Growing Up With Bruce

In 1983 I was 16 and 17. It was the first of many terrible years. Well, the first that I can really remember. There were earlier family incidents that no doubt had a powerful impact on me, but my reliably unreliable memory has buried most of them until I’m ready to dig them up. In 1983 I was supposed to begin my final year of high school. A week before school began I was running in a 3000m race at Olympic park in Melbourne. I was trudging along, halfway through the race, when I stepped off the track onto the grass and stopped still.
That was it. I went home to bed in my horrible bedroom at the house that still gives me the creeps when I think about it, and didn’t emerge for six months. Eventually, I was diagnosed with depression. I saw a psychiatrist for a while, was giving some medication (tricyclic anti-depressant) and was told I was better six months later. The truth was that this was not the first, but the beginning of a chronic battle with Churchill’s Black Dog that exists till today. Things have changed now, though.
There will be plenty of posts about coping and not coping with double depression, but this is not meant to be one of them. I need to talk about Bruce.
It must have been 1982 that, after saving up my pocket money, I made the fateful trip to Han’s Music Store in Main Street, Croydon (Australia – not sarf London) and bought Bruce Springsteen’s record album (yes, it was an record) Born to Run. I bought it on the basis of the title track, but, to be honest, I never really loved it like other songs (more later, of course). I was really just following an impulse to explore some different music. I liked it, but it was not at good as The Angels, AC/DC, or, dare I say it, Neil Diamond (but only side 4 of Hot August Night – the rest was crap). I took it home and played it for the first time and it changed my life, and I still feel it today. With Bruce it’s a complex thing. On Born to Run there are only eight songs and four of them didn’t interest me – that ballady, slow kind of rock has always left me cold, bar a few brilliant exceptions. The title track, Thunder Road, Backstreets and, most powerfully, Jungleland were the ones that burned into me. Remember, I was a teenager heading for a major fall, but I was also a deep reader and, most poetically, an athlete. For a mixed up teen feeling deep depression and heart busting ecstatic moments (rolling on the carpet in a tight ball with sheer sheer joy almost breaking me up), I would write in my journals and read my books, but nothing gave me the satisfaction or completion like running myself to exhaustion on the footy field or the track or the silent streets at night. Into this messed up ball of elation and misery arrived, fully-formed, Bruce Springsteen. And he’s still there. Different meanings, different relationship, but still meaning something to me.
The guitar solo in Jungleland transported (cliche) me to tears (not that difficult at the time, but it still brings me a chill), but Bruce had a meaning for me way beyond the music. The cover of the album shows Bruce and his saxophonist Clarence Clemens. He’s relaxing, leaning on the larger man. Leather jacket and guitar seemed like a standard look, but he had a straggly beard and a genuine grin. Springsteen’s defining trait, still, is his lack of irony. In his music and his public life he believes everything he says and that what he does is worthwhile. Thirty years later I find it both endearing and a little hard to cope with. Man plays straightforward rock music with a band and sees it as his job to make meaning and entertain people. Weird.
Back in my bedroom, looking at the cover, and later the cover and notes of earlier and later albums, Bruce became as close to a hero for me as is possible. I still cannot conceive of having any real hero in my life (bar Eric Cantona, (see still at 5.50min, but that is all about the sheer joy of watching the performance of being Eric – and in the beautiful film Looking For Eric), but Bruce has my admiration.
His image is genuine. It seems. See Shakespeare for examination of the word seems. What attracted me back in those dark days was his working class ethic. Young man on the street finding his way through cars and girls and music seems cliched but he made it work. When I found out that his concerts would last three, four, even up to six hours once, the admiration level went up a notch or two. Working class man who busted his balls for his (dare I say it) art appealed to me like no other. Physical exhaustion for rock music, yet he could still feel like the man who wrote the beautiful lyrics and music of Thunder Road, the flat out drums and guitar of Born to Run and play a guitar in Jungleland that really did break my heart. That’s what I wanted to be. Rough-hewn, uninterested in image-making, physically giving it everything, working class underdog, but with enough of the poet in him to make a rough life worth living.
His first two albums, Greetings From Asbury Park, New Jersey and The Wild, The Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle confirmed what I wanted, almost. They were hugely energetic, lyrics busting way past their line length and the occasional great melody, but they were works in progress. Then Born to Run appeared in 1975 and the poet had found his control. That’s also what appealed to me. Chaos barely controlled. I love the unconfined joys of chaos, of anarchic mayhem, of live music with so much energy that I can’t believe the world has order and meaning and I don’t want it to ever any more ever. And Bruce did all that. Through the first episode of the many worst times of my life Springsteen grounded me and gave me a direction that I wanted to follow, but couldn’t.
And then, on June 4, 1984, he released Born in the USA. By then I had all of his previous albums (and I was now back in school having missed a year because of the depression) and I was the only kid in my school who knew about him – until then. So, I had some cred for a little while. Dancing in the Dark was, to my mud-churned brain, was okay, but a bit typical ‘80s music for me. Obviously, I preferred the title track, but it wore thin fairly quickly. What I was happy to see was the adoption of Bruce, the person, the blue collar rock and roll man, by most people I knew as a new superstar. Everyone trooped along to his concert at the Showgrounds in 1985 and he played for three and a half hours to a massive crowd and it was a brilliant concert just like we all expected it to be. But it was never about popularity.
After that I moved on. His next few albums, apart from the massive three album live set which I thought was brilliant, were a bit boring for me, so life began without Bruce in the background.
And then and then and then omg it blew me fucking right so far away I couldn’t believe it. A couple of years ago I stumbled upon a recent song played live – Wrecking Ball (no. He had the song out before Miley Cyrus). It was the end of the song that killed me. The best youtube comment I’ve ever read said below it ‘What kills me, what fucking kills me, is that after 30 years we’re still whah, whahing along with Bruce’. Beautiful. This commenter channelled Holden Caulfield and found the place Springsteen now holds in pop culture. It’s a great song. So, again, I found Bruce. I’m older and life has not been the bed of fucking roses and adulatory procession I imagined it to be in my younger and hopelessly neurotic and delusional youth (more on that elsewhere). And Bruce was still just being Bruce. Still uncomplicated, still unironic, still writing songs about American culture and at least they were now songs with a political undercurrent. And some of those songs were great. So, now, he’s ’sixty-fucking-three’ as he said at the concert I saw him play in Glasgow last year, and I’m forty-eight and finally beginning to learn about life after I’ve seen two thirds of what I’m allotted already and I can look to Springsteen and see through his music, his cheap ticket pricing, his lung-busting three and a half hour concerts still and his dedication to doing something he thinks is worthwhile and making the world a slightly better place and I can see an example of a life worth living.