If you've visited here before, you've learned I am passionate about rock and roll music in a way only a white guy with NO sense of rhythm (and sometimes of spelling) can be. I have seen Bruce Springsteen many times since our first encounter at The Ledge (the commuter student center on the main New Brunswick campus of Rutgers University) in the fall/winter of 70/71. I think of myself as a fan.
I think the first time was a night he performed under his own name, vice other Friday's where he and what was the embryonic E Street Band played as "Steel Mill" or "Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom." All of us, on stage and in the crowd, were displaced persons, emotionally if not geographically, looking for something and someone to call home. To some extent he was Peter Pan and we were the Lost Boys cruising the highways along the shore with Wendy and her sisters. I forget all of that was nearly forty years ago, not an eye blink.
In the space between then and now I grew old, though not so much up, fell in love and stayed there. We have a boy of our own now (and a girl) who are, themselves, adults. And Springsteen has evolved from a skinny, frenetic kid who wrote songs about hemi-powered drones to a choice for a voice of a generation (and beyond).
When I came home last Friday in my mail, as their text had promised me, was my copy of his newest work, Wrecking Ball (Amazon.com not only texted me that it had been delivered but boast I had saved an additional thirty-six cents because of their price guarantee!!!) an album my brother, Adam, is enjoying and he is not alone (nor should he be).
I have spent the last couple of days listening to it-sorting it out (as he's matured, his use of language has become more direct and less ornate; more art with less artifice) and I think in a world of bookends and equal and opposite reactions, its closest cousin in his catalog of work is Born in the USA.
With yet another 'new' producer, and without the E Street Band in the studio, there's a sense of space between the instruments and the sounds they make unlike any of his work I can recall but I believe the most impressive aspect isn't the themes or their treatment but it's being able to see/hear the journey of his life, and by extension, our own, in this work. It's hard for us, looking in a mirror, to see ourselves age but we can see the passage of time much easier while looking at a friend or loved one.
Wrecking Ball is more window than mirror but its reflection, in its lyrics, subject and musical treatment helps me to realize whether or not it's done gracefully and thoughtfully, as Springsteen has done in the nearly forty years he has been making music for the same record company or closer to the five decades he has been performing in public, we all age as part of our passage on this planet.
The distance from My Hometown to Death to My Hometown, I'd submit, is made more sobering by the realization the singer in both songs is talking about the same place. No man, suggests Springsteen, steps into the same river twice because both he and the river have changed. And elsewhere you learn his hero, long past that point where the boys try to look hard has to concede "I been looking for the map that leads me home" while acknowledging he has "...Nowhere to run, ain't got nowhere to go."
This is all we have and all there is, suggests the music and lyrics of Wrecking Ball. And his tone and tenor lead me to conclude Springsteen and the rest of us, assuming we'll 'be there in that chair when they wrestle her upstairs, 'cause you know we ain't gonna come" can be still standing on the other side if we're willing to find a dream to call our own and hold on with everything, and I do mean everything, we have.
-bill kenny
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