Ode to Springsteen, and a confession
God help me, but I still believe in rock ’n’ roll. It’s like any ingrained habit — I don’t think about it much, I just do it. I’ll fire up the iTunes before dinner and saturate the house in the pop, rock and country music of my youth. Sometimes I’ll try to be all adult and put on Coltrane or Miles or a jagged piece of Philip Glass, and sometimes I’ll feel the need to hear whatever’s new and talked about.
But most of the singers I listen to are around my age. We play Lucinda Williams, Neil Young, T Bone Burnett and Bryan Ferry. We play The Clash, The Kinks and The Pretenders. When Karen’s away, I blast the old Elvis Costello and the Attractions, The Replacements and Bob Dylan.
If I’ve got a spare moment, I’ll pick up a guitar and run my fingers through one of those simple, timeless chord progressions. For what it’s worth, I’ve got the music in me.
But the only time I really consider the cultural practice of rock ’n’ roll is when I write a piece like this one, in which I’m supposed to say something interesting about a new boxed set of old material, specifically the new boxed set comprised of remastered editions of the first seven albums recorded and released by Bruce Springsteen for Columbia Records between 1973 and 1984. (Legacy, $99.98; vinyl $269.98.)
All of the albums are newly remastered (five for the first time ever on CD) and all seven are making their remastered debut on records. Engineers Bob Ludwig and longtime Springsteen collaborator Toby Scott worked with Springsteen on the remasters, which employed the Plangent Process — an electronic restoration tool that seeks to eliminate distortion introduced to the original analog tape by a recording device — presumably producing higher fidelity recordings. But most people tempted to buy the set will probably be more interested in the packaging, which, in addition to replicas of the original album jackets, includes a 60-page photo book with copies of press clippings and other memorabilia.
There’s no doubt this is a luxury item. If you’re a big enough fan to want this set, you’ve probably already got all the music that’s contained herein. There are no previously unreleased tracks, no lost album like Springsteen’s 2010 release The Promise, which collected unreleased material drawing from the Darkness on the Edge of Town sessions in 1977 and 1978. Maybe the remastered versions sound much better to you, but to my ears they sound about the same, maybe a little clearer in the high end. (Rock ’n’ roll didn’t just take my heart, it took the high-end frequencies from my ears too.)
These albums meant a lot to me. I was an early adopter of Springsteen; in my high school, he never really caught on. I found out about him in October 1975 when, in the same week, he appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek. Because I was the sort of geek who would buy an album he’d read about in a newsmagazine, I immediately bought the two Springsteen albums I could find (1973’s The Wild, The Innocent and The E Street Shuffle on vinyl and the just-released Born to Run on audiocassette tape). It took me a little while, a couple of weeks, to find a copy of his debut album, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. While it would eventually become my favorite of the three, I didn’t immediately appreciate The Wild, The Innocent, etc. Instead, I fixated on the cinematic sweep of Born to Run and the folkie excess of the first record. I liked Springsteen’s stories more than the band’s surging sturm und dranging in those days. I thought “Thunder Road” was a perfect song, a short story about lighting out for the territory, and “Born to Run” kicked the Steppenwolf “Born to Be Wild” conceit into overdrive. My favorite song then, and one I’ll still defend, was the yearning ballad “For You” off the first album. Despite all the precious junior high poetry (“princess cards,” undaunted soldiers, etc.), it’s a remarkably tender, bitter song about a lover’s suicide, sung with convincing gritty urgency.
I remember torturing a garage band I was playing with at the time by demanding that we learn it. Its chord changes were fast and its tempos were tricky and the lyrics went on and on and on — and it has the power to move me today. It is juvenilia, for Bruce and for me too. I only thought of myself as a sophisticated listener then.
But it was the next two albums, Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) and The River (1980), that convinced me Springsteen was more than a rock ’n’ roll singer-songwriter with a killer band. Those albums are great works of American art that depict the despair and dignified resignation of the working class in plain but beautifully calibrated, loaded language.
“And for my 19th birthday, I got a union card and a wedding coat,” the protagonist of “The River” sings, as the world slams up and the dreams evaporate. Later, in “Stolen Car,” he reflects on the rest of the story: “At first I thought it was just restlessness/That would fade as time went by and our love grew deep/In the end it was something more I guess/ That tore us apart and made us weep/And I’m driving a stolen car/Down on Eldridge Avenue/Each night I wait to get caught/But I never do ….”
It is not fashionable to parse lyrics or to pretend they mean anything beyond the grip they supply the singer’s voice. But Springsteen is one of the few rock songwriters who understands the haunted shadows behind the words, the power in the short syllable, the way an interjected “sir” can convey subservience, hostility or a dangerous, volatile admixture. Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River haunt me the way e.e. cummings’ Olaf and Buffalo Bill haunt me. Though he’s more often compared to Steinbeck, I hear in Springsteen’s common phrases something of Wallace Stevens. Bruce is one pure product of America who hasn’t gone crazy yet.
I used to think Nebraska (1982) was his best, or at least his best collection of songs. Its grim folkie murder ballads still rattle in my head. Here’s your scarecrow rictus heartland, a gray, flat country best apprehended through a windshield. These days the four-track production seems a little fuzzy — I’m surely not the only one who wishes Springsteen had never touched a synthesizer — but the Echoplex tape delay lends an antique otherworldliness, as though the ghosts have joined the chorus. Who makes a record about Charlie Starkweather?
Born in the U.S.A. (1984) feels like a natural stopping point — the advent of stadium big, corporately misused Bruce. By now, everybody knows that the title anthem was originally a folkie dirge about a PTSDed Vietnam vet, and that Ronald Reagan’s co-opting of it as a campaign hymn made no rational sense. But what has rationality ever had to do with pop music?
It sounds like it sounds, jingoistically jangly. Springsteen wanted it to sound that way. This is the album with “Dancing in the Dark” and “Glory Days.” All the lyrics run counter to the happy blare of the tight-beyondtight E Street Band, reunited for their revenge on their suddenly gymmed up, newly buff frontman’s gloomy folk music. It’s an essential American rock album. If you can only have one Springsteen album it’s either this one or Born to Run, but the truth is I play it less than any of the others in this collection, and a lot less than 1987’s Tunnel of Love.
It bookends a great run. Not that Springsteen isn’t still great, it’s just that the world doesn’t receive pop music like it used to. Albums are kind of beside the point now and it’s beyond naive to believe that anything so slight as pop music can affect anything more than a sway in the hips. It’s not stuff you’re supposed to think about in a critical way, and so I don’t — at least not when I’m not called to think about it, when I’m not writing or talking about the greasy kid stuff for an audience. It’s not that I don’t like a lot of the pop music that I hear free-floating through the Spotified air these days, it’s just that I’m burned out by perspective, by having paid too much attention for too long to work up any genuine enthusiasm for Beyonce or Lana Del Ray.
I have had my run-ins with Springsteen fans over the years because I’ve suggested that they tend to make his concerts about their glory days, and that it’s never as interesting to hear the oldies as it is to discover someone singing your heart. Nostalgia cheats you of the moment by selling you a false and wishful image of the past. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go see “Bruuuccce” if your heart commands and your pocketbook allows. Just know that we’re all older and less authentic than we once were, we know more and, like old junkies, feel less than we once did. We need more bombast, we need the juice turned up.
My considered opinion is that Springsteen is the real thing, an artist of integrity who has never played a note for money. I also realize that stardom is part of the deal — that to achieve reach and influence, the artist must become an icon or an idol, which is just another way of saying he must become a caricature.
Young people see the caricature and think us all ridiculous. But I believe in rock ’n’ roll. And in these sacred books.