Bruce Springsteen and Our America

 

Bruce Springsteen and Our America

I have been fanatically devoted to Bruce Springsteen’s music ever since I first heard the opening chords and lyrics to Thunder Road from the Live 1975-1985 boxed set, which I first owned on cassette tape when I was around 13.  I only had an introductory-level knowledge of Bruce’s music at the time – mostly the radio hits from the mid-1980s phenomenon that was the Born in the U.S.A. album.  A boxed set seemed like a good way to get to know more of his music.

So picture a 13-year-old kid in his bedroom, sitting with a boom box late at night under lamplight.  He unwraps the cellophane, pops open the plastic cassette casing, slips the rectangular tape in, and hits play.  ‘Click.’  The tape begins to roll, and all is silent at first except for the low hiss of the tape running.  And then some audience clapping slowly fades in, and an announcer says somewhat matter-of-factly, “Ladies and gentlemen, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.”  A smattering of additional applause follow, and then that magnificent piano intro of Thunder Road, followed by the piercing harmonica, before Bruce’s hoarse, gravelly, melodic, beautiful voice delivers his poetry.  It took my breath away.

As my kids have heard me tell the story more times than they care to hear it, I would listen to a line or two, pause the cassette, write down what I heard, rewind if I missed something, and repeat that process until I had the entire song’s lyrics on the page.  (Reminder to you young folks: there was no such thing as the internet in 1987.)  And then I would read the lyrics over and over again.  To this day, I still get emotional when I hear, “The screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves…”  (I used to think it was “Mary’s dress sways.”  I guess I wrote it down incorrectly!)  It launched a lifelong adoration for Bruce and his music and lyrics.

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In my twenties, as my admiration for Bruce grew to irrational levels, a family member observed: “It can’t just be that you like Bruce and his music; there must be something about it that really speaks to you.” 

Wow, what an astute observation.  It wasn’t something that I had thought about before.  But yes, something about that music and those lyrics definitely spoke to me.  So I started to think about it then, and I have continued to think about it ever since – through new songs and old, live concerts or listening in the car, rocking arena shows or intimate Broadway performances.  There is something deep there, something in my consciousness and in my conscience.  Something emotional, raw, and visceral.

Why is Bruce’s music so impactful on me and so many other people around the world?  Today, in 2020, when I am a father, a husband, a worker, a voter, a citizen, and in the midst of the most turbulent period in my lifetime, and in many of our lives, I finally have my answer. 

Bruce’s music and lyrics tell us everything we want and need to know about the kind of country, community, and family we want to live in.  His characters are the best of us.  His stories are the best of us.

He’s a non-spiritual spiritual guide; he’s a moral compass in a world lacking moral guidance; he’s a shining light in a place of darkness.  I don’t want to put any pressure on the man himself.  I don’t expect Bruce, the person, to be all of those things.  But Bruce the musical icon is everything we need right now.[1]

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What is America?  Not the country, but the idea or ideal?  Many people would instinctively cite slogans and say it’s the land of opportunity; the land of the free; the place where dreams can come true if you work hard enough.  Others might say it’s a country with different people with a common purpose or shared values.  After all, we have always been a country of immigrants from all over the world and yet, it’s fair to say, we all view ourselves uniquely as Americans.

A recent article asked whether America is actually no more than a “myth.”  In Is America a Myth, by Robin Wright, https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/is-america-a-myth, the author wrote that America is “unraveling” in 2020 due to, among other things, the heated election, poor race relations, the pandemic, unemployment, and hunger.  She also observed that there’s even more to it that gives us Americans a sense of dread. 

The ideas and imagery of America face existential challenges—some with reason, some without—that no longer come only from the fringes.  Rage consumes many in America.  And it may only get worse after the election, and for the next four years, no matter who wins.  Our political and cultural fissures have generated growing doubt about the stability of a country that long considered itself an anchor, a model, and an exception to the rest of the world.

And then, the kicker: it was always this way.  “Scholars, political scientists, and historians even posit that trying to unite disparate states, cultures, ethnic groups, and religions was always illusory.”  The author quoted one of those scholars: “The idea that America has a shared past going back into the colonial period is a myth.  We are very different Americas, each with different origin stories and value sets, many of which are incompatible.  They led to a Civil War in the past and are a potentially incendiary force in the future.”  (Quoting “ Colin Woodard, the author of Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood.)

