I think onstage is about as carefree as I get, that’s when things switch off and you’re just living.

—SPRINGSTEEN, INTERVIEW, 2006

 

The stadium crammed full of spectators for a Sunday match, and the theater, which I loved with unequalled intensity,
are the only place in the world where I feel innocent.

—ALBERT CAMUS, The Fall

 

 

4

 

OF TIME AND THE RIVER

 

 

It’s a rainy December morning. I turn the ignition. The car thunders into life. Headlights blaze the driveway. I scroll the music. This is the first time I’ll hear the Agora Ballroom, Cleveland, show of 9 August 1978. I haven’t looked at the set list. I want the surprise of a “live” show. August 1978 was nine months before I first flew to America and two years before I registered Springsteen beyond “Born to Run.” Out of Chippenham I drive down Rowden Hill on the A4 toward Cochran’s memorial. Traffic lights explode in droplets between the wipers. The rain on the glass roof echoes the downpour that battered the Capitol Airways plane hurtling across the tarmac in June 1979 for the first of my five flights to reach Stony Lake, Michigan, to work as a camp counselor. The plane refueled at Gander Airport in Newfoundland, and I switched flights in New York for Chicago before a hop via Milwaukee to Muskegon. That extended entry to America is as vivid as this rainy December morning. “The future ain’t any damned thing,” said the young Springsteen (TAD 68). Well, time and place, past and present are about to coincide in it.

First up, a radio voice-over: This is Danny Sanders welcoming you to a live network broadcast of tonight’s concert featuring Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. The stations carrying tonight’s broadcast are WABX Detroit, WDVE Pittsburgh, WEBN Cincinnati, WLVQ Columbus, WXRT Chicago, KSHE St. Louis, KQRS Minneapolis, and your originating station tonight is WMMS Cleveland. . . . And you can hear the crowd building up. . . . Boy, Bruce is gonna knock ’em dead. . . .

Shouts and whistles. Instruments tuning.

“Good evening, and welcome to the WMMS Tenth anniversary concert,” says the emcee, Kid Leo. “Round for round and pound for pound, there ain’t no finer band around. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band!”

“Woh!” says Springsteen. “Gimme some lights! He must have memorized that at home. I know you did! Cleveland, How’re you doin’? Are you ready to shake them summertime blues?”

A heavy drumbeat, strumming E chords: “Are you smilin’? I wanna tell ya. . . . Well, I’m gonna raise a fuss, I’m gonna raise a holler about a-workin’ all summer just to try to earn a dollar. Sometimes I’m thinkin,’ I gotta get a date.”

“No dice, son,” intones Clemons, “’Cos you gotta work late.”

“Sometimes I wonder what I’m a gonna do, but there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.”

The traffic slows, a constellation of red, white, and orange fractures and sparkles on the windshield. The black chunk of Cochran’s memorial plaque slants to my right against the rain, the depiction of his red Gretsch guitar and the inscription lit up by the car behind. We move forward. The memorial recedes. Rudy’s Bridge comes into view, its gothic foliage black against the streetlights.

Whenever I drive under the bridge, I imagine the accident. I first found the details in newspaper archives of the Chippenham town library. Nowadays they’re online. It’s almost midnight on Easter Saturday, 16 April 1960. “Three Steps to Heaven” is number one on the UK charts. Cochran and Gene Vincent are passengers in a Ford Consul on a deserted stretch of the A4 rushing them from their concert at the Bristol Hippodrome to London to fly home. Both feature in the 1956 rock-and-roll film The Girl Can’t Help It. The screen-on-screen Cochran (on color TV within the movie) remains to this day, forever in the midst of his “weird, brilliant, Elvis-in-a-straightjacket performance of ‘Twenty Flight Rock.’” But half a decade later—and now over half a century ago—the real human being proves to be as mortal as the rest of us.1 The car skids. The back end hits a lamppost. The stroke of midnight, a witness tells The Wiltshire Times, brings “a screeching of brakes,” “a whistling noise,” then bang! Rear “completely wrecked,” the Consul steams, half on the curb, half on the road. Springsteen’s “Wreck on the Highway” superimposes itself on the scene. There’s blood and glass everywhere. As the rain tumbles “hard and cold,” I see “a young man lying by the side of the road.” Contrary to the entry in The Encyclopedia of Rock Stars, Cochran hasn’t been thrown through the windshield but through a rear door. He lies near Vincent on the grass verge. Further down the road, business manager Pat Thompkins crawls to Cochran’s girlfriend, cowriter of “Somethin’ Else” Sharon Sheeley, who kneels among photos and sheet music. Cochran’s Gretsch is a flat-topped island in a stream of oil. People rush out with blankets and cushions. Blue and red lights flash against the darkness like the end of Rebel without a Cause. An ambulance takes the victims to Greenways Hospital. Easter Sunday morning they’re transferred to St. Martin’s in Bath. Vincent has a broken collarbone and ribs and further damage to a leg already crippled in a motorcycle smash. Sheeley has a broken back and pelvis. Thompkins and driver George Martin are unhurt. That afternoon, Cochran succumbs to multiple head wounds and hemorrhages. Six thousand miles away in California, police knock on his parents’ door. In the words of “Three Steps to Heaven”: “And as life travels on, and things do go wrong.” He was twenty-one years old.2

The curse of the American popular musician: all those road or air crashes, killing Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens, Patsy Cline, Otis Redding, Duane Allman, Ronnie Van Zandt, Jim Croce, Harry Chapin, John Denver, and the rest, and all that self-destruction, from Hank to Charlie to John to Elvis to Janis to Jimi to Kurt. “Now some may wanna die young, man / Young and gloriously / Get it straight now, mister / Hey buddy that ain’t me,” sings Springsteen on “All That Heaven Will Allow,” just as he addresses Presley indirectly in such songs as “Johnny Bye-Bye” (“You didn’t have to die”), “Pink Cadillac,” and (with the reference to “that long black limousine”) “Walk Like a Man.” In Born to Run he denounces “the rock death cult.” “The exit in a blaze of glory is bullshit” (BTR 214). “Leaving a beautiful corpse” means nothing but heartache for family and friends, but for the young there’s romance in the artist’s untimely demise, from Christopher Marlowe to John Keats, James Dean to Marilyn Monroe (BTR 213). Moreover, for many non-Americans growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, America was an imagined world. Alive or dead, its stars framed the firmament. America beckoned. My dreams were adolescent. I’d hang out in the parking lot of Arnold’s with Ritchie, Ralph Malph, and Fonzie, and wear a white T-shirt under a short-sleeved checked shirt. I’d cruise for girls down Main Street with Paul LeMat and Harrison Ford in American Graffiti, and sit on a car with Richard Dreyfuss to watch a rerun of JFK’s assassination. I’d give old Holden Caulfield a buzz and meet up in the goddamned Wicker Bar of the Seton Hotel to shoot the shit about The Great Gatsby, for Chrissake. Then I’d light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.

My sense of American geography was equally naive. My fixation with Alaska hazily related to a late-night viewing of a Patricia Moraz film, Les Indiens Sont Encore Loin—“The Indians Are Still Far Away”—in which Isabelle Huppert, later to star in Heaven’s Gate, plays a girl in Switzerland searching for what Thomas Mann evidently called “the unattainable place of inexpressible happiness” (a phrase I’ve yet to find in Mann). Obsessed with the lost lives of Native Americans, she’s found dead in snowy woodland far from home. Perhaps I too felt something of that adolescent despair. But Alaska also sounded like a world of promise. A land of stupendous bears and caribou padding through snow, streams pulsing with salmon, it seemed to hold all the mystery I’d never find in Chippenham. Not that I was too particular. Hawaii would do. I’d seen Elvis in Blue Hawaii and knew what to expect. I worked two jobs, fifteen hours a day, saving for my breakaway. I wasn’t really cleaning urinals. The trade winds of my imagination had swept me nine thousand miles across the Atlantic, the American continent, and the Pacific to Technicolor islands concocted by James Michener and populated by girls with nā lei around their necks. I wasn’t sweeping floors. I was flying into a sunset over the extinct volcano of Diamond Head to jam with Jimi at the foot of Haleakalā. So when, one spring day, a letter arrived from Camp Miniwanca granting me a summer job, I accepted with the intention of visiting both Alaska and Hawaii. Headlines splashed news about a radioactive leak at Three Mile Island, but nothing would intervene. I was bound for the Promised Land in pursuit of happiness. Within weeks, torrential rain clattered the portholes and swept across the runway. I was nobody, invisible, irrelevant, in need of adventure. “Go west, young man,” said an elderly gentleman named Horace Greeley in the aisle seat. “Go west and grow up with the country.” Airborne, the plane shuddered between rain clouds and burst through cumulous castles into a sun-filled sky.

Meanwhile, nearly forty years later, but listening to the noise in the Agora Ballroom, Cleveland, back in 1978, I drive on through the rain into Bath. The car contains thousands of people, along with Springsteen and the band, and we’re having a great time. When I lament the multitude of concerts I never saw I keep in mind the Faulknerian view that there is no was.3 “The past is never the past,” echoes Springsteen. “It is always present” (TAD 357). More than that, not only can past and present intermingle in our minds, but so too, in a very real sense when we talk of recorded music and performance and memory, then can be now and there can be here. The footage of young Springsteen and the band performing “Rosalita” on 8 July 1978 in Phoenix, Arizona, is physically part of the present. The same goes for such recordings as Boston in 1973; Philadelphia and London in 1975; Cleveland, Passaic, Atlanta, and San Francisco in 1978; Tempe in 1980; New York in 2000; Barcelona in 2003; Dublin with the Sessions Band in 2006; and London in 2009 and 2013. In a different way, it’s true, too, for the concerts I’ve attended—including the first and last, London in 1981 and Paris in 2016. Of Time and the River is the title of a Thomas Wolfe novel, but it could stand for my journey through Springsteen in performance, from the 1980–81 River tour—or World Tour as my baseball shirt describes it—to the River tour of 2016. My discussion of Springsteen live is, among other things, about that sense that what matters is now.

