NOTES

 

 

PREFACE

1. Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 47. Subsequent endnote and in-text references are to this edition and cited as BTR.

2. William Faulkner, The Paris Review Interviews, ed. Philip Gourevitch (New York: Picador, 2007), vol. 2: 57. See also Robert Santelli, “Afterword,” in Racing in the Street: The Bruce Springsteen Reader, ed. June Skinner Sawyers (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2004), 386: “He was our Faulkner, our Emerson.”

3. Dave Marsh, Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts (New York: Routledge, 2004), 296.

4. See Springsteen, Born to Run, 296. “My ranch house was wall-to-wall orange shag carpet. I know, it was Sinatra’s favorite color, but I could feel a serial killing comin’ on. I decided I needed a permanent home.”

5. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1932; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1972), 378.

6. Bruce Springsteen, “Bruce Springsteen Remembers Madam Marie,” 2 July 2008, Box S15, Bruce Springsteen Special Collection, Monmouth University, NJ.

7. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Alan Russell (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986), 121. This is not an exact translation. The French is: “de ses rêves trop hauts, de sa maison trop êtroite” (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 153. This literally means “of her dreams that were too high, of her house that was too narrow.”

8. Gustave Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet, 22 September 1846, in The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830–1857, ed. Francis Steegmuller (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1980), 79. Flaubert is quoting Colet’s comment back to her.

9. David Kamp, “The Book of Bruce Springsteen,” Vanity Fair, October 2016, 194. See also 195: “One way or another, I’m always rolling that rock.”

10. See Dave Marsh, Bruce Springsteen on Tour: 1968–2005 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 254, and Eric Alterman, “From It Ain’t No Sin to Be Glad You’re Alive: The Promise of Bruce Springsteen,” in Sawyers, ed., Racing in the Street, 375. The fan was evidently New Jersey resident Edwin R. Sutpin Jr. Alterman is citing Gregory J. Volpe, “Rumson Man Inspired Boss,” Asbury Park Press, 31 July 2002. The Alterman extract is taken from the appendix of the Spanish edition (2003).

11. William Styron, Set This House on Fire (New York: Random House, 1960), 10, 18.

12. See Anthony DeCurtis, “Springsteen Returns,” in Bruce Springsteen: The Rolling Stone Files, ed. Parke Puterbaugh et al. (New York: Hyperion, 1996), 382. DeCurtis tells of how, on the first of two nights of acoustic sets for the Christic Institute, 17 November 1991, Springsteen described these drives and consulting the psychiatrist. For other versions of the story, see Marc Eliot with Mike Appel, Down Thunder Road: The Making of Bruce Springsteen (London: Plexus, 1992), 75, and David Remnick, “We Are Alive: Bruce Springsteen at Sixty-Two,” The New Yorker, 30 July 2012, 28–29, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/30/we-are-alive. Eliot quotes Springsteen referring to a psychiatrist. Remnick credits the comments to a psychotherapist. Given Remnick’s direct contact with Springsteen, this may be the more likely. See also Springsteen, Born to Run, 112.

13. Roland Bleiker, “Art After 9/11,” Alternatives 31 (2006): 85–86.

14. Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (1957; rev. ed., New York: Vintage, 1989), 189.

 

INTRODUCTION

1. Paul Valery, Pièces Sur L’Art: Autor de Corot, 1934, epigraph in Simon Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes (London: Allen Lane, 1999): “On doit toujours s’excuser de parler peinture. Mais il y a de grandes raisons de ne pas s’en taire. Tous les arts vivent de paroles.”

2. Robert Hilburn, Corn Flakes with John Lennon: And Other Tales from a Rock ’n’ Roll Life (New York: Rodale, 2009), 85.

3. See Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994). Zeldin’s book is based on oral history and provides portraits of living people and their hopes, desires, and disappointments. They happen to all be French women, but the book’s title is in no way misleading.

4. Martha Nell Smith, “Sexual Mobilities in Bruce Springsteen: Performance as Commentary,” in Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture, ed. Anthony DeCurtis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 197–218; Stewart D. Friedman, Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014), 142; Gavin Cologne-Brookes, “Written Interviews and a Conversation with Joyce Carol Oates,” Studies in the Novel 38, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 554; Matthew Continetti, “A Thousand Springsteens Bloom,” americasfuture.org.; Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Richard Zenith (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2002), 225, 30.

5. Hilburn, Corn Flakes with John Lennon, 85.

6. Bruce Springsteen, Songs (1998; rev. ed. New York: HarperEntertainment, 2003), 164. Subsequent in-text references are to this edition and cited as S. Springsteen speaks of “what it means to be alive” in the documentary Bruce Springsteen: A Secret History, directed by Steven Goldman (BBC, 1998).

7. Bruce Springsteen, “Keynote Speech,” in Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, Encounters, ed. Jeff Burger (New York: Omnibus, 2013), 397. Subsequent in-text references are to this edition and cited as SOS.

8. See, for instance, David R. Shumway, Rock Star: The Making of Musical Icons from Elvis to Springsteen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 192. “The disjuncture between lyrical content and musical presentation,” writes Shumway, “is a common feature of Springsteen’s work.”

9. See Daniel Cavicchi, Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning Among Springsteen Fans (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), 66: “As Fred Schruers wrote in Rolling Stone about his interview with Springsteen, ‘accuse Springsteen of being a star and he’ll flick his hand like he’s just been splashed with pigeon shit.’”

10. Roxanne Harde and Irwin Streight, “Introduction: the Bard of Asbury Park,” in Reading the Boss: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Bruce Springsteen, ed. Roxanne Harde and Irwin Streight (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), 13.

11. Mark Blake, Stone Me: The Wit and Wisdom of Keith Richards (London: Aurum, 2008), 54. Richards evidently made the comment in 1986.

12. See his longer explanation on that page, where he describes how, with his eldest son, “over the years, I’d subtly sent signals of my unavailability, of my internal resistance to incursions upon my time by family members . . . my fortress of solitude, where as usual I felt at home, safe, until, like a bear in need of blood and meat, I’d wake from my hibernation and travel through the house for my drink from the cup of human love and companionship. But I always felt I needed to be able to shut it all off like a spigot.” “The price I paid for the time lost was just that,” he writes elsewhere, “time lost is gone for good” (Born to Run, 311).

13. Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country (1985; rpt. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), 187.

14. For Springsteen’s view of this period, see Born to Run, 326.

15. Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), The Red and the Black, trans. Catherine Slater (Oxford, UK: Oxford World’s Classics, 1991), 443, 406, 520.

16. Cornel Bonca, “How (and How Not) to Write about 9/11,” Modern Language Studies 41, no. 1 (2011): 137; Stendhal, The Red and the Black, 11; Cormac McCarthy. The Road (2006; rpt. London: Picador, 2007), 136; Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre,” in Christopher Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein, eds., The Rorty Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2010), 479: “The imagination endlessly consumes its own artefacts. It is an ever-building, ever-expanding fire”; Friedman, Leading the Life You Want, 148. In a letter of 1813, Stendhal, who seems to have been unimpressed with the play, described Hamlet as “un couillon,” which his biographer translates as “pillock.” See Jonathan Keates, Stendhal (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994), 153.

17. Kevin Lewis, Lonesome: The Spiritual Meanings of American Solitude. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2009, xiii.

18. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925; rpt. New York: Scribner’s, 1953), 130; Emily Dickinson, Poem 288, The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (London: Faber, 1960), 133. Subsequent references are to this edition, cited by poem number only.

19. See Harry and Michael Medved, The Hollywood Hall of Shame: The Most Expensive Flops in Cinema History (London: Angus & Robertson, 1984), 170–85.

20. Dafydd Rees and Luke Crampton, Q Encyclopedia of Rock Stars (New York: Dorling Kindersley, 1996), 535. Mr. Skinner was evidently “a legendary antagonist of long-haired students.”

21. John Lombardi, “St. Boss: The Sanctification of Bruce Springsteen and the Rise of Mass Hip,” Esquire, December 1988, 142; June Skinner Sawyers, “Endlessly Seeking: Bruce Springsteen and Walker Percy’s Quest for Possibility Among the Ordinary,” in Harde and Streight, eds., Reading the Boss, 30; Springsteen refers to his “own localism” as “a strength and something to get away from” in the documentary Bruce Springsteen: In His Own Words, directed by Nigel Cole (Channel 4, UK), 2016. On the (well-known) localism of many of the lyrics, see, especially, Kevin Coyne, “His Home Town,” in Sawyers, ed., Racing in the Street, 366–70.

22. Christopher Phillips and Louis P. Masur, eds., Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 237. Subsequent endnote and in-text references are to this edition and cited as TAD.

23. The Spirit of Radio, Track 5, WBCN-FM, 9 January 1973: “Playing on the radio is something; to know what it’s like in the radio. Just open up the little back and we’re all right in there.”

24. Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in Leaves of Grass (1891–92; rpt. New York: Norton, 1973), 160.

25. Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self (London: HarperCollins, 1988), xiv.

26. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (2001; rpt. London: Flamingo, 2002), 236.

27. John Gardner, “A Novel of Evil,” in Critical Essays on William Styron, ed. Arthur D. Casciato and James L. W. West III (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985), 246.

