Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA

Geoffrey Himes

• Editorial: Continuum
• Año: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781441154590
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Rock Music

When Bruce Springsteen went back on the road in 1984, he opened every show by shouting out, "one, two, one, two, three, four, " followed by the droning synth chords of "Born in the U.S.A." Max Weinberg hit his drums with a two-fisted physicality that cut through the swelling chords. With a rolled-up red kerchief around his head and heavy black boots under his faded jeans, Springsteen looked like the character of the song, and from the very first line ("Born down in a dead man's town") he sang with the throat-scraping desperation of a man with his back against the wall. When he reached the crucial lines, though, the guitars and bass dropped out and Weinberg switched to just the hi-hat. Springsteen's voice grew a bit more private and reluctant as he sang, "Nowhere to run. Nowhere to go." It was as if he weren't sure if this were an admission of defeat or the drawing of a line in the sand. But when the band came crashing back at full strength-building a crescendo that fell apart in the cacophony of Springsteen's and Weinberg's wild soloing, paused and then came together again in the determined, marching riff-it was clear that the singer was ready to make a stand.

Chapter One: Nowhere to Run

Bruce Springsteen is best known for his most public acts. It’s in the concert hall—more than on the stereo or the screen—that he engages his audience as few other performers ever have. It’s on the stage that he makes his deepest impression, not only singing his hits, but also telling stories, digging out forgotten songs, shouting like a preacher, clowning like a vaudevillian, whispering like a confessor and leaping about in flagrant disregard for his own safety. From the seats, his fans respond with almost equal fervor until each show, larger than life and longer than a baseball game, reaches its climax of happy, communal exhaustion.

And yet, the most important moments of his career have taken place in utter solitude. His most crucial decisions, the ones that have most shaped his art and career, have taken place not on stage but at home. They’ve taken place in the privacy of those rooms where he has sat with an acoustic guitar and a notebook and tried to write the next line of words and the next measure of music for the next song.

His most enduring work has been that of a writer not an entertainer, an inventor not an interpreter. If his artistic persona has been an unlikely combination of Elvis Presley the performer and Bob Dylan the songwriter, the Dylan half defined the space where the Presley half would operate, not the other way around. A writer’s work takes place far from an audience, and anyone seeking to understand Springsteen’s work has to investigate those solitary moments. The most important of all those moments took place in the waning weeks of 1981 as he sat alone in his house in Colt’s Neck, New Jersey, and wrote “Born in the U.S.A.”

He had been trying to write a song about a returning Vietnam veteran. Those veterans—suffering from bad memories, a lack of work, lingering wounds and a lukewarm welcome—seemed to crystallize the betrayal of the American dream that was much on Springsteen’s mind that winter. But he was having trouble with the song. It was easy to describe the character’s problems but much harder to figure out the man’s response. Somehow the old solution, jumping in a car and roaring down the highway, seemed inadequate. If that wasn’t the answer, what was?

After all, the freedom of the road was not just Springsteen’s favorite songwriting theme; it was his way of life. Just three months earlier, he had finished a 347-day, 145-show, 59-city tour, traveling with his six bandmates and more than twenty backstage hands, playing almost every other night in a basketball arena full of 20,000 people. It had been eleven months of constant crowds, constant companionship. Now he was rattling around in an empty house in rural Jersey, trying to make sense of it all.

On June 5, for example, he had played London’s Wembley Arena with his longtime backing group, the E Street Band. Springsteen opened the show, as he did at most stops on the tour, with “Born to Run,” the song that had made him famous. He took the stage in his just-another-guy-down-at-the-gas-station outfit of motorcycle boots, blue jeans and a plaid, snap-button shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. He was as short and wiry as ever, and his sideburns spread down from his curly dark hair to his lower jaw. He counted off, “Uh, one, two…,” Max Weinberg hit a drum roll, and the rest of the band jumped on the drummer’s back with the unison four-bar melody that was one of the most recognizable pop hooks of the 70s.

Even on stage, the two guitars, tenor sax, glockenspiel synth, bass, drums and piano created a wall of sound worthy of Springsteen’s hero, Phil Spector. The lyrics were equally exaggerated, contrasting the daytime’s cagelike existence of sweaty jobs and diminishing dreams with the nighttime’s liberation of driving down a New Jersey highway toward the beach and the amusement park as you and your girl straddled a chrome-wheeled motorcycle. When the options were presented like that, the choice was obvious: “We gotta get out while we’re young, ’cause tramps like us, baby, we were born to run,” and the song accelerated like a chopper with a boot stomped on the pedal.