 

My journeys to and from work along the A4—the Cochran Road, as nobody else calls it—continue through the winter, and involve numerous live performances. The one I play most often is the San Francisco concert at Winterland, 15 December 1978. The memory of that first transatlantic adventure mingles
with the warm interior of my weather-battered automobile. Through that winter’s rain and snow, in the car I’m part of a community. Peopled by ghosts of voices from long ago, it builds through music into a life force. I’m on the road through the dark morning into Bath in the twenty-first century, and enjoying a far-off evening forty years earlier. On the third disc, deejay Norm Winer of the Bay Area’s KSAN-FM sums up the event. He thanks those who’ve made it possible, name-
checking the other FM stations broadcasting the show, in Seattle, Portland, and other cities of the Northwest. When Springsteen says that “the radio can still feel like it’s a magical device,” he goes on to explain that “it’s something you can hear in your room” and can feel “incredibly personal,” even while it’s “being disseminated over the airwaves” across “thousands and thousands of miles” (TAD 267). But perhaps a recording of a radio show provides an even greater magic in being a portal back in time to that moment of spontaneous immediacy, placing us in twentieth-century San Francisco, in the crowd, at the back, in the middle, at the front, on the stage, behind the microphone. I’m Max Weinberg on drums, Clarence Clemons on sax, Danny Federici on organ, Roy Bittan on piano, Steve Van Zandt on guitar, Garry Tallent on bass, and finally Springsteen himself. Even as Winer tries to corral the evening once more, the band again breaks loose, three hours in, with “Raise Your Hand.” Driving back and forth between Chippenham and Bath, I’m no longer part of the Wiltshire-Somerset commute, I’m with those radio audiences in cities and towns and hamlets spread out across the American night, as if seen from space, on a continent that, back in 1978, I’m soon to discover.

The grandeur and lonesomeness of the landmass, with all those people, and spaces between, was brought home to me on those inaugural flights. I’d read Of Time and the River and was now reading You Can’t Go Home Again, a prescient choice for an eighteen-year-old discovering a new continent. The long dead Wolfe, through the alchemy of the written word, told me about the land far below, seen from a sky with barely a cloud over North America. “Go seeker, if you will, throughout the land,” Wolfe urged, “and you will find us burning in the night.” My odyssey between 1979 and 1985, from eighteen to twenty-four, criss-crossing the United States, began with Wolfe exclaiming: “Behold the gem-strung towns and cities of the good, green East, flung like star-dust through the field of night. That spreading constellation to the north is called Chicago, and that giant wink that blazes in the moon is the pendant lake that it is built upon.” I craned my neck to see behind us through the porthole. “There’s Boston,” he continued, “ringed with the bracelet of its shining little towns.” “Here, southward and a little to the west, and yet still coasted to the sea, is our intensest ray, the splintered firmament of the towered island of Manhattan. Round about her, sown thick as grain, is the glitter of a hundred towns and cities. The long chain of lights there is the necklace of Long Island and the Jersey shore.” The “Jersey shore” (no capital “S” for Wolfe)—what strange seaboard might that be? Wolfe’s sense of the promise of America captures the exhilaration of casting my eyes down across the country that night. “Observe the whole of it,” he urged, “survey it as you might survey a field. Make it your garden, seeker, or your backyard patch. Be at ease with it. It’s your oyster—yours to open if you will.” I took Wolfe literally. Seeker, I thought. Ah yes, I must seek out life and meaning. I must go in search of America. “It’s your pasture now,” he affirmed, “and it’s not so big—only three thousand miles from east to west, only two thousand miles from north to south—but all between, where ten thousand points of light prick out the cities, towns and villages, there, seeker, you will find us burning in the night.”4

Driving through the rainy December morning, I think back to when, pre-
Springsteen and pre-arrival, the United States existed for me only on the radio and TV and in films. The dry cocoon of the car against the wet dark is akin to the comfort of the radio-as-community. As Danny Sanders on the Cleveland broadcast cites each station, the sounds I hear are so far away in time and place that they might as well belong to the Voyager II spacecraft, or the spooky sounds of the Philae lander descending from the Rosetta spacecraft to bounce and balance precariously on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. But the past is alive in the performance. Recall and survey live concerts, and you confront a kaleidoscope of images and sounds drawn from audio and visual recordings and memory. To reprise Borges’s observation in “A New Refutation of Time,” in certain respects, if not in terms of our own aging, time “is a delusion” in that the past doesn’t exist, the future doesn’t exist and the present moment disintegrates even as it occurs.5 To reflect on a show is to enjoy an illusory power over time. Actually or mentally, we can rewind, select a scene, freeze-frame, re-watch. However fragmented, the hours of the concert are on a continuous loop. First-hand experience is part of this but also another class of memory. It can never be captured on YouTube or packaged recording. To be at a show is to be in the moment, but it passes into memory. Examine a memory, and it begins to dissolve. Memories of being at performances are the most elusive and precious, but I’ll start with concerts I witnessed in the 1980s and the twenty-first century—which is to say, in youth and in middle age—and from there, as befits Whitman’s notion that “it avails not, time nor place,” move from 1973 to the present by way of recorded concerts, whether visual or merely aural, to meditate on their nature.6

These are full-band concerts. Only too late for this book did I see a solo performance. Robert Hilburn asserts that not having seen a Tom Joad show is to have missed among “the most stirring” of Springsteen’s career. Gene Santoro is more equivocal, describing the audience as “respectful, quiet, supportive, a bit baffled, hanging in there for the Boss but not always quite sure why.”7 Either way, I missed them and, Springsteen reminds me again, that “time lost is gone for good.” But, if there are similarities between all Springsteen concerts, glued together by his personality whether in a stadium or, in 2017 in the wake of the autobiography, the intimacy of the 960-seat Walter Kerr Theatre on Broadway, even those I attended could hardly have felt more different from one another. This was only partly because of where I was in the venue. It also had to do with the contrast between the Springsteen of 1981, 1985, and the twenty-first century. At the first concert, I had a third-row seat, with 12,000 people behind me, at what Dave Marsh refers to as “crumbling Wembley Arena.”8 In the second show I was in the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, New York, on the final date of the first American leg of the Born in the U.S.A. tour. With around 36,000 of the 38,000 people there in front of me, and the band like ants before the giant U.S. flag, high up and far back in the mezzanine, worse than what Dale Maharidge calls “the nosebleed seats,” I’d “got me a nice little place in the stars.”9 In the first two new-millennium shows, I repeated the pattern, only in reverse. In Cardiff in 2008 my family and I might as well have been in the parking lot, so in Coventry in 2013 we queued all day and got our “Golden Circle” wristbands in the first few hundred. The resulting experience led directly to this book, and to the most memorable of them all, the first of two shows in Paris in 2016.

To coin a phrase that will make sense shortly, we’ll get that one for you later. First off was Wembley Arena, where it all began. I still have my ticket for a 4 April 1981 concert that never took place. Springsteen instead arrived in June. We used the same tickets on the later date. The momentous fact, lost on me until the show began, was that my Block A, Row 3, Seat 9 ticket was right in front of where Clarence Clemons would tower above us. I don’t recall the band coming on but can nowadays Google the details. I can therefore verify that this was the only night at Wembley Arena that Springsteen played “Backstreets.” The reason he did is because, according to my young self, I asked him to. This was the original River tour, but he opened with “Prove It All Night.” A few songs in and the stage silhouetted him against blue light. He sang Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” followed by “The River.” The hush between songs gave me the opportunity to call out. People echoed. We went quiet for “The River,” then tried again. Springsteen came forward, looked me in the eye, perhaps a little peeved, and said, “We’ll get that one for you later.”

This was, on one level, a trivial event. Unlikely as he is to remember it, if he did it would probably be as an example of how irritating young fans can be. But who knows what stays in a person’s head? Springsteen later said that the tour was “tremendously exciting” and gave the band “confidence.” “I can remember coming home in the end,” he recalled, “and everyone feeling it was one of the best experiences of our whole lives.”10 As for my memory, the resulting cheer ran through me like an electric pulse. Why do such things matter? A single sentence can change a life. Relieved of my need to receive a response, I flew through the rest of the concert. When eventually Bittan’s piano built then mellowed into the story of the singer and Terry one summer, sleeping in a beach house, “getting wasted in the heat,” we were no longer at Wembley Arena, we were on the Jersey Shore, on the beach, on the backstreets. Clarence gazed down, tapping a tambourine, his face sometimes wooden as a cigar store Indian, other times breaking into a life-devouring grin. But, however I recall it—and now, as I write, I see an actual beach house, that tiny bungalow of 7½ West End Court and the backstreets of West Long Branch—the night is decades gone. No doubt we left the steaming arena and, ears ringing, sloped intoxicated into the rainy London streets.