Why do I cite and quote this article in an essay on Bruce Springsteen?  Because whether consciously or not, Bruce always wrote and spoke about an America that was mostly an illusory place with disparate people and groups, with different values and desires, with opportunity but also with inequality.  He wrote about the American promise and also American despair.  He is famous for writing about working-class people working in factories, but he also wrote about Mexican migrants working in California orchards, young black men who were the victims of violence and police brutality, firefighters and police officers lost on 9/11, people displaced after Hurricane Katrina, people who lost homes and livelihoods after the financial crisis.  He wrote about fathers, sons, mothers, daughters, religions, ethnicities, everyone who makes up the American fabric and everything that makes up the American experience.  He always knew we were different from each other.  And yet he told our story from all of our perspectives.

Magically, he found a common thread for all of us.  He found that spark that makes us all one.  While we don’t share every value, Bruce knew and wrote about our shared values.  He wrote about what we all ultimately want: family, friends, fairness, a chance, respect, love, decency, sympathy, empathy, and maybe just a little bit of a good time.  Look carefully, and you will see, it’s all there in the poetry behind “these drums and these guitars.”

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When Bono from U2 introduced Bruce into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he described Bruce this way: 

Handsome, handsome mother with those brooding brown eyes, eyes that could see through America….  He didn’t buy the mythology that screwed so many people. Instead he created an alternative mythology, one where ordinary lives became extraordinary and heroic….  He’s America’s writer, and critic….  But then again, he is an Irish-Italian, with a Jewish-sounding name.  What more do you want?!?  Add one big African sax player, and no one in this room is gonna fuck with you!

Amen, Bono, Amen. 

Before Bruce and the “Big Man” Clarence Clemons, you would have been hard pressed to find a white man and a black man sharing that kind of intimate camaraderie on stage and in public, including all of that on-stage kissing and hugging that they did.  The cover of the Born to Run album deserves more credit than it gets for something radical at the time: a white guitar player leaning on a much larger black saxophone player, love for each other in both of their eyes.  Their relationship was no big deal to them.  It set an example and an ideal that sadly we have failed to live up to even all these years later. 

Bruce shared this sentiment during his historic and incredible run of shows on Broadway, when talking about Clarence’s death. 

Nobody captured my audience’s imagination or their hearts like Clarence.  Clarence was a figure out of a rock and roll storybook, and together, we told a story that was bigger than any of the ones I’d written in my songs.  It was a story where not only does Scooter and the Big Man bust the city in half, but we remade the city.  We remade the city, shaping it into the kind of place where our friendship and our love for one another wouldn’t have been such an exceptional thing.  

The emphasized language says it all: Scooter and The Big Man showed us all that a white and black man could love one another, support one another, hold each other up, celebrate one another, and there is nothing exceptional about it.

But Bruce also knew America didn’t live up to this ideal.  He wrote about the black experience often from the perspective of police brutality and violence – years before the most recent uproar after the killing of George Floyd.

In Black Cowboys in 2005, Bruce wrote,

Rainey Williams’ playground was the Mott Haven streets
Where he ran past melted candles and flower wreaths
Names and photos of young black faces
Whose death and blood consecrated these places
 
Raney’s mother said, “Raney stay at my side
For you are my blessing, you are my pride
It’s your love here that keeps my soul alive
I want you to come home from school and stay inside”

Rainey’s mother knew that it wasn’t safe for him on the streets.  Maybe he would have met the same fate as Bruce’s character Charles in American Skin (41 Shots).  In that song, Bruce told the story of Charles as a fictional stand-in for the real Amadou Diallo, who was shot 41 times by NYC police officers.  Charles’ mother Lena expressed the same concerns as Rainey’s mom about him being on the streets. 

