Jungleland by Matthias Scherer

Jungleland

You are holding in your hand a few dozen pages of fandom, expressed through essays, reflections, ramblings and stories. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s an effort to put a finger on what makes Bruce Springsteen so important to all of us, but, as I read the contributions, I realised that this is basically impossible. He means a lot of things to a lot of people, and to reduce his appeal to one single aspect is to misunderstand him and his music. What all of us share is, I think, a wish for Springsteen to be around until weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve figured out who can fill his boots. Because for more than 30 years, nobody has come even close. See you in the summer.

Contributors: John Burns, Jen Calleja, Toby Chelms, Mathias Haeussler, Rob Hastings, Daniel Issitt, Christoph Lindemann, Katie Malcolmson, Rory Porter & Reiner Reitsamer. Editor: Matthias Scherer

schererm87@gmail.com Cover design by Maximilian Westphal Layout by MS With thanks to Venessa Bennett

Contents

How I Learnt To Stop Worrying and Love the Boss

My Hometown 7 The Boss and His Girls 11 Order Manager 14 Waistcoats & Walkmen 15 The King and The Boss 18 Goodbye, Bobby-Jean 21 Nebraska 24 My Fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s House 28 Twenty Minutes in Asbury Park

Wrecking Ball 36

How I Learnt To Stop Worrying and Love The Boss A therapist ponders Springsteen’s unique kind of positive thinking

by Toby Chelms

“

Poor men wanna be rich, rich men wanna be kings/ and a king ain’t satisfied ‘til he rules everything/ I wanna go out tonight, I wanna find out what I got...”

These lines for me both sum up all of the problems with the ‘Positive Thinking’ movement and explain why Bruce Springsteen has an appeal that goes beyond that of many other popular artists. Positive Thinking is what many quasi-therapies rely on; by which I mean approaches to emotional well-being that focus on mantras, affirmations and general efforts to convince ourselves that we are the best at what we do, the top of the pile, unstoppable and invincible. This concept has its roots in the 1940s and 50s travelling speaker movement and was best encapsulated by the 1952 book ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’, a semi-religious tome which to date has sold over 20 million copies and spawned a whole load of re-arranged versions 4

by a hundred authors all keen to replicate its success with their own ‘spin’ (think of it as the print equivalent of Leatherface’s Mush to all the No Idea bands that followed). This led to what we have now: Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), motivational speakers (think Johnny Lee Miller in Series 5 of Dexter!) and general bullshit artists trying to scrape every last penny from the desperate. From my point of view as a Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapist, this approach is not only inaccurate (it reminds me of how everyone who has ‘past life experiences’ is always a kings or a queen – never a shopkeeper or a bin man) but unsustainable: if you go around

thinking that you’re the best and can never be wrong... well you’ll have an amazingly arrogant time attributing every success in life to your positive thinking until, one day, reality will clash with that, and where does that leave your self-confidence? It’s not really a million miles away from Noel Edmonds’s Cosmic Realigning in my opinion. If you want a more informative and well-written criticism of the Positive Thinking movement, then check out Barbara Ehrenreich’s Smile or Die – How Positive Thinking Fooled America & The World. Now how does this relate to the enduring success of Mr. Bruce Frederick Springsteen? Well, if you compare him to most anthemic pop/rock artists of his era, what you will find is fewer songs proclaiming to believe in yourself or that you are the best you can be and more along the lines of realising that the world is a pretty messed-up place and that this is reflected in most human beings. Take a look at some of the protagonists in his songs; thugs (‘It’s Hard to be a Saint in The City’), pimps (‘Meeting Across the River’), bank robbers (‘Johnny 99’), refugees and hobos (‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’) and god only knows what else (‘State Trooper’). However, what Springsteen doesn’t do is judge or blame these people. He doesn’t let them off as victims of circumstance, and often he shows the grim endings they meet, but he shows humanity for what it is: both good and bad. Springsteen shows that we don’t move through life in

episodes of highs and lows but a dulled, more or less steady line of events that end up balancing each other out in their respective joy and sorrow. This gritty realism is why we can relate to these pretty extreme characters – we might not be able to relate to their situations but we can certainly relate to their emotions. For example, take ol’ Johnny 99: we might not all (hopefully!) be able to relate to his holding up of the local Wine Barrel, but who can’t relate to feeling pissed off after a crap day at work and then shooting their mouth off a bit after a few drinks? That frustration at ‘the man’ and the inability to find a useful way to stand up to him is what lies at the heart of Johnny 99 – that acceptance of life being a drag but being able to take comfort in the fact that it’s not only us experiencing this. Everyone has a crap time some (or even most) of the time but it doesn’t define us, it just shapes us and I think that acknowledgement is more of a help than pretending that this side of life doesn’t exist. I always ask my clients, ‘what

sort of person would someone be if they were shaped only by positive events? Would you want to spend a night in a pub with someone like that?’ I know I wouldn’t, but I’d happily have a drink and a chat with most of Springsteen’s characters. I’ve heard some suggest that Springsteen does sink into escapism or overt, cheesy positivity at times with songs about ‘breaking out’ or ‘running away’ but for me those songs (like ‘Thunder Road’ or even ‘Pink Cadillac’) are less about daydreaming and more about the desperation of their characters, that

all have dreams (and these are important - me and Bruce are realists, not nihilists!) and it’s always good to keep them in mind, but it’s equally as important to accept that making them come true might take time or might not happen at all. Nevertheless, a lot of good can come from trying to realise them.

Springsteen isn’t bullshitting his fans. He’s not telling them that life will be all roses and rewards, and those bands that do haven’t had a career as long as he has or inspire half the passion in their fans that he does in his. If we expect bad Songs like ‘Thunder Road’ times, then we can prepare for them are less about daydreaming and find the fun and more about the despera- and enjoyment in them, and with his songs, Bruce sets tion of their characters out a world that shows us what that can be like. life is so unbearable they just want Well, either that - or I’m just readto escape. And again, that’s totally ing a bit too much into it all! understandable and something we can all relate to - who hasn’t wanted to just jump out of their office chair and ride off into the sunset? But these songs are the minority and Toby Chelms is an REBT when seen in context of the rest of his work reflect the reality that we Therapist for Leeds NHS. He also plays bass in Get Human (gothuman.wordpress.com) and tries to keep aloadofstuffthathappened. wordpress.com updated

My Hometown A short story

by Daniel Issitt

here was no question; it was a fine-looking car. Tom hadn’t seen a ’54 Buick in this condition in years, and he hadn’t seen one in this colour since forever.