That same month I saw Dylan, whose music also had an effect on my adolescence, though not in a good way, since I’d listen to it before parties then attend them so detached, cynical, and cool that I froze myself out of any kind of social interaction. Dylan’s appeal, I see now, had very much to do with an adolescent mind-set that he fostered in me. I still listen to Dylan, and am aware of the story of Springsteen first hearing “Like a Rolling Stone.”11 Perhaps “Born to Run” and “The Rising” will be remembered for as long in different ways, but Springsteen has never had a song with the mind-bending lyrics of “Mr. Tambourine Man” or the profile of “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Dylan’s impact had to do with his incisive commentary on a cultural wave. “A seismic gap had opened up between generations,” writes Springsteen in Born to Run, “and you suddenly felt orphaned, abandoned amid the flow of history, your compass spinning, internally homeless” (BTR 167). In this sense, lonesomeness has a specific historical and cultural context for the generation who came of age in the 1960s. Also, the remarkable, hypnotic unity of tone of, say, Blood on the Tracks, Planet Waves, or Modern Times would seem hard to match. But I was struck on recently hearing “Positively 4th Street” at the nastiness of lyrics that allude to empathy. If for just one moment you could be in my shoes, sings Dylan, you’d know “what a drag it is to see you.” Even “Like a Rolling Stone” has an aggression unimaginable in Springsteen’s work. For all Springsteen’s songs of betrayal, there’s nothing to compare with such sentiments from singer to listener. Indeed, it’s rather how Dylan behaved that night. As Mikal Gilmore implies, his relative reticence toward his audience is a mirror image of Springsteen’s warmth toward his. (“I’m not gonna give it all—I’m not Judy Garland, who’s gonna die on stage in front of a thousand clowns,” Gilmore cites him saying. “People come up to me on the street all the time, acting like I’m some long lost brother—like they know me,” he cites him saying another time. “Well, I’m not their brother, and I think I can prove that.”)12 It didn’t help that I was in the gallery, and half behind a pillar, but Dylan wore shades, barely moved, sang songs I’d never heard, said, “Some folk want to hear the old songs. Seems to me like some folk want to live in the past,” and then, grudgingly it felt from behind my pillar, played “Like a Rolling Stone,” raising the guitar head to signal an emotional high point. How did it feel? This particular clown became that rolling stone and left before the end. Dylan had shut me out, I felt in my unforgiving youth, while Springsteen had welcomed me in. He’d even bothered to speak to me.

That’s not to say that all was crisp and even in my relationship with Springsteen live, even if the next encounter was that snow-caked January night in upstate New York. From an upper tier it was possible to see that somewhere down below and far away was Springsteen—or maybe Sylvester Stallone, it was hard to tell—in a bandana and cut-off jean jacket with Old Glory behind him. Between us thousands of people waved little flags as he straight-strummed through “Born in the U.S.A.” Springsteen had suddenly become mainstream popular. He now addressed a whole new swathe of people. Many who appreciated Springsteen before 1984 would agree with Eric Alterman’s description of what this felt like. Here, now was “an individualist speaking through the voice of a corporate-dominated delivery system, an artist who employed an essentially conservative set of symbols to deliver a message of personal liberation and communal responsibility.” Springsteen concerts were now “huge events,” and “the members of the invisible church of Springsteen felt themselves being shunted aside.” Here, now were “millions of loudmouthed parvenus,” with many earlier listeners high in the stands of a stadium, recalling like Alterman their first time, in a venue a twentieth of the size. “Tickets were harder to come by, Springsteen was more difficult to see,” and the size of the shows meant that he was “forced to sacrifice virtually all the subtlety and spontaneity his performances once offered.”13 Miles back in the stadium, and not born in the U.S.A., I felt uninvolved. That was the first song. I recall nothing more of the concert other than the way that actual distance led me to suspect a distance in Springsteen himself. Back in England, I got engaged and began my academic career. New albums were still events, but Tunnel of Love doesn’t have the exhilaration and defiance that had attracted me. The record spoke of the opposite of my own life. I couldn’t relate to the songs or respond to the synthetic sound. Moving onward and inward, Springsteen seemed to be giving up on his band and part of his fan base. I now appreciate Tunnel of Love as a deepening of his art that I wasn’t ready for. Human Touch and Lucky Town coincided with parenthood, and these were truly “Better Days,” but it was a plateau. There were songs I enjoyed. “With Every Wish” was a sober reminder that not all goes well, and I played “I Wish I Were Blind” through the blossoming spring, but Alterman is right about the clichés, not least the cloying bluebird’s song of love.14 I didn’t wish I were blind, and wouldn’t have for any lost love—too high a price, surely?—and the rest of Human Touch left me indifferent. On Lucky Town, I could relate to songs like “If I Should Fall Behind” and “Living Proof,” and to the preoccupations of parenthood, but Springsteen’s influence was receding, only to return in the new century.

Time notwithstanding, the second of the series of twenty-first-century shows I saw reignited my interest. The 2008 concert at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium reminded me of the Syracuse one if only because we were so distant that virtually all we could see of the band was on the big screens. It centered on Magic, though Springsteen opened it with a solo of “From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come).” It had that blend of the political and personal that has come to characterize Springsteen live. He made his “public service announcement” about the Bush administration’s “eight years of mismanagement,” and told a story about Federici, who had died of melanoma. But to the naked eye the band were dots in colored lights. Down on the floor, figures wandered to and fro with beer. We even walked around the half-empty seats to the back of the back to see if the experience was any better. We corrected the error four years later. For the Wrecking Ball tour we bought standing-only tickets for the Ricoh Stadium, Coventry, arriving at dawn for the mosh pit. By now Clemons, as he would put it, had turned “the corner,” met up with Federici, and they weren’t coming back.15 Meanwhile, the night before had brought the news that James Gandolfini, Tony in The Sopranos, had died. Steve Van Zandt, who starred with him in the show, missed subsequent dates. Springsteen began with a solo of “Tom Joad,” before the full band came on for “Long Walk Home.” The set included a full rendition of Born to Run, with “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” as a tribute to Clemons and dedicated to Gandolfini. There was no jumping on the speakers or piano anymore; no sliding across the stage on his knees; no Clarence to pose with, his place taken by his nephew, Jake, only months old when the band had played that Wembley Arena date. Was it then or during another song that Springsteen came forward, during his hammy routine of pointing, à la Iggy Pop, at individual members of the crowd, and seemed to point at me? Perhaps he spotted my black T-shirt with “Nebraska” in red. Or perhaps I imagined the whole thing, but still. Are you looking at me? I thought. Let’s say he was looking at me. As they moved toward the end and “American Land,” the whole band except Weinberg came forward, Springsteen slapping and shaking hands, smiling. Joy, I recalled from 1981. Exhilaration, the promise fulfilled. “I still believe in its power,” Springsteen said of music to Michael Hann in 2016. “I believe in my ability to transfer its power to you. That’s never changed. One of the things our band was very good at communicating was that sense of joy.”16

Driving home, I thought of a Wallace Stevens poem, “The Idea of Order at Key West.” Describing listening to a singer with the sea behind her, it’s about how a musical performance can intoxicate, transforming and heightening perception.

 

                        It was her voice that made

The sky acutest at its vanishing.

She measured to the hour its solitude.

She was the single artificer of the world

In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,

Whatever self it had, became the self

That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,

As we beheld her striding there alone,

Knew that there never was a world for her

Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

 

The speaker asks his companion why, as they turned for home, the lights of the fishing boats at anchor “mastered the night and portioned out the sea, / Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, / Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.” Kathleen Higgins writes of “music’s psychophysiological power to influence the listener’s outlook.” The music had indeed altered not just my perceptions both mental and physical. “The dynamism of music,” she argues, “reminds us of our own dynamism.” It can help us achieve more. Nor was it a fleeting effect. Just as that 1981 show was the starting gun for my personal life race, so Coventry, more than three decades later, after days of tingling energy, brought a sense of renewal, and the decision to distill this phenomenon of Springsteen’s ability to harness music’s power and present it to us to rediscover our own vitality. It would lead, in time, to Paris 2016, the second River tour, and a completion of the circle.17

 

But I’ll get that strange event—the strangeness of the first of two shows—for you later. Moving for now from my own experience of live shows to recordings of them, I should explain that, like others, I’m not including Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band: Live/1975–85. The first official attempt to capture live performances as a recording failed as a whole, even though it contains enjoyable anecdotes and stirring performances. “In a sense, it was the most ambitious effort of his career,” writes Mikal Gilmore, “but also the least satisfying and least consequential. It didn’t play with the sort of revelatory effect of his best shows or earlier albums and it didn’t capture a mass audience in the same way either.” Rob Kirkpatrick writes that in hindsight “Springsteen’s boxed set stands very much as a record (record in the sense of document) of the Born in the U.S.A. era.” It offers “next to nothing in the way of performances from the early years” and only one from before 1978 (“Thunder Road” from 1975). Moreover, “performances from different years and venues” are “mixed with audience noise fading one into the next in an attempt to re-create a single concert experience.”18 The overall result is deadening. There’s no sense of a whole concert’s momentum, of the band adapting to audience mood, just songs out of context. Springsteen makes much of participation, with a cascade of interaction, progression, and contingency that uplifts performers and audience.19 “You have to keep it present and living,” he’s said, not allow it to “get embalmed.” The effect of cutting and splicing live songs was precisely to embalm them in their own time and space. Marc Eliot calls it “Bruce’s musical coffin.”20 It’s hard to erase Simon Frith’s image of “boxes piled high by the cash desks” to capitalize on what Jim Farber, reviewing the video anthology of 1989, describes as Springsteen’s “super-duper stardom.” As Frith goes on to say, while the supposedly “truth-to-life” nature of the set involves it lasting about as long as a show, the overall, distinctly postmodernist effect is of a “false event.” This leads Frith to his view that Springsteen merely “represents ‘authenticity,’” and to his statement: “If Bruce Springsteen didn’t exist, American rock critics would have had to invent him.” While Springsteen’s admirers don’t like to think that his “authenticity” is more an idea than an actuality, in the 1980s he was indeed facing, and would continue to face, “the fate of the individual artist under capitalism.”21 But fortunately we have much more than that document. We can’t save “time in a bottle,” to use Jim Croce’s song title. Nevertheless, if it’s not, as David Pattie ponders, a paradox to imagine “authenticity through the medium of performance,” we can at least savor the “authenticity” bottled and labeled in a range of live shows.22

The recorded performances between 1973 and 1978 reveal shifts from laidback entertainment to urgent drama. The change has to do with personnel but above all with Springsteen’s persona. The Boston radio recording of 9 January 1973 provides a glimpse of Springsteen at the start of his album career. It begins with a mellow Duke Ellington instrumental. After joking about the band as relatives, with Clemons as his brother, and the band as available for “Bar Mitzvahs and stuff” (technically that should be Bar Mitzvot, but he’s Catholic), he offers a surreal preamble about the wordplay in “Bishop Danced,” rolling out a collage of images centering on the story of a boy who suffers beatings by his father and retreats into his imagination. For all the rage he witnessed in his secular childhood, the ghosts of that Catholic upbringing intensify it. “What’s going on here?” the interviewer asks. “I don’t know,” says Springsteen. The next song, “Wild Billy’s Circus Story,”
he describes as a “behind the scenes adventure story.” Years later, he would talk about the Clyde Beatty–Cole Brothers Circus that came to Freehold, and of how the things a child notices “aren’t the things you’re meant to notice” (TAD 369). This image of a passing circus, with its inner drama of oddballs and curiosities, is a mainstay of Springsteen’s career. The circus world is not unlike the “outsider” world of rock and roll (SOS 388). Misfits set up tent and entertain for a while, providing theater by exposing themselves to physical and emotional risk. “Oh God save the human cannonball,” prays the little boy.23 The 1973 Philadelphia show continues the mellow mood. Only with “Spirit in the Night” do we get something less low key, even if the energy merges with melancholy. A succession of easeful songs with muted drums includes a jazzy “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?” and funky versions of “Tokyo” and “Thundercrack.” There’s no hint that Springsteen will write “Born to Run,” let alone any anticipation of the angst of 1978.