41 shots, Lena gets her son ready for school
She says, “On these streets, Charles
You’ve got to understand the rules
If an officer stops you, promise me you’ll always be polite
And that you’ll never ever run away
Promise Mama you’ll keep your hands in sight”

 But then brilliantly, if not subtly, Bruce didn’t just tell the story from young Charles’ perspective.  Often misunderstood as only a criticism of the police, the song also empathizes with them.  Police officers later confront Charles on the street and ask themselves these very difficult questions as they approach:

Is it a gun (is it a gun), is it a knife (is it a knife)
Is it a wallet (is it a wallet), this is your life (this is your life)
It ain’t no secret (it ain’t no secret)
It ain’t no secret (it ain’t no secret)
No secret my friend
You can get killed just for living in your American skin

This is your life.  It is Charles’ life.  It is Diallo’s life.  But it is also the officers’ lives.

Remember that Bruce wrote this song years before the George Floyd killing.  American Skin (41 Shots) was one of his more controversial songs and he risked alienating his mostly white audience with it.  A lot of his fans were uncomfortable having Bruce sing these lyrics to them.  I remember Bruce’s concerts from those days, when he’d ask the audience to “please be quiet” so he could sing this very serious song to them and everyone could truly hear what he was saying.  It would take a while for everyone to calm down.  Some audience members would walk out, or openly express their disdain for the song.  They thought Bruce was only criticizing police.  With all due respect to those audience members, they never understood Bruce. 

They wanted a white working man’s hero, a defender of the police no matter what, a flag-waving patriot who only sang about fast cars, parties, and the American dream.  But that’s a very one-dimensional vision of Bruce (a very important dimension we will get to).  It was never all of what Bruce was.

In American Skin, Bruce saw both sides of the divide.  He saw the challenges the police faced as much as he saw the fear from Charles’ perspective.  Tragically, in real life, Diallou was killed while holding his wallet.  But Bruce knew and wrote about that moment when an officer has to decide – is it a gun, a knife, a wallet.  That is the brilliance of Bruce.  He doesn’t take sides; he sees all our sides.

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Bruce famously said, “And in the end, nobody wins unless everybody wins.”  Some might view that as a socialist-style creed: we should all finish with the same amount.  But Bruce is no socialist.  He just has a strong sense of fairness and equality – those elusive American ideals that we all expect and strive towards.

The impact of the wealth gap and how the rich (or employers) take advantage of the poor (or employees) have been themes in Bruce’s music for decades.  Interestingly, they didn’t really show up in his lyrics until he was successful.  After his popularity exploded with the Born to Run album, his lyrics became more socially conscious and focused on these themes of economic inequality.  He and his characters were “growin’ up,” and the young teens and lovers of his earlier music, yearning to hit the road and break free, became the hometown-bound young adults, parents, employers and employees struggling in his new songs.

Many of his songs about workers were about how work could be physically and emotionally crushing.  Most of his casual listeners think of Bruce’s working men and women as heroes, and they were.  But he didn’t just put them on some working-class pedestal.  What he really sang about was how defeated those regular people became at the end of the day, broken by a system that took advantage of working folks.

There are too many examples to cite here, but I’ll start with Badlands, where a “Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king, and a king ain’t satisfied until he rules everything.”  Bruce sent a message that he understood how greed corrupts.  On the same album, in Promised Land, he wrote about the daily struggle to go to work, do what’s right, and how it can beat you down: “I’ve done my best to live the right way, I get up every morning and go to work each day, But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold, Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode.”  And in Factory,

Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain
I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain
Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life
The working, the working, just the working life.

Most of us can relate to these images of the working life.

Then there’s The River.  The entire song paints a picture of a struggling town and its tragic characters.  The song starts with a young man who is brought up to be like his father.  “I come from down in the valley where mister when you’re young, They bring you up to do like your daddy done.”  Bruce used this theme – children growing up to be like their parents despite not wanting to – a lot in his music, often to describe the “promise” that was “broken” when young men and women could not take the jobs that their parents once had or the opportunities that have since disappeared. 

In this particular song, the job for this young man does vanish: “I got a job working construction for the Johnstown Company, But lately there ain’t been much work on account of the economy, Now all them things that seemed so important, well mister they vanished right into the air, Now I just act like I don’t remember, Mary acts like she don’t care.”

And when the jobs vanish, when the “promise is broken,” what happens?  Bruce understood that people become desperate.  In Johnny 99, from the Nebraska album, the protagonist kills after getting drunk upon learning that “they closed down the auto plant in Mahwah late that month.”  And in his plea to the Judge, he cites his economic woes. 

