March 25-26, 2023: Bruce in 2023

[This past Monday, I finally got to cross off one of the very top items on my bucket list—seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert with my sons! In honor of that truly momentous occasion, I wanted to share a handful of the past posts where I’ve featured Bruce on the blog—leading up to this special weekend reflection on the concert!]

On three moving layers to how Bruce’s 2023 concert both reflects on the past and continues to fight for the future.

1)      The opening four songs: Bruce has always worked to start his concerts with a series of sequential songs that set the tone for what’s to come, and on this tour that opening combination was particularly striking. It featured two songs from Letter to You that are overtly concerned with both the past’s legacies and the work Bruce has striven to do throughout his career, “Ghosts” and “Letter to You.” And back and forth with those it included two songs from long ago, “No Surrender” and “Prove It All Night,” that would seem quite distinct from both those themes and from each other, but that when reframed in this context became anthems for not just survival but endurance and collective triumph in the face of time’s inevitable losses. By the end of these four, we were all right there with Bruce and the Band.

2)      “Last Man Standing” and “Backstreets”: Because this was a full-E-Street-Band concert, there wasn’t as much time for talking as there is when Bruce is on stage by himself. But right about the midpoint of the show, he does stop to tell an extended, deeply moving story about joining his first band (when he was just 15), and the moment 50 years later when the last surviving member of that band besides Bruce (George Theiss) passed away. He segued directly from there into a solo acoustic rendition of “Last Man Standing,” the Letter to You song about that precise experience, which was logical enough. But then the full band segued directly from that into the opening of “Backstreets,” a profoundly familiar Bruce anthem that suddenly became just as much about these lifelong experiences, losses, and persistences—especially when Bruce ended it with one more monologue, about all from Theiss (and everyone) that he will keep with him in his heart.

3)      Two closing tributes: It’s no surprise that a concert so thoughtfully constructed ended just as thoughtfully as it began. That began with the final Band song—after introducing the members of this current iteration of the Legendary E Street Band, Bruce led them in a celebratory performance of “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out,” culminating in an incredibly moving video montage of clips of the Band’s two deceased founding members, Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici. And then, for his one final encore, Bruce returned to the stage solo to perform an acoustic version of “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” Letter to You’s beautiful closing track about how and why “death is not the end.” While all these layers to the concert were particularly meaningful to this BruceStudier as he watched by his sons’ side, I’m quite sure there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Concert reflections, on Bruce or any other artist, you’d share?

March 24, 2023: Bruce on the Blog: Born in the U.S.A.

[This week, I finally get to cross off one of the very top items on my bucket list—seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert with my sons! In honor of that truly momentous occasion, I wanted to share a handful of the past posts where I’ve featured Bruce on the blog—leading up to a special weekend reflection on the concert!]

On two ways to argue for the patriotic possibilities of an easily misunderstood song and album.

In one of my first-year blog posts (back in those silly mid-2011 days before I used hyperlinks, dear reader), I used an article by music journalist Ben Schwartz on the battles over Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” (the song) to think about questions of audience readings and misreadings, of whether and how an artist’s choices can contribute to them, and of why I’d still make the case for “Born” as representing some of the best and most thoughtful (rather than most bombastic or simplified) visions of American identity and community. Many of those same questions and lenses can be applied to the Born in the U.S.A. album as a whole, of course, which consistently weds arena and bar rock sounds to dark and painful lyrics and situations. No fewer than three of the album’s songs end with main characters under arrest or in prison, and yet two of them (“Darlington County” and “Working on the Highway”) are also among the album’s most upbeat-sounding rockers. As I argued in that post, I believe audiences should be and are capable of looking beyond sound and music to hear and engage with songs on lyrical and thematic levels as well—but I also called “Born” a split-personality song there, and the same can definitely be said about the album as a whole.