He ran his weathered hand over the gleaming blue hood and methodically traced the lettering above the grill. Everything from the contrasting white top to the elaborate grill screamed American motor. “She’s leaking oil, anything you can do?” Marty asked. “I’ll give her the once-over,” replied Tom, rousing himself from his daydream, “should be ready by this evening, stop by later.” “Thanks pal”, said Marty, tossing Tom the keys. Tom plucked the keys out of midair, nodded at Marty and watched as the young teacher strolled out of the workshop. Tom chuckled to himself and wandered over to the Buick’s driver’s door. His father had had a car just like this. He placed the key in the lock, turned it and smiled as he heard the reassuring click of the car’s lock mechanism. The door let

out a loud creak as Tom opened it, and he made a mental note to apply oil to the hinges later on. He felt that his own hinges could probably do with some of that oil as he manipulated his body into the front seat. He closed the door behind him, put his hands on the wheel and stared out of the windshield, onto Whitman Avenue. Little Eden sure looked tired, thought Tom. “And so do I”, he said aloud as he caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror. Tom wasn’t always this tired and neither was Eden. Sitting at the wheel of the Buick, Tom soon turned his thoughts to his childhood. He remembered sitting on his father’s lap steering the family Buick down the street as his father worked the pedals. It was the same journey every Saturday, the four blocks from his house to Mrs Patterson’s store. His father would leave the engine running, and send Tom into the store for milk and flour. Every Saturday without fail, Mrs Patterson would stick her head out of the store and wave at Tom’s father while Tom ran back to the car. On the way home,

his father would pull into the bus stop and send Tom out, dime in hand, to get the paper. Everything seemed a lot simpler back then. Tom remembered the look of pride that crossed his father’s face, as he told Tom to look around and take in the view of his home town. Little Eden was very different back then. The post-war years had seen the little manufacturing town prosper. Tom’s father did okay for himself, running the local garage, and life was generally happy for the eight-year old. Tom shook his head. How has it come to this? he thought as he stared across the road at the “Foreclosure” sign on the furniture store opposite. In his mind, the town had started to decline around the same time as his father’s happiness had hardened into a sense of being wronged. The catalyst for both seemed to be the summer of 1965. Tom remembered that July being one of the hottest on record, and the heat had added to the strain both at home and school. Tom’s mother had been taken seriously ill in June, and the heat was threatening to finish her off, while at school racial tension had been at an all-time high. Tom had never been a high-achiever at school, but any hope he had of 8

fluking a high SAT score were ruined that summer. Tom doubted he would ever forget the 14th of July. He returned from school to find his father weeping on the porch. It was a harrowing sight - this hulk of a man, doubled over in grief. Tom’s mother had been defeated by her illness and the heat and had passed away at lunchtime. Later that night, in neighbouring Newark, the cops would shoot dead a black guy named Lester Long during a routine traffic stop and search, an incident that would have lasting implications for Little Eden’s already volatile race relations. Tom shuddered. He still found it hard to think about that day for too long. As if in defeat, Tom rubbed his face, took a moment and got out of the car. Age was catching up with him. He stood by the side of the car for a minute, while his joints caught up with him. He’d never imagined being a mechanic, let alone being one for this long. He was supposed to be a musician like Elvis. The 13-year-old him would have never settled for following in his father’s footsteps, and he wasn’t sure his mother would have, either. She’d worked so hard for that guitar. Still, it was

partly her fault his dream was never realised, her fault for succumbing. He’d had to learn the trade to keep his father’s business open. Tom’s father wasn’t the same after his mother died. Work didn’t matter anymore, paying the bills didn’t matter anymore, Tom didn’t matter anymore. The only thing that meant anything was the bottom of the bottle. Tom looked around at the empty garage. It was a good job he learnt the trade at such a time, as his was the only business in Little Eden that was surviving. He walked out onto the forecourt and shielded his eyes from the sun. Whitman Avenue was deserted. There was no soul in sight, from the garage down to the old mill on the other side of the tracks. The mill was still a commanding presence on the Eden landscape, but like a bloated old dictator, it was basking in former glories. Tom remembered the day when the mill shut down vividly. It was nearly thirty years ago now - the day of Tom’s eldest son James’ third birthday. June the 8th, 1984. The town

was devastated. Over half the town’s population was directly employed by the textile mill, and even more had businesses that were linked to it. Some said it had been a long time coming. Businesses all over the country were being outsourced. It was cheaper, and it helped the rich get

richer. Tom always said the heart of Little Eden stopped that day. Three months later, so did Tom’s father’s. When the businesses had first begun to close, the buildings had been maintained in an attempt to encourage new residents. Once it became apparent that no one was coming, the buildings began to decay.

As Tom glanced at the shops on Whitman, he felt a pang of loss. He remembered driving down Main Street with James and seeing all the whitewashed stores. “This is your home town” he’d muttered to James. Him and Kate had spoken about moving south, but she soon fell pregnant with their daughter Rae, and when their youngest Ryan came along four years later, the others were settled. Tom hit the button that would raise the Buick into the air, and headed over to his tool chest. He grabbed a wrench and ducked under the car. Should be simple enough, he thought as he began to tinker. There were very few people left in Little Eden, and most of those that had stayed were hardly ever around. Everybody had left. James was in Chicago, Ryan was just out of college and was living in Boston, and Rae was over the Atlantic living with her English husband. They called every now and then, but with the world the way it was they had their own set of problems. As Tom tightened the oil filter, he thought about Kate. She was the last to leave him. Cancer had taken her in the fall. She’d made it through the

summer, but when the leaves died, so did she. For the first time in his life, Tom had understood how his father turned to the drink. Thankfully, Tom had found comfort and support from elsewhere, and the bottle hadn’t been an option. In the months since Kate’s passing, Tom had found some semblance of understanding, if not forgiveness for his father’s actions. Tom lowered the Buick, and gave it a quick vacuum, ready for its collection. It had been a slow afternoon. Marty collected the Buick and paid Tom a little extra for cleaning it out. As the Buick drove out, Tom watched as it rolled down the road and out of sight. As Tom closed the garage up, he noticed again how tired he was. But as he glanced down the street one more time, he said to himself: “I’m not done for yet”. And neither was Little Eden.

Dan Issitt is a freelance writer and author. His writing on music can be found at danissitt.wordpress.com

The Boss and his girls A look at the female characters in Springsteen’s songs

by Rob Hastings

“

There’s nothing else in this crazy world/ except for cars/ and gi-gi-gi-gi-girls…”

So sang New York punk quintet The Dictators on the final track of their debut LP, released in March 1975 - just as the E Street Band and our hero were completing the recording of Born To Run in that same city. Lest anyone somehow misinterpreted The Dictators’ central pleasures in life, the song itself was helpfully titled ‘(I Live For) Cars And Girls,’ while the album was named ‘The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!’ Even Bruce has never been quite that blunt in asserting cars and girls as the main fixations of his life, but, admittedly, he has not stopped far short. Indeed it was on Born To Run that the world would hear him not only realising his full musical and lyrical talent, but also confidently laying those down as two of the key thematic foundations of his songwriting career in the classic ‘Thunder Road’.

