Today in 2011 Clarence Clemons of the E Street Band died.
Earlier this week, it so happened that I saw on cable a concert of Springsteen
and his band from 2000. Watching Clemons, knowing he’s gone, had a certain
impact, and I got a bit misty when they played “If I Should Fall Behind” and Clemons
took the mike, along with Patty Scialfa, Nils Lofgren, and Miami Steve Van
Zandt, in a close shot with Bruce. The show was full of the camaraderie of the
E Street Band, though at a considerable remove from when I saw them on the tours
in 1978 and 1980. Which is a way of saying that I go back quite a ways with
that band and Bruce, back to long before their big money-making hit album Born in the U.S.A. (1984).
I more or less stopped being an automatic buyer of
Springsteen LPs after Tunnel of Love
(1987), though I’ve kept up, sorta. The Seeger Sessions in 2006 got me
interested again, though not to the same degree. While we were watching the
concert, I was reading aloud through Rolling Stone’s list of 100 Best Songs by
Springsteen, and while I disagree with the rankings and some of what’s on
there, I feel that almost any song of Springsteen’s that needs to be on there
is. After giving it a bit of thought, I realized that today’s song, from Born to Run (1975), is most likely the
song I’d pick as my #1 Springsteen song—partly from how I felt hearing the band
launch into it in the concert. “Backstreets,” which they also played, was
another strong contender, but I have (maybe) more reason to pick this one.
I should say that
Springsteen was a major touchstone for me from 1977 to 1980, after that less
so. The latter fact due in part to the endless earnestness of his songs, and the fact
that, no matter how big he got, he couldn’t drop the effort to romanticize grease
monkeys and their girls, the working guys and homecoming queens of some
perpetual high school date night. As someone who more or less detested high
school and grew up around the types who think jobs and family and houses are the be-all and
end-all, I had to both respect Bruce for his ability to find ways to poeticize
such lives as well as look askance at his many redundant themes. How many times
does someone “cross the river to the other side” or spend time monologuing from
behind the wheel of a car?
But put all that quibbling aside for the moment. “Thunder
Road” is one of Springsteen’s big, sweeping, grand mini-epics about the flurry
of romance when a guy—just your average Joe, Bruce-style—realizes that he can’t
live without “the girl.” And there’s only one, even though she sounds like
legions of regular girls who need to separate themselves from some kind of stultifying
home environment—either it’s not cool or it’s too constraining or it’s just not
good enough for you, babe—and ride off into the sunset in the mean machine of
the guy with the most charisma and machismo on the block. It’s the great
American fantasy of boy and girl off to see the Wizard, so to speak. Given that
this basic scenario gives rise to the likes of Clyde Barrow and Charles
Starkweather as “romantic heroes,” it’s not surprising that Bruce eventually
gets around to a very dour and powerful song about the latter serial killer—and
his thrill-ride girlfriend—called “Nebraska.” But that’s the dark side of today’s
song, so to speak. After all, this one says “It’s a town fulla losers, I’m
pulling out of here to win”—and the way Roy Bittan’s piano leads the crescendo after
Max Weinberg’s drum roll is one of my favorite moments in all of Springsteen,
and it keeps up, with the piano doing wonderful fills as Clemons’ sax, blended
into Jimmy Iovine’s wall of sound, keeps pumping like a maverick heart, all going on for
a full minute at the song’s stirring conclusion.
For all the irony I can’t help but feeling—“all the
redemption I can offer, girl, ‘s beneath this dirty hood”—at times, the song
boasts many great passages that show Springsteen to be fully in command of his
idiom: “You can hide ‘neath your covers / And study your pain / Make crosses of
your lovers / Throw roses in the rain / Waste you summers praying in vain / For
a savior to rise from these streets.” If that doesn’t give a nicely worded spin
to the usual bored girl at home looking for excitement—and one that is also
shy, pained, and maybe even Catholic—then I don’t know what. And the opening harmonica
is so plaintive but resounds with “call of the road” excitement as the
singer speaks of Roy Orbison singing for the lonely, a way of indicating,
early, that this is all about the redemption via radio, of songs that sweep up
the spirit into subtle longings. Since high school, kids, and before.
But it’s more than that. This is about the doldrums after
high school ends and how do you make a go of it then, of having a social life. “So
you’re scared and you’re thinking that maybe we ain’t that young anymore.” That’s
the part that got to me in 1978, a year out of high school, and even more so a
year later when I put it at the start of a tape I gave to an older woman I knew—many
years out of high school and college—as a kind of gesture toward the kind of
romance I hoped she was still willing to feel. That she happened to be named
Mary like the girl in the song (the most common girls’ name in the U.S. for
decades) is just one of those things. Certainly the idea that I was asking her
to leave her home for the front seat of my car was absurd. I didn’t have a car
nor even a driver’s license. Like I say, the terms of Springsteen’s fantasies
are rarely mine, but I’d be lying—and denying something in me akin to his
vision—if I said I didn’t see my situation, or at least its feeling, mirrored
in some of his songs, particularly this one. That song became one of those
great “running away from it all” songs and that was important then.
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In that Rolling Stone
list, the write-ups for the songs tend to speculate about the real life sources
of some of Bruce’s lyrics. I never do that. I really don’t care who a given
artist is sleeping with, slept with, or would like to sleep with. I’m much more
concerned with my own erotic life. And that means accessing songs through the
kinds of fantasies, and sometimes experiences, that my own life provides and
which often find answering reflection in songs I like to hear. It’s much less
the case now—soon to be 55—that such things happen, but back then, when I was
getting to know this album and Springsteen’s next, Darkness on the Edge of Town
(1978), it wasn’t so much that the songs “spoke for me” or even “to me,” but
that they spoke in a way that was plausibly “like” the place I lived in then
(New Castle, Delaware, with its closeness to New Jersey and to the seashore,
and to Maryland, as well as cities like Philly, and NYC and DC) and showed how
it could be done. Not that I ever wanted to write about truck stops and sock
hops and burger joints and cops and greasers and gangs and the heart-stopping
beauties you can sometimes find in the midst of it all. But when I was down by the
sea in Ocean City, as I am now, the world of Springsteen always came to mind, till I was 22 or so.
What I love most about this song is that it’s a long,
sprawling lyric and the song has no real chorus, though it moves from crescendo
to crescendo, constantly upping the ante, so that the big spike of “oh and that’s
alright with me” gets driven further by “we’ve a chance to make it good somehow
/ So what else can we do now” and then hits the spike from “the night’s
busting open” to “Thunder Road.” Then it
gets wound up further with “tonight we’ll be free / All the promises will be
broken” as the sweet talk of this importunate lover gets more excitable, more
demanding, but also more sure of himself. It’s a great monologue, full of male
desire and able to sketch the skittish attitudes of its object of desire so
that, whether or not either is our romantic ideal, they take shape for us and
the amazing arrangement of the song makes us believe in them, as Springsteen,
vocally, gives it his all in what is still my favorite of all his recorded
performances.
We got one last chance to make it real.
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