The most overt way to read “Born” as uber-patriotic is, as I also wrote in that post, likewise both a misreading and a further emphasis on sound over lyrics (the first line of both the song and album is “Born down in a dead man’s town,” after all). But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other, and important, ways to think of both song and album as patriotic nonetheless. In recent years Springsteen has consistently described one of his central and lifelong artisitic goals as charting “the distance between American reality and the American Dream,” and the album’s opening and closing songs (“Born” and “My Hometown”) chart particular aspects of that distance with clarity and force. Like another easily misunderstood song of Springsteen’s, “We Take Care of Our Own” (the lead single from and first song on 2012’s Wrecking Ball), “Born” creates an especially clear representation of that distance between ideal and reality in the back and forth between its patriotic chorus and its far more dark and critical verses (although the same could be said of “My Hometown,” with a chorus that recognizes the value of a foundational place even while the verses chart that place’s decline and limits). I’ve written a lot in recent years, including in my fourth book (NB. and then doubly so in my sixth book), about the concept of critical patriotism, and both this overall idea of distance and the specific representations of it in these songs and their structural shifts exemplify critical patriotism.

There’s another, even more overarching way to think about Born in the U.S.A. as a patriotic album, however. The album’s most optimistic song is its exact midpoint, “No Surrender,” an anthemic tribute to Springsteen’s lifelong musical companion Steve Van Zandt and to the power of rock and roll (“We learned more from a three-minute record, babe, than we ever learned in school”). But what if we read that central song as a mission statement for the album itself? That is, to put it in first-year writing terms, what if “No Surrender” is the album’s thesis, “Born in the U.S.A.” and “My Hometown” are its introduction and conclusion, and the remaining songs are the evidence paragraphs? In that case, even if the songs are consistently darker in their themes and images, the acts of creating and performing them, of assembling them into an album, of sending that album out into the world, of touring to share it with audiences, and so on are all optimistic recognitions and extensions of the power and importance of rock and roll, and of the role it can play in helping America move toward a better future. Perhaps that future comprises the “romantic dreams” that the speaker of “No Surrender” still has in his head, dreams that animate—if not without challenge and complexity—the critical patriotism of Born in the U.S.A.

Concert reflection this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 23, 2023: Bruce on the Blog: “American Skin (41 Shots)”

[This week, I finally get to cross off one of the very top items on my bucket list—seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert with my sons! In honor of that truly momentous occasion, I wanted to share a handful of the past posts where I’ve featured Bruce on the blog—leading up to a special weekend reflection on the concert!]

On two more reasons I have come to love my long-time favorite song.

I’ve written on at least two prior occasions in this space, as well as at length in the opening of my second book, about Bruce Springsteen’s “American Skin (41 Shots)” (2000; I still prefer that 2000 Live in New York City version to any subsequent one, although this post-Trayvon Martin performance from 2012 comes very close for sure). But I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned in this space a very cool complement to my own love for the song: my younger son’s early and continuing affection for it as well. Of course that began with my playing it for the boys, but I’ve played plenty of songs for them, and it was “American Skin” that really grabbed my son and has endured across many years and many other shifts in musical taste. To hear him sing along to my favorite lines—“We’re baptized in these waters/And in each other’s blood”—has been one of those singularly moving moments that parenting can offer.

So that’s one way I’ve come to love Springsteen’s song even more fully. But another is the reason I’m highlighting it today (NB. when I first shared this post in February 2018): this afternoon I’ll be giving Fitchburg State University’s biannual Harrod Lecture, focusing on the topic of my book in progress, We the People: The 500-Year Battle over Who is American (2019). I’ve been thinking about those themes pretty much nonstop for the last couple years, and I’m not sure I’ve encountered a cultural work that more succinctly and powerfully highlights both of them than does “American Skin.” Even the title alone features both ends of the spectrum: Amadou Diallo was killed because of the color of his skin and what it meant to certain other Americans; but by calling it his “American skin,” Springsteen reminds us that those racist and exclusionary attitudes do not and cannot deny Diallo his full participation in an American community and identity. That we still so desperately need to hear that message is just one more reason to keep listening to “American Skin (41 Shots).”

Last Bruce blogging tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 22, 2023: Bruce on the Blog: Wrecking Ball and High Hopes

[This week, I finally get to cross off one of the very top items on my bucket list—seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert with my sons! In honor of that truly momentous occasion, I wanted to share a handful of the past posts where I’ve featured Bruce on the blog—leading up to a special weekend reflection on the concert!]

On two entirely different and equally inspiring recent albums from an all-time great.