By the time of Philadelphia, 5 February 1975, Roy Bittan has replaced David Sancious on piano. “Incident on 57th Street” leads into to Harold Dorman’s “Mountain of Love” and the drum-led, driving rhythm that ushers in Springsteen as rock star. Part of the band’s texture of this period is the oscillation between jazz and rock. “Born to Run” precedes an elongated “E Street Shuffle” to tell the story of how the Big Man joins the band. Springsteen is a raconteur, reassuring the audience that this is an act and that, when he bellows his angst-ridden lines, there’s no need to call for the psychiatrist yet. Yet after “Wings for Wheels”—“Thunder Road” before Springsteen found the song’s title—such reassurance gets drowned out as “She’s the One” segues into “Backstreets.” As in the Atlanta concert of 30 September 1978, Springsteen launches into a frenzy of bitter words in an early sign of soul baring. This is the beginning of the shouted vocal. He reaches into the silt, dredging catharsis. It’s easy to understand why this mesmerizes the audience. If, heightened to melodrama, it owes more than a little to the latter stages of Van Morrison’s “Madame George,” there’s no more of the laconic here: a primal beat is exorcising demons.

Perhaps it’s all an act, a psychological version of the cult of illusory or actual bodily harm some rock performers undergo in the name of their art: Alice Cooper being mock-guillotined, Iggy Pop lacerating himself with glass. As Steve Waksman notes, such artists play “on their own victimization, punishment, even death.” It’s beyond disentanglement as to whether, to use Philip Auslander’s theory of three layers of performance, this is “the real person,” “the performance persona,” or “the character.” Perhaps, as Paul Nelson suggests, it’s akin to method acting, with the effort making real and projected emotion almost indistinguishable.24 But Springsteen, that September night as on innumerable other nights, steers it back to clear showmanship. The concert ends in celebration, with Springsteen hamming it up in pursuit of a hamburger during Chuck Berry’s “Back in the U.S.A.” He’s found the three-hour theatrical journey that will bring fame. It’s only rock and roll after all, to be treated as seriously as death but also as entertainment. Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it’s not to be worried over. “If we shadows have offended,” Puck explains, “think but this and all is mended, that you have but slumb’red here while these visions did appear.” The show ends with the equivalent of Shakespeare’s return to strong rhythm and obvious rhyme. Order is restored, awkward questions forgotten. Springsteen and the band are just performers. They’re Shakespeare’s “rude mechanicals,” Bottom and Co., putting on a play. Don’t go home thinking there’s any more to it.25

To see as opposed to just hear a 1975 concert is another thing again. Sound lasts
better than fashion. Springsteen refers to “the sartorial horror” of the E Street 1980s. “The band had never looked and dressed so bad,” he writes (BTR 326). Take another look at 1975, Bruce. Mike Appel evidently had the Hammersmith Odeon show filmed with no special arrangements for visual broadcast—merely Marc Brickman’s usual lighting. For Appel, Brickman’s understanding of “color, drama, positioning,” transformed the shows.26 But with that one, at least, the lighting comes across as crude and dated; its 1970s emphasis on alternating primary colors is a reminder of yesteryear. Remnants of the laconic Springsteen remain. When the lights come up after a Springsteen piano solo of “Thunder Road,” the band appears with Weinberg wearing a shoulder-strap undershirt (possibly one of what New Jersey native Fred Schruers means by “guinea-T’s” or “Newarkys” as worn by “Newarkylanders,” the Joe Greasers who filled Joe Colleges with contempt and fear). In contrast, Clemons and Van Zandt in wide lapels and fedoras resemble pimps from Kojak.27 Springsteen wanders around in loose shirt and wooly hat like a straggly street urchin. As for the shape of the concert, “Born to Run” is dropped in without fanfare as just another song. “The deliberate peaks and valleys” that characterize later performances are there, but it’s not a mammoth show, and there’s nothing on the level of the drama that, evident in the Philadelphia concert, would in time come into its own.28

Move on three years to 1978, and the emotional risk of Springsteen’s music takes center stage. Between islands of excitement the tone darkens, reflecting his self-professed tendency to “drift into that other thing” and produce “a lot of desperate fun” (TAD 162). When he says, years after these performances, that the greatest rock-and-rollers “are desperate men,” he knows what he’s talking about (TAD 373). Whatever the demons, it’s almost too clear that he needed to “make something” of them (TAD 372). Aspects of the 1978 shows resemble public psychotherapy. Discussing creativity and depression, Storr describes writing as “a form of therapy” requiring no “therapist other than the sufferer himself.” Listeners to the shows of that year might beg to differ. Storr does go on to say that, while “the initial response to depression is to turn inward,” “once a work is completed it can be shared with others.” But the need for this material to be acted out in public is palpable. Whether this is the “real” person, performance persona, or a character, if uttered by a street-corner tramp, or if Springsteen’s career had collapsed, it would be painful to hear. The Springsteen of these 1978 shows is the human cannonball: thrilling to witness, dangerous to be. No wonder those April 1981 dates were put back to June due to his being “physically and mentally exhausted.”29 In “Wild Billy’s Circus Story,” circus boy “dances like a monkey on barbed wire.” If this song has shades of the Beatles’ “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” there’s a personal dimension absent from Lennon’s composition. Just as in “The Last Carnival,” Springsteen sings, after Federici’s death, of an end to “dancing together on the high wire,” so too in “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” there’s a sense of the toll exacted on the performer who puts his soul (and body, judging from Ben-Gay and liniment references, and candid details in Born to Run) on the line for the crowd’s vicarious pleasure.30

From the outset, the Cleveland show of 9 August 1978, which I first heard passing Cochran’s memorial, reflects a new, political dimension. “Badlands” follows “Summertime Blues,” and a mélange of the heavy songs from Darkness follows “Spirit in the Night.” As in other shows, that Bo Diddley beat morphs “Fade Away” into “Gloria” into “She’s the One.” This is musical pragmatism. The sound, he implies—by showing how Holly, Morrison, and he all use the Bo Diddley beat—belongs to no one. Acknowledging himself as part of a continuum, Springsteen explains elsewhere how he learned the guitar at a time when local guitarists would sit in a circle on the beach. Later in the interview he reprises the idea. Dylan, he said, first gave him a “map of America” that “felt real and true.” Through music he found Sinatra, James Brown, and singers in between. “I want to be part of that story,” he said, “part of that circle on the beach” (TAD 341). From that communal sound onward in the concert, in a pattern Springsteen periodically maintains to this day with songs such as “American Land,” the downbeat middle of the show gives way to the upbeat ending. The Cleveland concert concludes with “Twist and Shout,” the first song Springsteen learned, and so again nods to his fandom preceding his role as performer.

By the time of Winterland the sense of urgency is unmistakable, from the vocal intensity, squealing guitars, heavy rhythm, to the counted-in songs. Despite “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” a darkness dominates not altogether having to do with the album of the moment. Springsteen speaks more seriously. He dedicates the album’s eponymous song to Ron Kovic, having read his memoir, Born on the Fourth of July. His tone, here the rage of the disabled Vietnam veteran, is barely recognizable from 1973. He’s now contemplating others’ perspectives. In “Factory,” he honors his father, listening to it back home on the radio. He prefaces it with a memory of him tinkering with the car “to get it started so he could go to work,” a story the emotions of which are more common in literature than rock. The observations recall, for instance, those of another working-class writer, D. H. Lawrence, in his evocation of his father’s morning habits prior to going down a coal mine in Victorian times. When Springsteen writes in Born to Run of the “kerosene stove in the living room” that was all they had for heating, and of how all their cooking was “done on a coal stove in the kitchen,” we’re very much in Lawrence territory (BTR 9–10). Brought up in Eastwood, in the English Midlands, he produced in Sons and Lovers (1913) a novel of family life in which his father, known only as Morel, slides from “bullying indifference” to such a diminished sense of assurance that he becomes “more or less a husk.” Turning to drink, abusing Paul Morel’s mother, he’s emotionally “shut out from all family affairs.” But on the morning after a particularly ugly incident, when he forces Paul’s mother into the cold night, Lawrence describes this man with tenderness, making his predawn breakfast prior to his day down the pit. Sitting by the fire “on a little stool with his back to the warm chimney-piece, his food on the fender, his cup on the hearth,” reading “last night’s newspaper—what he could of it—spelling it over laboriously,” we can imagine Morel happy, just as Camus imagines Sisyphus happy during the time between rolling the boulder up the hill and
starting over.31