This romantic vision of a life divided between daytime traps and nighttime escapes set the mood for the whole evening. If the days offer scant opportunities for demonstrating your worth, what choice do you have but to “Prove It All Night”? Why? “Because the Night” belongs to us. If work, school and home provide no platforms for such proof, where can you go? “Out in the Streets,” down “Thunder Road,” wherever your “Hungry Heart” leads.

Springsteen didn’t invent this fantasy; he inherited it. From Chuck Berry singing of driving with “No Particular Place to Go” in 1964 to Bob Seger singing of driving out to “Fire Lake” in 1980, the lure of the escape hatch had always been a central myth in rock ’n’ roll. You didn’t have to give in to your parents’ rules, your teachers’ definitions, your preacher’s don’ts, your classmates’ rejections or your boss’s orders. You could grab the car keys and light out for a new territory where the camaraderie was real, the music was righteous and the sex was good. It was an update of the American frontier myth for a new generation.

From Elvis Presley singing “Good Rocking Tonight” in 1954 to the Clash singing “White Riot” in 1977, rock ’n’ roll claimed immediate, total gratification as a birthright—and if it were thwarted, the response was rebellion, not stoicism. Rock ’n’ roll may have grown out of blues, gospel and country music, but it refused to accept their working-class fatalism or their Christian faith in delayed gratification. The first generation of rock ’n’ rollers may have played the same instruments in much the same way as older blues and country bands, but this refusal distinguished rock ’n’ roll from its predecessors and defined it as a genre. Born in the shadow of an atomic bomb that made delayed gratification seem an absurd joke, rock ’n’ roll promised its listeners that they could have it all right now.

The rock ’n’ roll promise was an amplification of the American dream. The latter offered this contract: if you go to school, work hard and obey the law, you’ll get a decent paycheck, a safe neighborhood and a nice house with a spouse and kids. The contract was backed by the frontier myth: if you can’t realize the American dream here, you can find it out in the open spaces of the unbuilt West.

The rock ’n’ roll promise raised the stakes: if you stay true to your friends and ideals, if you live every moment to its fullest, you can find work that not only pays well but also keeps you thinking; you can mix true love and hot sex; you can be a nonconformist individual and still belong to a community of family and friends. And it offered a similar contract guarantee: if you can’t find it here, hit the road and look for it there. Few artists had ever articulated this promise as passionately and seductively as Springsteen had in the mid-70s.

“My whole life,” Springsteen told Rolling Stone in 1978, “I was always around a lot of people whose lives consisted of just this compromising—they knew no other way. That’s where rock ’n’ roll is important, because it said that there could be another way. That’s why I write the kind of songs I do.”

“There’s no halfway in most of the songs,” he added in the same interview, “because I don’t approach what I do in that way. There’s just no room to compromise. I think, for most musicians, it has to be like life or death or it’s not worth it. That’s why every night we play a real long time and we play real hard. I want to be able to go home and say I went all the way tonight—and then I went a little further.”

Life without compromise is an intoxicating fantasy, but a fantasy just the same. If you examine the results rather than the prospectus, you’ll find that no one gets everything they want; reality isn’t constructed that way.

But the fantasy is necessary. If you’re a young person facing a world full of adults telling you to curb your desires, a pop song that tells you that you have every right to those desires—even if it misleads you about what it will take to achieve them—is invaluable, because it keeps you hoping, keeps you fighting. Rock ’n’ roll insisted you could have more than a slice; you could have the whole pie. You can’t, but if you believe you can, you’re likely to eat a lot more pie than you would otherwise. This rock ’n’ roll fantasy may not be entirely true, but it’s an indispensable lie.

That vision was certainly invaluable for Springsteen himself. Born in Freehold, New Jersey, on September 23,1949, he had grown up in a home where money was scarce; books were scarcer; work was drudgery, sex went unmentioned, and friends were few. Doug Springsteen was an Irish-American who worked as a bus driver, factory worker and prison guard; Adele Springsteen was an Italian-American who worked as a legal secretary; they sent their kids to Catholic schools and rarely socialized outside the family.

On January 6, 1957, though, when Bruce was seven, he saw Elvis Presley on the “Ed Sullivan” TV show and, like St. Paul on the road to Damascus, was “blinded by the light.” In Presley’s swaggering confidence and carefree joy, the third grader heard the promise of a fuller life, a life where you got to eat the whole pie. He became addicted to the radio, searching for variations on that promise from girl groups like the Ronettes, surf groups like the Beach Boys, soul singers like Gary U.S. Bonds and greaser bands like Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels. In 1963, he bought a pawnshop guitar for $18 and devoted himself to it as if it were his door out of a small room.