As is no doubt obvious from this blog, many of my favorite American artists died long ago, meaning that (barring surprising rediscoveries) I have long since run out of new works of theirs to encounter and experience. As a result, I believe I get even more excited about new releases by the living artists I love—like John Sayles and Jhumpa Lahiri—than would already always be the case. There is, of course, always the possibility that these new releases won’t live up to the artist’s past work or overall career; but as I wrote in that Sayles and Lahiri post, I’m an optimist on this score as on most others (yes, even in 2023 when it is getting very hard out here for an optimist). And when it comes to my single favorite artist, Bruce Springsteen, I’m happy to say that his most recent two albums (NB. as of 2014 when I wrote this post) have entirely rewarded my excited anticipation, if in almost entirely different ways.

2012’s Wrecking Ball is one of the most thematically unified yet stylistically diverse albums I’ve ever heard. Every song on the album, including the two bonus tracks, represents a response to the 2008 economic collapse and its many ongoing effects and meanings in American society; yet almost every one utilizes a distinct style, engages with a different musical tradition and sound, with which to do so. For both reasons the album has been compared to The Rising (2002), Springsteen’s post-9/11 masterwork; I would agree with that comparison, yet to my mind, because September 11^th has inspired so many responses and representations (in every artistic genre), Wrecking Ball is an even more unique and significant social and historical document. While it might not have any individual songs that crack my Springsteen top 10, I would say it’s one of his couple best albums—and that’s pretty impressive for a record released forty years after an artist’s debut!

About a month ago (NB. in January 2014), Springsteen released his most recent studio album, High Hopes. But to be honest, High Hopes isn’t really a unified album at all, existing at the other end of the spectrum from something like Wrecking Ball—it’s a collection of (mostly) previously unreleased tracks, representing the last couple decades of Springsteen’s career (if not even further back, since a song like “Frankie Fell in Love” feels more like his 1970s works). Interestingly, the most thematically unified songs, the title track and the concluding “Dream Baby Dream,” are both covers of other artists, the first time Springsteen has included covers on a studio album in his long career. And that last clause is precisely what makes High Hopes so inspiring to me—that even forty-two years into his recording career, Springsteen is continuing to experiment and innovate, trying new things, pushing himself in new directions, refusing to rest on that already impressive body of work. I didn’t really think I could love Bruce more, but these last couple albums have indeed raised the bar.

Next Bruce blogging tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 21, 2023: Bruce on the Blog: “State Trooper”

[This week, I finally get to cross off one of the very top items on my bucket list—seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert with my sons! In honor of that truly momentous occasion, I wanted to share a handful of the past posts where I’ve featured Bruce on the blog—leading up to a special weekend reflection on the concert!]

On two very different ways to AmericanStudy one of Bruce’s most ambiguous songs.

As my 2013 series on ambiguous songs (and any other time I’ve written about music on this blog) no doubt proved, when it comes to music I’m a lyrics guy—by which I mean not just that I listen to them closely, but that I try to figure out what they mean, even when (as with one of my favorite 21^st century bands, The Killers) that’s damnably hard to do (“Jealousy, turning saints into the sea”?!). There are no artists to whose lyrics I’ve listened more frequently and more attentively than Bruce Springsteen, and thus few Springsteen songs that I haven’t obsessively figured out. But there are still some that remain elusive to me, their ambiguity defying my repetitive listens and analyses. And at the top of that list would have to be the most eerie and evocative song on an album full of them (and about which I wrote yesterday as well), Nebraska’s “State Trooper” (1982).

From its title track on, Nebraska can be located in the American tradition of what we might call outlaw romanticism, valorizing—or at least sympathizing with—the misdeeds of those who find themselves living and dying outside the law. The opening verse of “State Trooper” concludes with an indication that its speaker sees himself as precisely such a justified outlaw: “License, registration, I ain’t got none / But I got a clear conscience ‘bout the things that I’ve done.” Seen in that light, his repeated injunction to “Mister State Trooper, please don’t you stop me,” might reflect an outlaw code of honor, a sense that while the speaker and the law are by necessity opposed, he hopes to avoid violence whenever possible, particularly against innocent men who “maybe … got a kid, maybe … got a pretty wife.” “My argument is not with you,” says Jason Bourne to a Moscow policeman at the start of his trilogy’s final film (NB. since I wrote this post that has turned out not to be the final Jason Bourne film, but in this household it will always be!), before he takes his outlaw fight to the heart of the American power structure.

