I think I walked across the street to where the fire hydrant stuck up out of the grass and was a natural spot for kids to park themselves. I think there was a group of kids a few years older than me there listening to a small transistor radio in the soft afternoon after school. I don’t remember knowing them though there may have been an older brother or sister of one of my generation there.
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I remember it was as if the song had another track playing under it, just in earshot, that promised to blow the ordinary shit up and blast a door open to a radical new beauty.
I was…I don’t know…11 or 14…and I was coming off a John Denver overdose. I blame my mother for this and for a shitty turntable in a shitty cabinet for that. The player worked though, and cut me open a little bit then so I could bleed copiously later when the Darkness fell. The big kids were playing the radio and a song came on, and in my youthful mind years later after seeing Bruce for the first time in DC in ‘84, I was thrown back to that corner that day, and I knew it was the single from Born to Run or Darkness. I didn’t know, at that moment, what they were playing on the radio but it was a lance shot right in between my ribs, and it was attached to a rope that pulled something inside straight into the meta-truth that was the Boss.
I think that the memories that lead to a sense of Esthetic attachment spin about one like a kaleidoscope whirling its impossible beauty. It’s what you heard when your parents danced or saw as a trailer at the drive-in; the subversive book that you snuck into English class because you wanted to break out; the first time you pressed your lips against your other one’s. The pieces come together finally, and the light of the day bounces off the infinite facets to burn that moment on the stage, screen, page…into you…like a tattoo. Nothing again will ever plunge into you so deeply - through the skin and the viscera, bone, muscle, to the very heart of it all. It will cup your beating heart in its fingers and will leave its mark in the deepest part of you, and you will be a different person than you were three minutes before.
A fan of liminal moments, I will say that it WAS Springsteen playing on that small tinny box that afternoon. I don’t really know if this is true, but I’m a writer, not a reporter. I do know for sure that I spent a couple of days, when I was 16, in the back of my dad’s tricked-out van driving to Utah from the Bay Area reading books and listening to The River and thinking that I was a better person for having heard it. The power of words was the dart that made holes in my heart even then, and Bruce left me bleeding out. From San Jose to St. George and back, I knew every pause and every solo; 50 years later those words still carve my tongue into those youthful shapes.
My cousin, Mike, and I saw our first Springsteen concert in 1984 in Washington, DC. I was a junior at GWU and living in a fraternity house. Mike slept on the floor for a couple of days. We predicted the set list on separate sheets of paper and found out later that we each got the same number of songs right. I was transformed that night, and not more than a few weeks go by, even now, when I don’t listen to Racing in the Streets and die a little bit each time.
I think we each have heroes that we first met as children that spread out their protective wings and enfolded us and warded off the sharpest jabs. We all needed an aegis then, and though the many intervening years dull out what was so immediate then (when we didn’t know anything but felt every…last…thing), Bruce was my esthetic shield. I marvel at the young man who wrote about that ride to the sea to wash the sins away and think that he unlocked the door to redemption and to true Beauty. And as a writer, I will spend my whole career trying to put on paper something so gorgeously true as those lines.
My favorite Springsteen moment was seeing him in concert with my wife and kids, 20 years ago. I think it was The Rising tour in Oakland. My youngest daughter, Sara, was the biggest Bruce fan of the bunch and Thunder Road was her favorite song. We were well past Born to Run, and I told her that he was unlikely to play that song so many albums later. It was late in the show, and some of my kids were asleep. I was gearing myself up for the encores when the first plaintive harmonica notes blew out over the arena. Sara jumped out of her seat like she was on a spring, and looked at me with the purest expression of happiness I’ve ever seen, and we sang our lungs out.
Every artist, no matter how iconic, exists most purely and powerfully in her own time. Shakespeare’s time is still aborning, most singers and writers never get a time. Springsteen’s era lasted far longer than most, but the inevitable slide advances as surely as do the years.
When the Columbia Records executive, John Hammond signed Springsteen, he said he had talent that would last a generation. As good as Hammond was, he woefully underestimated Springsteen’s musical gravity, as evidenced by mine and my kids’ love of the Boss.
Looking back on my life, all of the most important moments had lyrics to illuminate meaning and take away some of the hurt. The ordinary ones, too, float by on a river, supported by a raft of pulse-pounding, jump-out-of-your-seat jubilance. At times it has been Dickinson and Cather; Faulkner and Miles Davis - each providing musical succor for an episode of a life’s season. These greats artists, and more, have contributed to the soundtrack, but only Bruce Springsteen has scored an entire life.