28. Richard Ford, “The Boss Observed,” Esquire, December 1985, 326–29.

29. See “Introduction: The Bard of Asbury Park,” Roxanne Harde and Irwin Streight’s audacious, light-hearted, but actually rather intriguing comparison of Springsteen and Shakespeare in Reading the Boss, 1–20. The review is by Colin Carmin, Rocky Mountain Review (Spring 2012), 126.

30. Bruce Springsteen, “No Retreat, No Surrender,” Comments at John Kerry Rally in Madison, Wisconsin, 28 October 2004, Common Dreams News Center, Box S15, Bruce Springsteen Special Collection.

31. See Rorty, The Rorty Reader, 416. “When people try to associate Americanism and pragmatism,” writes Rorty, “it is usually only the classical pragmatists whom they have in mind. The so-called neo-pragmatists do not concern themselves much with moral and social philosophy, nor do they see themselves as presenting anything distinctly American.”

32. John J. Sheinbaum, “I’ll Work for Your Love: Springsteen and the Struggle for Authenticity,” in Harde and Streight, eds., Reading the Boss, 240.

33. Marsh, Bruce Springsteen on Tour, 11, 14.

34. Randall E. Auxier, “Prophets and Profits: Poets, Preachers and Pragmatists,” and Heather E. Keith, “Living in ‘My Hometown’: Local Philosophies for Troubled Times,” in Bruce Springsteen and Philosophy: Darkness on the Edge of Truth, ed. Randall E. Auxier and Doug Anderson (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2008), 3–15, 173–82.

35. Robert Coles, Bruce Springsteen’s America: The People Listening, a Poet Singing (New York: Random House, 2003), 43; Jim Cullen, Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (1997; rev. ed., Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), xiv–xv, 125. For a skeptical review of Coles’s conversations with Percy, see David Hajdu, “Tramps Like Who?” New Republic (15 December 2003), newrepublic.com/article/67272/tramps-who. Hajdu challenges the authenticity of Coles’s conversations with Percy, and quotes Will Percy telling him that the attributions are “outrageous.” See also Steven Weiland, Intellectual Craftsmen: Ways and Works in American Scholarship (New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions Publishers, 1991), 86. Coles scholar Weiland defends them, arguing, “some distortion is perhaps inevitable given Coles’ method and purposes and expectations of his readers.” What is not in doubt is that the novelist wrote Springsteen “a fan letter—of sorts.” The letter, along with Springsteen’s eventual response to Percy’s widow, is reprinted in Sawyers, ed., Racing in the Street, 319–20.

36. “Bruce Springsteen: By the Book,” Sunday Book Review, New York Times, 2 November 2014: BR8; 30 October 2014, nyti.ms/1p6nB21.

37. William James, “What Pragmatism Means,” in Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy: Essential Readings and Interpretive Essays, ed. John J. Stuhr (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), 196; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in The Complete Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Ward, Lock and Co., 1889), 15.

38. Sleeve notes, Tracks (1998).

39. Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, 19; Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, trans. Donald Yates, James Irby et al. (1964; rpt. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1987), 266.

40. See Borges, Labyrinths, 269, on Buddhism and the fictional nature of past and future as constructed concepts in the human mind.

41. Ibid., 266.

42. Simon Frith, “The Real Thing—Bruce Springsteen,” in Sawyers, ed., Racing in the Street, 137; Clarence Clemons and Don Reo, Big Man: Real Life and Tales (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2009), 134, 339.

 

CHAPTER ONE

1. Springsteen, in The Ties That Bind, directed by Thom Zimny (New York: Thrill Hill), in The Ties That Bind: The River Collection (Columbia Records, 2015).

2. Wendell Berry, “A Homage to Dr. Williams,” in The Generation of 2000: Contemporary American Poets, ed. William Heyen (Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1984), 11. See also Bryan K. Garman, A Race of Singers: Whitman’s Working-Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 250. Writing specifically about the Tom Joad era and beyond, Garman states that, “to convert democratic promise into reality, Springsteen suggests, individuals must accept social responsibility, practice active citizenship, be vigilant for abuses of power, and subordinate self-interest to the good of the community.”

3. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; rpt. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977), 8: “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”

4. Joyce Carol Oates, (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities (New York: Dutton, 1988), 39–40: “The writer must accept it as a premise of his existence that certain delusions—one of these, in fact, the delusion of ‘self-knowledge’—are necessary or his career; as necessary as delusions of various sorts are, for all of us, generally. The ‘life-lie’ as Ibsen called it, but Ibsen is being rather cruel: why not erect ‘life-ideal’ as a more beneficent term?”

5. Coles, Bruce Springsteen’s America, 43.

6. Lewis, Lonesome, xv, xviii.

7. Ibid., 15–16. In fact this feeling transcends cultures. The Turkish have “hüzün”; the Spanish “melanchonia”; the Portuguese the music of fado, and the word “melancholy” itself can be given a positive spin.

8. See Remnick, “We Are Alive.” See also Phillips and Masur, “Introduction,” in Talk about a Dream, 8. They cite Springsteen using the word “depression” in 1992 to describe his feelings after “the Born in the U.S.A. juggernaut.” Perhaps the most revealing early interview he gave about this was to James Henke, again in 1992. See “Bruce Springsteen: The Rolling Stone Interview,” in Puterbaugh et al., eds., Bruce Springsteen, 401–23, and TAD 151–69. Several biographies address this issue.

9. William Cowper, “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity,” The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Martin Price (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1973); Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (London: Heinemann, 1963); William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (New York: Random House, 1990), 47; Elizabeth Wurtzel, “My Working Class Hero,” Esquire, June 1996, 72.

10. Marsh, Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts, 371; Springsteen to Mikal Gilmore, “Twentieth Anniversary Special,” in Puterbaugh et al., eds., Bruce Springsteen, 295–96.

11. Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys (New York: Dutton, 1996), 148. For an intriguing reading of “Highway Patrolman,” see Jonathan Caspi, “‘Highway Patrolman’: An Application of Sibling Theory and Research,” in Bruce Springsteen and the American Soul: Essays on the Songs and Influence of an American Icon, ed. David Garrett Izzo (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 160–72. Caspi, a teacher of sibling relationship and childhood development courses, suggests that Joe is the older sibling and once again getting to be the hero. Frankie’s behavior, in other words, is not to be separated from Joe’s holier-than-thou attitude.

12. News on Campus, “King’s Connection to the Boss,” Pride (Winter 2011–12): 8. See also Joe De Pugh, “Reminiscence,” 11 May 1979, Box S10, Bruce Springsteen Special Collection.

13. Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King (1959; rpt. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1981), 157;
L. S. Lowry to Edward Mullins, quoted at Government Art Collection, www.gac.gov.uk/lowry.html.

14. Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918; rpt. London: Everyman, 1996), 210.

15. Borges, Labyrinths, 259.

16. Stevan Weine, “On the Edge,” in Izzo, ed., Bruce Springsteen and the American Soul, 215.

17. Cecelia Tichi, High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 102, 83, 87; Lewis, Lonesome, 17, 25, 36.

18. Clinton Heylin, E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (London: Constable, 2012), 22.

19. Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884; rpt. New York: Norton, 1977), 229.

20. See Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 227, 350. Peirce borrowed the term itself from a passage in Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason). Writing of a physician’s need to act on behalf of an endangered patient, Kant explains that the physician may know that his decision is based on a contingent belief. “Such contingent belief, which yet forms the ground for the actual employment of means to certain actions,” Kant entitles “pragmatic belief,” a belief based on a degree of “betting.” Menand also notes, “none of the principle figures who became identified with the term much liked the name.”

21. Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 95, 88.

22. Ibid., 75.

23. Rorty, The Rorty Reader, 421.

24. Quoted in Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 58.

25. Rorty, The Rorty Reader, 446.

26. Giles Gunn, Thinking Across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 6. The phrases in quotation are from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Gunn refers to James and “all his talk about ‘cash values’ and truth as ‘something that pays,’ that saves ‘labor.’”

27. Rorty, The Rorty Reader, 488.

28. John J. Stuhr, “Introduction: Classical American Philosophy,” in Stuhr, ed., Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy, 1–7.

29. Quoted in Heylin, E Street Shuffle, 27.

30. See for, instance, Mikal Gilmore, Nightbeat: A Shadow History of Rock & Roll (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 224, and in Puterbaugh et al., eds., Bruce Springsteen, 436, and Abbe Smith, “The Dignity and Humanity of Bruce Springsteen’s Criminals,” Widener Law Journal 14 (2005): 835.

31. William James, “What Pragmatism Means,” in Stuhr, ed., Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy, 194 (James is paraphrasing Charles Sanders Peirce); Wendell Berry, “Homage to Dr. Williams,” and Marge Piercy, “To Be of Use,” in Heyen, ed., The Generation of 2000, 12, 244.

32. Peter Ames Carlin, Bruce (New York: Touchstone, 2012), 457.

33. Rorty, The Rorty Reader, 418.

34. Ibid., 446.

35. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1997), 102, 13.

36. William James, diary entry, April 30, 1870, quoted in Stuhr, ed., Pragmatism and Classical American Writing, 142. See also William James, “Diary,” in The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 7.