Despite their cynical attitudes toward the law and power, such outlaw narratives tend to be ultimately optimistic, at least in their sense that there are those who will fight back—and their admiration for such figures. Yet from the final lines of its opening title track—“They wanted to know why I did what I did / Well sir I guess there’s just a meanness in this world”—Springsteen’s album is far more dark and pessimistic, portraying its outlaws as embodiments of a fallen and perhaps irredeemable America (although the album does end with another ambiguous song called “Reason to Believe”). While the speaker of “State Trooper” is apparently driving “to my baby,” the final lines suggest that he has nowhere to go: “Hey, somebody out there, listen to my last prayer / Hi-ho silver-o, deliver me from nowhere.” Seen in this light, the speaker’s injunction to the state trooper is simply a threat of more darkness and violence to come, in a world “where the great black rivers flow” and where “the only thing that I got’s been bothering me my whole life.” This is the land of the American nightmare, and its outlaws are simply symptoms of the disease, not a potential cure.

Next Bruce blogging tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 20, 2023: Bruce on the Blog: Executioner Songs

[This week, I finally get to cross off one of the very top items on my bucket list—seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert with my sons! In honor of that truly momentous occasion, I wanted to share a handful of the past posts where I’ve featured Bruce on the blog—leading up to a special weekend reflection on the concert!]

On two striking similarities and one important difference in a pair of pop culture serial killer texts.

Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979) and Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” (1982) both consistently link the story of their real-life serial killer protagonists—Gary Gilmore in Mailer’s novel and Charles Starkweather in Springsteen’s song—to key women in the men’s lives. Although Mailer’s opening section is titled “Gary,” it begins instead with the perspective of Brenda Nicol, a cousin and childhood friend of Gilmore’s who remained linked to him through his final killing spree; parts two and three are titled “Nicole” and “Gary and Nicole,” after the girlfriend (Nicole Barrett) who stayed with Gary through his execution and on whom much of Mailer’s portrait of Gilmore focuses. Similarly, Springsteen’s song uses the 19 year old Starkweather’s relationship with 14 year old Caril Ann Fugate, who accompanied Starkweather while he took part in his own killing spree, as its linchpin, from the song’s opening lines, “I saw her standin’ on her front lawn/just twirlin’ her baton,” through to Starkweather’s culminating desire to have Fugate “sitting right there on my lap” when he is executed. These family and romantic relationships certainly humanize Mailer and Springsteen’s protagonists, but they also seem tied to the men’s crimes in complex ways that echo the links between sex and horror I discussed in this post.

Mailer’s and Springsteen’s works also similarly feature a near-complete disappearance of their creators in the course of the texts. That’s perhaps more expected in a song like Springsteen’s, but I don’t just mean that Springsteen doesn’t refer to himself in any overt way; even the voice in which he sings “Nebraska” is strikingly affected and distinct from Bruce’s own (and an entire departure from the voice in which he had sung any of his five prior albums), and since this was the first song on the album, would have taken contemporary listeners entirely by surprise. The absence of Norman Mailer from his book is more striking still, as the book is as the subtitle puts it “A True Life Novel,” and one based (as he writes in a brief “Afterword”) on extensive interviews and conversations between Mailer, Gilmore, and many other individuals. Yet to the best of my recollection Mailer does not appear anywhere in the book’s more than 1000 pages, engaging with his role in producing the text (and even participating in the text’s events in the closing period of Gilmore’s life) only in that brief concluding coda. As a result, Mailer’s mammoth book feels as closely focused on Gilmore and everything within and connected to his life and identity as Springsteen’s intimate song does on Starkweather, even though in both cases the texts are the careful, artistic constructions of two deeply talented creators in their respective genres.

