Dr Springsteen, or: how I stopped worrying and learned to love The Boss

[diffrentcolours]

cosmolinguist has been a fan of Bruce Springsteen and his music for about as long he can remember. I, on the other hand, had basically no knowledge of his existence for most of my life. Like, I'd heard "Born in the USA" and was dimly aware that it wasn't actually a jingoistic song, but I didn't know who wrote it. I heard "Dancing In The Dark" sampled in a mashup mixtape. That's about it.

My first couple of Springsteen experiences were... fine. We went to see Blinded by the Light at the cinema, and it was a perfectly cromulent movie but didn't turn me into a fan of The Boss. For E's birthday, I bought him the DVD of The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concerts, and we watched it together. I appreciated the music but I found the vocals kind of mumbling. I felt the same when we watched Springsteen perform "Land of Hope and Dreams", solo during the Covid lockdowns, at the Lincoln Memorial following the Biden Inauguration in 2021. Good performer, decent tunes, no idea what they're about. I learned a bunch of trivia from E, like how he was born on Bi Visibility Day, and frequently kissed black E Street Band saxophonist Clarence "The Big Man" Clemons on stage, partly because they openly loved each other in a very wholesome way for straight guys, but also partly to piss off racists and homophobes.

Last year, I heard that Springsteen would be touring the UK in 2024 and was determined to take E to see him live. My Christmas present to him, skint as I was at the time, was organising the tickets, travel and accommodation to make this possible. Given a choice between London and Cardiff (ludicrously expensive), Belfast (a pain to get to) and Sunderland, I chose the latter more or less by default. We got poor tickets at high prices because the gig was mostly sold out already; all the hotels walkable from the Stadium of Light were also booked out, so I found a hotel in Gateshead a short tram ride away.

In the run-up to the gig I was determined to do some homework. E sat down with me and we watched "Springsteen on Broadway" from 2018. This is an acoustic, mostly solo show (he does a couple of tracks with his wife, who is a member of the E Street Band) with lots of talking between, including excerpts from his autobiography. And most importantly for me, as a Netflix show, it had subtitles. I could tell out what he's saying and what he's singing. And that's when it clicked for me. Bruce Springsteen is a storyteller. He tells stories which aren't true (he admits that he didn't know how to drive before writing "Thunder Road") but feel true. He tells stories about the American heartland, the rust belt, the suburbs. Places just off the beaten track. He tells stories about growing up there, about the people around him. About people who feel trapped in these towns, having big dreams, having big feelings, wishing for something better. He tells stories about how the world should be, how it could be. Stories that you can identify with even if you didn't grow up in New Jersey in the 1960s. And he tells them well enough to bring a tear to your eye.

In this, I can draw a parallel with Justin Sullivan from New Model Army. He tells stories about (quite literally) small town England, the towns in Yorkshire where there's nothing to do but fight outside the pubs on a Saturday night, where the industries were stripped and nothing replaced it. Where the only escape is into the hills, the wild places, long drives in the dark. Stories you can identify with even if you didn't grow up in Bradford in the 1970s. Sullivan has a slightly more international perspective than Springsteen but hey, America is a big enough country for one man's career.

Armed with this perspective, I picked up the 2024 "Best Of Springsteen" compilation, 31 tracks which E considered to be a reasonable selection of his career. I listened to the lyrics, I listened to the music. I got to the point where I could have meaningful opinions. Springsteen should have played "We Take Care of Our Own" at Biden's inauguration, not "Land of Hope and Dreams", and I hope he plays it at the second one next January. Grace Petrie needs to cover "Rosalita" as a lesbian anthem. "Cadillac Ranch" is trying too hard to be the Beach Boys, and "Girls In Their Summer Clothes" sounds like Echo and the Bunnymen. I can see why E calls "Thunder Road" a transmasc anthem.

I finally managed to set my server up so that E can upload music through Nextcloud and we can all stream it through Navidrome, so E started uploading his Springsteen albums (I also set up Nicotine+, a client for the holy fuck it's still there Soulseek network, so he could fill in gaps in his collection left when he moved out of his old place). I listened to a lot of Springsteen in the run-up to the gig, in the car on the way there, and beyond.

It wouldn't have mattered to me if I hadn't fallen in love with Springsteen before the gig - it was E's present, not mine - but I'm glad I could not only provide him with the experience but also share it with him. Oh yeah, I haven't even talked about the gig yet, have I? I'll save that for another post, it's getting late!

I guess the next stop is to re-watch "Blinded By The Light" and the No Nukes concert...

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

Love this, love you. :) x