We ought to hold with all our force, both of hands and teeth, the use of the pleasures of life that our years, one after another, snatch away from us. Carpamus dulcia; nostrum est, quod vivis; cinis, et manes, et fabula fies. (Let us pluck life’s sweets, ’tis for them we live: by-and-by we shall be ashes, a ghost, a mere subject of talk)—Persius, Sat., v. 151.

—MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, “OF SOLITUDE”

 

Death don’t fuck around. . . . it’s waiting around some corner for all of us, and once you make that turn you’re not coming back. Order the good wine.

—CLARENCE CLEMONS, Big Man

 

7

 

AFTER SPRINGSTEEN

 

 

I work to be an ancestor,” writes Springsteen (BTR 503). “I know I’m writing toward an ultimate disappearance,” writes poet Tess Gallagher. In Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty cites an essay by novelist Dorothy Allison. “There is a place where we are always alone with our mortality,” she writes, “where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger. Sometimes I think they are all the same. A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.” This is very much the pragmatist mode, going back to Nietzsche’s observation that we love our desires rather than what we desire, and dovetailing with Rorty’s own view, elsewhere, that “to accept the contingency of starting points is to accept our inheritance from, and our conversation with, our fellow human beings as our only source of guidance.”1 It’s not where you start but where you’re at, not what you start with, but that you start: that you find your reason to believe in whatever you believe in.

For years I’ve considered Springsteen’s work wherever I’ve been. I first contemplated his music in the summer of 1980 in the Poconos. Since then I’ve thought
about it in bars and cafés from Buenos Aires to Bucharest, Cincinnati to Catania, Indianapolis to Istanbul, Kitale to Kansas City, Lisbon to Long Branch, Moscow to Montevideo. It accompanied me on those buses all over North America, in cars, on trams, trains, and planes in Europe, Africa, and North and South America. The cliché is the idea of Springsteen as the soundtrack to an individual life. To focus on one individual’s music for life seems, to say the least, narrow. One of a crowd of musicians, he’s mingled with Mozart and Mariza, Coleman Hawkins and Maria Tǎnase, Ruben Rada and Roberta SÁ Delírio. Art works on us in obvious and subtle ways. The more we’re exposed to, the more nuanced its effect on our moods and attitudes. Springsteen agrees with Walker Percy’s view, in his essay “The Man on the Train,” that “the truly alienated man isn’t the guy who’s despairing and trying to find his place in the world. It’s the guy who just finished his twentieth Erle Stanley Gardner Perry Mason novel,” or who “just saw the fifth Batman picture” (TAD 227). If any one artist, sports team, or movie franchise carries too much weight there’s a danger that you live second-hand. Vicarious enjoyment can create the illusion that you’ve lived yourself when in fact you’ve devoted yourself to “the dream world” of popular culture. I had this tendency in youth. I was the Great Pretender, the Wanderer, the Duke of Earl. Traveling the country felt in a way like floating through a “giant hologram,” as Jean Baudrillard calls America for Europeans, made of music, art, and literature. Perhaps there’s no escape from this escapism—“we are all in flight from the real reality,” writes John Fowles—or perhaps the drifting of youth is a way the mind acquires experience to form a fruitful vision of the world.2

Springsteen’s appeal is connected with this. It therefore feels appropriate to focus on his music as a subject in varied settings and in conjunction with other experiences, reading and listening. This is partly because Springsteen himself is, in Heylin’s phrase, “a musical magpie,” open to eclectic experience, reading included. When, for instance, I recall spending a hot afternoon west of Bergerac in the coolness of Montaigne’s tower, contemplating the Latin proverbs carved into the beams, I can connect it to the fact that Springsteen has read a biography of this sixteenth-century philosopher.3 Curiosity produces some ostensibly unlikely links. But this approach also feels appropriate because Springsteen has performed all over the world, and has spoken of the “rootless existence” of being on the road, and the need to find something stable amid the “transitory.” During early touring that meant keeping room keys. In your transitory life you need things to provide “a reminder that you were somewhere” (TAD 403). Born to Run shows Springsteen to be a fine travel writer. The book opens with his childhood adventures on Randolph Street where, his “belly to the stone, alongside the tiny anthills that pop up volcanically where dirt and concrete meet,” he’d be “Hannibal crossing the Alps, GIs locked in vicious mountain combat and countless cowboy heroes traversing the rocky trails of the Sierra Nevada” (BTR 3). Later he describes actual journeys out West. “The desert at dawn” reveals “the deep blue and purple shadowed canyons, the pale yellow morning sky with all its color drawn out, leaving just the black silhouetted mountains behind.” With the sun rising on his back, “the deep reds and browns of the plains and hills” come alive, and his palms turn “salty white on the wheel from the aridity” (BTR 127). But the issue is more profound than mere physical travel. We seek solace against time’s attrition through whatever gives our journey substance. This includes creating art, a major motivation for which is to produce something to memorialize our “Kingdom of Days.”

