Bruce gigs no longer require a love of music

IT’S not right, is it? The whole Bruce thing, there’s something about it that is not . . . quite . . . right.

I mean we all know this, deep down. Or at least some of us do, but we’re finding it hard to just nail it down exactly, this thing that isn’t quite right about what happened in Croke Park last weekend.

And as a columnist, I’d like to provide you with the usual definitive analysis of what is right and what is wrong, but as a human being I’m finding this one a bit elusive. I love Bruce, after all, have done for much of my life.

But I’ll have a crack at it anyway.

Maybe it is precisely because I have loved Bruce that I am confronted with these doubts, even when presented with what seems ostensibly like vast crowds of people having a wonderful time. Maybe I’m remembering Darkness On The Edge of Town and what that great album meant to me and maybe I’m thinking, “Where were some of these people back then?”

Because there were indeed at Croke Park some people who had better things to do be doing back then than listening to seminal albums by Bruce Springsteen. But the role of the Taoiseach is pivotal here, because he provided us with the defining image of the occasion, perhaps of a whole culture.

His playing of the air guitar in that picture which has caused so much distress to viewers of a sensitive disposition can be interpreted in several ways.

It is, of course, an exquisitely rendered illustration of Class A eejitry. Ask not any more what eejitry is, for it is an indefinable thing, but merely look at the Taoiseach playing the invisible guitar at a Springsteen gig and there it is.

He did it before when he declared that every time he sees Riverdance it makes him cry. You want to know what eejitry is, again I can’t give you an abstract definition, but I can tell you for sure that it’s going on when Enda says that Riverdance made him cry. Who but a man in the throes of an episode of the most advanced eejitry would cry at Riverdance, then actually tell everyone about it?

So yes, he has done it before and now he has done it again. And psychologists too would find much to savour in his air-guitar moves, in the messages coming from deep within the Taoiseach’s subconscious, emerging as this perfect representation of what the political class has been doing for some time now — pretending to be leaders of the band, as it were, while in truth all the real music on the proverbial main stage is being pumped out by some global corporation.

But this does not raise hard questions about the Taoiseach, none at least that haven’t been asked already and answered in the affirmative. It is Springsteen who is the important player here, it is Springsteen who made himself into one of the great artists of the 20th century, who wrote so many powerful and important songs, who brought out Darkness On The Edge of Town, which raised him to a very high place indeed, little knowing that at some future date, his act would be deemed suitable for various elderly Fine Gaelers who are otherwise to be found crying at Riverdance.

I mean, it’s just not right, is it?

In fact, it’s plain wrong.

The Bruce who played that famous gig at Slane in 1985, during that magical time in his career when he was about to break out into the stratosphere, is now the Bruce who is attracting the sort of fellows who are impressed by the idea that he plays for three hours — measuring it by the yard, as it were.

Must we now face an agonising reappraisal of Springsteen himself, must we start looking for some hitherto undetected flaw in the man and his work which has eventually led to him making music for people who don’t like music?

I mean we all love Ivan Yates, but WTF was he doing within a hundred miles of a Bruce Springsteen gig?

What happened during the astonishing journey from Asbury Park, NJ, to Croke Park, Ireland, that drew these two characters into the same building, on the same night, for a mutually agreed purpose?

What happened and when did it happen?

Whatever it was, it didn’t happen to Bob Dylan, who realised at an early stage that he had written so many great songs, if he fancied it he could just tour the world doing note-perfect versions of them and nobody would ever want him to do anything else. Which would have been nice, but which probably would have resulted in his creative death in 1972 or thereabouts.

So in live performances he would sabotage his own songs, doing these unrecognisable renditions, refusing to give the people what they wanted — because he knew where that might end.

And maybe Bruce doesn’t care how it has ended for him, with his audience now joined by these people who call him ‘The Boss’, in such a way that he may be the Boss of them, but he’s not the Boss of me.

Yet I think he does care and in the dark reaches of the night, he will see again that man pretending to play the guitar.

And it will grieve him.

‘Ask not what eejitry is, merely look at the Taoiseach playing the air guitar and there it is’