Now judge, judge, I got debts no honest man could pay
The bank was holding my mortgage, they taking my house away
Now I ain’t saying that makes me an innocent man
But it was more and all this that put that gun in my hand.

Bruce doesn’t condone the killing, but he sympathizes.  He knows that the loss of work and a person’s pride can lead to drastic actions.

Other examples abound.  Youngstown is perhaps the most direct in capturing all of these themes in one place, where the protagonist comes home from the Vietnam war and gets a job in the Ohio furnaces.  He works himself to the bone until he makes his bosses rich enough that they close the plant and no longer need him.  In relevant part, Bruce wrote:

Well my daddy worked the furnaces, kept ‘em hotter than hell
I come home from ‘Nam worked my way to scarfer, a job that’d suit the devil as well
Well taconite coke and limestone fed my children and made my pay
Them smokestacks reaching like the arms of God into a beautiful sky of soot and clay
 
Well my daddy come on the Ohio works when he come home from World War Two
Now the yard’s just scrap and rubble, he said Them big boys did what Hitler couldn’t do.
Yeah these mills they built the tanks and bombs that won this country’s wars
We sent our sons to Korea and Vietnam, now we’re wondering what they were dying for
 
From the Monongahela valley to the Mesabi iron range
To the coal mines of Appalachia, the story’s always the same
Seven hundred tons of metal a day, now sir you tell me the world’s changed
Once I made you rich enough, rich enough to forget my name

The last line – you tell me this world changed once I made you rich enough to forget my name – captures the theme that runs through our American history as Bruce understands it: that hard-working, honest people in this country get hit the worst after every crisis we face, from the depression, to the 1970s economic crisis to the shift to manufacturing jobs overseas, to the housing bubble and financial crisis, to today’s impact from the Coronavirus.

The Wrecking Ball album released in 2012, after the financial crisis hit, also contained one after another of songs touching on themes of greed, the wealth gap, disparities between employers and employees, white collar and blue collar workers.  From the government abandoning folks displaced by Hurricane Katrina in We Take Care of Our Own (“From Chicago to New Orleans, from the muscle to the bone, From the shotgun shack to the Superdome, There ain’t no help, the cavalry stayed home, There ain’t no one hearing the bugle blowin’“). 

To the Jack of All Trades who will do whatever work he needs to do to survive while the “bankers” grow fat with excess.  (“The banker man grows fat, the working man grows thin, It’s all happened before and it’ll happen again, It’ll happen again, yeah, they’ll bet your life, I’m a Jack of all trades, darling, we’ll be alright”). 

To the destruction of cities through the silent killer of complex financial transactions in Death to My Hometown.  (“No shells ripped the evening sky, no cities burning down, No army stormed the shores for which we’d die, no dictators were crowned, I awoke from a quiet night, I never heard a sound, The marauders raided in the dark and brought death to my hometown, boys, Death to my hometown.”) 

It’s no surprise that the financial crisis would trigger such strong feelings from a man who had been singing and writing about them for years.

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Born in the U.S.A. deserves special mention here, for it is surely Bruce’s most misunderstood and misinterpreted song.  We all know the Ronald Reagan story: the song has such a soaring, patriotic-sounding musical chorus, such a powerful sing-along refrain about being “Boooooooorn in the U.S.A.” that Reagan’s campaign mistook it for a patriotic anthem.  Nothing could be further from the truth. 

The song was originally written as a somber acoustic song, which Bruce rewrote musically as an anthem for the Born in the U.S.A. album.  Musically, the new version was a megahit and catapulted Bruce to an unheard of level of stardom.  But the new music masked the true lyrical meaning.  The country in 1984 was riding high and it was easy to get swept up in the Born in the U.S.A. hysteria, especially with that album cover: the all-American kid from New Jersey in tight jeans and white t-shirt in front of the Stars & Stripes.  But that was never what the song was about. 

In the late 1990s, Bruce released the acoustic version of the song on Tracks and started performing it in concerts.  Same lyrics, different music, completely different song.  And none other than President Barack Obama subsequently observed when Bruce performed it in his Broadway show, “Not out yet, but the blues version in his Broadway show is the best!”  (In fact, that version or something like it was released on Tracks much earlier.)  The “blues” or acoustic version certainly put the lyrics in their proper context.