To travel and to create are intimately connected. Just as art can center us, so we can feel most alive in a strange city or country and able to see life beyond routine. Hence, on a rainy March day in Berlin, caught in a rainstorm after wandering down Unter den Linden Boulevard from the Brandenburg Gate to Berlin Cathedral, I sheltered in the art bookstore of the Instytut Polski w Berlin on Burgstraße. Looking out across the Spree at the back of the cathedral, I contemplated the fact that Springsteen visited East Berlin in 1981, and again in 1988, when he, too, had strolled Unter den Linden. This part of the city has changed hugely since I first visited in 1994, and would have been very different when Springsteen came here in the 1980s. The second time was to perform what Erik Kirschbaum celebrates, with enthusiastic hyperbole, in Rocking the Wall as the “concert that changed the world.” A little over a year later, the Berlin Wall came down. Springsteen had told the 300,000 people, many of whom had trampled over barriers the authorities had dismantled, “Ich bin gekommen, um rock and roll für euch zu spielen in der Hoffnung, dass seine Tages alle Barrieren abgerissen warden”: “I came here to play rock and roll for you, in the hope that one day all barriers will be torn down.” He then sang Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom.” Whether or not the concert was all that important, in the words of Imke Handke, a participant found by Kirschbaum, it was clearly “a piece of the mosaic to what happened a year later.” For music critic Matthias Döpfner, it shows that “at the right moment and the right place, an artist can do more to change the world than lots of clever speeches by smart people supported with a myriad of logical arguments.” For Springsteen, “it was the biggest concert we ever did,” exemplifying what he feels his music is about.4

I browsed the bookstore with these thoughts in mind. Once again serendipity accompanied me. With no letup in the rain I sat at a table with a few books. The first on the pile was a small volume by Yale professor of the history of art David Joselit. After Art is primarily about visual art and architecture. The only immediate link to Springsteen is that it’s published in New Jersey. But as I read the book, first in Germany and then back home in a Wiltshire pub within sight of Rudy’s Bridge and Cochran’s memorial, I began applying Joselit’s ideas to Springsteen. His premise is to shift “critical emphasis from art’s production (and the corollary of artistic intention) to what images do once they enter circulation in heterogeneous networks.” An interest in aftereffects is at the heart of a lot of Springsteen commentary. Kirschbaum argues that a concert can help alter the course of history. Daniel Cavicchi’s Tramps Like Us is subtitled Music and Meaning among Springsteen Fans. Baillie Walsh’s Springsteen & I speaks for itself. But Joselit’s particular interest in images provokes further thoughts.5

Image, he argues, has “vast power” through its “capacity for replication, remediation, and dissemination at variable velocities.” In considering Springsteen’s work, image goes beyond Joselit’s definitions of “a quantum of visual content (say a digital photograph) that can assume a variety of formats,” or “a visual byte, vulnerable to virtually infinite remediation.”6 Such definitions would include photographs of the concert on display in the Stasi Museum, the former headquarters of the secret police on Ruscherstraße, deep in the East Berlin suburbs. But while important as a reminder of the dynamism of the performance these are a lesser part of the package. Without wider resonance, no photograph would count for much. More interesting in thinking about “After Springsteen” are other kinds of images. By this I mean recorded shows and interviews, mental images of shows that participants recall (Kirschbaum testifies that many East Germans “vividly recall the details and atmosphere” of the concert decades later), and, perhaps most important of all, images created by a given song.7 Since a song is invariably a collage of images, “the video dilemma,” as Springsteen puts it, is that you provide physical images on top of mental images, thus dictating or distorting the creative response. “You’re robbing people of their imaginations,” he says. Since “music is meant to be evocative,” you’re placing an unnecessary, often counter-productive medium in the way (TAD 137).8