37. William James, “The Will to Believe,” in Stuhr, ed., Pragmatism and Classical American
Writing, 239.

38. See Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 375, and Rorty, The Rorty Reader, 415–16. For Menand, “turn-of-the-century pragmatism” has “deficiencies as a school of thought. One is that it takes interests for granted; it doesn’t provide for a way of judging whether they are worth pursuing apart from the consequences of acting on them,” and it doesn’t address the fact that “wants and beliefs can lead people to act in ways that are distinctly unpragmatic.” Rorty points out that, while “philosophy and politics are not that tightly linked,” and that in fact, “there is no reason why a fascist could not be a pragmatist,” any more than a democrat, the tendency of American pragmatists is toward the democratic. Of Nietzsche and Dewey, for instance, Rorty writes that their “only substantial disagreement” is “about the value of democracy.” He upholds Dewey’s description of pragmatism as “the philosophy of democracy” in that it expresses a “melioristic, experimental frame of mind.”

39. Sawyers, “Introduction,” in Sawyers, ed., Racing in the Street, 1; Greil Marcus, In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977–1992 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 48; Anne Douglas, “Bruce Springsteen and Narrative Rock,” Dissent (Fall 1985): 486; Geoffrey Himes, Born in the U.S.A. (London: Continuum 2005), 71–72; Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980 (Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1982), 166. Springsteen acknowledges, in selecting “Madame George” on “Desert Island Discs,” that without Astral Weeks there would have been, in Springsteen’s example, no “New York Serenade.” “Desert Island Discs” was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 23 December 2016, bbc.in/2gWiz8U. On the more general point about our interconnectedness, see also Dale Maharidge, Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression (2011; rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 85. Maharidge quotes hobo folk singer Utah Phillips’s “Bridges,” depicting time as a river into which we deposit and out of which we collect material. “You do ‘art’ and then let it go into the river,” writes Maharidge. “If you are doing it for the right reason and are very, very lucky, the work gets picked up downstream. It becomes a continuation of a story that must be told, a voice speaking over the decades and centuries.”

40. This has included putting his money where his mouth is, as the various biographies attest, in his support for charities and other social groups within the communities he visits. See, for example, Marsh, Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts, 493–502, and numerous references in Marc Dolan, Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock ’n’ Roll (2012; 2nd ed. New York; Norton, 2013).

41. For a detailed, informed, and highly impressive study of Springsteen’s political engagement, see David Masciotra, Working on a Dream: The Progressive Political Vision of Bruce Springsteen (New York: Continuum, 2010). See also Shumway, Rock Star, 203–4. Shumway thinks “Masciotra claims too much” in arguing for Springsteen’s “progressive political vision,” which he feels “would perhaps be too much to expect of any popular musician,” but cites Wrecking Ball as an exception when noting “how little the recent economic crisis has found expression in popular music.” “Springsteen’s willingness to address the human cost of inequality,” writes Shumway, “continues to set him apart.”

42. Heylin, E Street Shuffle, 184, quotes Springsteen referring, in 1981, to “that fantastic book, American Dreams, Lost and Found by Studs Terkel.” See Studs Terkel, My American Century (New York: New Press, 1997), for selections from Terkel’s many acclaimed books of oral history. The foreword is by Springsteen’s friend and commentator, Robert Coles.

43. Heylin, E Street Shuffle, 6.

44. Cullen, Born in the U.S.A., 132.

45. Warren French, Steinbeck Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1961), 76.

46. Cullen, Born in the U.S.A., 182.

47. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939; rpt. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1992), 570.

48. Ibid., 206.

49. Christopher Sandford, Springsteen: Point Blank (London: Little, Brown, 1999), 147; Pedro Almodóvar, All About My Mother (Sobre mi Madre) (Barcelona: Warner Sogerfilms, 1999).

50. Michael Watts, “Lone Star,” in “Melody Maker” Classic Rock Interviews, ed. Allan Jones (London: Mandarin, 1994), 55; Joyce Carol Oates, You Must Remember This (New York: Dutton,
1987), 401.

51. David Hepworth, Interview with Bruce Springsteen, The Late Show, London Weekend Television Productions, 15 June 1992.

52. Frith, “The Real Thing,” 132.

53. For detailed discussion of this period, see Garman, A Race of Singers, 227–52.

54. See “A Policeman Takes on the ‘41 Shots’ of ‘American Skin,’ ‘Johnny 99,’” in Coles, Bruce Springsteen’s America, 109–42, for a criticism of Nebraska in terms of the emphasis on criminals rather than victims and their families. See also Gilmore, Nightbeat, 222, for a different view on how Nebraska and Tom Joad only superficially resemble one another.

55. See Richard Gray, After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11 (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) for a book-length discussion of literary responses.

56. Bonca, “How (and How Not) to Write About 9/11,” 138.

57. Himes, Born in the U.S.A., 138; Roxanne Harde, “Living in Your American Skin,” Canadian Review of American Studies / Revue Canadienne d’études Américaines 43, no. 1 (2013): 135. Harde is disagreeing with Josh Tyrangiel, whose view is that “what’s missing on The Rising is politics.” See Josh Tyrangiel, “Bruce Rising: An Intimate Look at How Springsteen Turned 9/11 into a Message of Hope,” Time 160, no. 6 (5 August 2002): 52–59.

58. Cullen, Born in the U.S.A., 199; Rorty, The Rorty Reader, 198, 480, 486, 454.

59. Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music (1975; rev. ed. New York: Plume, 2015), 122.

60. Dave Marsh, Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts, 632; Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1966), 66. : is quoting Springsteen in 1987: “Is making the Loud Noise worth it? That’s a question that I feel like I’m constantly asking myself, and the only answer I come up with is, Well, you don’t know unless you try.” Pascal’s thought number 201 is: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.”

61. Philip Roth, Nemesis (2010; rpt. London: Vintage, 2011), 122–23.

 

CHAPTER TWO

1. Coles, Bruce Springsteen’s America, 45; Sandford, Springsteen, 392; Coles, Bruce Springsteen’s America, 45.

2. Richard Ford, “2 Comments,” Wall Street Journal, 20 January 2015, www.wsj.com/articles
/richard-ford-on-bruce-springsteens-wild-billys-circus-story-1421777496; “Rock Springs Eternal: Richard Ford on Bruce Springsteen,” backstreets.com/newsarchive74.html. Ford’s public comments also include “The Boss Observed,” Esquire, December 1985, 326–29, and “Richard Ford Reviews Bruce Springsteen’s Memoir,” New York Times, 22 September 2016, nyti.ms/2d1S058. See also Elinor Ann Walker, “An Interview with Richard Ford,” in Conversations with Richard Ford, ed. Huey Guagliardo (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001), 131–46. In this 1997 interview Ford says that, given that Springsteen’s lyrics, phrasing, and music have influenced him, “that must mean that it or he fits into whatever level of culture being a story writer in America is now.” He also says that “Independence Day” was “probably the first thing” that instigated his novel of that title (131), and that he avoided reference to Springsteen in The Sportswriter because he’d never have been “able to reauthorize the scene” (132). For an extended analysis of Springsteen and Ford, see David N. Gellman, “‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’: Springsteen, Richard Ford, and the American Dream,” in Bruce Springsteen, Cultural Studies, and the Runaway American Dream, ed. Kenneth Womack, Jerry Zolten, and Mark Bernhard (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 7–24.

3. Trouble in the Heartland: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Bruce Springsteen, ed. Joe Clifford (Dublin: Gutter, 2014); Meeting Across the River: Stories Inspired by the Haunting Bruce Springsteen Song, ed. Jessica Kay and Richard Brewer (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005); Tennessee Jones, Deliver Me from Nowhere (Brooklyn: Soft Skull, 2005).

4. Storr, Solitude, 15–19.

5. Ibid., 122–24. See Remnick, “We Are Alive,” 11. Remnick quotes Springsteen saying: “T-Bone Burnett said that rock and roll is all about ‘Daaaaddy!’ It’s one embarrassing scream of ‘Daaaaddy!’ It’s just fathers and sons, and you’re out there proving something to somebody in the most intense way possible.”

6. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (London: W. F. Roper, 1903), 381, quoted in Storr, Solitude, 196.

7. See also Springsteen’s comments on having read “all the Russians,” on “Desert Island Discs,” bbc.in/2gWiz8U.

8. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, ed. Nina Baym et al. (1979; rpt. New York: Norton, 1989, 442). Emerson’s phrase doesn’t appear in all versions of the essay.

9. Dickinson, Poem 280. “And then a Plank in Reason broke / And I plunged down and down / And hit a World at every turn”; Lewis, Lonesome, 174. “For nothing quite so much as the qualities of their respective solitudes,” writes Lewis, do we hold up Whitman and Dickinson as “our crucial forebears in the American tradition.” “No other native poet,” he writes of Whitman, “has done more to open up ‘lonesomeness’” as a way “to signify a positive, ‘up-lifting’ access of illumination and happiness paradoxically experienced” in solitude. Dickinson, in turn, expresses “metaphysical lonesomeness” (24–26, 29, 32, 36).

10. Frederick Douglass, The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845; rpt. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1982), 135.

11. Ibid., 47.

12. Ibid., 56.

13. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; rpt. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1994), 156–57; James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963; rpt. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1964), 42–43; Toni Morrison, Jazz (1992; rpt. London: Picador, 1993), 114.

14. Douglass, Autobiography, 56–58; Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, vi.

15. Alain Locke, “The Ethics of Culture,” in Stuhr, ed., Pragmatism and Classical American Writing, 672–73, 676.

16. George F. Will, The Morning After: American Successes and Excesses 1981–1986 (New York: Prentice Hall, 1987), 11; Eric Alterman, It Ain’t No Sin to Be Glad You’re Alive: The Promise of Bruce Springsteen (1999; 2nd ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 2001), 156; Gavin Martin, “Hey Joad, Don’t Make It Sad . . . (Oh, Go On Then),” in Burger, ed., Springsteen on Springsteen, 218–19.