Yet, as passionately as Bruce extols his love for them, cars have never done much for me. No matter how good a “sixty-nine Chevy with a 396 Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor” sounds when the words are coming from his mouth, it doesn’t change the fact that I can’t drive. But when I was first exposed to Springsteen as a teenager with a real yearning – just like our hero from New Jersey – to know if love is wild, and to know if love is real, the women who populated his songs soon formed a central pillar in my adoration for his music. And why? Because they felt real. Authentic, genuine – tangible even. They, and Springsteen’s narration of his desires for them and travails with them, felt like hints of the happiness and sadness of adult life waiting before me. A decade or so on, of course, my love life has been far less eventful than almost any of Springsteen’s four-minute stories – and in many cases thankfully so. 11

But my affection for his characters has also matured, to the extent that at times, they almost feel like memories of love affairs of my own. Sherry, Mary, and dear old Wendy. Sandy, Candy, and Bobby Jean.

Sherry, Mary, dear old Wendy, and Bobby Jean would never appear in the musical poetry of a Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan song They would never appear in the musical poetry of a Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan song – it would be like Eliza Doolittle turning up in The Great Gatsby. But perhaps it’s a comparison between Springsteen’s women and those of these two other great lyricists that highlights the greatness of his ability to make us believe he is singing about real characters, who ordinary people like us could fall in love with.

Take Dylan’s ‘Visions of Johanna’. Even if you believe, like me, that the peak of Dylan’s peerless genius came as he searched for his wild mercury sound in the mid-1960s, you surely also have to recognise that in his finest and most dreamlike songs, such as this one, his female creatures became brilliantly elusive and mysterious but also as far from depictions of real women – real people – as you can get. They are impressionistic sketches, painted intentionally thinly in the ghostly and sometimes tragic colours of modernist literary romance: characters to be studied by poetry professors, not to represent the girl next door whom you have a crush on. In short, Dylan’s women are nothing but visions – or more accurately, perhaps, mirages. Shadows. As you listen to his music, they float wispily through the ether, leaving you with the sense you have been in the presence of something or someone but you are not entirely sure what or who exactly. They really do steal your voice and leave you howling at the moon. As for Cohen: Bruce doesn’t want a girl to give him tea and oranges that come all the way from China, just as you know he’d never claim to have touched her perfect body with his mind – not, at least, before losing his dead-pan look

and creasing up in throaty laughter at the ridiculousness of what he had just said. Cohen’s poetry is sublime, but of another world. Bruce’s ladies, in contrast, are right there in the room with you as soon as you press play. It’s no revelation to point out the rather obvious differences between the lyrical styles of these three great songwriters, of course – rarely could their work be confused. But placing Springsteen’s female characters in an imaginary identity parade alongside the other female musical characters populating the North American airwaves does help to underline just how clearly and directly they are written, even amongst the sensitive and image-laden lines of songs such as ‘Thunder Road’, and why they grabbed my affections and have held them ever since. They’re not all fully fleshed, of course. Quite a number of Springsteen’s songs don’t actually tell us much about the women he mentions beyond dropping their names into the lyrics. Yet for all the half-formed depictions, there’s the headstrong Bobby Jean, celebrated not in the traditional but ultimately shallow manner for being a wonderful beauty, but instead for being the narrator’s equal, his cultural soulmate in music, bands and clothes – evoking the spirit of love and joy at finding it far more than any details about

the depth of her eyes or the colour of her hair. And ‘Thunder Road’s Mary – with her bespoiled graduation gown, her hopes and dreams, her fears of her youth slipping away – personifies the kind of partner we want to care for across a lifetime, just as Candy’s fancy clothes and diamond rings mean nothing when in the intimacy of her room, with the pictures of her heroes on the wall. While Dylan dismisses Louise because “She’s all right, she’s just near,” Springsteen tells Mary to climb in because she’s all right, and that’s all right with him. Perhaps some will cynically and misogynistically contend that Bruce simply has lower standards than Bob. But I’d rather think it’s because Springsteen is one of us, with the honesty to represent life and love as it is for his fans, and the skill to express the glories and pitfalls of our realities, rather than of worshipping grand but remote romantic literary ideals. Johanna can go whistle. For me, it’s Wendy all the way.

Rob Hastings is a freelance news reporter, feature writer and editor, predominantly with The Independent, tweeting from @robhastings1000. His website is www.robhastings.co.uk 13

Order Manager A poem By Jennifer Calleja

woke up that first evening this headache’s not going away get up the twenty-first morning return to bed, feeling the same way

I’m recovering from a long illness spent contemplating my wash-basin pelvis after the cooled water has drained from the bath slid low, slipping lower with eyes that can hardly stand a single small candle at my feet while the original of dancing in the dark plays in the other room the way I like it barely able to hear the children’s choir or bruce’s hungover voice but still know without hearing where he sighs between verses and sniffs back a tear of sickening defeat, the damp piano trumpeting soft steam-clouds of chords across the hollow spanish guitar and I almost wish I could remember how to laugh, so well does this funeral-favourite fit the new me. Jen Calleja is a writer, poet and translator, editor of Verfreundungseffekt magazine and co-founder of Bathysphere Editions. She makes noise in the band Sauna Youth. www.jencalleja.com 14

Waistcoats & Walkmen A first true love’s beginning and end are soundtracked by the Boss By Reiner Reitsamer

very morning, when I get up and sit down at the living room table with a bowl of cornflakes, Bruce Springsteen is there to greet me with a smile.

He smirks at me from a “Born To Run” poster that’s been hanging on my wall for over a decade now. I remember the day I got it vividly. It was one of the best days of my life. It was the spring of 1999. Up until then my coming-of-age had not exactly played out like a John Hughes movie: pimple-faced and socially awkward, I didn’t attract any Molly Ringwalds. Instead of living the Ferris Bueller high-life, I was pretty much ignored by my fellow students. I found it hard to fit in with boys my age. What was more, I didn’t want to fit in with the baggy pants-wearing jocks who yelled “faggot” at anyone who was smaller than them, had better grades or wouldn’t know how to kick a football if his life depended on it (I fell into all three of those categories). Naturally, I turned into a loner pretty soon.