Such comments reveal much about Springsteen’s approach to his craft. In performance he exudes a “raw energy” that’s “contagious,” and participants retain moments that exemplify that exuberance.9 But it’s our own images, brought forth by way of evocative phrasing, that produce the most enduring aftereffect. As one might expect, an urge to be useful permeates Springsteen’s autobiography, and not least in terms of writerly advice. “The correct detail can speak volumes about who your character is,” he counsels, “while the wrong one can shred the credibility of your story. When you get the music and lyrics right, your voice disappears into the voices you’ve chosen to write about” (BTR 401). In Joselit’s words, images “produce power—a current or currency—that is activated by contact.” “The more points of contact an image is able to establish, the greater its power will be.”10 As Roland Beiker points out, music as an art form has always been “unique in a variety of ways,” not least in “that it can be perceived simultaneously from all directions.” But, as Kathleen Higgins notes, “the incredible range of music, a range spanning centuries and the world’s cultures,” is now easily available to us. We can access it anywhere anytime. We can walk or run with music in our head. We can hear it in the car, on a boat, in bed, in the air, and in any city or on any country road, by any shore, or any river, be it the Spree or the Sewanee, the Wisła or the Willamette, the Potomac or the Plate. If the music aids reflection or shifts mood, it becomes a calming or galvanizing tool. In the twenty-first century, proliferation has accelerated exponentially. In the capitalist world, this has its own raison d’être. Art has become “a fundable hedge,” writes Joselit, the value of which “must cross borders as easily as the dollar, the euro, the yen, and the renminbi.” As a currency, it must transfer “value easily and efficiently,” and, “with the aid of computers, almost instantaneously.”11

Joselit’s ideas amount to a pragmatist theory of art. Giles Gunn argues in Thinking Across the American Grain that pragmatism replaces the notion of the canon, whereby culture is seen as “the amassed moral capital of the ages” with a “toolbox” view of culture “as so many sets of directions that show you what can be built with its assistance, or, in other words, that display how the toolbox can be used.” Thus, pragmatism construes an artist’s importance with regard to the questions that artist continues “to keep alive and insistent.” These questions belong to the recipient, upon whom meaning depends. Set against this idea of art as a tool, or as Gunn elsewhere puts it, a currency, is the idea of art as an item of reverence. In a way analogous with religious fundamentalism, to be reverential toward art is akin to adhering to “a doctrine, as laid down in sacred texts,” or to assert that “a visual artefact belongs exclusively to a specific site (its place of origin).”12 In terms of Springsteen, one might think of those who argue that the authentic experience is to attend a concert, and in particular some legendary show. In contrast, those who see art as currency would argue that you can gain from the music in all manner of times and places. A concert may be thrilling, but a given song can have just as deep an effect even if you never see Springsteen perform it. (His attestation to the power of radio backs this up, as does the effect on us of long-dead artists of all kinds.) Both experiences are valid. This is fortunate, since the vaults of the rock-and-roll dead and of original show participants fill as inexorably as such sprawling cemeteries as La Recoleta and Père Lachaise.

To argue that the live experience is the only authentic one is to invoke what Walter Benjamin, in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” coined the “aura” of performance. The twenty-first century, however, is a very different world from the 1930s, and Joselit argues that we should move on. “The right of possession,” he argues, depends not on “cultural commonality or special knowledge” but “on pure empathy.” Benjamin may have “produced the most enduring model of how art belongs to a place,” but it “can hardly account for the revolutions in image production and circulation initiated by media like television, the Internet, and mobile phones.” “In order to value the art of our own time,” writes Joselit, we can’t continue to hold with Benjamin’s sense that “in even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place.”13 Instead of assuming that “reproduction constitutes an absolute loss—and consequently that commodification, which is premised on large-scale mechanical reproduction, is the worst possible fate for any cultural content,” we should recognize that “there are gains as well as losses in the shift from singular artworks to populations of images.”14 Without debunking the idea that a live concert has aura, we can say that its reproduction has enormous and profound benefits. If we talk of “After Springsteen,” we should also talk of “Before Springsteen.” Few of us saw Elvis Presley perform live—Springsteen didn’t—but it doesn’t seem to have mattered. As a boy to watch Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show was, ironically, somehow to “see the real world,” in which what matters is that you “dare” and “watch” and “listen” (BTR 40). “The product of top 40 radio,” as he put it, Springsteen has always been the beneficiary of recorded material (S 65). He listened to records, and watched films and TV. Indeed, some of the aura he experienced even had to do with the medium separating the receiver from the actual moment (just as hearing rather than seeing a concert can create a no less dynamic effect).15 In turn he’s exploited this to the benefit of those who wish to loop view the concert experience. The splicing of images that constitutes Live in Barcelona makes it arguably superior visually, if not viscerally, to the live experience. There’s something to be said for having no one stand on your feet, or edge between you and a view of the stage.