17. Douglass, Autobiography, 79.

18. Ibid., 84, 87.

19. Ibid., 122.

20. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, trans. Ralph Parker (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1963), 143. The extra three days “are for leap years.”

21. Kathleen Mary Higgins, The Music of Our Lives (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2011), 123–30.

22. Douglass, Autobiography, 79; Michel de Montaigne, “Of Glory,” in The Essays of Montaigne, trans. Charles Cotton (London: Bell, 1913), vol. 2: 337: “Those discourses are, in my opinion, very true and rationale; but we are, I do not know how, double in ourselves, which is the cause that what we believe we do not believe, and cannot disengage ourselves from what we condemn.”

23. Robert Duncan, “Lawdamercy, Springsteen Saves!” in Burger, ed., Springsteen on Springsteen, 90. This is from a story Springsteen would relate during concerts and can be found in several sources. Duncan refers to an introduction to “Growin’ Up” at a 1978 Houston concert.

24. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter: A Romance (1837; rpt. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2012), 7–8.

25. Ibid., 248–49.

26. See Cullen, Born in the U.S.A., 157–89. As a result of his work on Springsteen and Catholicism here, Cullen went on to write a book about other Catholic figures, Restless in the Promised Land: Catholics and the American Dream (Franklin, WI: Sheed & Ward, 2001).

27. Cullen, Born in the U.S.A, 8.

28. Ibid., 250.

29. See Born to Run, 179. Of the trauma of experiencing his father’s drunken tirades, Springsteen writes: “As a child, my nervousness became so great I began to blink uncontrollably, hundreds of time a minute. At school I was called ‘Blinky.’ I chewed all of the knuckles on both of my hands night and day into brown rock-hard calluses the size of marbles. Nope, drinking wasn’t for me.”

30. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851; rpt. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972), 93.

31. Keith Richards, Life (2010; rpt. London: Phoenix, 2011), 36.

32. “Bruce Springsteen: By the Book,” BR8.

33. Marsh, Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts, 615.

34. Melville, Moby-Dick, 95.

35. Eleanor Melville Metcalf, Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 283–84. Melville evidently kept this quotation from Johann Friedrich Schiller’s Don Carlos by his desk.

36. Melville, Moby-Dick, 150.

37. “Bruce Springsteen: By the Book,” BR8.

38. Melville, Moby-Dick, 241.

39. Henry David Thoreau, Walden and “Civil Disobedience,” ed. Owen Thomas (1854; rpt. New York: Norton, 1966), 1–5, 62.

40. Ibid., 5.

41. Marsh, Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts, 631.

42. Thoreau, Walden, 57, 61, 61; see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Live in New York City, DVD, Sony, 2001; Alex Pitofsky, “Springsteen’s Intimations of Mortality,” in Izzo, ed., Bruce Springsteen and the American Soul, 228, reminds us that “the late seventies was the time when he began to shout ‘Are you alive?’ to fire up audiences.”

43. Thoreau, Walden, 214.

44. Gilmore, “Twentieth-Century Anniversary Special,” in Puterbaugh et al., eds., Bruce Springsteen, 298.296.

45. Robert Hilburn, “Out on the Streets,” in Sawyers, ed., Racing in the Street, 97. See also, Marsh, Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts, 323: “I was very distant from my family for quite a while in my early twenties. Not with any animosity; I just had to feel loose.”

46. June Skinner Sawyers, Tougher than the Rest: 100 Best Bruce Springsteen Songs (New York: Omnibus, 2006), 246.

47. Ibid., 246.

48. See Lisa Delmonico, “Queen of the Supermarket: Representations of Working Class Women,” in Izzo, ed., Bruce Springsteen and the American Soul, 51: “Rescue, not gender equality, is Springsteen’s fixation, and feminists can justifiably have a field day noting his infantilization of women by use of sexist pet names such as: baby, girl, little girl, little pretty, little darlin’, little miss, little honey,
little sugar.”

49. Marsh, Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts, 372–73.

50. Coles, Bruce Springsteen’s America, 6, 23.

51. Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap,
1996), 174.

52. “Bruce Springsteen: By the Book,” BR8; Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass, 89.

53. Sawyers, Tougher than the Rest, 240–41. See her whole entry, 238–42, for a detailed discussion of the song and its sources.

54. Ernie Sandonato, “All Aboard,” Box A5, Bruce Springsteen Special Collection.

55. Sawyers, Tougher than the Rest, 242.

56. Marcus, Mystery Train, 116–17: “There is no chance anyone who wants to join will be excluded. Elvis’s fantasy of freedom, the audience’s fantasy, takes on such reality that there is nothing left in the real world that can inspire the fantasy, or threaten it.”

57. Alterman, It Ain’t No Sin to Be Glad You’re Alive, 188; Gilmore, Nightbeat, 221; Springsteen, interview (Channel 4, UK), 18 October 2016. For Springsteen’s response to Reagan’s appropriation attempts see, among other sources, Marsh, Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts, 483–89. I should note that, on the Wrecking Ball version of “Land of Hope and Dreams,” Springsteen sings that “you don’t need no ticket,” you just need to “praise the lord.” This information, however, is contradicted by the
lyrics sheet, which starts with “grab your ticket” and makes no mention of any need to profess religious belief.

58. Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 52–53.

59. Quoted in Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 375; Cologne-Brookes, “Written Interviews,” 548.

60. Colin Burrows, “What Is a Pikestaff?” review of Denis Donoghue’s Metaphor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), London Review of Books 37, no. 8 (23 April 2015): 27. On the question of landscape and travel as metaphor, see Tichi, High Lonesome, 174.

61. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 79; James Baldwin: The Price of a Ticket, directed by Karen Thorsen (Nobody Knows Productions, 1989).

62. William James, “A Pluralistic Universe,” in Stuhr, ed., Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy, 158–59.

63. Gunn, Thinking Across the American Grain, 98–99.

64. Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 31.

65. Paul Nelson, “Springsteen Fever,” in Puterbaugh et al., eds., Bruce Springsteen, 55. Among other sources, for details of Springsteen’s lawsuit filed against Mike Appel, Appel’s counter-lawsuit, and a comment on “The Promise,” see Carlin, Bruce, 224–26. For Appel’s version, see Eliot, Down Thunder Road, 175–228, and elsewhere. Down Thunder Road also contains transcripts of Springsteen’s deposition in an attorney’s office on 16 August 1976 and cross-examination by Leonard Marks, and an appendix of letters and other documentation.

66. See Maureen Orth, Janet Huck, and Peter S. Greenberg, “Making of a Rock Star,” in Sawyers, ed., Racing in the Street, 56. See also Eliot, Down Thunder Road, 186–223 and appendix A, for a transcript of the court proceedings and related documents. “It’s hard to trust anybody anymore,” Springsteen is recorded as saying (189).

67. Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 89, 52.

68. Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (New York: Scribner’s, 1935), 22; F. Scott Fitzgerald, statement read at the Banquet of the International Mark Twain Society, 30 November 1930, in F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli with Judith F. Bauman (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 122: “Huckleberry Finn took the first journey back. He was the first to look back at the republic from the perspective of the west.”

69. Marcus, Mystery Train, 12–13, 127.

70. Storr, Solitude, 28, 197.

71. Twain, Huckleberry Finn, 169, 170. See also 279. In his autobiography, an extract of which appears in the 1977 Norton edition, Twain describes Huck as being a bona fide portrayal of a boyhood acquaintance, Tom Blankenship, who became “a justice of the peace in a remote village in Montana, and was a good citizen and greatly respected.”

72. Lewis, Lonesome, 54.

73. Eddie Cochran was born in Minnesota, but his parents came from Oklahoma.

 

CHAPTER THREE

1. Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, trans. Cedric Belfrage (1973; rpt. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2009), xiv. The fuller quotation is: “one writes out of a need to communicate and to commune with others, to denounce that which gives pain and to share that which gives happiness. One writes against one’s solitude and against the solitude of others. One assumes that literature transmits knowledge and affects the behavior of those who read.” It’s included in this edition of Galeano’s classic study as an introductory excerpt from his 1978 book, Days and Nights of Love and War, trans. Bobbye Ortiz. Open Veins of Latin America took on a new lease of life when the president of Venezuela, Hugo ChÁvez, presented Barack Obama with a copy in 2009.

2. For Springsteen’s comments on McCarthy, see “Bruce Springsteen: By the Book,” BR8.

3. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 79.

4. Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” The Complete Stories (London: Faber, 1990), 132. “No pleasure but meanness,” says the murderer known as the Misfit.

5. See Sawyers, “Endlessly Seeking,” and Michael Kobre, “On Blessing Avenue: Faith, Language, and a Search for Meaning in the Works of Bruce Springsteen and Walker Percy,” in Harde and Streight, eds., Reading the Boss, 23–39, 41–52, and Gellman, “‘Darkness on the Edge of Town,’” in Womack, Zolten, and Bernhard, eds., Bruce Springsteen, Cultural Studies, and the American Dream, 9; Ford, “Rock Springs Eternal.” Ford is “already known to be a Springsteen fan,” the article states, “even if the name of his Pulitzer and PEN/Faulkner award-winning Independence Day were any kind of coincidence.” On O’Connor, see Irwin Streight, “The Flannery O’Connor of American Rock,” in Harde and Streight, eds., Reading the Boss, 53–75. None of the collections discuss Springsteen and either McCarthy or Roth. That intersection between lonesomeness and community is also true of music and the visual arts. Useful further contextualization can be found both in Lewis’s Lonesome and in Tichi’s High Lonesome.