The song is about a Vietnam veteran who comes home after the war to a country that has nothing for him (also repeated in Youngstown, as discussed).  The country asked him to go fight, and abandoned him upon his return.  It’s worth repeating the relevant verses here.  Imagine them without the anthemic “Boooooooorn in the U.S.A.” arena chant:

Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man
 
Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says, “Son if it was up to me”
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said, “Son don’t you understand now”
 
…
 
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I’m ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go
Born in the U.S.A.

We saw Bruce sympathize with young black men, with police officers, and now, with veterans and factory workers.  Think about those groups today.  They are often clashing with each other in the streets.  Bruce saw all of their pain.

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Bruce also gave us the soundtrack for our lives as fathers, sons, mothers, daughters, brothers and sisters.  He didn’t just write about family.  He wrote about it differently at each stage of his own life.  Of course it started as the rebellious son who could not get along with his father (the stories are legion and legendary).  Listen to all of Independence Day if you want to know what I mean, but these lines in particular:

Well Papa go to bed now, it’s getting late
Ain’t no talking gonna change anything now
I’ll be leaving in the morning from St. Mary’s Gate
We wouldn’t change this thing even if we could somehow
 
‘Cause the darkness of this house has got the best of us
And there’s a darkness in this town that’s got us too
But they can’t touch me now and you can’t touch me now
They ain’t gonna do to me what I watched them do to you
 
So say goodbye, it’s Independence Day
It’s Independence Day, all the boys must run away
Oh say goodbye, it’s Independence Day
All men must go their way come Independence Day
 
Well Papa I don’t know what it always was with us
We chose the words and yeah we drew the lines
This house no how could it hold the two of us
I guess that we were just too much of the same kind

 But then later Bruce became a father, and his lyrics about fatherhood changed.  First he learned of the overwhelming beauty of parenthood in Living Proof. 

Well now on a summer night oh in a dusky room
Come a little piece of the Lord’s undying light, crying like he swallowed the fiery moon
In his mother’s arms it was all the beauty I could take
Like the missing words to some prayer well that I could never make
Oh in a world so hard and dirty, so fouled and confused
Searching for a little bit of God’s mercy, I found living proof

And then he spoke of the challenges of getting it right as a father and not repeating the mistakes of those who came before you or your own mistakes, in Long Time Coming.

Well my daddy he was just a stranger
Lived in a hotel downtown
When I was a kid he was just somebody
Somebody I’d see around
Somebody I’d see around
 
Now down below and pulling on my shirt
I got some kids of my own
If I had one wish in this god forsaken world, kids
It’d be your mistakes would be your own
Yeah your sins would be your own
 
…
 
There’s just a spark of a campfire left burning
Two kids in a sleeping bag beside
Reach ‘neath your shirt, lay my hands across your belly
And feel another one kicking inside
And I ain’t gonna fuck it up this time

Like the rest of us, Bruce learned a valuable lesson.  And he passed it on to us to learn with him as we grew with him.  It’s easy as a kid to be critical of a parent.  It’s harder as a parent not to be criticized by your kids.

Brotherhood is yet another important familial theme.  And it’s not just the brotherhood between “Blood Brothers,” though that’s critical too.  It’s also the brotherhood between all people.  Indeed, the song Blood Brothers can be seen as a tribute to biological brothers, but also to the bonds between all people:

We played king of the mountain out on the end
The world come charging up the hill, and we were women and men
Now there's so much that time, time and memory fade away
We got our own roads to ride and chances we got to take
We stood side by side each one fighting for the other
And we said until we died we'd always be blood brothers

And biological brothers – any family – well you don’t turn your back on them no matter what.  In Highway Patrolman (a personal favorite), the narrator law enforcement officer can’t bring himself to arrest his brother who is always in trouble.

Now ever since we was young kids, it's been the same come down
I get a call on the shortwave, Franky's in trouble downtown
Well if it was any other man, I'd put him straight away
But when it's your brother sometimes you look the other way
 
Yeah me and Franky laughin' and drinkin', nothin' feels better than blood on blood
Takin' turns dancin' with Maria as the band played "Night of the Johnstown Flood"
I catch him when he's strayin' like any brother would
Man turns his back on his family, well he just ain't no good

At the end of the song, the narrator chases Franky in his police car because Franky assaulted someone.  But as he was closing in on Franky, he pulled to the side of the road “and watched his taillights disappear.”  He let Franky go because a man who turns his back on his family just ain’t no good.