Lawrence has father-son demons to exorcise through that first novel, and Springsteen in Darkness performs a similar ceremony. Both men’s stories are of growing up as (in Springsteen’s words) “gentle,” “sensitive” children in a poor household with a father’s soul in tatters (TAD 215). If “lack of work creates a loss of self,” it’s equally true, as he’s also said, that unhappiness at work leads to an unhappy life. Both grew up in a house where the mother remained “steadfast” but the boy “picked up a lot of the fallout.” When the father lacks that self-worth, Springsteen continues, it creates “tremendous emotional turmoil” all around (TAD 415). “Work was the surround that absorbed them every morning and restored them to us at day’s end, a little transfigured by dust or grease, their hands smelling of borax, their breath a little sour with beer or whiskey,” writes W. S. Di Piero of his South Philadelphia childhood. “None ever seemed happy or expectant, as if the work, the need and the duty of it, was a mineral substance they wore like a coat. It impressed on me, before anything else, that work was never a lightness and gaiety, but something gravid, earthborn and earthbound. The departures were built on ritual morning preparations: the clatter of cups on saucers, the gurgle of coffee perking, the familiar (and threatening) cadence of feet down the stairs.” “Fool with the rigors of habit and you became your own bad luck,” reflects Di Piero, contemplating his childhood ignorance of “the daily humiliations” many of this generation suffered. For all their “sharp intelligence,” “formal education wasn’t available to them and many had to make their way as unskilled laborers. They seemed not so much beaten or embarrassed by their work, of whatever kind, as numbed to a silence their children could hardly pierce.” I think of Springsteen’s lines to his mother in “The Wish”: “If pa’s eyes were windows into a world so deadly and true / You couldn’t stop me from looking but you kept me from crawlin’ through.”32

The content of the songs and shows involved Springsteen dealing with this material on two levels. On one level, it has a deep, emotional core. On another level, he was dealing externally not with the thing itself but with the emotions. “You’re not trying to re-create the experience,” he’s said, “you’re trying to re-create the emotions and the things that went into the action being taken” (TAD 206). At the same time, he sought in his own experience the wider contexts. He said of his father in 2012, at a press conference in Paris: “So, I kind of lost him, and I think a lot of the anger that surfaced in my music from day one comes out of that particular scene. And as I got older, I looked toward not just the psychological reasons in our house, but the social forces that played upon our home and made life more difficult. And that led me into a lot of the writing that I’ve done” (TAD 415). While not articulated by Springsteen in 1978 or perhaps really understood by his audience of the moment, this accounts for much of the emotional power of these shows. The son will not live the stunted life of the father. Intent on portraying, with compassion as well as anger, the world of dead-end jobs and wasted lives, he’s building new dreams and actualities out
of the materials at hand. When Lawrence describes his father trying to read the newspaper, and “spelling it over laboriously,” we know that the father lacks the tools that empower the son: reading and writing. The son is articulate, and the power of the word is his way out. In Springsteen’s case the key line here, from “Thunder Road,” is that he’s got this guitar and he’s “learned how to make it talk.” As he says in an interview, “I picked up the guitar because I wanted to speak to you” (TAD 242).

In pragmatist terms, to articulate a situation is to start to transcend it. If you master language, you can describe or re-describe a scenario. To articulate a future is to create the possibility that it will happen. There’s another element to this. The son will work, but rather than drawing him down to hell the work will lead to transcendence: not emptiness but epiphany. To return to Di Piero, coming “from a culture of working-class Southern European Catholics,” he “was bred to believe that work is, in conscience and in fact, the curse of the fall from grace, and that the curse determines and defines one’s life. Adam fell, brought himself down, bound to earth: existence is the struggle to rise from the earth of work that compacts life in habit.” Di Piero therefore talks of poetry as “a dutiful adversarial engagement with the object world,” and “the task of writing” as “a life-sustaining answer.” The gravity and weight of work on the adults he witnessed led him in childhood “to infuse their weightedness with some ethereal element. Lightened, lifted, they could be stopped and held in mind. The bricklayer on his scaffold is reshaping the sky.” Work had to be “an ascendency.” “Caliban is enslaved, but Ariel does the important work.” There is much of this in The Rising as well as in Springsteen’s performance work ethic, in wearing his father’s work clothes on stage, in the heavy boots, the dripping sweat, panting lungs, and bulging veins, the trudge around the microphone when performing the later “Shackled and Drawn.” “One night I had a dream,” writes Springsteen in Born to Run. “I’m onstage in full flight, the night is burning and my dad, long dead, sits quietly in an aisle seat in the audience.” Then the son is kneeling beside the father, and together they watch the man onstage. “I touch his forearm and say to my dad, who for so many years sat paralysed by depression, ‘Look, Dad, look . . . that guy onstage . . . that’s you . . . that’s how I see you’” (BTR 414).33

Back at this Winterland show, in San Francisco in 1978, Springsteen follows “Factory” with “The Promised Land.” Life doesn’t have to begin and end with alienated labor. He tells Elvis Costello in 2009 that Van Zandt one day announced his approval of a comment, made by a go-go dancer on Shindig, that rock and roll “creates an energy that pushes you toward the future.” It’s “a developmental force,” concurs Springsteen. It’s about living with “the ever present now” but it also anticipates “tomorrow.” Hence, he says, Elvis Presley “presaged a certain type of modern citizen more than a decade away. Gender lines dropped, racial lines dropped. He crossed all those boundaries.” A rock-and-roll song is “for tomorrow too because what I see isn’t here now. But I have some sort of faith that it can exist” (TAD 382). How do we get there? As William James advocated, we open ourselves to life—this is what crowd surfing is about; as Elias Canetti writes, “as soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch”—and, believing the future into being, we work to achieve our goals.34 Seen in this light, the psychological undercurrent of the Winterland sequence of songs becomes all the more compelling. “Prove It All Night” succeeds “The Promised Land.” Dead-end entrapment gives way to a vision of something better. Springsteen’s concerts take place at night. After sunset a magical world provides escape from the working life. Our lives reflect back at us as in a hall of mirrors. “Prove It All Night” is one of several Springsteen songs taking place at dusk or night or dawn, in the darkness or semi-darkness, on the edge of town, beneath the covers, in the margins. These are the spaces where the outsiders dwell, the nobodies, the invisible. Introducing the song, he says that he was told when he went to bed as a child that as long as he said his prayers everything would be fine. You find, in fact, he laughs sardonically, that you must “prove it all night, prove it every night,” then launches into a guitar solo. The song plays out over nearly thirteen minutes, with the lengthy solo providing a barrier between daily life and the world of the song. “Racing in the Street” follows, dedicated to “everyone back home in Asbury Park,” and returns us to the small-town setting that begins the sequence.

With hindsight, Auslander’s theory of performance layers notwithstanding, the self-abuse Springsteen later admitted was a part of these concerts becomes very apparent.35 The rendition, for example, of “Point Blank” is more menacing than the River version. A soft voice turns to bullying. The way he utters “point blank” implies murder. Phrases like “the pretty lies that they sell,” and “how fast you learned” suggest a pimp threatening a prostitute. A “false move” and “the lights go out.” The voice is cruelly intimate. The urgent whisper of “out” is grimly repeated. “Fade Away” with the same rhythm segues into “She’s the One” with Springsteen’s voice an elongated shout, sometimes a screech. “Without your love,” he sings alarmingly, “I might as well die.” Part way through, talking to Clemons about stopping by the girl’s house, he sounds like a stalker. “I drive by her house real late. I see two silhouettes in the window shade. That’s when I get mad,” he says, “like Al Capone . . . like Popeye. . . .” The comic undercutting loosens the tension. “She gets me so mad that I just wanna . . . I just gotta . . . I just don’t know. . . .” The audience cheers, but the levity is precarious. “Backstreets” brings us back to something shockingly bleak. On this performance it’s about rather more than a melancholy yearning for lost friendship. “I hated you when you went away,” is a plaintive cry that Springsteen lingers on in concert. Muttered confession becomes a shout, like a drunken tirade, as if the speaker seizes the girl and hisses into her face. She is silent, cornered. “It’s good to see you back again,” he slurs. The monologue becomes manic. “I remember way back then that you promised you’d never leave without me . . . and you lied, didn’t you? You lied, little girl, you lied,” he repeats, “so now you come back and I want to know why,” repeated four times, and the shout: “and I want to know just what makes you think it’s so easy”—and then, repeated over and over, “to stop”: a frenzied killing.

The exhausted voice brings us again to “hiding on the backstreets” and safer ground. The tirade appears at other shows, but here in particular, heard rather than seen, it’s a troubling performance. The final heartfelt howl suggests someone struggling out of sleep paralysis or awakening from a trance. We can’t worry for him now, but in retrospect it has a quality perhaps beyond hearing at the time.36 Once again, the party atmosphere returns. It’s all been a dream and will soon be dawn. But even here it’s as if there’s a struggle to awaken. “Somebody stop me,” cries Springsteen, “before . . . I . . . hurt myself.” The drumroll ends the song, but up comes the chorus of “Bruce, Bruce,” and an insistent clapping. “Are you talking to me?” is followed by a silence as if after a thunderclap and then, as disturbingly as anything heard that evening (unless, following Auslander, you buy the idea that this is merely the performance persona, which I don’t), the muttered words, “I think I’m going to throw up.” And off it goes again, not unlike Duke Ellington at Newport in 1956, higher and higher, faster and faster, defying inevitable descent.