6. John Hammond, John Hammond on Record (New York: Ridge, 1977), 391.

7. Sawyers, “Endlessly Seeking,” 23.

8. Will Percy, “Rock and Read: Will Percy Interviews Bruce Springsteen,” Sawyers, ed., Racing in the Street, 319–20.

9. Kieran Quinlan, Walker Percy: The Last Catholic Novelist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 5, 11, 13.

10. Ibid., 17, 5.

11. Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (1948; rpt. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1994), 30.

12. Walker Percy, “From Facts to Fiction,” in Signposts in a Strange Land (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), 188.

13. Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983; rpt. New York: Picador, 2000), 12–13.

14. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927; rpt. New York: Harvest, 1955), 224: “A brush, the one dependable thing in a world of strife, ruin, chaos.”

15. Rorty, The Rorty Reader, 479–80.

16. Quinlan, Walker Percy, 49–56; Ohio Review, “Transformations of the Self,” in Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates, ed. Lee Milazzo (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1989), 49; Henry James, “The Middle Years” (1893) in Collected Stories (New York: Knopf, 1999), vol. 2: 123. Marsh, Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts, 23.

17. Walker Percy, “How to Be an American Novelist in Spite of Being Southern and Catholic,” in Signposts in a Strange Land, 168–85; John Edward Hardy, The Fiction of Walker Percy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 224, quoted in Quinlan, Walker Percy, 226.

18. Walker, “An Interview with Richard Ford,” 132.

19. Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Norton, 1958), 12; Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (1942; Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1975), 2.

20. Albert Camus, The Fall, trans. Justin O’Brien (1956; London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957), 66; Richard Ford, The Sportswriter (1986; rpt. London: Flamingo, 1987), 22, 47, 69.

21. Ford, The Sportswriter, 360, 14.

22. See Sandford, Springsteen, 195. Sandford states that Springsteen first sought therapy in the winter of 1981–82.

23. Ford, The Sportswriter, 15, 111, 50, 52, 180.

24. Carlin, Bruce, 339.

25. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up,” in The Crack-Up with other Pieces and Stories (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1965), 39.

26. Ford, The Sportswriter, 104, 230, 38, 73, 59, 103.

27. Ibid., 316.

28. Ibid., 276.

29. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1973), 72.

30. Ford, The Sportswriter, 44, 53, 250.

31. John Dewey, manuscript page, John Dewey Papers, Special Collections, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, 102/58/10, quoted in Stuhr, ed., Pragmatism and Classical American Writing, 434.

32. Ford, The Sportswriter, 87, 103, 318, 380.

33. Ibid., 381.

34. Albert Camus, “Reflections on the Guillotine,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. Justin O’Brien (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1961), 125–65; Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1941; rpt. New York: Bantam, 1966); George Orwell, “A Hanging,” in Why I Write (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2004), 95–101 (quoting 97–99).

35. William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, III, i, 127–30; Stendhal, The Red and the Black, 526; Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Jessie Coulson (Oxford, UK: Oxford World’s Classics, 1980), 152; Richard Wright, Native Son (1940; rpt. London: Vintage, 2000), 392, 304.

36. Stendhal, The Red and the Black, 501.

37. Camus, “Reflections on the Guillotine,” 141–42.

38. Wright, Native Son, 374.

39. Ibid., 304.

40. Ibid., 306.

41. Ibid., 426.

42. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2011; rev. ed. New York: New Press, 2012), 162.

43. Wright, Native Son, 270.

44. Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 174.

45. See “Bruce Springsteen: By the Book,” BR8, and Steve Kandell, “The Feeling’s Mutual: Bruce Springsteen and Win Butler Talk about the Early Days, the Glory Days, and Even the End of Days,” in Burger, ed., Springsteen on Springsteen, 323, 326. Butler, of Canadian band Arcade Fire, gives Springsteen a copy of Orwell’s Why I Write, which contains “A Hanging.” Orwell describes being shot in Homage to Catalonia (1938; rpt. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1966), 177.

46. Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States (1993; rpt. London: Fount, 1996); Smith, “The Dignity and Humanity of Bruce Springsteen’s Criminals,” 794.

47. Black Lives Matter, blacklivesmatter.com.

48. Joyce Carol Oates, ed., Prison Noir (New York: Akashic, 2014), 14.

49. Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 6.

50. Ibid., 14, 216.

51. Smith, “Dignity and Humanity in Bruce Springsteen’s Criminals,” 789–91.

52. Ibid., 794, 798.

53. Springsteen in Zimny, director, The Ties That Bind.

54. Camus, “Reflections on the Guillotine,” 137.

55. Prejean, Dead Man Walking, 3–4.

56. Wright, Native Son, 443.

57. For Springsteen’s comments on Roth, see “Bruce Springsteen: By the Book,” BR8. American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain “just knocked me off my ass,” Springsteen said to Ken Tucker in 2003 (TAD 279).

58. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Murder She Wrote,” Studies in the Novel, 38, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 544–45; Greg Johnson, Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates (New York: Dutton, 1998), xviii; Frederic Oates in conversation with the author, July 1998; Joyce Carol Oates, Fabulous Beasts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 83. The poem is reprinted in Invisible Woman: New and Selected Poems, 1970–1982 (Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1982), 81–82.

59. Oates, “The Nature of Short Fiction; or, the Nature of My Short Fiction,” preface to Handbook of Short Story Writing, ed. Frank A. Dickson and Sandra Smythe (Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest,
1970), xii.

60. Johnson, Invisible Writer, 40, 263.

61. Joyce Carol Oates, The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age (New York: Ecco, 2015), 132.

62. Johnson, Invisible Writer, 15, 108, 108.

63. O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” 117–33. The statement is on 132.

64. Tichi, High Lonesome, 7.

65. Joyce Carol Oates, “High Lonesome,” High Lonesome: Selected Stories 1966–2006 (New York: Ecco, 2006), 118, 145, 150, 152, 153.

66. José Saramago, All the Names, trans. Margaret Jull Costa (New York: Harvest, 1999), 14.

67. Carlin, Bruce, 240–41.

68. Joyce Carol Oates, The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art (New York: Ecco, 2003), 24; Oates, unpublished response to the author’s written interview question, July 1994.

69. Oates, (Woman) Writer, 3–4; W. S. Di Piero, Memory and Enthusiasm: Essays, 1975–1985 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 255.

70. Carlin, Bruce, 243; Oates, (Woman) Writer, 4–6, 13. 19, 158, 24; Orth, Huck, and Greenberg, “Making of a Rock Star,” in Sawyers, ed., Racing in the Street, 56; Eliot, Down Thunder Road, 199.

71. Oates, (Woman) Writer, 25, 44, 52.

72. Oates, The Lost Landscape, 237.

73. Cologne-Brookes, “Written Interviews,” 549; Gates, “Murder She Wrote,” 544.

74. Cologne-Brookes, “Written Interviews,” 553–54, 555; Carlin, Bruce, 265–66.

75. See Marsh, Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts, 414, for Springsteen’s reference to this: “The John Wayne character can’t join the community, and that movie always moved me tremendously.”

76. Tichi, High Lonesome, 126.

77. Robert Coles, quoted in Lewis, Lonesome, 114. The work of Hopper and Springsteen also share the risk of over-exposure, being counterproductive to whatever their original aims may have been. See Springsteen’s comments in Steve Pond, “Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel Vision,” in Puterbaugh et al., eds., Bruce Springsteen, 329: “The size is tricky, it’s dangerous. You can become purely iconic, or you can become just a Rorschach test that people throw up their own impressions upon, which you always are to some degree anyway. With size, and the co-option of your images and attitudes—you know, you wake up and you’re a car commercial or whatever. And the way I think the artist deals with that is just reinvention.”

78. Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America: Or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (1936; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1973), 53.

 

 

* * *

CHAPTER FOUR

1. Garry Mulholland, Popcorn: Fifty Years of Rock ’n’ Roll Movies (London: Orion, 2010), 16.

2. Rees and Crampton, Q Encyclopedia of Rock Stars, 201. There are many sources now available about the facts of the crash. For newspaper headlines from the time, see www.eddie-cochran.info/the_crash.htm.

3. William Faulkner, comment on the Emmett Till murder, 1955. See also Requiem for a Nun (1951; rpt. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1987), 81: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

4. Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again (1940; rpt. New York: Harper Perennial, 1978), 391–92.

5. Borges, Labyrinths, 262.

6. Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” 160.

7. Hilburn, Corn Flakes with John Lennon, 232; Gene Santoro, Highway 61 Revisited: The Tangled Roots of American Jazz, Blues, Rock, & Country (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), 225.

8. Marsh, Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts, 288.

9. Maharidge, Someplace Like America, 75.

10. Marsh, Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts, 290.

11. See Gilmore, Nightbeat, 71. Gilmore quotes Springsteen’s remarks to Bob Dylan when Dylan was being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: “When I was fifteen and I heard ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ for the first time, I heard a guy like I’ve never heard before or since. A guy that had the guts to take on the whole world and made me feel like I had ’em too. . . . To steal a line from one of your songs, whether you like it or not, ‘You was the brother that I never had.’”

