the streets.

The kids were hungry by then so we had pizza at a pretty authentic Italian joint (Ray’s on 9th) and started meandering through Chelsea. On 10th Avenue (freeze-out baby!) we came upon this wonderfully retro but sadly deserted diner.

A little web research (later on at home) informed me that I had photographed the famous Empire diner which has stood on this spot since the forties and which, at the height of its popularity was a favourite hangout for celebrities such as Madonna, Kate Winslet, Minnie Driver, Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Steven Spielberg, and Barbra Streisand.

The diner even features on the cover of the album Asylum years by the great Tom Waits as well as appearing in several movies including Manhattan and Men in Black II.

Sadly, the most recent owner failed to keep the doors open despite all its history and the diner has fallen into the sorry state you see in the photos above.

Today, I was reading Born to Run on the train when I got to the chapter about Springsteen’s marriage to his wife Patti. As you may have noticed, I’m a bit of an incurable romantic so I was really enjoying his retelling of their courtship. Then I got to this part;

…said yes.

 

And here, courtesy of Google Maps, is the park where Springsteen bagged his Jersey girl.

 

This probably doesn’t have the same wow factor for you the reader as it does for me the rabid Springsteen fan. But, from my perspective, the fact that I cluelessly stumbled upon what, for Springsteen, must amount to a sacred site and had the presence of mind to actually record it is pretty special. The fact that I’m only now learning how significant this place is, only serves to make the entire experience more amazing to me.

 

 

Words and images are my own unless otherwise credited.

 

©2016

Born to write

 

From a house on a hill a sacred light shines
I walk through these rooms but none of them are mine
Down empty hallways I went from door to door
Searching for my beautiful reward
Searching for my beautiful reward

Springsteen, My beautiful reward

 

As the entire world must know by now, Springsteen has released his much-anticipated autobiography Born to Run and, as expected, it’s a massive hit. No real surprise there. What I personally wasn’t expecting was just how good it has turned out to be. This isn’t really a review because, well, I haven’t actually finished it yet (it’s a big tome) but what I’ve read so far has been truly wonderful and remarkably poetic.

Many books have been produced about the life and music of this unique and brilliant man but all of the information came second hand and much of it was contradictory. This is the man himself writing about his life as he experienced it and to say it fills in the gaps is an understatement.

I was particularly interested in his early life in Freehold NJ and this book does not disappoint on that score. You get a warts and all journey through the low rent streets of the unlikely town that birthed a legend. And it’s all seen from the perspective of an alienated teen who had a burning need to get the hell out of Dodge. A teen who just had to show the world what he’d been hiding under that awkward, acne riddled, and insecure exterior his whole young and unexceptional life. It’s great stuff.

Glad I was that Jersey girl and I had had the opportunity to visit Freehold before I sat down to read this book. His descriptions of home life – the very real seeds of so much of his music – were all the more vivid for my having visited the town and particularly the house on South Street. I could see so many of the scenes he describes playing out before my eyes simply because I know the places where they took place.

 

68 South Street Springsteen’s family home throughout most of the 60’s.

 

He writes about the first time he ever played in front of an actual audience and sang lead (on the Beatles’ twist and shout). That took place here at the Freehold Elks Lodge. It was an unexceptional beginning for such a stellar career (as is so often the case with such stories).

 

 

He writes about a bullet coming through the glass of his front door one Saturday night just moments after he’d walked past to go up to bed.

 

 

Other writers have mentioned this as some sort of mysterious, unexplained event but here we get the Springsteen take that it was probably tied to his father’s involvement in a labour dispute at his factory job.

Then there is his love-hate relationship with the nuns of St Rose of Lima, the Catholic school he attended just up the road from his house. Again, I had the chance to visit this place and so his recounting of the time he spent at that torturous institution is that much more vivid.

To be sure, most people are probably more interested in the later periods of his life when he had already become a bona fide rock god but I’ve always been interested in the how and the where of  these things. What propelled the pimply faced Bruce out of a life of mundane isolation onto the international stage? How did this barely educated boy become such a prolifically talented and erudite storyteller?

And make no mistake, this is very good writing. The same remarkable talent that produced songs like The River and Jungleland is very much in evidence between these pages. I think anyone with even a vague interest in Bruce will probably read this book. I know I’ll be reading it more than a few times. It’s brutally honest much of the time and full of the self-examination we’ve come to expect from Mr. Springsteen over the years.

If you think you know the story already, I’m fairly confident you’re quite mistaken. This book rips the band-aids off old wounds, exposing a Bruce that has hitherto only been hinted at.

