 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Issue #24, September 8, 2006 |
Neighbor:
Bruce Springsteen
Singer
By Julia Nasser
There are places I could imagine running into Bruce Springsteen, but not the Hamptons. They’re gritty places – like windy highways, warehouses leaking purple smoke; empty arcades and slanting boardwalks. In short, Asbury Park, New Jersey, the place The Boss calls home.
You might imagine my surprise when I encountered him at the swanky Hampton Classic last week, where he and his wife, Patti Scialfa, were holding hands, doting, and cheering on their daughter, Jessica. The family attends every year, in fact, and often rents a house for the month of August.
This might be a shock to those, like me, who picture a streetwise waif in a red bandana. Over the years, Bruce Springsteen, the sweaty, adrenaline-pumped Jersey boy singing “Born in the U.S.A.” with his fist in the air, made a huge pile of cash. Now, the “blue-collar hero” summers in the Hamptons. Maybe he still sings of the regular people, but does he live among them?
Springsteen charmed from the start. He had a tousled mop of curls like Dylan; a snarl like Elvis and his shirt-tails hung out of his leather jacket. He had the romance of folk, the spice of punk. He was American in every way. And after Emmys, Grammys, an Oscar, magazine covers and cult followings, he still feels just like you and me. Bruce was, and is, the everyman.
“I love his music because it reminds me of me…Or it reminds me of how I wish I were,” said Chuck Berry of his friend. “He sings about us, while he sings to us.”
Born to a working class, New Jersey-based family in 1949, Springsteen spent his youth in a resort town fallen to decay. After he saw Elvis Presley on the “Ed Sullivan Show,” music became his obsession and Bruce bought his first guitar for $17. Three years later his mother, Adele, saved up to buy him a $60 Kent, a moment which he describes as a great turn around point.
“That guitar was a gift…my lifeboat…a lifeline back into people…to the human race.” Music served as protection, too – from kids that bullied; teachers that scolded; a father who alienated him and tormented him throughout his life and was the subject of many ballads.
“It was my way of making sure those guys couldn’t look through me or around me. Now I was there. Now they would see me.”
In the years that followed, he started local bands like Steel Mill and Rogue, and they played at dive bars, trailer parks, firemen’s balls, the State mental hospital and Sing Sing Prison. Around this time, he started pulling together his Jersey-based musician friends, including Steven Van Zandt and Clarence “Big Man” Clemmons, the beautiful black giant with a honking sax. These were the men who would one day assemble the 10-piece E Street Band. Soon they were rousing crowds for three or four hours each night, performing with the brave, raw energy that Bruce maintained through his career. His epic concerts draw gigantic crowds and fill stadiums and his tours have cult- followings.
Frequenting Greenwich Village speakeasies with the likes of folk heroes like Woody Guthrie, Rambling Jack, Pete Seeger, and the younger Dylan troupe as well, Springsteen’s style also borrowed from the folk tradition. His sound, however, emerged from a rhythm and blues/rock and roll sound from old R & B types. Despite these eclectic influences, Springsteen’s early songs are homegrown, as his first album, “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.,” showed us. This group of ballads and lyrical tales were composed in the back of a defunct Asbury Park beauty salon. On an out-of-tune piano, he caught the worn-out mood of the town.
“Kids flash guitars just like switchblades/Hustling for the record machine,” he wrote.
His first triumph was “The Wild, the Innocent,” featuring the E Street Shuffle’s ridiculous jazzy rhythms and a chaotic clamor of horns. “Rosalita” is a magic, eight-minute anthem of the ultimate us-against-the-world teen romance.
Not long after the release of this album, music critic Jon Landau caught a club performance. What he wrote in his 1974 issue of Boston’s Real Paper has made its mark:
“I saw rock and roll’s future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time.”
His evocative scenes, strange words and memorable characters earned the young Springsteen the title of “the Second Dylan.” A breakthrough hit came next when “Born to Run” hit the stands. It is one of the great raucous screams in rock history. It was all about drama, lust, and risk and would soon become New Jersey’s State song. “Jungleland” is a fabulously overblown epic about a rumble under an Exxon sign, starring the Magic Rat, his sleek machine, and a supporting cast of Jersey boys.
After this commercial peak, Springsteen’s work began to take on a more somber tone. When “Darkness on the Edge of Town” was released in 1978, it was a turning point into darker, quieter territory. Gone were rapid-fire lyrics and complex compositions, rich plot or hyperbolic allegory. Grim, bitter, adult – they were also simpler, more accessible and true to life. The working class heroes hang tough while the dogs on Main Street howl for the soul of a small-town kid in the Utah desert.
During this time, the songwriter acquired a Dust Bowl twang that birthed “Nebraska,” which he recorded at home on a four-track tape machine. It is a bleak, unforgiving acoustic portrait of the dark side of Reagan’s America.
Released in 1984, “Born in the USA” established him as the most dynamic American songwriter since Bob Dylan. The songs, suggesting a shrinking landscape, narrated stories of disillusioned Vietnam veterans, the destruction of small-town American life. He mastered the simple pleasures of the working man. To date it has sold more than 20 million copies.
“Tunnel of Love” came in 1987, offering us a more sedate and contemplative Bruce. Springsteen’s words refer to his marital strife with actress Julianne Phillips, whom he married in 1966.
“Ought to be easy, ought to be simple enough. Man meets woman, and they fall in love. But the house is haunted, and the ride gets rough. You got to learn to live with what you can’t rise above.”
After a failed marriage to the model-actress, Springsteen moved into a $14 million mansion in Beverly Hills, California and married his current wife, back up singer Patti Scialfa. After that it was less music, more love, and a happy existence on “the Mansion on the Hill.”
At this point, the Boss had become an American somebody by singing about nobodies. So what happens when the unassuming music laureate of the working classes makes a Forbes list of billionaire?
“I never felt like I was an Elvis or a Dylan, or the Rolling Stones,” he said. “I don’t see myself in that way. I see myself more like a real good journeyman.”
The family, with their three children, left Hollywood and returned to New Jersey after 9/11. He and his wife go out unguarded to local bars, and he still answers the fan mail with personal responses whenever he can.
This story has spread over websites and blogs, of how a fan saw Bruce Springsteen driving near the New Jersey seashore a few days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, rolled down his window, and called out to him, “We need you!”
“They needed something familiar. And that was me.”
Back in New Jersey, Springsteen began to chronicle the stories of those who lost loved ones from his community and the event also inspired him to write music again. The release of “Rising” in 2002 is considered his great artistic revival.
 |