12. Ibid., 60, 71. For one striking example of Dylan’s evident indifference to his audience, see Erik Kirschbaum, Rocking the Wall: Bruce Springsteen: The Berlin Concert That Changed the World (New York: Berlinica, 2013), 66. Dylan played behind the Iron Curtain on 17 September 1987, a few months before Springsteen’s concert for 300,000, “but those who saw his lackluster performance that evening in East Berlin described the show as a massive disappointment. Dylan was anything but inspirational. He did not endear himself, either, by leaving quickly with nary a wave goodbye after playing just 14 songs in a little over an hour.”

13. Alterman, It Ain’t No Sin to Be Glad You’re Alive, 168–70.

14. Ibid., 211.

15. Clemons, Big Man, 239.

16. Bruce Springsteen: “You can change a life in three minutes with the right song,” The Guardian, Sunday, 30 October 2016, theguardian.com. Springsteen may have picked up this repeated gesture from Iggy Pop. See Steve Waksman, This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 101: “Iggy Pop did not view the rock audience as an organic whole. He was motivated to break through the typically guarded rock-and-roll proscenium by a refusal to see his audience strictly as a mass.” “Mass recognition is not what’s important to me, what’s important is individual recognition,” he told Dave Marsh. The cover of Waksman’s book features a photograph of Pop pointing at an individual in the crowd.

17. Higgins, The Music of Our Lives, 114, 121.

18. Gilmore, Nightbeat, 220; Rob Kirkpatrick, Magic in the Night: The Words and Music of Bruce Springsteen (2007; 2nd ed. 2009), 110–11.

19. See, for instance, Cavicchi, Tramps Like Us, 90: “Many performers have mentioned the high they get from performing; Springsteen used to say that the only place he felt right was on stage. Music listeners, including Springsteen fans, likewise report a similar kind of high, which includes feelings of exhilaration, connection with the performer, and a sense of unity with other participants.”

20. “Random Notes,” in Puterbaugh et al., eds., Bruce Springsteen, 424; Eliot, Down Thunder
Road, 241.

21. Frith, “The Real Thing,” 131, 134, 138; Jim Farber, “Springsteen’s Video Anthology/1978–88,” in Puterbaugh et al., eds., Bruce Springsteen, 344. See Springsteen, “Keynote Speech,” in Burger, ed., Springsteen on Springsteen, 385: “We live in a post-authentic world. And today authenticity is a house of mirrors. It’s all just what you’re bringing when the lights go down. It’s your teachers, your influences, your personal history; and at the end of the day, it’s the power and purpose of your music that still matters.”

22. David Pattie, Rock Music in Performance (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), vii: “The idea that it is somehow possible to capture a moment of authenticity through the medium of performance seems paradoxical at best.”

23. See Kurt Loder, “Tunnel of Love LP Due from Springsteen,” in Puterbaugh et al., eds., Bruce Springsteen, 285, on Appel’s idea of a traveling tent show.

24. Waksman, This Ain’t the Summer of Love, 72; Philip Auslander, Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 4; Nelson, “Springsteen Fever,” in Puterbaugh et al., eds., Bruce Springsteen, 51. Waksman cites Auslander’s layer theory (73). Nelson suggested in 1978 that Springsteen had “carefully cultivated the Method actor’s idiosyncratic timing.”

25. See also Roxanne Harde and Irwin Streight, ed., “Introduction: the Bard of Asbury Park,” in Harde and Streight, eds., Reading the Boss, 1–7.

26. Eliot, Down Thunder Road, 105. The information about the lighting is from a post by theseshadows, 12 September 2005, www.greasylake.org/the-circuit/index.php?/topic/38098-born-to-run-30th-anniversary-package/. The Hammersmith Odeon concert is available as part of the Born to Run box set.

27. Fred Schruers, “Bruce Springsteen and the Secret of the World,” in Puterbaugh et al., eds., Bruce Springsteen, 112.

28. Christopher Phillips, “The Real World,” in Sawyers, ed., Racing in the Street, 380.

29. Storr, Solitude, 123, 129; Heylin, E Street Shuffle, 220.

30. See Schruers, “The Boss Is Back,” and Debby Bull, “The Summer’s Biggest Tours Get Under Way,” in Puterbaugh et al., eds., Bruce Springsteen, 99, 160. For the physical toll paid over the decades, see Springsteen, Born to Run, 492–93. “Probably since my forties, some physical problem had come along with every tour,” he writes. “One tour it’s your knee, then it’s your back, then it’s tendinitis in your elbows from all the hard strumming.” Most serious of all was a near-paralysis of his left arm in his sixties that turned out to be “cervical disc problems” in his neck, leading to major surgery and temporary voice loss.

31. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (1913; rpt. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1981), 63, 85, 101, 64; Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 111: “I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain!” writes Camus. “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

32. Di Piero, Memory and Enthusiasm, 238–39.

33. Ibid., 255–56. Springsteen refers on “Desert Island Discs” to wearing his father’s work clothes (bbc.in/2gWiz8U). For a more cynical view of this, see Frith, “The Real Thing,” 132: “Bruce Springsteen is a millionaire who dresses as a worker.” “He makes music physically, as a manual worker.”

34. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (1962; New York: Noonday, 1984), 15, cited in Waksman, This Ain’t the Summer of Love, 23.

35. Henke, “Bruce Springsteen,” in Puterbaugh ed., Bruce Springsteen, 409, and TAD 158: “I had locked into what was pretty much a hectic obsession, which gave me enormous focus and energy and fire to burn, because it was coming out of pure fear and self-loathing and self-hatred . . . It’s funny, because the results of the show or the music might have been positive for other people, but there was an element of it that was abusive for me. Basically, it was my drug.”

36. On the “Sad Eyes” segue on the 1978 Winterland recording, see also Charles R. Cross, “The Promise,” in Sawyers, ed., Racing in the Street, 178–81. Heylin, E Street Shuffle, 135, quotes the “sad eyes” segue at length.

37. Eliot, Down Thunder Road, 104.

38. Kamp, “The Book of Bruce Springsteen,” 203.

39. Carlin, Bruce, 457, 239, 458. There’s also the story a factory worker tells in Springsteen & I of traveling from Britain to New York for a concert and being a little disappointed with the seats at the back, and of how someone came up to him who worked for Springsteen and got him the best seats in the house.

40. Caryn Rose, Raise Your Hand: Adventures of an American Springsteen Fan in Europe (New York: Till Victory, 2012), 12. Rose invites us to “compare the energy in front of the stage in Barcelona to the loud but mostly stationary crowd in 2001’s Live in New York City DVD.”

41. See Rose, Raise Your Hand, 101–2, 111, on the differing responses to Springsteen depending upon whether he’s playing in the United States or elsewhere.

42. Marcus, In the Fascist Bathroom, 161; Springsteen, “Desert Island Discs,” bbc.in/2gWiz8U.

43. John Lahr, “Greaser and Rah-Rahs,” London Review of Books 39, no. 3 (2 February 2017): 27.

44. Michael Hann, “Bruce Springsteen: ‘You can change a life in three minutes with the right song,’” The Guardian, Sunday, 30 October 2016. www.theguardian.com › Arts › Music › Bruce Springsteen.

45. Pattie, Rock Music in Performance, 20, 35, 39. Pattie is quoting from Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetic of Rock (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996), 76.

46. Shumway, Rock Star, 5; Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (1999; rev. ed. 2008), 183, 10, 184, 25. See also Santoro, Highway 61 Revisited, 226. On his Tom Joad tours, Springsteen was deliberately no more than a “small figure on stage.”

47. Thomas Gencarelli, “Popular Music and the Hero/Celebrity,” in Susan J. Drucker and Robert S. Cathcart, eds., American Heroes in a Media Age (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 1994), 298.

48. When I contacted Giles, he told me to view the concert on YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch
?v=DIZ2-Gn3TC0). The two of us are not only briefly visible during Springsteen’s walk-around but if you freeze the frame at 2 minutes 49 seconds you’ll find proof of my comradely gesture (aka embarrassing moment). The whole ‘encounter’ is between 2.49 and 2.53 seconds. More importantly, he told me, basically a stranger, the following: “I’m actually a widower. Lost my wife December 2015. Springsteen’s music helped me during the long illness and has certainly helped since. I went to eight shows that year. It was something I promised myself I would do during the dark times.”

49. For another take on this, see Auslander, Liveness, 76, paraphrasing Theodore Gracyk: “The individual listener has the opportunity to commune with fellow fans and to experience an illusory bond with the performer.”

50. Hilburn, Corn Flakes with John Lennon, 83.

51. Lewis, Lonesome, 40; David Bromwich, “The Novelists of Every Day Life,” in The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, ed. Morris Dickstein (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 370–76; Michael and Ariane Batterberry, “Focus on Joyce Carol Oates,” in Milazzo, ed., Conversations, 46; Lewis Rowell, “Thinking Time and Thinking about Time in Indian Music,” Communication and Cognition 19, no. 2 (1986): 233, cited in Higgins, The Music of Our Lives, 121.

52. Wallace Stevens, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (London: Faber, 1955), 524.

53. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Complete Prose Works, 311; Lewis, Lonesome, 91.