Joselit’s celebration of mechanical reproduction directly links to his emphasis on after. This pragmatist focus on the audience-listener-participant, moreover, is clear in Springsteen’s dislike of aspects of hero-worship, and his sense that what matters is the music. “The status of being everywhere at once rather than belonging to a single place,” argues Joselit, far from depleting material, “now produces value for and through images.” “In place of aura, there is buzz.” This he likens to coming sufficiently “in phase to produce co-ordinated action.” “Several small acts” when “taken individually” “may have no intention,” but “buzz indicates a moment of becoming—a threshold at which coherence emerges.” Such sentiments are in line with what William James means when he says that pragmatism is “an attitude of orientation.”16 Rather than fixating on an authoritative starting point, individuals encounter and share ideas. Emphasize a starting point, and you encourage the idea of aura. Emphasize process, and you think in terms of buzz. Aura equals fundamentalism and foundationalism. Buzz, like pragmatism, is anti-foundational, suggesting that ideas are not authoritative but open to adaptation. In seeing rock and roll as forward-looking, Elvis Presley as instigating change, and the E Street Band as “a purpose-based organization,” Springsteen, too, emphasizes after. In doing so he is, in Joselit’s terms, thinking “democratically about image circulation,” considering the “redistribution of image wealth,” and using “the currency of art for purposes other than financial profit.”17 Songs and albums anticipate and depend upon ever-changing responses. It being “a commonplace that a piece of music is never the same twice,” and that a listener’s experience “is never repeated,” writes Higgins, “music makes us all Heracliteans.”18 I would say the same is true of art in general, and proof abounds that it profits recipients. “After art,” writes Joselit, “comes the logic of networks where links can cross space, time, genre, and scale in surprising and multiple ways.” While the recipient of any art participates in its afterlife, this is a central thrust of Springsteen’s work. Seen this way, explains Joselit, art assembles “a new kind of power,” and “the point is to use this power.”19

What Joselit explains, and what Springsteen practices, however, is also traditionally American rather than merely a response to contemporary changes. “Trust thyself,” writes Emerson. “Arouse!” shouts Whitman, in “Poets to Come,” “for you must justify me.” Whitman sees himself as “a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you and then averts his face.” He expects “the main thing from you.”20 The purpose of the apparent intimacy is lost on those who see the actual writer as the focus. The power of art depends upon response. “For it is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book,” he writes in “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand,” “Nor is it by reading it that you will acquire it, / Nor do those know me best who admire me and vauntingly praise me.”21 The life force must come from within the participant in the dialogue art facilitates. This idea of reciprocity is at the heart of Stevens’s poetry, too, as it is at the heart of Oates’s work. As Hannah Arendt notes in her essay “On Violence” (cited by Joselit), “power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual, it belongs to a group.” Hence, writes Joselit, “our real work begins after art, in the networks it formats.”22 All writing being a form of art, I have thus appropriated Joselit’s ideas about image to Springsteen’s work. Springsteen surely knows that, compared with those who truly put themselves on the line, who risk their lives, or who work tirelessly without tangible reward, he’s been little more than a hard-working but immensely rewarded entertainer. The image we have of him is not the real man, and the world he offers is a kind of fantasy parallel universe. But he is representative of the kind of person who learns their craft, cultivates their talent, and through force of will rises from obscurity. As Marsh notes, quoting John Berger, this is why he fits the description of a “hero,” not an “idol.”23 Through the years he’s come to a mature understanding of what it means to matter, of what fuels his own life and the lives of his audience. His art, itself inspired by various sources, has produced the art of others, both literally, in terms of books, stories, artwork, and other music, and in terms of the way others have shaped their lives in part through awareness of that art.