Finally, in this sequence, I think of the 5 November 1980 River tour show in Tempe, Arizona, included in the Ties that Bind collection. This is one of the last and best live visual recordings of the era on which Springsteen’s reputation was built. It’s also scant months before our rendezvous at the Wembley Arena concert that was put back to the end of the European River tour. It’s startlingly different and better than Hammersmith in 1975. With Marc Brickman’s lighting, as Appel suggests, the performance does this time take on “dramatic dimensions” that raise “the entire show to new visual, musical, and emotional heights.”37 But there’s also now a sophisticated architecture. The chiaroscuro of the lighting matches the contrasts in the performance. “The peaks and valleys” are beautifully carved. After the jagged drama of “Born to Run” through to “Out in the Street,” “The River” takes us down into a dark, quiet valley, and the same happens with an opening sequence to “I Wanna Marry You,” and later the intensity of “Drive All Night.” When eventually the lights come up with the Detroit Medley, I’m of two minds. One of these is of the recorded moment. Springsteen is thirty-one. I’m a teenager caught up in the energy and emotional drama. But the other is the living room and TV screen. I’m aware that this is taking place in a time when certain things that do now exist weren’t even dreamt of, either in personal terms for Springsteen and his audience or in terms of the songs and albums he would produce. Above all, career-wise it was before Born in the U.S.A., mainstream acceptance, hit singles, and Bossmania, before he became dissuaded about the idea that “those big coliseums ain’t where it’s supposed to be,” or, put more succinctly, “better bring your binocs” (SOS 34). In that first phase, 1978–81 was surely the wave crest, and I was lucky to see him before a great deal changed: when, happily for the audience if not in all ways for the man himself, his art was the center of his life. “Sometimes when I’m playing,” he told Dave DiMartino in 1980, before trailing off and refocusing his response, “life just ain’t that good, you know? And it just ain’t. And it may never ever be. But that doesn’t make those emotions not real. Because they are real and they happen. And that stuff happens onstage a lot, when people sing some of the songs it’s like a community thing that happens that don’t happen in the street” (TAD 104). If the Springsteen of this era felt most at home on stage, if he couldn’t stop, why was that? “Playing a show brings a tremendous amount of euphoria,” he told David Kemp just prior to the publication of Born to Run, “and the danger of it is, there’s always that moment, comes every night, where you think, Hey, man, I’m gonna live forever! And then you come off stage, and the main thing you realize is, ‘Well, that’s over.’ Mortality sets back in.” It’s clear now, if it wasn’t before the autobiography, that he felt there was nothing beyond the show but his own heartbeat against the lonesome silence of the night.38

 

In the 1990s Springsteen came to realize that there’s more to life than rock and roll. In Bruce, Carlin quotes him musing on his writing. As early as 1977 he’d been interested in how he might bring “adult concerns” into his music “without losing its vitality.” Far from thinking that “the future ain’t any damned thing,” as the years passed he began to focus on the fact that he and his audience were aging. It plainly matters to Springsteen that his music and lyrics brighten lives, not least those whose existence tends otherwise to be relentlessly dark. Carlin asserts what Springsteen has often confirmed since, that he’s “committed to the idea that music, particularly his music, really does have the power to change lives.” If this wasn’t obvious early in his career, it became so sometime after Born to Run, helped by viewing The Grapes of Wrath, and later distilled in the title of The Ghost of Tom Joad. “Something in that picture,” he’s said, has “resonated” through subsequent work. He realized not just who he was but what he could do with that fact. What matters, he decided, is the galvanizing effect on others. Carlin describes tour director George Travis making sure “that every new crew member, or a down-in-the-dumps veteran, walks with him to the back of the arena in midshow.” He explains that between them and Springsteen “stand x thousand people,” of whom “a small but important segment will go home with something that will be with them their entire lives.” That, he reminds them, is “what makes their job, no matter what it is, important.”39

I’ve pondered the role performance plays in Springsteen’s “real job” (TAD 256). When he reunited the band in 1995, and then consolidated that reunion at the end of the century, something must have brought him back to a renewed sense of how important that role is. The pragmatist thrives on work that’s productive for the individual and the community. Surveying or recalling Springsteen’s concerts in the new millennium, from Live in New York City, recorded in 2000, through Live in Barcelona, and the Live in Dublin show with the Sessions Band, to London Calling: Live in Hyde Park and beyond, as well as my experiences in Cardiff, Coventry, and Paris, means facing the gallop of time. The reuniting of the E Street Band, recorded in the 1996 Blood Brothers documentary, came toward the end of the twentieth century. Perhaps the fin de siècle, as well as the death of his father in 1998, sharpened Springsteen’s focus. The events of 9/11 must only have added to the sense of urgency about using as best he could the time that “heaven will allow.” Settled domestically, and with some sort of work and personal life behind you, the question becomes: what else am I here for? Live in New York City is most notable for its political edge, especially with “Youngstown,” “Murder Incorporated,” and “American Skin (41 Shots),” offset by the entertainment of Springsteen’s quasi-evangelical fervor. There’s humor in his impersonation of a gospel preacher of rock and roll—at the second Paris show of 2016 he “married” a couple as “Mr. and Mrs. Rock and Roll”—but there’s also something serious about why the band plays, as he is recorded as saying on Live in New York City, “night after night after night.” During the course of his New York gospel spiel that intertwines such songs as Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” and Curtis Mayfield’s “It’s All Right,” he tells the story of coming through the woods to the other side, of needing a band and an audience. This is a serious joke having to do with the E Street Band being “purpose-based.” The New York show’s purpose is spelled out in a way that those early shows were not.

Nine/eleven followed months afterward, along with that often-recorded comment from a Sea Bright local to Springsteen that he was needed. The Live in Barcelona DVD preserves a Rising show. Caryn Rose points out differences between the New York and Barcelona crowds. Perhaps this had more to do with timing than a cultural divide.40 In 2002 the band and audience, European including, would have felt renewed purpose. That need for emotional uplift had never been greater. When Springsteen sings “Prove It All Night” it really does come across as a promise to the audience since “there’s nothing else that we can do.” Live in Dublin is as exuberant as New York and Barcelona. That Springsteen chose in the years following 9/11 to go back to American roots also relates to this sense of community and continuity. He’s always used earlier music but, once he brought these folk songs back into a large public domain, first with We Shall Overcome and then intermingled live with his own music, another aspect of the pragmatist impulse became clear. They include songs of sorrow (“Mrs. McGrath”), of teamwork (“Erie Canal”), and of struggle and triumph, from “Eyes on the Prize” to “O Mary, Don’t You Weep” to “Jacob’s Ladder,” that express an impulse toward solidarity informed by historical perspective. That this renaissance could extend well into the twenty-first century, with the huge crowds at the open-air events in Hyde Park, Glastonbury, and elsewhere, testifies, moreover, to the pertinence of his approach.41 Exhilarating as the later concerts are, and interesting as they are as quasi-spiritual, quasi-political events, they also illustrate damage limitation against the tsunami of time; the future will belong to the next generation in the audience. While rarely mere exercises in nostalgia, their poignancy lies in our awareness less that the singer may never see Sandy again—we assume he hasn’t seen her for decades—than that we may not see him again in person, or some other member of the band. In 2008, Federici is the ghost of the show. In 2013 Clemons, barely mobile by 2008, is a giant photograph on the back screen for “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” The celebration of now is still the focus. The then remains, but as electricity on screen, all the more poignant as the century advances.

Yet life has a way of confounding expectations. Not all its patterns are of our own creation. In 2016 in Paris strange things happen. By this time, I’m researching the book. With my wife, Nicki, I’m traveling to the show because to comment on American writing is part of my job. Given the burden of such work, it’s with heavy hearts that we pack our bags, drive to Folkestone and onto Eurostar to roll beneath the Channel to France, plunge through the fields of Flanders, zip around the Périphérique to stay near Fontainebleau in preparation for the shows of 11 and 13 July. Since I’ve been aiming to get fitter and leaner now that we’re not that young any more, I accompany Nicki to the line for the Fosse mid-afternoon (despite her attempts to disown me) in my 1980–81 World Tour baseball shirt, which fits again after thirty-five years. Time loops in on itself. The River tour has returned. What chance that Springsteen and I might make contact again, just as we did when I was twenty and he was in his thirties? No chance, of course. There will be up to thirty thousand people there, and my ticket is the cheapest available. Still, I’m open to possibilities. The crowd becomes individuals. In the line we meet Gary Foodim of Washington, DC; Pat and Rachel from Quebec; and, inside the AccorHotels Arena, Giles Withers, who owns a shoe shop in Wells, near Bath, a single father for whom traveling to watch Springsteen is his “thing”; and Valerie, a white-haired, jolly lady from Orleans. Valerie is celebrating her sixty-sixth birthday at the show, alone except for a few thousand others. Rachel is anxious and pregnant. We meet her and Pat because we talk to Gary when Pat goes off to search for her, assuming she’s fallen asleep from jet lag. He only knows Pat through Springsteen and has yet to meet Rachel. But he’ll be traveling with them to Rome after Wednesday for a performance at il Circo Massimo, the Circus Maximus. We promise Pat to look out for her while he goes off to search. She turns up breathless with worry a short while later and, between grateful gulps of our water, explains that she got lost.

I expect nothing special of the show, but serendipity has long been a companion. We get into the second section of standing area, with the numbers 357 and 358 felt-tipped on the back of our hands, and find ourselves right by a gangway. During “Hungry Heart” and then again, without his guitar, during “I’m a Rocker,” around comes Springsteen. This second time, by whim or happenstance, or maybe some osmosis connected with my need to shape a narrative, he stops by us. This, I realize, will be the moment of contact that rounds things off. Bruce approaches. There’s a swamping, joyful, cacophonic hysteria, a current of energy carrying us forward and an undertow swirling us back. A red balloon bobbles among the placards and waving arms. I think, now, of all those dreams I used to have of meeting him: the one where he knocks on the door, a giant of a man, and asks if he can set up and play with his band for our family in our humble living room; the one where he calls off sick and asks me to go on for him—much like his dream of substituting for Mick Jagger at Convention Hall (BTR 67), except that I can barely play guitar, can’t sing, don’t know all the words, have twenty thousand or more expecting him, and am truly “an imposter who expects to be asked for his stage pass,” even as the crowd grows restless and the arena empties out. But this is real. He’s here. He’s standing right in front of us and on the same level. As others often attest, he’s no giant. In fact he’s considerably shorter than me. (“You’re shorter than I expected,” I’ll later read, is a common response from fans.)42 He’s two feet away. He’s reaching out, shaking hands, with Pat, with Rachel, with Giles, with Gary, with Valerie, with Nicki. I clasp his cold, clammy shoulder, his shirt dark with perspiration and sponged water. He’s still here, singing half a verse at us, a whole verse, and during this time I do what any serious, sane professor of American literature in his mid-fifties does when confronted with an artist he’s writing about. I have form for this. With William Styron, after I’d traveled three thousand miles, including taxi, train, plane, and bus, to visit him in Connecticut, I greeted him when he arrived to collect me by car in Danbury, less than twenty miles from his home in Roxbury, with the question: “Did you have a good trip?” With Joyce Carol Oates I was struck dumb on meeting her for lunch in Princeton after four years of correspondence. “How are you?” she asked as I sat there in my blazer and slacks on the hottest day of that summer. “Sweaty,” I finally replied. With Bruce Springsteen, who is not just sweaty, as we all are, but truly drenched, I have nothing to say, and he wouldn’t hear it if I had. I look at him. He looks at me—actually, no, he isn’t really looking at me—I reach out with a clenched fist and, delicately, slowly, clonk his cheek.