54. Borges, Labyrinths, 282–83.

 

CHAPTER FIVE

1. Himes, Born in the U.S.A., 60, 81; Frith, “The Real Thing,” 139; Sandall was speaking as part of David Hepworth’s interview with Springsteen, The Late Show, London Weekend Television Productions, 15 June 1992. 1992; Ian Collinson, “A Land of Hope and Dreams? Bruce Springsteen & America’s Political Landscape from The Rising to Wrecking Ball,” Social Alternatives 33, no. 1 (2014): 68; Alex Pitofsky, “Springsteen’s Intimations of Mortality,” in Izzo, ed., Bruce Springsteen and the American Soul, 230–32. Other examples, taken from Sawyers, ed., Racing in the Street, include Martin Scorsese, who refers to Springsteen, at a time of punk and new wave, as “something else—deeply romantic, even extravagantly so” (xiii). See also Simon Frith, Taking Popular Music Seriously: Selected Essays (Burlington, VT: Ashgate 2007), 271: “Realism inevitably means a non-romantic account of social life,” he argues, merging the two, “and a highly romantic account of human nature.” But here, too, the word sounds pejorative.

2. Lester Bangs, “Hot Rumble in the Promised Land,” in Sawyers, ed., Racing in the Street, 75. Bangs continues: “he is so romantic, in fact, that he might do well to watch himself as he comes off this crest and settles into success—his imagery is already ripe, and if he succumbs to sentiment or sheer grandiosity it could well go rotten” (77).

3. Stuhr, “Introduction,” in Stuhr, ed., Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy, 3; Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 236, 330.

4. That judgment seems clear from his view that Springsteen, at least at that time (pre–Tom Joad, but not Darkness, The River, or Nebraska) was depicting a “folksy America that was being dealt with realistically back in the thirties.” For many, this might seem a contentious comment in any case; there’s nothing folksy about those latter three albums, out when the comment was made, and no couples running away into the sunset, though plenty of doomed yearning to do so.

5. For a detailed study of this, see Russell B. Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Goodman has chapters on the links between the Romantics and Emerson, James, and Dewey.

6. Marsh, Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts, 257.

7. Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 183; Gilmore, Nightbeat, 211.

8. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 299–300; Stuhr, “Introduction,” in Stuhr, ed., Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy, 3; Joyce Carol Oates. New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (1974; rpt. London: Victor Gollancz, 1976), 246.

9. See Bryan K. Garman, “The Ghost of History: Bruce Springsteen, Woody Guthrie, and the Hurt Song,” in Sawyers, ed., Racing in the Street, 223. Nevins and Commager’s small, dated volume was just a start, of course. Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980), among countless other books, added nuance.

10. Carlin, Bruce, 201.

11. See Christa Wolf, The Reader and the Writer: Essays, Sketches, Memories, trans. Joan Becker (Berlin: Seven Seas, 1977), 41–44.

12. Daniel Wolff, 4th of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005), 4.

13. See also Springsteen’s comment to James Henke on guitars and other paraphernalia in Talk About a Dream, 405: “That’s part of the magic trick, right? That’s the magician’s tools.”

14. Gray, After the Fall, 12.

15. Stevens, “The Motive for Metaphor,” in Collected Poems, 288.

16. Herman Melville, “The March into Virginia, Ending in the First Manassas,” Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (New York: Harper, 1866), 22.

17. For further thoughts on Springsteen in relation to Keith’s song, see Bryan Garman’s discussion of The Rising in “Models of Charity and Spirit: Bruce Springsteen, 9/11, and the War on Terror,” in Music in the Post-9/11 World, ed. Jonathan Ritter and J. Martin Daughtry (London: Routledge, 2007), 71–89. Garman contrasts “City of Ruins” with “Red, White and Blue,” noting that, “in this evocation, Springsteen prays not for the nation, but for ‘this world,’ a visionary act that departs from the jingoistic rhetoric of both the American president and Toby Keith” (81).

18. Rorty, The Rorty Reader, 415–16, 444, 476–79. What I call pragmatic romanticism, Rorty calls “romantic utilitarianism.” He describes the pragmatist rejection of truth beyond language as “romantic polytheism”—the belief in multiple possibilities, in this case that truth can take many forms.

19. “Bruce Springsteen: By the Book,” BR8.

20. Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1961), 766–68.

21. Ibid., 771.

22. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 772–73.

23. William James, Lecture VI, “Pragmatism’s Concept of Truth,” in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York: Longmans, 1946), 201.

24. Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2008; rpt. London: Picador, 2011), 319. Orpheus, for instance, Russell tells us, hadn’t so prominent an addiction to music in the earlier legends; “primarily he was a priest and a philosopher” (37); the other references are to Plato’s Republic, where music stands for anything related to the muses, and is to be forbidden (126–27); to the links between mathematics and music traceable to the disciples of Pythagoras, and Puritan objections to music; and to Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, who wrote of the link between “the harmony of the Intellectual Realm” and “the harmony in sensible sounds” (295). It should be noted that James only makes one reference to music in Principles of Psychology (Sacks, Musicophilia, 319). For the record, as it were, Dewey joined them in having “little interest in, or appreciation of, music.” See Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition, 117.

25. See Alterman, It Ain’t No Sin to Be Glad You’re Alive, 21. Springsteen’s first gig ever, at Woodhaven Swim Club, 1965, ended with Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.”

26. Higgins, The Music of Our Lives, xiv. See also 109: “Some depressed people can find a beautiful, sunny day offensive. One’s empirical response to art, as aestheticians since Hume have noted, may be aberrant because of one’s particular circumstances. But the dynamic features of music and certain features of performance and its effect that listeners commonly recognize do provide a basis for claiming that the emotional character is intersubjective and not arbitrary.”

27. William James, “Humanism and Truth,” from The Meaning of Truth, in Selected Papers on Philosophy (London: Dent, 1917), 222: “Truth we conceive to mean everywhere not duplication but addition; not the constructing of inner copies of already complete realities, but rather the collaborating with realities so as to bring about a clearer result.”

28. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (1961; rpt. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 56–57: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. . . . The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which I alone understand) mean the limits of my world.”

29. Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984; rpt. London: Pan, 1985), 121; Carlin, Bruce, 195.

30. Joyce Carol Oates, “George Bellows’ ‘Mrs. T. in Cream Silk, No. 1’ (1919–23),” in Tenderness (Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1996), 84: “Time?—devours us / in the name of wisdom.”

31. Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 23. What you in fact discover as the years pass, Barnes continues, is “that life is not a choice between murdering your way to the throne or slopping back in a sty, that there are swinish kings and regal hogs; that the king may envy the pig; and that the possibilities of the not-life will always change tormentingly to fit the particular embarrassments of the lived life” (121). As Springsteen put it to Mikal Gilmore: “One of the byproducts of fame is you will be trivialized, and you will be embarrassed. You will be, I guarantee it” (“Twentieth Anniversary Special,” in Puterbaugh et al., eds., Bruce Springsteen, 297).

32. Carlin, Bruce, 162.

33. John Rockwell, “New Dylan From Jersey? It Might as Well Be Springsteen,” in Puterbaugh et al., eds., Bruce Springsteen, 21.

34. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, ed. David Berman, trans. Jill Berman (London: Dent, 1995), 84.

35. Ibid., 74.

36. Ibid., 84–85; Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 88. See also Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, 162–72. For Schopenhauer, music is the one art form that, rather than reflecting this “will,” embodies it. “This is why the effect of music is so much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts, for they speak only of the shadow while music speaks of the essence” (164). When Springsteen refers to his music as not an attempt to “recreate the experience” but “to recreate the emotions and the things that went into the action being taken” (TAD 206), and extols the art over the individual artist as a person, he’s offering versions of other points that Schopenhauer makes. “The composer reveals the inner nature of the world, and expresses the most profound wisdom, in a language which his reasoning faculty does not understand,” he writes. “Thus in the composer, more than in any other artist, the person is entirely separated and distinct from the artist” (167). Springsteen’s lyrics may reflect aspects of his life, but the music itself—as he shows in paying homage to many other musicians—eventually belongs to no one.

37. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, 37.

38. See Charles R. Cross et al., Backstreets: Springsteen, the Man and His Music (New York: Harmony, 1989), 47: “For years the Circuit was the place to be seen and to see others—especially if you had a hot set of wheels. You can’t do it fast—the traffic lights are tuned to stop speeding.”

39. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957; rpt. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972), 10, 94, 97.

40. Samuel R. Bagenstos, “The Promise Was Broken: Law as a Negative Force in Bruce Springsteen’s Music,” Widener Law Journal 14 (2005): 837–45. Bagenstos describes this as Springsteen’s “most despairing song” (837), and the invocation of his “greatest anthem of teenage escapism” as its “most powerful element” (839).

41. William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807; rpt. in The Oxford Anthology of English literature: Romantic Poetry and Prose, ed. Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1973), 176.

42. Heylin, E Street Shuffle, 196. Springsteen describes “Stolen Car” as a “ghost story.”

43. Gilmore, “Twentieth Anniversary Special,” in Puterbaugh et al., eds., Bruce Springsteen, 298.

 

CHAPTER SIX

1. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (Oxford, UK: Oxford World’s Classics 1998), 302: “Everyone, knowing intimately all the complexities of his own circumstances, involuntarily assumes that these complexities and the difficulty of clearing them up are peculiar to his own personal condition, and never thinks that others are surrounded by similar complexities.” Ironically, Tolstoy’s oversimplifies the matter in a way that also, paradoxically, seems to reinforce his point—making assumptions about everyone else while assuming his own mind to be more complex.