What has Springsteen got to do with all of this? Well, everything. It’s hard to describe how much reassurance a simple line like “We busted out of class/Had to get away from those fools” can give an irritated teenage boy. It made me feel less alone. I did learn more from that three-minute record than I ever learned in school: I learned how to walk the halls with swagger, amidst people who despised me and whom I despised in return. I had only discovered Springsteen’s music when I was about 14 years old. I got Born In The U.S.A. and Born To Run first and was hooked straight away. The more I listened, the less I could get enough of all those stories of shattered dreams, guys racing in the streets and girls waiting on the porch for a wild-eyed lover in some huge American car to take them to a better place. Springsteen had a way of turning frustration into energy. He made it seem 15

I had dressed up in a white shirt and a waistcoat, Bruce-style – only I wasn’t Bruce and so looked like a bit of a dork cool to be an outcast. To my miserable teenage ears his songs were like a voice of reason when nothing else made much sense. I immediately accepted him as The Boss. Around the same time I fell madly in love with a girl whom I’d like to call Mary for the purposes of this article. She was not only the prettiest and most intelligent girl in school, but also one of the few people my age who behaved like a normal, kind human being – and for some reason she showed interest in acneplagued old me. We started going out on a few dates, and although I never dared to dream that any more could come of it, for the first time in a long time the outside world didn’t seem to be hostile and repellent. Then it was announced that Springsteen would get the E Street Band back together for a tour, which would also bring them to Vienna, where I lived. That was the icing on the cake. It was perfect timing. I collected every piece of information I could get my hands on. In 1999 most people already had access to the in-

ternet, but my family wasn’t most people. My dad was still convinced that all you really needed to make it into the next century was teletext. Somehow I still managed to piece together the set list Springsteen and the band were playing on that tour. I put all the songs on a mixtape and proceeded to blast it through my crappy Walkman headphones 24/7. When the big day finally arrived, I was more than ready. My mum drove me to the concert hall at noon. I had dressed up in a white shirt and a waistcoat, Brucestyle – only I wasn’t Bruce and so looked like a bit of a dork. At the venue some fans had already gathered, drinking beer and waiting for the gates to open. As we stood there, a man – with hindsight, I’d like to believe it was Jon Landau – joined us at the fence and asked us not to run once we were let in. “This is going to be a threehour show”, he said. “Let’s make sure we can all enjoy it without anybody getting hurt.” His words just got us more excited. Three hours! Of course, when the gates did open, we all ran like the devil.

What happened inside the venue later that night doesn’t really need describing. Most of you have experienced the power of a Springsteen performance yourselves. It was a mind-blowing show, easily the best gig anyone had ever played anywhere. Just like every time I’ve seen Springsteen since that day. I came out of the concert hall sweaty and happy like a newborn. I spent the last of my hard-saved pocket money on a t-shirt and a poster – that poster – and thought about what to do next. Going home was not an option. I was still too fired up from what I had just witnessed. In my euphoria I worked up the courage to call Mary. She was at a party with friends and asked me to join her. I did, and as we finally kissed, I made a solemn promise in my head to let the world know someday that Springsteen saved my life that night. Hey, give a guy a break. I was just an excited teenager in a waistcoat.

Mary and I would stay together for ten years. It was a huge Springsteenesque romance (we probably “swore we’d never part” at some point) – but it wasn’t meant to last. When we split up – weeks after another E Street Band show, incidentally – I resorted to Springsteen’s music for comfort again and found it in songs like ‘Drive All Night’ and ‘One Step Up’. It’s this quality I admire most in The Boss: He never lets you down. He celebrates with you when you’re winning and picks you up when you’re down. He’s like the best friend I’ve never met. And that’s why that poster in my living room isn’t coming off any time soon.

Reiner Reitsamer is a freelance writer for the German music magazine Musikexpress and is currently looking for excuses not to get a proper job.

The King and The Boss An exploration of the parallels between two rock ‘n’ roll legends by Mathias Haeussler

ost people would date Elvis’s comeback at 1968, the year of the now iconic TV special where the King performed his old hits in a black leather outfit.

This performance - a full seven years after his last live appearance – was followed up with the release of hit singles like ‘In The Ghetto’ or ‘Suspicious Minds’. But for Springsteen, Elvis’s comeback occurred in 1972, with the release of ‘Burning Love’: “That’s when the jockeys woke up and found out that Elvis could still rock with the best of them”. Springsteen, of course, had always admired Elvis first and foremost as a rock star. He was seven when he first saw him on TV, immediately caught by the voice and the shaking hips. As he later reflected: “I 18

couldn’t imagine anyone not wanting to be Elvis Presley”. In 1976, almost twenty years later, Springsteen jumped over the wall at Graceland in order to try and speak to the King, having just played a ‘Born to Run’ tour show in Memphis. When security interceded, he tried to impress the guards by bragging about having recently made the covers of Time and Newsweek, but to no avail: he got quickly escorted to the street by the Memphis Mafia. Elvis was not even home that day – he was playing a show at Lake Tahoe – but the meeting would probably have

Bruce Springsteen wrote ‘Fire’ to inspire the King to rock the stage once again resulted in disappointment anyway. For at that time, Elvis was anything but the rebellious rock star of the 1950s. ‘Fat and Forty’ was the title of a New York Times article on the singer, who was caught in a downward spiral of endless tours, weight problems, and prescription drugs. He also couldn’t stand his former identity as a rock’n’roll star. “All he cares about these days are sentimental ballads”, his sound engineer complained. He also couldn’t stand ‘Burning Love’. In fact, Elvis had to be persuaded to even record the track, mumbling through six lacklustre attempts before thrashing out a half-decent

master take. Neither could he be bothered to rehearse the song properly with his live band, and the Golden Globe-winning documentary ‘Elvis On Tour’ shows him parodying the song on stage while having to read the lyrics from a sheet. Springsteen never accepted this abandonment of rock’n’roll. Having seen Elvis on 28 May 1977 in Philadelphia, he was so shocked that he went home straight away to write ‘Fire’, hoping to inspire the King to rock the stage once again. Elvis’s death less than three months later of course thrashed that plan, so the song went to Robert Gordon and later to the Pointers Sisters 19

instead (who had in turn inspired Elvis’s version of ‘Fairytale’ in 1975). So what remains of the Boss-King relationship, apart from a small Elvis fanclub badge on the album cover of Born to Run? As Springsteen later reflected on his fascination with Elvis, “it was like he came along and whispered some dream in everybody’s ear and somehow we all dreamed it”. It was a dream that was distinctively American. “When I was a child”, Elvis said in his Jaycees Award Acceptance speech in 1971, ‘I was a dreamer... I read comic books, and I was the hero of the comic book. I saw movies, and I was the hero in the movie. So every dream that I’ve dreamed has come true a hundred times’. And it is precisely this spirit of relentless ambition and youthful enthusiasm that transfigures Elvis’s career as the ultimate embodiment of the American dream; a career that “almost had the scope to take America in” (Greil Marcus).

Now this bodes well for Springsteen, a musician who has, according to himself, spent most of his life “measuring the distance between the American dream and American reality”. And it is in this sense that Springsteen carries on Elvis’s legacy: just as ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ freed an entire post-war generation from its moral conservatism, so ‘Born to Run’ offered nostalgic visions of romantic escape for the deeply divided 1970s America. For rock music is all about the moment; it’s the journey, not the arrival that matters. As Elvis continued in his Jaycees Award speech: “I learned very early in life that without a song the day would never end. Without a song a man ain’t got a friend. Without a song, the road would never bend - without a song. So I keep singing a song.” Thankfully, so does Bruce Springsteen – long may he continue.

Mathias Haeussler has tried to measure the distance between the American dream and American reality during a fiveweek trip across the US. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. 20

Goodbye, Bobby-Jean A short story

by John Burns

obby-Jean had been Jimmy’s girlfriend for about seven months.