It’s not every day you punch someone, and even less often that you punch a billionaire rock mega-star of global renown. But please understand (though I’m not sure I can myself) I didn’t exactly punch him. I gently put my fist to his cheek, in a brotherly gesture, like a gangsta (maybe, I don’t know) gestures to another brother, fist to fist. John Lahr writes of being close enough to him as a journalist at a media event that “we could almost have fist-bumped.”43 Well, his hands were clasping others, including Nicki’s. Bumping fists wasn’t an option. What on earth was I doing? When an academic meets a writer, when anybody meets anybody, what you don’t do is, in however brotherly a gesture, put fist to face. Maybe I should ask a psychologist. It was instinctive and, as I see it, a gesture of gratitude, of solidarity, if a little embarrassing. Maybe he momentarily gave me a bemused expression—“catch a subject by surprise,” writes Michael Hann, without managing this when interviewing Springsteen, “and you can see them deciding what they think about something”—but more likely he didn’t even notice.44 What he did notice was a girl behind us with a sign saying something like, “Since we lost the Euros last night” (a reference to the soccer tournament Euro 2016, in which France lost in the final to Portugal) “my Daddy says I’ll get a hug from the Boss.” He gestured to her and we lifted her over us and onto the gangway for probably the longest, biggest hug she’d ever had. Then he was back on stage, no longer with us but enwrapped in the sound and light show of mega-stardom.

That might have been it. That was full-circle enough. You start as a teenager annoying him by calling for “Backstreets” when he’s playing his new River songs. You end in middle age by fisting this sexagenarian superstar’s face, and then you confess to it in writing, so putting your credentials as a serious academic at further risk. But it wasn’t over yet. This was the show where the E Street Band blew the circuitry. A few lines into “Ramrod,” everything went down and on came the house lights, like the end of a party. The amplifiers blew. The video screens blew. The stage lighting blew. Suddenly you could see thirty thousand people watching some senior citizens and a young saxophonist standing in silence on a bare, black stage less ornate than you’d find at a high-school prom. Yet, oddly, it wasn’t silence. Was it the ringing in our ears or a miracle worthy of loaves and fishes that led us to believe, against all likelihood, that above the din the roadhouse rhythm rumbled on? Led by Springsteen, the band, bar Weinberg, left the stage and shuffle past us, left to right, strumming away, Jake’s saxophone uttering the occasional phfft. No chance of a voice. But everyone understood. The band played on. We knew what this was about. In the face of adversity, whatever life throws at you, you carry on. Back on stage the band had a conference with the arena management, and eventually Springsteen took a cardboard sign and wrote on the back, “5 mins.” Soon up came the sound, if with little more than house lights, and the show ended without paraphernalia, nothing but the band.

This told me two things. One was that, as the Tom Joad and 2017–18 Broadway shows corroborate, Springsteen doesn’t need anything more than words and music. The rest is enhancement. The other was that he and his band members are ordinary, traveling minstrels. When we first had contact, Springsteen seemed like a wizard from a foreign land way up on stage weaving spells. Thirty-five years later he was on our level, facing old age just a little ahead of us. When the circuits blew, and the theatrical effects fell away, we were all just human animals making the Big Noise. In a way, it was as if Toto had pulled back the curtain on Oz, but far from dispelling the magic, Springsteen’s handling of the power outage made the event all the more human and real. As David Pattie points out, in discussing the question of authenticity, “the performer does not have entire control of the event” any more than the audience is “entirely constructed by their place in the event.” Pattie quotes Theodore Gracyk’s observation that in rock music the instruments are “almost always several steps removed from the audience. In live performance, speakers deliver a combination of amplified and electronic sounds. We almost never hear the ‘original’ sounds; when the electricity fails, the music stops.” Well, not in Paris, my friend! Paris proved that Pattie is right that, while “mediation is everywhere” in a live event, “so is agency, and so is authenticity.” “The fact that it is difficult—in fact, probably impossible—to pin down moments of pure mediation, pure authenticity, or pure agency,” he argues, “does not mean that the real has somehow disappeared.” True enough, I’d have said before Paris, but that it’s not impossible revealed itself at that very moment. The mediation had failed. All we had left were those minstrels and a few thousand well-wishers determined that the minstrels would prevail, and they did.45

David Shumway, in Rock Star, writes of how, with the giant screens, “visual intimacy with the face” enables “the illusion of an emotional intimacy with the performer greater than one produced by being in the same room with him or her.” Equally, Auslander argues that “almost all live performances now incorporate the technology of reproduction, at the very least in the use of amplification, and sometimes to the point where they are hardly live at all.” Consequently, while “initially, the mediatized form” was based “on the live form,” gradually the positions have been reversed, and the live performance has often been an attempt to reproduce “the very mediatized presentations that once took the self-same live event as their models.” He thus rejects “the argument for ontological differences between live and mediatized forms.” While it’s true enough that a person far from the stage and dependent upon a video screen is present “but hardly participates,” when it all broke down in Paris there wasn’t a vacuum but a new kind of happening. A contributor to Springsteen & I suggests “that only the people who saw him in the early days in the small venues, before the mega-crowds, when you could get so close that you were sharing the sweat and the spit of whichever band member you were closest to, can really know the intimacy and the ferocity of those concerts.” That may be true, yet however mediated Springsteen’s shows are much of the time—but certainly not all of the time—one of the striking things about his concerts is how, even in arenas rather than bars, he fosters togetherness, not just onstage, not just crowd surfing well into his sixties, but by walking down a gangway that’s on the same level as the audience, or by deliberately courting relative intimacy, as on Broadway. Whatever else, this emphasizes that, far from being a giant, or, as the line from “The Promise” goes, “way up on the screen,” he is physically diminished and, yes, shorter than his stage and screen presence might suggest.46 When the fuses blew, and the band sauntered round with ordinary light and barely a sound, I thought of Thomas Gencarelli’s comment that Springsteen’s “music has always been about reaching.” “At the end of the monomythic journey, whenever it comes,” he writes, “we take that last step of return and find ourselves two steps back: still no more than just human beings, still shy of attaining that greater something, and with only what we have already done and given as a measure of our lives.” It was fitting that the lights should blow because Springsteen is always reminding us that they will blow. The illusion will shatter. As he tells David Kemp, “mortality sets back in.” You just have to fix the switch, plug in and go again.47

While the band did just that, playing on with limited lighting, Nicki left to fetch her coat. Then, during “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out,” I received a text with the words, “Get out now!” Given that only a few months earlier, on the night of 13 November, Paris terror attacks had left 130 people dead and hundreds more injured in the northern suburb of Saint-Denis, outside the Stade de France, and in particular at a rock concert in the Bataclan, and given that one member of the couple we were meeting had been at the Stade de France with their son that night, I did as instructed. It turned out that Nicki had misunderstood. They were just ready to leave. They’d had seats and felt enough of a disconnect, they told me later, to have gone for a cup of tea during, of all songs that night, “Point Blank,” when spontaneously, the lights of phone after phone, into the thousands, shone like stars in the darkness on behalf, I felt, of the 130. Springsteen writes in Born to Run of how, on discovering that the copper beech tree that once stood outside the house on Randolph Street had been cut down, “it was gone but still there. The very air and space above it was still filled with the form, soul and lifting presence of my old friend, its leaves and branches now outlined and shot through by evening stars and sky.” By corollary, he feels that we, too, “remain in the air, the empty space, in the dusty roots and deep earth, in the echo and stories, the songs of the time and place we have inhabited” (BTR 504). If we as a European audience sensed that, then it was precisely the kind of moment one seeks at a show. “You cannot book, manufacture or contrive these dates,” Springsteen writes of a New Orleans performance after Hurricane Katrina. “It’s a matter of moment, place, need, and a desire to serve in our own small way the events of the day.” Sometimes there’s “a real job to do,” and “something as seemingly inconsequential as music does certain things very well. There’s a coming together and a lifting, a fortifying, that occurs when people gather and move in time with one another” (BTR 453). That night, I felt, really did show Springsteen as “a repairman” (BTR 414). I don’t know what happened to Pat or Rachel or Valerie. I think she had a pretty good sixty-sixth birthday and they all had a good time. Rachel’s child will now be in this world, and maybe named Kathryn, Mary, Bryce, or Bruce or Max. Gary I heard from later, and Giles as well.48 But since we had to leave, we walked along the Seine sparkling in the moonlight, and, back in Fontainebleau, stayed up the rest of the night recalling the concert, ready for another, two days hence.