2. Patrick White, Flaws in the Glass: A Self-Portrait (1981; rpt. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1983), 20.

3. See also Gilmore, Nightbeat, 220: “Springsteen seemed to step back from rock & roll’s center at the same moment that he won it.”

4. Peter Knobler, with Greg Mitchell, “Who Is Bruce Springsteen and Why Are We Saying All These Wonderful Things about Him?” in Sawyers, ed., Racing in the Street, 38.

5. Patrick Humphries and Chris Hunt, Bruce Springsteen: Blinded by the Light. London: Plexus, 1985.

6. David Fricke, “The Long and Winding Road,” and Gilmore, “Twentieth Anniversary Special,” in Puterbaugh et al., eds., Bruce Springsteen, 245, 297

7. Bobbie Ann Mason, Elvis Presley (2002; rpt. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2007), 121; Oates, (Woman) Writer, 384.

8. Eduardo Galeano, Soccer in Sun and Shadow, trans. Mark Fried (1997; rpt. New York: Nation, 2013), 233; Nicholas Dawidoff, “The Pop Populist,” in Sawyers, ed., Racing in the Street, 248. Of the Born in the U.S.A. era and images, specifically the album cover, Springsteen said in 1996 that he “was probably working out” his “own insecurities.” “That particular image,” he continues, “is probably the only time I look back over pictures of the band and it feels like a caricature to me” (TAD 203).

9. Emanuel Swedenborg was an eighteenth-century man of science who became a theologian. Swedenborgianism, in Louis Menand’s words, “was a religion for liberals” (The Metaphysical Club, 89).

10. John D. McDermott, “William James,” in Stuhr, ed., Pragmatism and Classical American Writing, 141–42; Erin McKenna and Scott Pratt, “Living on the Edge: A Reason to Believe,” in Auxier and Anderson, eds., Bruce Springsteen and Philosophy, 163. McKenna and Scott discuss McDermott’s own contemporary pragmatist philosophy in more detail, and with regard to Springsteen.

11. Lahr, “Greaser and Rah-Rahs,” 27; Maharidge, Someplace Like America, x, 78.

12. Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (New York: Little, Brown, 2015), 13, 248, 255.

13. Ibid., 322, 80.

14. Cavicchi, Tramps Like Us, 77, 142, 14.

15. Stendhal, The Red and the Black, 348.

16. McDermott, “William James,” in Stuhr, ed., Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy, 142–43.

17. James Henke, “Bruce Springsteen: The Rolling Stone Interview,” in Puterbaugh et al., eds., Bruce Springsteen, 406, and TAD 155.

18. Clemons, Big Man, 46, 254, 47.

19. Edwin T. Arnold, ed., “The William Styron–Donald Harington Letters,” Southern Quarterly 40, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 118.

20. Alan Rauch, “Bruce Springsteen and the Dramatic Monologue,” American Studies 29, no. 1 (1988): 31, 33. See Michael Ventimiglia, “Bruce Springsteen or Philosophy,” in Auxier and Anderson, eds., Bruce Springsteen and Philosophy, 191–92, for a solid argument that even this character is not naive.

21. Rosalie Zdzienicka Fanshel, “Beyond Blood Brothers: Queer Bruce Springsteen,” Popular Music 32, no. 3 (October 2013): 377, 365, 379; Auslander, Performing Glam Rock, 33, 234. In the lengthy live renditions of the song in the 1970s, where Springsteen includes an extended segue into what will eventually become “Drive All Night,” for instance in Atlanta and Cleveland in 1978, Terry is clearly female. For further discussion, see Smith, “Sexual Mobilities in Bruce Springsteen,” in DeCurtis, ed. Present Tense, 197–218. For a contrasting perspective, see Will, The Morning After, 10. Will’s assessment, on attending a 1984 concert, was that “there is not a smidgen of androgyny in Bruce Springsteen.”

22. McKenna and Pratt, “Living on the Edge,” in Auxier and Anderson, eds., Bruce Springsteen and Philosophy, 170.

23. See Henke, “Bruce Springsteen,” in Puterbaugh et al., eds., Bruce Springsteen, 407, 410, and TAD 156–58: “People think because you’re so good at one particular thing, you’re good at many things. And that’s almost always not the case.” “I reached an age where I began to miss my real life—or to even know that there was another life to be lived. I mean, it was almost a surprise. First you think you are living it. You got a variety of different girlfriends and then, ‘Gee, sorry, gotta go now.’”

24. Nelson, “Springsteen Fever,” in Puterbaugh et al., eds., Bruce Springsteen, 56.

25. Springsteen, in Zimny, director, The Ties That Bind.

26. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, trans. Richard Freeborn (Oxford, UK; Oxford World’s Classics), 104.

27. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 375.

CHAPTER SEVEN

1. Tess Gallagher, “Borrowed Strength,” in The Generation of 2000, ed. Heyen, 56; Dorothy Allison, “Believing in Literature,” in Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1994), 181; Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 161.

2. Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1988), 29; John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), 99.

3. Heylin, E Street Shuffle, 118; “Bruce Springsteen: By the Book,” BR8.

4. Kirschbaum, Rocking the Wall, 99, 118, 131.

5. David Joselit, After Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), xiv.

6. Ibid., xv.

7. Kirschbaum, Rocking the Wall, 109.

8. The dilemma, he expands, is that “either you illustrate the story, which limits it, or you relay another story in something that’s already telling a story, which doesn’t make sense, because if you did it right the first time, why are you going to try to do it again?” An exception to this, Springsteen seems to suggest, is as a way into the music for people too young to attend shows. “I’m not really interested in making an ad for my record,” he says, but the “most intense audience” for video “is between six and sixteen,” and they tap into “a cartoonish thing that the videos employ” (TAD 137). The example he gives is of a boy of about eight coming up to him on the beach and asking him if he wanted to see his “Dancing in the Dark” moves. Springsteen, of course, “said okay” (TAD 137).

9. Carl “Tinker” West quoted in Anders Mårtensson and Jörgen Johansson, Local Heroes: The Asbury Park Music Scene, trans. Christophe Brunski (Piscataway, NJ: Rivergate, 2008), 61; anonymous fan quoted in Cavicchi, Tramps Like Us, 77.

10. Joselit, After Art, xvi.

11. Bleiker, “Art After 9/11,” 91; Higgins, The Music of Our Lives, xiv; Joselit, After Art, 1–2.

12. Joselit, After Art, 3.

13. Ibid., 11–14. David Shumway, Rock Star, 8, writes that, in contrast, “Benjamin welcomed this destruction of art’s aura.” In fact, Benjamin’s essay allows for both interpretations. See Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1969), 223, 226. On one hand, Benjamin writes that “the situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated. . . . its authenticity . . . is interfered with. . . . that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” But he also writes, “for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an even greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.” See also Auslander, Liveness, 31, 37–39, and elsewhere, for further discussion of Benjamin’s theories in relation to rock music.

14. Joselit, After Art, 14–15.

15. Carlin, Bruce, 246–47. This was not for want of trying. Not only is there the well-known story of Springsteen scaling the gates of Graceland and heading for the front door only to be told that Presley was at Lake Tahoe, but he also wrote “Fire” with the idea that “he might pitch the song to his boyhood hero as a possible single,” and had tickets for a September 1977 concert at Madison Square Garden. Presley died on 16 August.

16. Joselit, After Art, 15–19.

17. Ibid., 23.

18. Higgins, The Music of Our Lives, 168.

19. Joselit, After Art, 89, 91.

20. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 14.

21. Ibid., 115–17.

22. Joselit, After Art, 96.

23. Marsh, Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts, 634.

24. Mason, In Country, 80.

25. See Will Percy, “Double Take,” in Phillips and Masur, eds., Talk About a Dream, 219. Springsteen refers to Mason’s novels. He writes about the genesis of the song and about Walter Cichon in the sleeve notes to High Hopes.

26. Roth, Nemesis, 141, 143.

27. Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 134. See William Wordsworth’s conclusion to The Prelude, lines 446–47.

28. See Tichi, High Lonesome, 44, who notes that “holding court on a barstool” is “a country mode.”

29. See Greil Marcus, “The Old, Weird America,” in A Booklet of Essays, Appreciations, and Annotations Pertaining to the Anthology of American Folk Music, ed. Harry Smith, ed. Peter Seital (Washington DC: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 1997), 16–17. Springsteen is echoing Bob Dylan’s comments in the 1960s about folk music. Marcus commandeers Dylan’s comments to describe the feeling of listening to these songs, whose singers “sound as if they’re already dead.” For a more negative take on rock music and death, see Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (London: Faber, 1988), 148. “I hate to hear the beat of my heart; it is a relentless reminder that the minutes of my life are numbered.” “The tedious rhythmic primitivism of rock; the heart’s beat is amplified so that man can never for a moment forget his march toward death.”

30. Cologne-Brookes, “Written Interviews,” 563; Alain de Botton, “Britain’s Useless Galleries Don’t Know What Art Is For,” London Times, Saturday 7 March 2015, 26.

31. Nelson, “Springsteen Fever,” in Puterbaugh et al., eds., Bruce Springsteen, 59.

32. Clemons, Big Man, 239.

33. Stevens, “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” in Collected Poems, 65.