The age difference between the two – Bobby-Jean was 17, Jimmy 24 – was a subject of gossip in the neighbourhood, but Jim paid no heed to this. He was proud to hold Bobby’s hand and be seen with her. BobbyJean worked the evening shift at the Carmike, two blocks from her mother’s house on Fitzhugh Avenue. Despite this short distance, Jimmy would be there at ten on the dot each night to pick her up and drive her home. Bobby-Jean would always appear with two scoops of ice cream liberated from the chill cabinet in the lobby on her way out. Those would then melt in the passenger seat while they kissed. Theirs was the sort of romance that does not avail itself to everyone and so has the habit of making others jealous. It was the couple’s intimacy that frightened Sam, Jimmy’s older brother. Sam feared that the information Bobby was privy to could land himself and his brother in trouble, and he began to distrust the girl. He needn’t have worried. While Jimmy did let his mouth run around

Bobby, the 17-year-old locked his secrets away deep within her, refusing to believe the truth about her lover. The rain was beating down on the road and on the river and on the wretched little car sat in the motel parking lot. Sam sprinted the twenty-odd metres to the reception desk in search of a room, while Jimmy leant back in the driver’s seat and sparked up a cigarette. Pushing his curly black hair out of his eyes and sliding the lighter back into the pocket of his jeans, he exhaled extravagantly and thought about his girl, and how strangely she’d acted this afternoon. Sam’s seeds of doubt were beginning to take hold in the younger man’s mind as he thought about the phone call he’d made to Bobby at 3:30pm. Jimmy thought about how scared and small she’d sounded over the phone as he told her his plans. He remembered the silence, and the dry sobbing sound, then her rallying her courage, choking back the fear and telling him: “OK”. He told her to pack a bag and that 21

he would meet her on Fitzhugh in two hours. He told Bobby not to tell her mother where she was going to and that she could call her later on tonight. He’d made her promise, and she had done so. Sam had grave doubts about Bobby’s promise and felt a secret vindication two hours later, as he rested his hand on his brother’s shoulder. The house on Fitzhugh was empty, Bobby nowhere to be seen. Bobby called Jimmy 45 minutes later, tearfully apologising in rapid, fractured sentences. She said she didn’t know why she’d felt scared and that she would take her dad’s Buick and meet them tonight. All this echoed pleasantly in Jimmy’s mind as Sam’s bedraggled face reappeared at the window, gesturing for his brother to get a move on. The motel room was bare except for a wardrobe, a bed beside the door and a coin-operated TV in the far corner. Jimmy stood by

the window and looked out towards the river and the distant lights of the city he’d left behind. He thought about tomorrow’s sun rising over the city he’d spent his life in and how by that time he, Bobby-Jean and Sam would be gunning in the opposite direction, up the highway and westwards into the freedom of obscurity. Sam rooted around the room in search of something to occupy his whirring, paranoid mind. In the wardrobe he found a crumpled-looking acoustic guitar, which he carried over to the bed and began to tune. Thinking it sort of appropriate to the two brothers’ predicament, Sam gently began to pick the chords to ‘Nebraska’, whistling the harmonica part, plaintive and low. He longed for movement, for him and his lovelorn brother to be back out on the road. “That’s too sad, man. Play something else,” Jimmy said, as he turned from the window, eyes wide and red. “Play

something happy, for Christ’s sake.” Sam lit another cigarette and rested his chin on the body of the guitar. Happiness was not a feeling he felt able to convey at that moment. “What do you suggest?” he asked his brother. Jimmy sat down on the bed, his head pounding, wanting to hear anything that took his mind off of Bobby-Jean and her absence.

“Anything.” Sam laughed quietly, took another few drags, stubbed out his cigarette and began to play. Three brighter chords filled the room in a gentle sequence. Smiling benignly at his oblivious younger brother, he whistled a new melody, silently spelling out the lyrics in his head: “… just to say I miss you baby, good luck and goodbye, Bobby-Jean.” Jimmy nodded in a solemn motion, swayed slightly as if drunk then smiled warmly at his brother, who kept playing, still gently laughing. Conceding defeat, Jimmy turned back to the window and the horizon beyond it, cursing himself for having trusted anyone but his brother all along. Bobby-Jean stood on the tarmac and looked southwards in disbelief. The oily water that lay across the road reflected the glow of her cigarette in the darkness, great blotches of grey now appearing on the rolling paper as the wind and rain battered the girl stood alone on the road in the depths of the night. The

Buick was dead by the roadside – its headlights sputtered their last a quarter of an hour ago - and her cellphone was the same. Now water lapped around her tennis shoes, dirty, cloying and cold. The wind lifted the mop of blonde hair that had been plastered to her forehead, exposing her blue eyes to the wild night, which were beautiful even in the face of such a brutal storm. She threw her defunct cigarette into the black water and hugged her elbows tight to her chest for warmth. Bobby felt like she was sleepwalking on someone else’s streets - distant and detached, but acutely aware of her own anguish and living every wretched second of it. There is a boy, she thought, in a motel room up ahead, cursing the ground I walk on, the name I carry, everything about me, because I’ve abandoned him when he needed me. Bobby-Jean looked out over the river, then southwards into enveloping rain and rising water.

John Burns is a freelance journalist and writer from Nottingham. When not listening to Springsteen he tweets as @johnburnslrh

Image by John_K flickr.com/people/jak757

Nebraska An appreciation

by Katie Malco

oooo, I’m going to make some generalisations right now.

These are purely based on audience reaction to Springsteen and his music drawn from conversations I’ve had. When the general public talk about Bruce Springsteen, they often associate him with his mainstream, radiofriendly hit album Born In The USA and many have judged or dismissed his music based on the title track of that album, describing it as “cheesy” or “very 80s”. Now, I›m only going on my own experience here. It usually happens at the part in the conversation where people ask: “So, what kind of music do you like?” And I, without hesitation, answer: “The Boss.” 24

“Who?” “Bruce Springsteen.” “What, that Born to Run guy? The old guy?” “Yeah, him.” Queue laughing, sniggering, or the simple reply: “Ok...um...really?” Admittedly, this was a more common scenario several years ago, when I was an enthusiastic and naive 18 year old, and it was incredibly uncool to be such a shameless super fan of Bruce. The cutting edge of cool was like, Razorlight or some shit (this was, of course, before they were massive). But back then, it seemed that to the average person like I was into “Dad music.” (I do also love Crowded House, Fleetwood Mac and Wings, so maybe they’re right.) As the years have gone on, it seems that opinions have changed, and

