One of my earliest musical memories is of hearing "Badlands" one night in the bar with my dad. There's not a lot of specificity to the memory, but I can hear the charging piano line and the bluesy bottoming out of the guitar and see his mustache very clearly. Is there anyone my age who hears a Bruce Springsteen song and doesn't think of their father?
Now I'm not going to get all mopey and Tony Soprano-reminiscing-about-the-glory-of-Johnny-Boy hagiographying about either my dad or Bruce. Go read Joe Posnanski's blog entry on the song "The Promise" if you want that flavor today. Nor am I going to give you a cynical post-modern reading on the photo above, pointing out how the Darkness on the Edge of Town back cover photo uses familiar symbols (the faded wallpaper, the V-neck undershirt, the door that Springsteen's slouch says he's about to use to go out for a ride and never come back) to convey blue-collar existential dread to an audience whose lives Bruce's stopped resembling around his 21st birthday. Chuck Klosterman covers that somewhere in Sex, Lies and Cocoa Puffs, I think. No, what I want to talk about really quickly here is how Springsteen has tricked a huge fan base into listening to the most depressing shit ever to tumble out of a jukebox.
Dylan is an adept at setting sad songs to upbeat tempos as a method of disguising the content. If the title didn't give the game away, I'd bet many people could be fooled by the pace of the song and the lightness in Bob's voice into thinking that "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" is a love song. In Dylan, it's a bit of a game, though, one of the dozens of obfuscations and roadblocks that he throws in front of his audience to force them to engage with the content rather than just shout along. For Springsteen, the despondent lyrics and anthemic music are interconnected. I read once that the message of Bruce Springsteen is that Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life. I think a more accurate read is that Nothing Will Save You But It's Okay To Try And Find Something Anyway.
Born to Run made the anthem a safe form for rock and roll. I don't think that's hyperbolic. As massive as Pink Floyd songs are, you don't really sing along to them. The biggest Zeppelin songs are more like dance tracks or jam sessions than verse-chorus form songs. The Who probably came the closest to what I would define as an anthem, but as much as I love them, there's something impersonal about The Who. Springsteen always seems like he's reaching back past all the big rock acts that preceded him and channeling Frank Sinatra, Roy Orbison, even Ray Charles, guys who sang what sounded like very personal stories that were also very relatable. Everything about their voices made you think that they'd lived those songs.
Let's take "Backstreets." This is about as huge a song as any in Springsteen's setlist, with big, yelling choruses and a backing piano that sounds possessed by the ghost of Jelly Roll Morton on barbituates. My reading of the lyrics is that Bruce watched Midnight Cowboy and decided to write an uplifting song about Rizzo and Joe but not gloss over their lives at all. There's absolutely no redemption at all in the lyric, as near the end the narrator cries out to his long-lost friend/lover/partner, "Remember all the movies, Terry/We'd go see/Trying to learn to walk like the heroes/We thought we had to be/Well after all this time/To find we're just like all the rest/Stranded in the park/And forced to confess/To hiding on the backstreets." I don't care how Romantic a view you might have on the ability of pain to bring out the sweetness in life, that's just fucking bleak. And I'm not cherry picking. "Badlands" is about an auto mechanic who wants to "find one face that ain't looking through me." "Hungry Heart" is about a guy who abandons his wife and kids. "Born in the U.S.A." is about a Vietnam vet betrayed by his country. AND THOSE ARE THE FUCKING HITS!
Nebraska was the first album on which Bruce dropped the artifice of rock and roll and gave us the lyrics unadorned. Jason once described it as "the album on the stereo when you walk into the garage and find the body." It's not an easy listen and the songs on it don't often make it into the live shows, which I think is rather unfortunate. There's nothing in the lyrics of a song like, say, "Atlantic City" that makes it any less uplifting than a song like "Glory Days." If anything, "Atlantic City" is less cynical. Why not slap a few power chords and a Max Weinberg back beat on that bitch and get Chris Christie to bellow along to it at the next concert he attends?
My suspicion is that, by 1982, Springsteen was coming to grips with what he'd unleashed upon the world. Boston, Journey, Billy Joel, Night Ranger, Bon Jovi, eventually even Guns N Roses would succumb and blast out something larger than a power ballad - an Anthem, laden with screeching guitars, breathless vocalizing and stultifying drums, like a many-winged early airplane trying to take off from under its own weight. And so Bruce gave us Nebraska, the distillate of his worldview. It's easily my favorite of his records. I've been told that shows how sad my tastes lean. I think most people are too busy shouting along to the chorus to pay attention to the verse, and that Nebraska takes away that crutch. I also think it's his most strangely uplifting album. You endure nine tracks of acoustic guitar, harmonica, wailing and shit and then you get "Reason to Believe," which is equally awful (quick summation: dead dogs, dead babies, dead love) but saved by a bounce in the harmonica and the vocal that is otherwise missing from the album. It's not an anthem, and it's barely even a jaunty-tempoed-sad-song, but it stands out because of the context and teaches the listener how to properly hear a Bruce Springsteen song - enjoy everything that's there, be it a single moment of grace in a river of shit or the enormous promise of dawn on the open road, because this is the life you've got and "it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive."
No comments:
Post a Comment