He joined his first real band, the Castiles, in 1965, when he was fifteen. At the end of 1968, he dropped out of Ocean County Community College and joined the hard rock quartet Earth. In 1969, he formed a similar band called Child. By the time they changed their name to Steel Mill and drove out to California, the band included Springsteen, drummer Vini Lopez, keyboardist Danny Federici and bassist Steve Van Zandt. In 1971, there was a short-lived group called Dr. Zoom & the Sonic Boom, followed by the Bruce Springsteen Band.

In March of 1972, Springsteen signed a management contract with a pair of New York songwriters, Mike Appel and Jim Cretecos; in May he auditioned for the legendary John Hammond Sr.; in June he signed with Columbia Records and immediately went into the studio with his current band (Lopez, Federici, bassist Gary Tallent, keyboardist David Sancious and saxophonist Clarence Clemons). The first album, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., was released in January 1973. The second album, The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, soon followed in September. The third album, Born to Run (featuring Springsteen, Federici, Tallent, Clemons, keyboardist Roy Bittan, drummer Max Weinberg and Van Zandt on guitar) finally emerged in 1975.

Fueling these early bands and early albums were Springsteen’s own versions of the vision offered by Presley, the Ronettes and the rest in songs such as “Rosalita,” “Growin’ Up” and “Spirit in the Night.” The ultimate version was “Born to Run,” which did for countless youngsters what Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock” had once done for a seven-year-old Bruce Springsteen. When he declared that rock ’n’ roll had saved his life, it wasn’t an idle claim. If your dreams were being squelched in the here and now, rock ’n’ roll told him, you could seek out the there and tomorrow.

But where was this there? When was this tomorrow? If you were born to run, where did you run to? When did you get there? Rock ’n’ roll, like most fantasies, was always a little hazy on these details, and Springsteen’s early writing was no different. It was almost as if the over-the-top arrangement of “Born to Run” and its dreamlike lyrics, all the overheated imagery of “mansions of glory” and “madness in my soul,” were necessary to keep reality at arm’s length.

After all, if you roar out of Freehold, New Jersey, on your motorcycle and cruise down Highway 9, where are you going to end up? In another small, blue-collar New Jersey town. What makes you think life is going to be any different in this town than in the one you just came from?

These were the questions Bruce Springsteen wrestled with each afternoon as he awoke in another New Jersey town, Colt’s Neck. It was December 1981, and he was trying to write the songs for his next album. A fantasy that’s easy to embrace when you’re fifteen (as Springsteen was in early 1965 when he joined the Castiles) or twenty-four (as Springsteen was in mid-1974 when he wrote “Born to Run”) is harder to swallow when you’re thirty-two (as he was at the end of 1981). It was hard to let go of a fantasy that had meant so much to his life, but it was impossible to write another version of it. He had seen too much.

Springsteen would seem to be living proof that the fantasy could come true. He had just scored a #1 album (The River) and a #5 single (“Hungry Heart”). He was financially set; he enjoyed strong friendships with his guitarist (Steve Van Zandt) and his manager (Jon Landau); and he had found immensely satisfying work, a way to express himself to millions of listeners.

But the rock ’n’ roll promise was not that a few people could get the whole pie if they were extremely talented or extremely lucky; the promise was that everyone should have a full life. It was supposed to be a birthright, not a lottery prize. As Springsteen crossed the boundary of thirty, he watched as many of his old friends became hemmed in by dead-end jobs, troubled marriages, drug problems or worse. He couldn’t accept the argument that it was their own fault.

“One of the things that was always on my mind,” Springsteen told Rolling Stone in 1984, “was to maintain connections with the people I’d grown up with, and the sense of the community where I came from. That’s why I stayed in New Jersey. The danger of fame is in forgetting, or being distracted. You see it happen to so many people….I believe that the life of a rock ’n’ roll band will last as long as you look down into the audience and can see yourself, and your audience can look up at you and see themselves—as long as those reflections are human, realistic ones.”

There was something wrong with a society that made a full life so difficult to achieve. Something was wrong with a rock ’n’ roll fantasy that suggested that merely wanting the dream was all that was required. Nothing brought these issues into focus more sharply than Vietnam, the first rock ’n’ roll war. The Vietnam veterans were the most dramatic example of everyone who had been let down by the American dream and the rock ’n’ roll promise. All the disappointments that happened to anyone else happened to them—only more so.

Springsteen himself had escaped the draft, thanks to a 1968 motorcycle accident and a heartfelt impersonation of a crazy person at the induction center. His objection to the war at that point wasn’t so much political as it was musical; it threatened the only thing in the world he cared about: a career in rock ’n’ roll. But many of the guys he had grown up with hadn’t been so determined or so lucky.