Bruce has made a few comebacks in the hipster scene - lordy, even H&M sold t-shirts with the Born in the USA album cover on the front (of course I know this because I bought one). It interests me, however, that The Boss will go in and out of fashion, but, as the H&M Tshirt displayed, it has always been Born to Run and Born in the USA that people will hail as his greatest work. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love those albums. Let’s face it, you can’t be a true Springsteen fan and not love the hits. But the highly contrasting, dark and haunting album Nebraska is not to be overlooked. It is badly recorded, it is drowning in loneliness and desperation and it is bare. It’s stripped down so much it’s not so much naked but skinless, with the nerves exposed and twitching. I never knew music could be so below par sonical-

ly, and for that very reason, sound so great. Far from the victorious and energetic songs romanticising the American D r e a m in previous albums such as Born to Run, themes of hopelessness, defeat, death and pleading curse through Nebraska. Springsteen recorded the album in his bedroom on a 4-track Tascam cassette recorder (cost: $1050) mixed through an old Gibson guitar unit to a beat box. The result was the marking of a Bruce Springsteen we had only previously heard hints of in earlier tracks such as ‘The River’ and ‘Thunder Road’; one who wasn’t afraid of expressing doomladen visions of individual destinies and downright fatalism… or maybe he was just being realistic? The instantly recognisable album cover features a high-contrast black and white photo of a long,

desolate road in the state of Nebraska, a very stark image that almost epitomises the content of the album – no frills, no sugar-coating, but truthful and stripped-down Americana folk songs. Springsteen paints a graphic picture of the lives of the unemployed at the time and the struggles people endured for short-term fixes to earn money. ‘Atlantic City’ has been a staple of Springsteen shows from the mid-80s right up to the most recent Work-

The comforting sneer of sarcasm in Bruce’s delivery ensures we don’t lose the sense of melancholy the earlier songs have instilled in us ing on a Dream tour and Bruce has played it in concert around 300 times, which perhaps makes it the designated ‘hit’ of Nebraska. The song sums up the message of the album in very frank terms – whilst everything around you crumbles, and the American Dream fades, there is always a glimmer of (perhaps misplaced) hope or belief

which encourages you to struggle on through the hard times: “Everything dies baby that’s a fact/Maybe everything that dies someday comes back”. This theme is very much echoed in the final track, ‘Reason to Believe’, where, in contrast to the cynicism that shapes the rest of the album, Springsteen tells stories of everyday human tribulation, despair and misfortune, but ends each verse with the fairly positive line “At the end of every hard-earned day/People find some reason to believe”. However, the comforting sneer of sarcasm in Bruce’s delivery ensures we don’t lose the sense of melancholy the earlier songs have instilled in us. Nebraska’s successor, Born in the U.S.A, was the commercial hit that Nebraska deliberately wasn’t, remaining in the US Top Ten for over two years. The slickly produced, classic 80s album delivered a string of hit singles, including the title track whose lyrics were based on the Vietnam war, and ‘Glory Days’ – the lyrics of which told stories about characters out of work, older, divorced, drinking away their

lives and reminiscing about the days when they had everything to live for. However, it is well known that these two tracks were originally written during the Nebraska sessions and were initially intended for release on that album instead. The demo version of ‘Born in the U.S.A’ is significantly different to the released version – much more in keeping with the tonal themes of Nebraska, it is bluesy, played in a minor key, and delivered sardonically, as the lyrics were intended. I chose to write an essay on the album Nebraska for a university project a couple of years ago and was amazed at how little there was to work with. Most articles - especially from the era during which it was released - choose to hail Born in the USA and mostly ignore the release of Nebraska. I guess most reviewers and journalists were dazzled by the glitzy production which at the time must have been so new and refreshing, and failed to appraise the content of the music. Perhaps if they had, then they would have seen the parallel between those BITUSA tracks and Nebraska: The dark imagery, the stories about ordinary working class lives and the lack of hope for something better.

Nebraska continues to be one of the most challenging and unique Bruce Springsteen albums to date, having sharply captured an important period in history within his story-telling lyrics. I cannot see how Bruce would have gained such a diverse and loyal fan base had it not been for albums such as Nebraska, a cutting and observant work that sets Bruce aside from average rock and roll ‘stars’ and places him in a league of his own. Nebraska is a stunning literary work, lyrically sharp as well as musically beautiful, haunting and contagious.

Katie Malco is a singersongwriter, who enjoys a good rant on this blog: www.katiemalco.co.uk. She has released two EP’s, with another release on its way.

My Father’s House A reflection on a filial relationship strengthened by Springsteen’s music By Matthias Scherer

’ve been spending hours thinking about what I could write for this zine, but when I bought my father’s Christmas present yesterday it became obvious.

I bought him a ticket to Springsteen’s Hyde Park gig in July next year, and as I entered my bank details I realised that if it weren’t for my dad, I would not be trying to put together the thing you’re holding in your hands right now. One of my first musical memories is brushing my teeth in our first apartment in Germany, and my father turning up the radio when ‘Born in the USA’ came on. My brother had been born in Rochester, New York, and my father liked to say that ‘Born…’ was his (my brother’s) song. In my early 28

teens, I used to grab my dad’s copy of Springsteen’s Greatest Hits and take it upstairs to his study, where I had my stereo. I would leaf through the lyrics sheet to decipher what ‘Badlands’ and ‘Thunder Road’ were about, and I put on ‘Secret Garden’ whenever I had a girl-induced blues. Back then, Springsteen’s music was like a connection to the time before I was born, when my parents were living in America. The photo of a young Springsteen on the first page of the sleeve notes, on some street, sitting on some American car or other, with a porch in the background, made me nostalgic for a time and place I had and only minimal memories of. This has changed over the years, because I have developed my own relationship with Springsteen’s music, and a different relationship to my father. Springsteen’s difficult relationship with his own dad, Douglas Freder-

“If everything had gone great between us my dad and me, it would have been a disaster. I would have just written happy songs” ick Springsteen, is well-documented. The latter’s authoritarian style brought out Springsteen’s rebellious streak, and the two fought pretty much constantly. The tension between the two was the inspiration for some of Springsteen’s greatest songs, a fact that Springsteen himself has acknowledged: “I’ve gotta thank him because — what would I conceivably have written about without him? I mean, you can imagine that if everything had gone great between us, [it would have been a] disaster. I would have just written happy songs”. In Springsteen’s back catalogue, there is a moment that moves me to tears almost every single time I hear it. It’s on the Live/1975 – 1985 album, when the harmonica introduces ‘The River’ after a particularly gripping monologue about Springsteen’s father and an impending draft into the US Army at the time of the Vietnam war. The way Springsteen says “oh man, I used to hate him” is heartbreaking, but not as much as the final, redemptive line before the harmonica kicks in.