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How did Bruce do it all?  How did he write credibly and critically about all of us – white, black, Hispanic, worker, boss, police officer, father, son, and on and on.  In a word – which I have used more than once already – empathy. 

I am sure I am going to get this story slightly wrong to explain Bruce’s empathy, but I think I am going to come close.  After 9/11, Bruce wrote The Rising, an album almost entirely about the stories of those who lived through and were lost on that tragic day.  One of the songs, Into the Fire, is told from the perspective of a young woman who lost her husband or boyfriend, a firefighter, that day.

Well the sky was falling and streaked with blood
I heard you calling me, then you disappeared into the dust
Up the stairs, into the fire
Yeah up the stairs, into the fire
I need your kiss, but love and duty called you someplace higher
Somewhere up the stairs, into the fire

Bruce was asked how he wrote that and other songs from other people’s perspectives about such an emotional and heart wrenching event.  I recall him answering to the effect of, ‘I don’t know what it’s like to lose someone like that, but I can feel what it’s like.’  That might be Bruce’s greatest gift.  He can feel what we all feel.

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What’s most meaningful about all these songs (and dozens of others that I have not discussed here) is Bruce’s “magic trick” (a term Bruce has used to describe his music and songs).  The magic trick is that despite the darkness, despite the despair, despite the struggle, Bruce’s music is ultimately about hope.  The music itself is so inspiring, so uplifting, that it appeals to a wide audience across political and economic divides regardless of the lyrics.  (Not so much across racial divides.  Bruce’s audience is predominantly white, which has always been the case for rock music.) 

In fact, I doubt many of Bruce’s biggest fans have thought about the lyrics the way I have.  And that’s a good thing.  It’s something that, in this mixed-up, me-against-you, red-against-blue world, we can share across the political divide by enjoying the entire package.  We can share the “hope and dreams” of Bruce’s music that he sings about in, well, Land of Hope and Dreams:

Grab your ticket and your suitcase, thunder’s rolling down this track
Well, you don’t know where you’re going now, but you know you won’t be back
Well, darling, if you’re weary, lay your head upon my chest
We’ll take what we can carry, yeah, and we’ll leave the rest
 
Well, big wheels roll through the fields where sunlight streams
Meet me in a land of hope and dreams
 
I will provide for you and I’ll stand by your side
You’ll need a good companion now for this part of the ride
Yeah, leave behind your sorrows, let this day be the last
Well, tomorrow there’ll be sunshine and all this darkness past
 
Well, big wheels roll through fields where sunlight streams
Oh, meet me in a land of hope and dreams

Not only does Bruce inspire us with hope and dreams, but like I said earlier, he doesn’t really take sides.  We are all taking sides now more than ever, and to be sure, Bruce isn’t shy about supporting one political candidate or another.  But he doesn’t view a political stance as an end-all for any other kind of talking, listening, or empathizing.  At the end of the day, he wants for all of us what we want for ourselves. 

And that brings me to an important ending.  There’s a part of Bruce’s music I didn’t mention yet.  It’s a “heart-stopping, pants-dropping, love-making, earth-quaking” American block party that we are all invited to.  He’s a unifier of different people; he’s an explainer of different perspectives; he’s a storyteller in the mold of the greatest literary figures of our country.  He just happens to set his stories to kick-ass music by a kick-ass E Street Band.

When the hard work is done, when the long day is over, we put aside our squabbles, we bury our troubles, we hit the street, the backyard, the club, the beach, wherever it is that brings people together to say, we are one.  We are more alike than different.  We have more in common than what sets us apart.