Let me give a literary and then a personal example. Perhaps the best evidence of Springsteen’s dialogue with his era is in the patterns that interconnect his work with Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country. Mason’s novel took full shape when she visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the spring of 1983. The following year saw the production of Born in the U.S.A., which Mason subsequently referenced. But the story would not end there. Mason’s novel would seem to have inspired a Springsteen song—“The Wall” on High Hopes. Sam’s quest to learn about her father, the war he died in, and the experience of her uncle Emmett and other veterans, becomes a narrative about the wider American experience. In the midst of it, Sam asks a veteran if he’s seen the memorial. “A big black hole in the ground,” he scathingly replies.24 Sam will eventually reach the memorial with Emmett and her grandmother, Mamaw, and be moved by it. “The Wall,” written decades later, acts as a kind of black granite reflection of “Born in the U.S.A.” In it, a family member, speaking to a dead relative, reflects on the small recompense this monument is to their loss. It’s a long way from the record that saw Springsteen become a household name as a pop icon. He was everywhere on the airwaves in the mid-1980s, with songs that sound made to be the radio and MTV hits they became. People newly exposed to Springsteen’s work through these media came to the performances because of that exposure. But rather than being a mere soundtrack to this and other novels, “The Wall” shows how his work came to participate in a conversation. In its remembrance of former band member Bart Hanes and local musician Walter Cichon, both of whom died in Vietnam, and in its specific location at the memorial, it nods to Mason’s 1985 novel.25 With regard to Joselit’s ideas here, while something was lost when Springsteen went pop something was also gained. On one hand, many people who appreciated Springsteen before 1984 would agree with Eric Alterman’s description of feeling “shunted aside” by “millions of loudmouthed parvenus” attending huge events shorn of “subtlety and spontaneity.” On the other hand, hadn’t many of us come to Springsteen through media other than the live show? Hadn’t we benefited from the age of mechanical reproduction, and don’t we now benefit all the more from this, as well as being able to witness live performance? It’s not just about the moment of production but the aftereffects. Not only can the influence of one artist create art in another, but that new art can in turn influence the influencer.

As for the personal example of how all this apparent abstraction can translate into personal terms, at a 1981 concert Springsteen finally had to silence my call for “Backstreets” by saying, “We’ll get that one for you later.” Growing from adolescence into middle age, the beautiful symmetry of life allowed me a second encounter when, with Springsteen on the same floor level, and now perceivable as a human being rather than superhero, I put my fist to his cheek. The British are not very demonstrative, and on the rare occasions when we show affection it can manifest in awkward ways. But what mattered in both cases was human touch—mental in the first instance, physical in the second. Why do we seek to be seen? Why do those up close at a concert feel the need to touch? Why does a performer, indeed, not merely pander to this but enjoy that rapport? To shake a hand or look an individual in the eye is to acknowledge. We can all do this with strangers, students, workmates, employees, neighbors. Acknowledgment is powerfully enabling. One of the odder Springsteen songs, at least on first hearing, is “Queen of the Supermarket.” But it’s about acknowledgment. When the checkout girl smiles at the speaker, it “blows this whole fucking world apart.” A mere smile can touch a person. “After Springsteen” also, therefore, refers to the “After” that came from that gesture at that show all those years ago, for which I suppose I was thanking him with a gesture thirty-five years on. It’s not that the sentence, “We’ll get that one for you later,” had meaning beyond the literal, but that through the years I gave it greater meaning. This, moreover, has happened time after time and all over the world. A word, a look, a gesture, an acknowledgment, can change a life. This is true for good and bad; we must therefore take our responsibilities seriously: “From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come).”

For we have many “after” moments. Writing on Springsteen, I’ve had in mind a youth in a car with Born to Run on his tape deck. He’s driving a 1973 Mini. The tape deck is wedged precariously between the steering wheel and windshield. Turning corners it’s odds-on that it will slide out and crash down on the passenger side. Listening to “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out,” he’s heading for night school and, he hopes, college. He dreams he might become a student, learn a few “-isms,”
and make something of himself. He imagines he might one day write a book, not daring to believe that the inspiration might become the subject. Above all, he hopes to escape. To that end, he flies to America, works at a Christian camp in Michigan, and the next year at a Jewish camp in the Poconos, just outside Stroudsburg, that may even be the same camp Philip Roth describes in his 2011 novel, Nemesis. (The camp driver picks up Roth’s hero, Bucky Cantor, “at the Stroudsburg station.” They zigzag “into the hills” and bounce through woods to a green vista sloping to “the bright metallic sheen of a vast lake.”26 Camps can be similar, but this fits the memory.) Lacking any sense of direction or much sense of what matters to him, he reads voraciously, and listens to whatever music he encounters. At some point in the summer, a counselor from New Jersey named Dogie lends him Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.