He described his day at the draft induction center to Rolling Stone in 1984: “I remember being on that bus, me and a couple of guys in my band, and the rest of the bus was probably 60, 70 percent black guys from Asbury Park. And I remember thinking, ‘What makes my life, or my friends’ lives, more expendable than that of somebody who’s going to school?’ It didn’t seem right.”

“I had no real political standpoint whatsoever when I was 18,” Springsteen says in Dave Marsh’s biography, Bruce Springsteen—Two Hearts, “and neither did any of my friends. The whole draft thing, it was a pure street thing. You didn’t want to go. You didn’t want to go because you’d seen other people go and not come back. The first drummer in my first band, the Castiles, enlisted and he came back in his uniform and he was, ‘Oh, here I go; I’m going to Vietnam.’ Kind of laughing and joking about it and that was it. He went and he was killed. There were a lot of guys from my neighborhood, guys in bands.”

Bart Hanes, the Castiles’ drummer, went to Vietnam and did not come back. Those who did return weren’t having an easy time. There were the health problems and nightmares, and now, in 1981, as the Reagan recession settled over the land, it was hard to find a job good enough to pay the mortgage. As he watched his old friends struggle, Springsteen must have peppered himself with questions: Why did they have to go and not me? Why do these guys who seemed so full of life ten, fifteen years ago now seem so sad, so weary? What can rock ’n’ roll possibly say to them now? Can a car, a girl and a guitar make any difference? What can my own songs say to them? Or for them?

The Viet vets had it tougher than most, but as Springsteen’s baby-boomer buddies—male and female, vets or not—drifted into their thirties, they faced similar challenges: reclaiming the thrill of Saturday night, finding a reason to get up in the morning, finding a reason to believe. Where was the full life rock ’n’ roll had promised them? Did the promise expire when you reached thirty? No, Springsteen wasn’t ready to accept that.

One of the songs he was working on was called “Vietnam.” It was sung from the first-person perspective of a Vietnam veteran returning to his hometown to receive something less than a hero’s welcome. The first two lines describe his airplane touching down on the runway and, when no one meets him at the terminal, the lonely taxi ride back home. In the second verse, the hiring man down at the factory shakes his head sadly and tells the out-of-work protagonist, “Son, understand, if it was up to me…”

There’s a photo of one of Springsteen’s 1980s writing rooms in the CD booklet for the album, Tunnel of Love. He sits, with a guitar in his lap, in a plain wooden chair by a plain wooden desk. On the desk is a small fan, a hinged lamp, a double-slot cassette deck, a direct-input box for the guitar cord, a small microphone, a set of headphones and half a dozen pens propped up inside a roll of duct tape. His writing room at Colt’s Neck must have been very similar.

One can imagine Springsteen sitting in his chair with his acoustic guitar on his right thigh, playing through the song one more time. It sounded a lot like Randy Newman’s “Have You Seen My Baby”; it had Newman’s imitation of Fats Domino’s New Orleans music and it turned Newman’s line, “I’ll talk to strangers if I want to, ’cause I’m a stranger, too,” into Springsteen’s line, “All I seen was strangers…and nobody was stranger than me.”

Something’s not right, Springsteen must have decided. The bouncy, happy-go-lucky music didn’t fit the anguished lyrics at all. Even the lyrics by themselves were problematic. The chorus tells the protagonist, “You died in Vietnam.” Maybe Springsteen intended the song as a modern ghost story; maybe the chorus is a metaphor for the way many veterans were treated as barely acknowledged, living corpses. In either case, the whole thing sounded too defeated. To tell the protagonist that there’s no hope would merely add to his burden instead of relieving it.

OK, Springsteen might have told himself, I’ve got this character who went to Vietnam to shoot people and get shot at in return. Now he’s back in New Jersey without a job or prospects. What happens next?

To answer that question, Springsteen tried to learn everything he could about the Vietnam veterans. He talked at length to every vet he met. He read Born on the Fourth of July, Ron Kovic’s vivid memoir of serving in Vietnam and then coming home in a wheelchair to protest the war (in 1989 it would become a movie starring Tom Cruise and directed by Oliver Stone). He read Henry Steele Commager and Allan Nevins’s A Pocket History of the United States to understand the historical context for the war.

The more Springsteen investigated the situation, the more he wanted to do something about it. He had his manager, Jon Landau, contact Bobby Muller, a wheelchair-bound paraplegic like Kovic. Muller, an alumnus of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, had founded in 1978 the Vietnam Veterans of America, a group agitating for the rights of those former soldiers who were now being neglected by the nation they fought for. By 1981, despite a notebook full of newspaper clips, the organization was struggling, una...