There is another fantastic moment relating to Springsteen’s father, during the spoken word interlude on ‘Growing Up’ from the same live album. In this instance, Springsteen speaks with a lot more distance and humour about how his father despaired of his only son’s rock ‘n roll ways, and shouted at him to “turn down that god-damned guitar”. The fact that Douglas Springsteen was in the audience for this performance makes the song all the more life-affirming. My own father was much more supportive of my teenage ambition to become a rock god, paying for guitar lessons and chipping in for my first amplifier. I guess the only real parallel between Springsteen and myself in regards to our fathers is the way I have come to notice the similarities between my old man and myself, much the same way Springsteen

did once he got married and became a father himself. I might not have my father’s discipline, sense of orientation, intelligence and perfectionism, but the aversion to conflict, an occasional temper, and the love for Springsteen’s music are things I definitely got from him. Since we first saw him together at Crystal Palace stadium in 2002, my dad and I have bought each other

We did have pretty intense phases, and there was a period where I did think I hated him every single new album (Wrecking Ball was actually released on my dad’s birthday), and have been to seen him two more times – at the Emirates Stadium in May 2007, and again at Hyde Park in 2009. Every one of these shows increased my appreciation for Springsteen’s music and the way my father and I now speak to each other: as friends, with fondness and pride in the other’s achievements. This wasn’t always the case. During my teenage years, there was a time I was so mad at him a barely talked to 30

him for a couple of months. But he never expressed anything resembling the disgust towards my ideas the way Springsteen Senior did. I can’t say for certain what Springsteen’s music means to my father. Oddly enough, I’ve never asked him, so I can only assume that he relates to Springsteen’s honest, romantic stories about the working men and women’s lives. My father was the first in his family to leave Germany permanently, in his case for the US. When he came to Rochester, NY in the early 80s, Springsteen must have been on the cusp of superstardom, so I’m thinking it was Born in the USA that introduced The Boss to my father. That album contains ‘My Hometown’, probably the song that means most to my father (‘Long Walk Home’, with its succinct description of returning home after a long time away, being another). His own hometown, a tiny village in the middle of Germany, used to be a healthy farming community, where summers were spent in the fields and forests that surround it even now. Now, most of its inhabitants are dead or dying, and there is nobody coming to build new livelihoods.

My father has said that one of his biggest regrets is that he didn’t provide a sense of family roots to my brother and me – we were both born on the other side of the Atlantic and grew up in the UK, miles away from either side of the family. When asked where we’re from, we usually answer in a long-winded, unsatisfying way – because neither of us is really sure. Another regret he still harbours – and one I can’t help but feel partially responsible for – is the fact that he gave up his teaching career at university to provide for us. He was a fantastic professor by all accounts (he taught theoretical physics), but had to switch into the financial sector when his contract ran out.

The last time we saw Bruce Springsteen play live, I had to push a few people aside to get through to where my dad was standing so we could spend the duration of ‘Born to Run’ arm in arm, raising one fist to the skies and shouting along. It was a great moment, and one that I look forward to revisiting this summer I frequently curse myself for not being around for more Springsteen tours, and I’m aware that every tour he announces these days could be his last. I’ll savour this show, but more than that I’ll savour the time I have left with my father.

This might not seem like a tough blow, but the fact remains that he had to give up doing what he loved to provide for his family. Springsteen’s own father slaved away in a rug mill, inspiring the song ‘Factory’, and the pain that he went through resonated immensely with his songwriter son.

Twenty minutes in Asbury Park A kid from the Munich suburbs goes to New Jersey to look for a moment of truth by Christoph Lindemann

first heard his music as a teenager. Born in the USA was a very important album to all of us.

We played it at all our parties – when we’d DJ, we’d put on songs like ‘Working on the Highway’ and thought it was the best thing ever. The only song I didn’t like as much then was ‘No Surrender’. I love that song now, but when I was 15 it seemed over-arranged and I couldn’t really comprehend it fully. But songs like ‘My Hometown’ really meant a lot to me back then. Even from today’s perspective, it just seems like it’s an album that is very easy to love: It’s so strong, so direct. At home, I used to play ‘I’m on Fire’ on my acoustic guitar. When you’re a teenager and you’re starting to learn English, that is a great song, because the lines are very poetic but still easy to understand – “wake up with the sheets soaking wet”, etc.

His music, to me, was totally representative of America and American culture. There’s a line in ‘Darlington County’ that goes “take a seat on my fender”, and the first time I went to America I asked the first park ranger I saw what a fender was, because I had to know – the music meant that much to me. With Springsteen’s music, and country music as well, I’ve always felt that to understand the songs was to understand America. This music was like a little window into the culture of real American people. When Born in the USA came out I read somewhere that the title track was actually a protest song against the Vietnam war, so of course I had to tell every one of my friends about how easy it is to misunderstand that song. I felt very smart knowing these things.

I’ve always had a fascination with America, and at some point I realised that I wanted to get to know the real America – all of it. So when I lived in L.A. I took trips to random desert towns just to sit at a gas station and look at the people and try to understand what it felt like to live there. Even when my parents and I went on holiday to Greece, we

would go to a small village in Greece and stick around until we knew everyone there –until we had seen the old lady who lived around the corner often enough to know at what time she would take her coffee. I was always more interested in these things than seeing famous sights.

The reason Springsteen is so widely loved is that there are some very basic themes in his songs – but also a lot of truth. A very good friend of mine always says that if you get goosebumps, that’s because what you’re experiencing is true. And I think what Springsteen does really well is have little mo-

ments of truth in all of his songs. With a song like ‘My Hometown’, you get to hear something that isn’t shown in the big blockbuster movies, where it’s all about New York and all that stuff. I heard the story of a town where the windows are boarded up and there are no jobs, and I thought “Wow, what would it feel like to live in a place like that?”

I wanted to see the parts of America that weren’t in the guidebook. Then came a time when I was working at ABC News in New York. I didn’t have any friends there, and I used to get long weekends, so I had some free time. After a while I got tired of sitting in Central Park and I decided to go to Asbury Park in New Jersey. I even knew that Springsteen wasn’t from there, but from a small town nearby, but I thought “why did he name an album after that place?” and wanted to know what it was like there. That was back in 1998, and at the time that was a three-hour trip from Central Station because you had to change trains. At my changeover station, I had about an hour before my next train left. It was in a nameless town in New Jersey, and I went to a cornerstore and bought my first ever packet of cigarettes. It was like, I’m going to Asbury Park, I’ve got to have a cigarette now. I didn’t inhale, but I felt really cool. The way I had planned it was that I was going to spend two hours in

Asbury Park before going back. All I knew about the place was that there was a fair going on, and that there was a coast. I had lived in L.A. for a few months two years earlier, but I had never seen a place like Asbury Park in 1998.

I asked a guy where the ocean was, and he said he didn’t know All the windows were boarded up, and there was nobody on the street. I couldn’t see the ocean or a coastline, and there was nothing even resembling a main street when I got off the train. I walked around for about five minutes, and then I asked a woman which way the ocean was. She just shook her head and didn’t say anything. I asked another guy, and he said he didn’t know. Then I saw a couple of guys with gold teeth and hoods drawn down

to cover their faces, and I got really scared - after all, I was just a kid from the suburbs of Munich. I had driven through South Central L.A. before, which isn’t a very safe environment either, but in Asbury Park I had the feeling that I really, really didn’t belong there. And after two locals not being able to tell me where the ocean was, I thought “what the hell is going on here?” But I still felt I had to do something while I was there, so I could tick it off my list and tell people I’d actually been. So I went to a little store and bought a cup of coffee, which I had sitting on one of two plastic chairs. I felt so utterly out of place, more than I’ve ever felt in my life – nobody talked to me, nobody even looked at me. There was a train going back to New York 20 minutes after I had gotten to Asbury Park, which I ended up taking. I spent 20 minutes in Asbury Park feeling overwhelmed.

out in ‘My Hometown’, the sadness about how that town turned out. Because when you walk out of the train station at Asbury Park and all you see is empty streets, you know what he’s talking about. And I could see that, if you’re actually from that place, you’d feel even more sad at the sight than I did. I haven’t been back since.