He learns more from riding a Greyhound than he ever learned in school. Traveling the country, he talks to people and eavesdrops, but also retreats into his own world through his Walkman, or personal stereo, in the days before MP3s, iPods, and smartphones. All kinds of American music nuance his melancholy, but he also listens to music from his home country, including the Animals, the Who, the Kinks, the Stones, John Lennon’s Rock ’n’ Roll album, and, on that long trip from Vancouver to New York, Supertramp’s Crime of the Century, haunted by Rudy on his “train to nowhere.” Springsteen’s music becomes part of a continuum that began with “Summertime Blues” and the Everly Brothers’ “Cathy’s Clown” and “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” It doesn’t especially accompany him on the bus journeys. The Springsteen interest, beginning in 1980, is really suffused with thoughts of rainy streets and driving to night school, and setting up home, starting a family, driving to work: his English life. Enrolled at night school to study history, he finds that Born to Run has become synonymous with his studies. It isn’t that he sees any great connection between “hiding on the backstreets” and the Thirty Years’ War, or “flashing guitars just like switch blades” and writing essays about Elizabeth I, but the music works away at him through those night drives along spooky country roads and the traffic lights of towns, and red taillights, and glistening rain. Springsteen, like an older brother, has something to tell him. There’s a saying that the teacher arrives when the pupil needs the lesson. So it’s personal. It’s as personal as it is for all Springsteen’s listeners, and it’s just beginning.

Studying harder, becoming more determined, as spring approaches he views life’s possibilities in ways he might never have envisaged pre-Springsteen. His concern is not really with America, which is part-real, part-imagined, but with a world of friendship and self-definition. Each visit feeds rather than finishes the fantasy. He’s imbued with the country’s nostalgic view of itself, one that influences a generation of Europeans slightly older than him. He’s conscious that many of his contemporaries reject this romanticism in favor of “seventies cynicism” (BTR 262). But that’s okay. He doesn’t expect to fit in: outsider here, outsider there. Autumn brings The River, but Darkness mingles with it, increasing his discontent. “Badlands”—the galvanizing song of his youth—appeals to anyone who kicks at restrictions without quite knowing why. He has “a head-on collision” smashing in his guts. He’s “caught in a crossfire” he doesn’t understand. “Don’t waste your time waiting,” Springsteen says. “You gotta live it every day.” “It” would seem to combine energy, focus, and drive. Looking for those who have “a notion deep inside, that it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive,” out “to find one face” that isn’t looking through him, the youth buys Penguin Classic paperbacks with foreign names and foreign-sounding authors: Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, and not least Le Rouge et le Noir. He reads them on the commute to London for his dead-end job. But above all he has that urge to get out, get away, and “win,” which means to define his life.

There have always been then, looking back, two of us in that third row of Wembley Arena in 1981, the one who was there and the one who continued on through time and lived his life. Equally, in Paris, there was the older man and the young self. As part of that reunion, along with periodic selves in between, we’ve agreed to write this book. We’re much like many others in the crowds across the years. A Danish participant in Springsteen & I stands in an empty stadium talking of his concert experiences. In his final clip, he says his girlfriend turned to him at a show and said that at some point she felt that she was the only one there and that Springsteen was playing just for her. He replied that he knew exactly what she meant. That was the way it felt that night, or how I recall it. Very much the adolescent, very self-absorbed, I felt that there was no one else at Wembley Arena except Springsteen, the band, and me. No wonder they heard me when I yelled “Backstreets” between songs. Around me, in time, others—who’d mysteriously found their way into the arena—took up my call, until eventually he said, and has continued to say, year on year, decade after decade, “We’ll get that one for
you later.”

 

After Springsteen, then: Bruce Springsteen, the passionate pragmatist, takes the lonesome and turns it into a communal experience, and changes lives just as music changed his life. He’d been inspired, and he sought to inspire. Such a perspective is akin to Wordsworth’s lines (quoted by Rorty), that “What we have loved / Others will love, and we will teach them how.”27 To create and to teach, in the broadest sense, are both part of the pragmatist impulse. “If you look at the role of storytellers in communities going back to the beginning of time,” said Springsteen in 2010, “they played a very functional role in assisting the community and making sense of its experience, of the world around them, charting parts of their lives, getting through parts of their lives.” How he might “perform that function best” has been a key motivation through his career (SOS 369). We evaluate writers in terms of their impact in their own day and their legacy, whether through influence on subsequent writers or continued interest in their work. Springsteen’s contemporary impact is obvious, but is he an artist merely of his era or with something to offer eras to come?