There’s one key formal difference between the two texts, though, and it significantly impacts their portrayals of the two serial killers. As he does with all but one of the songs on Nebraska, Springsteen sings the title track in the first-person, speaking directly as Starkweather (the only historical figure among the album’s first-person speakers); Mailer’s book features a fully omniscient third-person narrator, one who can provide the perspectives of any and all of his historical figures (including Brenda and Nicole among many others) alongside Gary’s. Due in large part to that narrative distinction, Springsteen’s song forces its audience into a direct and unfiltered relationship with Starkweather’s raw voice and cynical worldview, as in its nihilistic concluding lines: “They wanted to know why I did what I did/Well sir I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.” Mailer’s more sweeping narration, on the other hand, situates Gilmore as part of broader communities (family, romantic relationships, neighborhood, prison, region, nation) and offers more of a sociological than a psychological engagement with his identity and perspective. I wouldn’t say Executioner’s Song is optimistic, exactly, but it certainly offers its audience more ways to understand its serial killer subject than does “Nebraska”—while the latter lets us see through that subject’s eyes, whether we want to or not.

Next Bruce blogging tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 18-19, 2023: Wild West Stories: Wyatt Earp

[175 years ago this weekend, Wyatt Earp was born in Illinois. Earp would go on to become one of the most iconic Wild West figures, so this week I’ve AmericanStudied stories of that complex and mythic region and history. Leading up to this weekend birthday post on engaging Earp!]

On Wild West myths, realities, and how to split the difference.

While the mythos of a figure like Billy the Kid very much began during his (brief) lifetime, it seems that the myth of Wyatt Earp only truly began to be created after his January 1929 death at the age of 80. Earp had been living in Los Angeles for the last couple decades of his life, trying among other things to get a film of his life made; to that end he had been working with Western author Walter Noble Burns, whose book Tombstone, an Iliad of the Southwest (1927) had really begun the mythologizing of Earp. The process accelerated significantly with Stuart Lake’s authorized biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal (1931), a bestseller which was based on many conversations between Lake and Earp but which nonetheless (or perhaps as a result) established many of the iconic details of the Earp myth that have endured to this day. It is those details, centered on the shootout at Tombstone’s O.K. Corral but also and especially framed by stories of a lifetime of legal and extralegal justice delivered with his trusty pistols (and alongside his brothers and his best friend Doc Holliday), that became the basis for pop culture representations, from TV shows like The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955-61) to films like Tombstone (1993) and Wyatt Earp (1994) among many others.

Earp did work off and on as a lawman throughout his life, but it was his brother Virgil who was working as a Deputy U.S. Marshal in Tombstone (Wyatt was working as a stagecoach shotgun rider at the time). And in any case, the through-line of Earp’s life, at least from his first police work in Wichita, Kansas when he was in his mid-20s through his move to LA in his 60s, was not any one profession but rather constant sojourns across a series of Western boomtowns in an effort to strike it rich. The settings also included Dodge City, Kansas; Deadwood, South Dakota; Tombstone, Arizona; Eagle City, Idaho; Nome, Alaska; and San Francisco. The get-rich-quick schemes included participating in numerous silver and gold rushes, owning and operating saloons, dealing faro (a popular card game at the time), racing horses, and refereeing boxing matches. If the latter doesn’t sound like a way to get rich quick, it’s worth noting that Earp was suspected of having fixed the December 1896 heavyweight championship bout in San Francisco between Bob Fitzsimmons and Tom Sharkey, an accusation that haunted Earp until the end of his life. Earp’s brothers and Holliday frequently joined him in these endeavors, as did his multiple wives, reinforcing these pursuits as the most consistent part of his identity.

So beyond simply noting oversimplifications and inaccuracies in the pop culture stories (a somewhat useful but too often pedantic exercise), how do we put these different stories in conversation with one another? I’d say one important way to do so would be to recognize that work as a lawman was simply one of many professional paths for Earp (and his brothers and friends), and indeed one through which he and they were likewise hoping to prosper. That doesn’t mean they were necessarily corrupt, but rather that the system and society of these towns, of the late 19^th century West more broadly, and of Gilded Age America overall was one in which law and justice were very much caught up in power and prosperity, gold and greed, the American Dream and its darker undertones. Those interconnections are somewhat specific to the world of the “Wild West,” not in its mythic meanings but in its all too fraught realities. But, as Monday’s focal voice Richard Slotkin would no doubt remind us, those interconnections are also definingly American, one more reason why the Wild West has retained its powerful hold on our collective imaginations.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Wild West stories or histories you’d highlight?