It was a good day.

 

I’ll have more to say on this subject once I’ve delved deeper.

Words and images are my own.

©2016

Hiding on the backstreets

 

 

For me, one of the most tearingly raw moments I think I’ve ever experienced within a piece of music comes midway through Backstreets. Springsteen’s delivery of the lines – blame it on the lies that killed us. Blame it on the truth that ran us down. You can blame it all on me Terry it don’t matter to me now. When the breakdown hit at midnight there was nothing left to say, but I hated him and I hated you when you went away – is as intimate and bleeding as anything to be found in, for example, Eric Clapton’s moving track Tears in heaven.

Considering that Clapton’s song deals with his coming to terms with the tragic death of his own, very young, child (after a fall from a high-rise window of all things), that’s probably a big call, I know.

A sense of longing and resigned regret infuse Clapton’s ode with an almost transcendent beauty, but it comes from a place where the singer has, to a certain degree, made his peace with the tragedy that informs the song. There is a sober, mature quality to his delivery. The emotions are deep, but no longer raw.

We’ve heard Springsteen deliver pain that way in songs like You’re missing & Streets of Philadelphia.

By contrast, when he reaches that emotional zenith in Backstreets, there is the rawness of the nerve exposed. The first part – blame it on the lies that killed us. Blame it on the truth that ran us down. You can blame it all on me Terry it don’t matter to me now – has an almost cornered animal quality. The devastating nature of the thing that has overtaken his characters – turning friend against friend – is redolent in every note. There is the sense that the pain of his own inward facing rage is too much for him to bear.

When the breakdown hit at midnight there was nothing left to say – here we see the moment of dissolution, but now he has got something to say, now comes confession – but I hated him – is spat out with such undisguised pain and blind anger that it is as if he were a child howling against the injustice of some deep betrayal. And yet, immediately there is a shift into an almost apologetic self-awareness and shame as he sings – and I hated you when you went away. The anguished wail that follows is almost redundant.

It’s a moment of instinctive performance genius.

I’ve listened to multiple versions of Springsteen singing this song and those lines are always delivered with exactly the same level of intensity. It is a moment of pure emotion, of total honesty. It touches that place inside us where every past overreaction, every hasty and soon regretted decision hides, coiled and ready to lash out in condemnation.

It is a tortured roar of defiance against our own petty natures; simply a brilliantly artful moment.

This is why art exists.

Backstreets

One soft infested summer me and Terry* became friends,
trying in vain to breathe the fire we was born in
Catching rides to the outskirts tying faith between our teeth.
Sleeping in that old abandoned beach house getting wasted in the heat
And hiding on the backstreets, hiding on the backstreets
With a love so hard and filled with defeat
Running for our lives at night on them backstreets

Slow dancing in the dark on the beach at Stockton’s Wing
Where desperate lovers park we sat with the last of the Duke Street Kings
Huddled in our cars waiting for the bells that ring
In the deep heart of the night to set us loose from everything
to go running on the backstreets, running on the backstreets
We swore we’d live forever on the backstreets we take it together

Endless juke joints and Valentino drag where dancers scraped the tears
Up off the street dressed down in rags running into the darkness
Some hurt bad some really dying at night sometimes it seemed
You could hear the whole damn city crying blame it on the lies that killed us
Blame it on the truth that ran us down you can blame it all on me Terry
It don’t matter to me now when the breakdown hit at midnight
There was nothing left to say but I hated him and I hated you when you went away

Laying here in the dark you’re like an angel on my chest
Just another tramp of hearts crying tears of faithlessness
Remember all the movies, Terry, we’d go see
Trying to learn how to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be
And after all this time to find we’re just like all the rest
Stranded in the park and forced to confess
To hiding on the backstreets, hiding on the backstreets
We swore forever friends on the backstreets until the end
Hiding on the backstreets, hiding on the backstreets

 

 

*It is generally assumed that Terry is a girl and that the song deals with the protagonist’s anger at being betrayed by her. I tend to believe that Terry is probably a guy.

…Remember all the movies, Terry, we’d go see
Trying to learn how to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be…

That really doesn’t sound like a relationship between a man and a woman to me.

I also take exception with the notion that the song is about his anger over being betrayed by Terry. I feel it is more about the realisation that he (the protagonist) was just as much a betrayer as he was betrayed. For me, it is about looking back and seeing the moment you screwed it all up. The anger is inwardly directed.

Further thoughts.