Certainly his work deals with mortality. He’s not afraid to face his own demise. I was in Rome the summer of Wrecking Ball. The title song is ostensibly about the leveling of Giants Stadium, and a metaphor: in Springsteen’s words, “an image where something is destroyed to build something new,” but also one that suggests “the flat destruction of some fundamental American values and ideas” over the past three decades (TAD 409). It’s about the way big business wrecks the lives and cultural activities of ordinary Americans. But it’s also a song about transience. Springsteen sings of being raised in Jersey “some misty years ago” and seeing “champions come and go.” Once again we have the “guy in a bar telling his story to the stranger on the next stool” mode familiar from country music (S 100), but the “mister” could as easily be a deity, or time swinging that “wrecking ball.”28 The music wields creativity against the destroyer. Eros faces down Thanatos. Life throws up a finger at death. We’re defenseless in the face of time except for art in its many forms. When Springsteen sings of the filled arena, and of how tonight “all the dead are here,” he calls to mind all those shows from the 1970s through to the present, quelling absence with continuity.

That Wrecking Ball summer, I ran daily, through successive limoncello dawns, the sun cracking the umbrella pines and sharpening the spire of Basilica di Santa Anastasia, from Trastevere to the Forum. With barely a person in sight, I ran through cobbled lanes to the shrieks of gulls, the sound of my own footsteps, and soon the cacophony of the Tiber flowing over the weir near Isola Tiberina. Crossing il Ponte Palatino, its weed-wreathed chunk of Roman bridge crumbling against an ever-bluer sky, I ran through Piazza Bocca della Verità, up the short incline of Via della Greca to the grassy swathe of the Circus Maximus and pounded between the pine shadows along the southern side of this vast arena until I entered the wide stone-paved Via di San Gregorio, passed il Arco di Constantino, and reached the thunderous ruins of what Italians call il Colosseo. In its shadow I scrolled to the album’s title song and began a succession of circuits. The Colosseum is Rome’s most lasting monument to entertainment and to horror. Witness to the deaths of half a million people and two million animals, including nine thousand on the inaugural day, it was a place of unimaginable suffering and cruelty. We’ve moved beyond that. A rock concert is a life force. But it also contends with a death force. It cannot last, and nor can we. Springsteen talks often of how mortality haunts music. Asked about dealing with the death of Danny Federici and other friends, he says that such issues are “in most great rock music.” “The impact of so many great records tells you, ‘Oh, there’s something else, my friend!’” “I hear death in all those early Elvis records,” he says, “in all those spooky blues records. And in records made by young kids—it’s in ‘Thunder Road.’ A sense of time and the passage of time, the passage of innocence. It cuts through all popular music” (TAD 362).29 Such comments mingled with the lyrics of “Wrecking Ball” as I circled the Colosseum and contemplated “youth and beauty” being “given to the dust.” I couldn’t truly envisage the Colosseum in its prime, and was no nearer to Springsteen’s actual life, or to those of his dwindling band, than to the Romans. But there was a connection. He was getting older. I was getting older. The thing to do was to keep running.

Joyce Carol Oates once described running as having “the illusion that it’s timeless.” “I just run,” she said, “and there’s no beginning or end, basically just running. It’s a little like dreaming: dreams in succession.” Ultimately, perhaps the American lonesome and its connection with the work of Bruce Springsteen comes down to the individual listener’s imagination—that narrative dream we experience from infancy through adulthood. Maybe, in my case, it’s a lonesome trail, based on a culture that I’m outside of looking in on: a form of romanticism, but a pragmatic one. “The purpose of art is to help us to live and to die well,” writes Alain de Botton. Art is “a catalyst of appreciation.” It “helps us to develop our powers of empathy by introducing us to people and places far beyond our usual remit.” In sum, it’s “a form of propaganda for the very best values in human nature.”30 If these are valid definitions, then Springsteen’s work fulfills each one. Will the music speak to future generations? It will speak to someone, along with other art, celebrated or obscure. Springsteen sees himself in this continuity. It’s not about “glory days,” which pass in the blink of an eye. It’s certainly not about celebrity. It’s about something “money can’t buy.”31 It’s a process in which we are all invited to participate.

I sat on the grassy bank of the Circus Maximus later one morning, looking out over an arena that was first constructed unimaginable centuries ago. Springsteen, I now know, would play there a few days after Paris, in what was then the future but is now the past. Judging from YouTube, those Springsteen fans I met in the AccorHotels Arena—Gary, Pat and Rachel—saw quite a show. But I knew nothing of that then. I was thinking of Whitman, telling us to look for him “decades hence” beneath our boot soles. I was thinking of an E. M. Forster story, “The Point of It,” about a young man with a heart condition who rows hard because you have to say yes to life. “Death don’t fuck around,” said the shade of Clarence Clemons, nudging me on the grassy bank. “It’s waiting around some corner for all of us.”32 The concerts, I reflected, are ultimately one long concert, and, just as I circled the Colosseum, so they go around, in recording, on a loop, no beginning and no end, just intermittences, born to run and run. Listening to those 1970s shows, from before I personally had given much thought to Springsteen, I find myself telling the ghost of the young singer to look after himself. (I think I’m going to throw up, we recall him shout.) But if he heard my voice in the crowd the ghost might say: don’t you understand yet? That’s the point of it.