On the second night we traveled in by train and had seats up on a second tier with the stage to the right. Where two nights before we’d been momentarily swallowed up in the mayhem of “the Bruce surge,” now we had the equivalent of an out-of-body experience. We could see where we’d been. We watched Springsteen saunter down and along between the crowds, and crowd surf back to the stage. It was as if we were watching ourselves from the past, or from outside. I had another curious sensation. On one hand, concerts are about your personal relationship with the music, that feeling that you’re the only person there. On the other hand, concerts are about the interaction of the collective, about recognizing that you’re a grain of sand on the rock-and-roll beach; that your involvement as part of a cresting wave, however long and intimate it feels, is a fleeting moment in a vast crowd.49 The second Paris show finished with an acoustic “Thunder Road.” I imagine Springsteen did this for the reasons he gives in Born to Run with reference to a low-key encore at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. “It completed the set for me,” he writes, “It might get more response to do a boom-boom thing and really rock the joint, but when I walked down the steps afterward, I felt complete. Otherwise, I feel messed up. It’s just being honest with the audience and with myself, I guess.”50 The arena emptied, and we took the midnight train back to Melun and the early morning bus to Fontainebleau. Soon enough, on the evening of Bastille Day, we were on the overnight ferry from Le Havre to Portsmouth. I listened all night to a compilation, fell asleep on a couch, and awoke to walk on deck and watch the sun rise to the original, 1970s recording of the same song. It was over, we were older, but what else could we do now? Show a little faith? Find magic in the night? In fact we awoke to news that a truck driver had mowed down more than eighty people along the Boulevard des Anglais in Nice.

So: serious and trivial at once. Not life itself but a simulacrum of life without the risks involved. But, in its connection with my life, it had symmetry. These live shows I’d seen began and ended with The River. They began with a teenager calling out for “Backstreets” and Springsteen responding. They ended without a word exchanged, but a gesture: the fist to the cheek, the clasp of the shoulder, the handshake. Minimal need not mean meaningless. A French novelist friend of mine, Thérèse de Saint Phalle, told us when we visited her chateau in our forties with our daughters, twenty years after staying there as a young couple, that we are all “the children of time.” That’s how I feel about my “relationship” with Springsteen. Parallel lives, twelve years separating our ages, and with two fleeting encounters: the verbal exchange and the physical touch. What’s it all about? I was reminded of the moment recently when visiting, bizarre as it may seem, the David Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage in Nairobi; when the newest arrival, eight-month-old Musiara, strolled past the onlookers there was a similar need to touch. It has something to do with connection or verification. Is the need to do this religious? Atavistic? Comradely? Ridiculous? All I know is how much fun it’s been. There’ll always be London, 4 June 1981. There’ll always be Paris, 11 July 2016. Thirty-five years apart, a generation apart, the only common factor, given that physical beings evolve, being a guitar and a baseball shirt. Maybe I hadn’t grown up, or he hadn’t, but of course we had. We’d simply retained something of the spirit of youth, which is the spirit of life.

 

* * *

Awakening from my reverie, I’m still driving through darkness. The rain on my glass roof mingles with the applause as another show ends. Given the Paris massacres, any concert there now calls to mind the Bataclan and is an act of defiance and of remembrance. On those two July nights, songs such as “Point Blank” and “Because the Night” seemed to respond to these events, and when the lights from hundreds of cameras came on in the darkness I felt, as I say, that Parisians were thinking this too. Concerts thus have contexts, but time is inexorable. I see the sweat in Springsteen’s eyes across the decades. I see him at different ages, skinny and bearded in his twenties; thicker of torso and with receding hair in late middle age. I find myself pondering Dickinson and Stevens again. Both write about dusk, and Stevens also writes of gatherings and of the power of music. Dickinson begins Poem 258 with “a certain Slant of light.” In the final stanza, she writes that “When it comes, the Landscape listens— / Shadows—hold their breath— / When it goes ’tis like the Distance / On the look of Death—.” When dusk arrives, certain slants of light pierce the gloom. In Lonesome, Kevin Lewis takes solace from what he calls that “moment of haunting light.” Pragmatists tend to believe that humans are inherently meaning-makers. David Bromwich calls us “novelists of everyday life.” “Everyone is an artist,” argues Oates, experiencing a sensation of “‘egoless,’ almost mystical transport” when “totally immersed in a concentrated action that has some connection with other people.” Music enhances this capacity in its listener; “sound makes things happen,” posits one theory of music.51 The mind being creative, we build meaning from sounds, just as from slants of light, and from both fortune and misfortune. Sometimes these meanings only come later. With music, meaning has to do with personal preoccupations at the time of participation. Meaning doesn’t exist outside the human; we develop it in relation to the world. This might explain why “a certain Slant of light” evokes, as I write, the moment in open-air concerts when the sun sets. The Paris concerts were indoors, but even indoor concerts mimic the way that, as the day fades, the stage brightens. The darkness erases individual identity. The entrancing magic show becomes the exclusive focus.

“Light the first light of evening,” writes Stevens in “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.” Here, in this light, we can think “the world imagined is the ultimate good.” For Stevens, such gatherings enable us to “collect ourselves, / Out of all indifferences, into one thing,” momentarily enabling us to “forget each other and ourselves” and “feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, / A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.” Out of this “We make a dwelling in the evening air, / In which being there together is enough.”52 “The inspiration comes from the music,” says Springsteen. The “thing itself” is not “the performer” but “the music—that’s where the spirit of the thing is” (TAD 135). This may also be what he means when he refers to “in concert” by its literal meaning of “people working together” (TAD 231). A performance of “Rendezvous” is a pertinent example given Stevens’s use of the word. This is a simple song about a man telling a woman of his doomed dream that “their love would last forever.” Sung live, it also becomes about the show itself. The singer, band, and audience are the rendezvous. Stevens is writing of the connection that art provides: a deeply personal thing that is shared, a soliloquy. The concert is a drama of paradox. Like other art forms, it provides time away from “real life,” but its purpose is to awaken us to what it means to be alive. When Springsteen sings that he’ll “prove it all night for you,” the proof is in the performance and the “you” is each member of the audience. In such ways can art, for good or ill, change your perspective, actions, and so your life.

This vision of art as a revival mechanism to reinvigorate creator and recipient is an American tradition. Emerson writes of experiencing “a perfect exhilaration” when “all mean egotism vanishes,” and it’s indeed possible to achieve in everyday life what the Ancient Greeks called ekstasis, that “ecstatic moment in which one is lifted out of the mundane and beyond one’s ordinary self.”53 If the artist’s role is to help others “experience their own inner vitality,” then ultimately the train to the “Land of Hope and Dreams” is a round-trip of reinvigoration. You alight where you started, but the place seems different. The Land of Hope and Dreams is not a distant place but life itself. As Thoreau puts it, castles in the air can have foundations built beneath them, and real, practical, daily and long-term consequences. Performances are ephemeral yet can outlast much else in life, whether because recorded or in their effects on participants. The only kingdom we have, as Springsteen puts it in the wistful Working on a Dream, is our “Kingdom of Days.” Ordinarily we “don’t hear the minutes ticking by” or “see the summer as it wanes.” We’re merely aware of the “subtle change of light” on familiar faces as we each evolve from youthful vitality toward decrepitude. In the end, art provides the only possible afterlife. Springsteen is no longer young, and some of his original band members no longer physically alive. Yet the collective spirit exists in the form of memories of the great performances and in the recordings of shows from long ago. That, to my mind, is the ephemeral, timeless, triumphant nature of Springsteen in performance.

As for the relationship between past and present, in Borges’s mesmeric collection of paradoxes, musings, and fables, Labyrinths, he has a brief statement titled “Borges and I.” There are two Borgeses, he explains, the one on the page and the one who, at the moment of writing, lives. The paradox of his mini-essay is that the speaker purports to be both the living man and the written page. “The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to,” writes “Borges.” But further down he states: “I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature.” Now, it seems, the biological Borges is referring to the written Borges, who “has achieved some valid pages,” even though those pages cannot save him, “perhaps because what is good belongs to no one,” but only “to the language and to tradition.” Borges the being acknowledges that he must die and that “only some instant” of him can remain. “Little by little I am giving myself over to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.” The statement concludes with a reiteration of the paradox: “I do not know which of us has written this page.”54 Borges, who serendipitously refers to recognizing himself in “the strumming of a guitar,” died the year of Tunnel of Love. Yet his work still speaks to us. Surely Baillie Walsh had “Borges and I” in mind when he decided on the title Springsteen & I. Springsteen himself echoes Borges’s sentiments in sometimes wishing that he, too, could be Bruce Springsteen. After all, to be “Bruce Springsteen” (as opposed to the mortal being) would mean to be immortal, albeit without consciousness. Springsteen is not his fame, and Springsteen the “attachment figure,” in Storr’s phrase, is not the breathing, mortal being, even to himself. So, as I reach the end of this particular journey, my personal contribution to Springsteen & I is to adapt “Borges and I.”

The other one, the one called Springsteen, is the one whom things happen to. I walk through the streets of Chippenham and stop to look at Rudy’s Bridge and Cochran’s memorial, the red of the Gretsch guitar, the black background and white writing all glistening by the roadside. I know of Springsteen from his work and see his name in books and essays. Like him, I felt so transparent in youth that you’d see the wall through me. Like him I hit the road. We share preferences, but sometimes I wonder if he’s created mine in a way that I can never create his, for I know him, but he has never known me. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a warm relationship, or even a relationship at all. I live my life and do my work, and Springsteen lives his life on the Jersey Shore, and creates his music, and I listen to it, and the existence of people like me across the globe justifies his work. That work can’t save him, and can’t save me, but it can sustain us. We are destined to perish, definitively, though his work will live on for a while. I take this seriously and not seriously at the same time. I’m quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. I recognize myself less in his songs than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to the past now, and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus our lives are flights, and we lose everything, and everything belongs to oblivion, or to the printed word or recorded moment. It’s the fate of all writers to become their books, singers to become their songs, the photographed or filmed to become their images. But I, and only I, must take responsibility for this chapter and, reaching home now, park the car, and hang on its usual hook, so as not to lose it, the key to the universe. There ain’t no cure for the Winterland blues.