Bruce had the E Street Band to support him.  We have Bruce and the band, but we also have the crowd – each other.  When Bruce talks about partying, he talks about that crowd, that unity of people.  In one of my absolute live favorites, Out in the Street, Bruce brings us all together at the end of the hard day, in the crowd, and not alone:

Put on your best dress baby and, darling, fix your hair up right
‘Cause there’s a party, honey, way down beneath the neon lights
All day you’ve been working that hard line
Now tonight you’re gonna have a good time
 
I work five days a week, girl, loading crates down on the dock
I take my hard earned money and meet my girl down on the block
And Monday when the foreman calls time
I’ve already got Friday on my mind
 
When that whistle blows, girl, I’m down the street
I’m home, I’m out of my work clothes
When I’m out in the street, oh oh oh oh oh, I walk the way I wanna walk
When I’m out in the street, oh oh oh oh oh, I talk the way I wanna talk
When I’m out in the street, when I’m out in the street
 
When I’m out in the street, girl, well I never feel alone
When I’m out in the street, girl, in the crowd I feel at home
The black and whites they cruise by
And they watch us from the corner of their eye

We are the crowd.  At Bruce’s concerts, it’s palpable, as tens of thousands of people come together as one devoted mass.  But Bruce tells us to do more.  Be that unified every day.  Lift each other up every day.

The song Mary’s Place appears on The Rising album.  In the middle of all that grief after 9/11, even then, we found a way to come together.  In Bruce’s song, even the grieving wife or girlfriend meets everyone at Mary’s Place after expressing her sorrow.  She’s down, but what gets her up is the crowd.  All of us, together.

I got a picture of you in my locket, I keep it close to my heart
It’s a light shining in my breast, leading me through the dark
Seven days, seven candles in my window lighting your way
Your favorite record’s on the turntable, I drop the needle and pray (turn it up)
Band’s counting out midnight (turn it up), floor’s rumbling loud (turn it up)
Singer’s calling up daylight (turn it up), waiting for that shout from the crowd (turn it up)
Waiting for that shout from the crowd (turn it up)
Waiting for that shout from the crowd (turn it up)
Waiting for that shout from the crowd (turn it up)
Waiting for that shout from the crowd (turn it up)
Waiting for that shout from the crowd
 
Turn it up, turn it up, turn it up, turn it up, turn it up, turn it up, turn it up
Meet me at Mary’s place, we’re gonna have a party

Together we are the crowd.  Together we let out that shout that can bring us all back together.  Is it music?  Is it art?  Is it simple friendship and love?  Is it faith?  There is something that connects us.  Bruce was always able to find it.  It’s our job to do the same.

So from Asbury Park to Balboa Park; from Atlantic City to New York City; from Darlington County to Youngstown; from Nebraska to Arkansas; from My Hometown to My City of Ruins.  From Jungleland to the Badlands; from 57^th Street to 82^nd Street; from Thunder Road to Tenth Avenue; from the Backstreets to Out in the Street.  Whether you’re Meeting Across the River or are going to Meet Me at Mary’s Place.  Whether your name is Mary or Kitty or Rosalita or Candy or Sherry Darling or Bobby Jean or Terry or Wendy, one thing about Bruce is universal. 

He wants us to have a great time.

He wants us to have love.

He wants us to have faith.

He wants us to be proud.

He wants us to have and give respect.

He wants us – all of us – to achieve that mythical, shining, runaway American dream, to get to that place where we really want to go, and to walk in the sun, together:

In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream
At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines
Sprung from cages on Highway 9, chrome-wheeled, fuel-injected
And stepping out over the line
Whoah 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
…
The highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive
Everybody’s out on the run tonight but there’s no place left to hide
Together, Wendy, we can live with the sadness
I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul
Woah, someday girl, I don’t know when
We’re gonna get to that place where we really want to go and we’ll walk in the sun
But till then tramps like us, baby we were born to run

Bruce recently had a birthday.  He is releasing a new album.  I took one of my kids to see him in concert years ago but we need one more tour for two of my boys to see him live.  Let’s pray we get through this pandemic soon, our lives go back to something resembling normalcy, and we can all walk together in the sun, singing together, tens of thousands in unison, along with that kid from New Jersey.

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[1] About ten years ago, I read a fantastic book by Professor Robert Coles called Bruce Springsteen’s America.  It started me on the path to my current understanding of Bruce’s music, and is the influence for this essay.  The book is largely about the impact of Bruce’s music on everyday Americans’ lives: a police officer, a teacher, a lawyer, and others.  The author traveled around the country interviewing plain folks about what Bruce’s music meant to them.  The stories are profound.  Read the book, please.  So in a way, this essay is my own unsolicited entry into the collection of great pieces Prof. Coles put in his book.  Thank you, Prof. Coles, for the idea.