“We all wear the things we’ve survived with some honor, but the real honor is in also transcending them,” says Springsteen. “There’s a car, it’s filled with people. The 12-year-old kid’s in the back. So’s the 22-year-old. So is the 40-year-old,” and “nobody’s leaving.” “The doors are shut, locked and sealed, until you go into your box.” What matters is “who’s driving” (TAD 363–64). For me, there’s who I am now and there’s the young man who first heard Springsteen’s music and the increasingly older man in between. I see no reason why non-Americans would consider themselves excluded from the “feeling state” of lonesomeness. But perhaps Springsteen’s international appeal has something to do with perceptions that he seems quintessentially American. Perhaps, too, the solitary wanderings I shared with many a youth, then and now, made me predisposed to accept lonesomeness as a cultural norm. To gaze at the American landscape through a tinted bus window, stopping off here and there across the continent for encounters with friends and strangers, all the while seeking a sense of self and glorying in the solitude of travel, the excitement of arrival, and the melancholy of departure, epitomized the lonesomeness Lewis proclaims to be peculiar to Americans. “I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw / Or heard or felt came not but from myself,” writes Stevens. “And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”33

Deeply aware of the degrees of lonesomeness in all lives, but arguably endemic in American culture, Springsteen’s artistic response emphasized many of the key elements of pragmatism. With his focus on meliorism, on community, on art as action, and on artistic cooperation, with his qualities of openness and individualism, his provisional rather than categorical stance with regard to identities and perspectives, and his willingness to engage with the pressing or contentious issues of the day, he reflects this perspective. His writing has always involved a lonesomeness that he has sought to quell through the communal, and this has produced an obsession with “people trying to find their way in,” and a sustained emphasis on inclusion. This has been, in Dewey’s phrase, Springsteen’s “intellectual work.” All this adds up to a sense that, beyond the power and joy of performance, any writer’s enduring impact, if there’s to be one, will come outside and beyond his or her own life. In the end, therefore, we must consider his achievement not only in his impact on the generations who have experienced his evolving career, but also in the potential legacy of his work and writing beyond his own time.

The upshot of all this, of course, is that my personal sense of “After Springsteen” is that I wouldn’t have had the particular career I’ve had, for better or worse, had Dogie not introduced me to the music in the summer of 1980, had that not been the summer I decided to become some kind of teacher, and had I not driven back and forth to night school to study, and been up front at the June concert. “After Springsteen” is about the direction lives can go in after being introduced to something that galvanizes them. Springsteen’s music and performance were only factors among many others, but they were important. When I think, now, of his music, I think not only of driving through the dark listening to Born to Run but also of walking the rainy streets of my hometown listening to Darkness and The River aged nineteen, of my first year at university trying to play chords from songs on Nebraska (not difficult), of taking off again for America to study in upstate New York listening to Born in the U.S.A., setting up home with Nicki as my fiancée, listening to Tunnel of Love, becoming a parent to Human Touch and Lucky Town, traveling to California listening to Tom Joad, visiting Ground Zero with The Rising, being in Texas when Devils & Dust came out, taking my family to a concert at the time of Magic, running through Trastevere over the Tiber to circuit the Colosseum listening to Wrecking Ball, completing the circle with the River tour in Paris, and finally visiting Asbury Park.

Oh Bruce! In my demented memory, I’m back at Wembley Arena, aged twenty, with few prospects and nothing achieved. I’m in the third row and Springsteen, far younger than I am now, has halted the show. He calls back to a roadie who passes him a book. He saunters forward, guitar hanging behind, leans down and hands it to me. I take it and see the cover. It’s not any book but this book. Springsteen looks straight at me. He seems to want something.

“Would you sign it, please?”

Because he says please, I do. But he doesn’t want it back.

“I told you,” he says mysteriously, “it’s not about me. I’m a mere catalyst. It’s your life. Make something of it.”

I nod, look around at the crowd I’m in, and hand this book, in turn, to you.