Christoph Lindemann is a DJ (facebook.com/djxtoph) and Head of Music at on3 Radio in Germany. He was an editor at Musikexpress magazine from 1999 to 2009.

I definitely think I learned more about Springsteen even in those few minutes, though. I could relate to the feeling of nostalgia that comes

Image by Al Camardella flickr.com/people/camardella

Wrecking Ball by Rory Porter

et’s get one thing straight – everything is fucked.

The age we currently live in is a depressing one for pretty much everyone outside of what C. Wright Mills called ‘the power elites’ and what our own time has (conveniently for Twitter) renamed ‘The 1%’. The globe is as ravaged by poverty and famine, war and oppression as it ever has been - only this time around the economic model that promised to get us out of this mess via an atomic explosion of consumer goods has eaten itself from the arsehole inwards. History may be at an end, but, it seems, so is everything else. All we under-30s have to look forward to is working until we die just to secure an ever-decreasing standard of living. It’s at times like these that we need to listen to Bruce Springsteen more than ever.

Springsteen’s music is, as its base, a music born of optimism. I’m not talking about the rather cringeworthyy campaign-trail stylings of ‘Working on a Dream’ or the sundrenched West coast renaissance of ‘Lucky Town’ and ‘Human Touch’. Those records are pretty bloody optimistic alright; they don’t need an article written about the fact. Instead I want to discuss how even when Springsteen addresses seemingly dark and hopeless subject matters, his treatment always shows a faith in the transformative power of hope and love and an optimism that sooner or later we’ll learn how to wield both to improve our plight. Time and again situations that seem hopeless and inescapable are

transformed by Springsteen’s vision into instances of incredible beauty. Black holes that might consume his characters become bright lights that show them the way to something better. ‘Jungleland’ shows a night out for delinquent kids to be a veritable festival of culture, those taking part performing ‘an opera out on the turnpike… a ballet being fought out in the alley’.

Springsteen venerates what we create as a vital expression of our humanity Even the death of The Rat is given a histrionic treatment: we witness the demise not of a two-bit gangster but a latter-day hero whose ‘own dreams gun him down’. The cast of Jungleland, the midnight gangs and backstreet girls, understand the limitations of their social situation but refuse to be dragged down by them, instead using their passion to create something beautiful.

Unlike much popular music, both past and current, Springsteen never offers us the musical equivalent of Heat magazine, but instead venerates what we create as a vital expression of our humanity. He shows that those without the money to finance a lifestyle that denotes ‘success’ in modern society are in fact the Kardashians of their own, separate culture. These characters are actors rather than spectators in their own lives, and even though The Rat fails and the poets who look on ‘wind up wounded not even dead’, the very fact that they all refused the paltry offerings afforded by their social positions gives hope to anyone listening who’s unhappy with the life they lead. The problem with this, as anyone who has ever met more than three other human beings knows, is that such a faith in yourself and pride in your own abilities can easily spill over into chauvinism and arrogance. However, Springsteen never offers us some arse-kicking Übermensch as the way to some undefined ‘better’. What we are shown is how even more than from our own agency in

And we too hope The Rat will meet Jane tomorrow night, because we see that without her there’s no escape for him the world, hope for something better stems from our relationships with others. When Spanish Johnny rolls into town, beaten and bruised, rejected by the hard girls on easy street and subject to sinister accusations from axe-swinging pimps, it’s Puerto Rican Jane’s voice telling him not to cry that gives him the strength to carry on and helps him see that the city isn’t all doom and gloom. As the song ends and Johnny departs on a job to make some easy yet seedy money (this is The Rat’s world of heroic failure after all) he tells Jane that everything’s all right and he’ll meet her tomorrow night. And we hope he will too, because we see that without her there’s no escape for him. This is a theme that recurs constantly in Springsteen’s work, from ‘Born to Run’ to ‘Rosalita’, from ‘For You’ to ‘Out in the Street’. The narrator of ‘Thunder Road’ has a plan for his success but he nevertheless can’t face himself alone. In ‘Atlantic City’ he buys two tickets on that Coast City bus.

So far, so micro-scale. Believe in yourself and love others - pretty prosaic, right? Maybe, but the larger the scale on which such platitudes are applied, the less like platitudes they seem. In the wake of 9/11, Bruce Springsteen went into the studio to record The Rising. The album was released a year later into an America that had introduced the civil libertycurtailing Patriot Act, begun The War on Terror with the invasion of Afghanistan and kicked off a relentless media campaign of demonisation against its Muslim population. The Rising resists any retreat into jingoism or political orthodoxy and instead addresses a country’s open wounds with sensitivity and humanity, never losing sight of the hope for a better future. In ‘My City of Ruins’ Springsteen calls on his city, his country and perhaps even his world to ‘rise up’ from its current level where terms like ‘infidels’ and ‘collateral damage’ excuse atrocities. But how do we go about it? ‘With these hands’ comes Springsteen’s answer. It won’t be easy, but we can do it if we want. The title track continues in this vein, inviting us to ‘come on up for the rising’, but, very much like the archetypal Springsteen protagonist,

this more candid incarnation of the artist can’t do it alone either, needing someone, perhaps all of us, to ‘come on up, put your hand in mine’. The whole contention of this article may seem pretty glib to those with an interest in current affairs and possibly downright pretentious to those who like music, but I’m afraid there’s not much I can do about it. In a musical environment populated by the clever-clever irony and post-modern regurgitation of Lady Gaga or the simply dispiritingly cynical and reactionary nature of much that passes for ‘political’ music (whether hip-hop- or rock-based) I keep going back to Springsteen. A few reasons for this come to the fore. One of them is that in a world where everything has been stripped down to its market value, Springsteen continues to think big and talk about the importance of love, friendship, community and self-expression for their own sakes and for all our sakes, regardless of how much mon-

ey they’re going to make for someone. But ultimately I think the reason Springsteen resonates so deeply with me and so many other people around the world is that we were hopeful first - Springsteen just put it into words for us. I for one still believe that someday we’re going to get to that place where we really wanna go and we’ll walk in the sun, but ‘till then we’ll all just have to keep using our hands and above all, hoping. With Springsteen around that massive task is made a little easier.

Rory Porter works in the service sector and lives in privately rented accommodation. He sings about these and other things in citydwellerband.tumblr. com. He will write articles on current events, Jacobean drama and the 1980s DC hardcore punk scene for money.

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