First off, if you think he can't sing, you're full of shit.
It's that simple. It really is. You may be a very nice person, smart person, tasteful person. You may not like his singing - that is, you may not find it to your personal taste. Which is just fine - everyone's entitled. But don't mistake your preferences for facts of life. Here's what Bono (who's singing I often don't find to my personal taste) had to say about him:
When Sam Cooke played Dylan for the young Bobby Womack, Womack said he didn't understand it. Cooke explained that from now on, it's not going to be about how pretty the voice is. It's going to be about believing that the voice is telling the truth ... To understand Bob Dylan's impact as a singer, you have to imagine a world without Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Kurt Cobain, Lucinda Williams or any other vocalist with a cracked voice, dirt-bowl yelp or bluesy street howl. It is a vast list, but so were the influences on Dylan, from the Talmudic chanting of Allen Ginsberg in "Howl" to the deadpan Woody Guthrie and Lefty Frizzell's murmur. There is certainly iron ore in there, and the bitter cold of Hibbing, Minnesota, blowing through that voice. It's like a knotted fist, and it allows Dylan to sing the most melancholy tunes and not succumb to sentimentality. Here are some of the adjectives I have found myself using to describe that voice: howling, seducing, raging, indignant, jeering, imploring, begging, hectoring, confessing, keening, wailing, soothing, conversational, crooning. It is a voice like smoke, from cigar to incense, where it's full of wonder and worship. Dylan did with singing what Brando did with acting. He busted through the artifice to get to the art. Both of them tore down the prissy rules laid down by the schoolmarms of their craft, broke through the fourth wall, got in the audience's face and said, "I dare you to think I'm kidding." (Rolling Stone, 500 Greatest Singers)
One of the things I like about Bono (and there's a lot of things I don't like about Bono ... he's getting smarter as he gets older.
I. Talkin' New York (1961-63)
Little Bobby Zimmerman grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota, a place I know nothing about except it's a small town and it's cold. He loved music and books, apparently; blues and country that broadcast out of Shreveport, Louisiana, and then rock and roll. He learned guitar and piano and harp, and he formed bands: The Shadow Blasters, the Golden Chords. He scared his high school principal stomping out an extra loud
"Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay" at the high school talent show. The principal, anticipating Pete Seeger a decade or so later, cut the mike. His idol was Little Richard. After high school he read Bound For Glory and discovered Woody Guthrie. He decided rock and roll groups weren't making it, so he embraced Woody and became a folk singer. In later years, when his rock`n'roll past was still a secret, folkies would claim he sold out when he got an electric guitar. Surprise! It was when he went folk that he sold out.
In `61 he went to NYC to seek fame and fortune as a folkie. He found it because he was unique, and original, and irreverent.
Resembling a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik, Mr. Dylan has a cherubic look and a mop of tousled hair he partly covers up with a Huck Finn black corduroy cap. His clothes may need a bit of tailoring, but when he works his guitar, harmonica or piano and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent. Mr. Dylan's voice is anything but pretty. He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his back porch. All the "husk and bark" are left on his notes, and a searing intensity pervades his songs. Mr. Dylan is both comedian and tragedian. Like a vaudeville actor on the rural circuit, he offers a variety of droll musical monologues. "Talking Bear Mountain" lampoons the overcrowding of an excursion boat. "Talking New York" satirizes his troubles in gaining recognition and "Talkin' Hava Negilah" burlesques the folk-music craze and the singer himself. Mr. Dylan's highly personalized approach toward folk song is still evolving. He has been sopping up influences like a sponge. At times, the drama he aims at is off-target melodrama and his stylization threatens to topple over as a mannered excess. But if not for every taste, his music-making has the mark of originality and inspiration, all the more noteworthy for his youth. Mr. Dylan is vague about his antecedents and birthplace, but it matters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to be straight up. (Robert Shelton, 1961)
Dylan became the darling of the folkies, their great white hope, their new Woody. And he broke their hearts when he left them. He left them because he had to. Because he was too big a fish for their little folkie pond. Even today there are those who mutter that he was a fraud, a fake, a phony; he was never any good, he sold out for the big bucks, he was only in it for the money and the fame. Sounding like jilted teenage romantics, turning on their once-pedestaled-paramours because they left them for something bigger and better. It doesn't matter worth a god-damn if Richard Farina or Eric Andersen or Tom Paxton or Dave Van Ronk or Eric Von Schmidt or Koerner Ray and Glover or Joan Baez were "better" (as musicians, as writers, as whatever). Dylan could, and did, do things artistically, that they could never have done. They all made some nice records. Dylan made epochal ones.
It was true even with album number one. Other white folksingers of the era, including his older contemporaries Eric Von Schmidt and Dave Van Ronk, had incorporated blues in their work, says Allmusic,but Dylan's presentation was more in your face...There's a punk-like aggressiveness to the singing and playing here. His raspy-voiced delivery and guitar style were modeled largely on Guthrie's classic '40s and early-'50s recordings, but the assertiveness of the bluesmen he admires also comes out, making this one of the most powerful records to come out of the folk revival of which it was a part. Within a year of its release, Dylan, initially in tandem with young folk/protest singers like Peter, Paul & Mary and Phil Ochs, would alter the boundaries of that revival beyond recognition
The difference is, Dylan never really was a folkie. He was a rock`n'roll singer who assimilated folk music, and coughed it back up, his way. His ambition went way beyond the Folk Revival. And his talent allowed him to reach for it. He reached and he got it on Freewheelin', his early `63 second album. "Blowin' in the Wind" gave the Folkie Revival its greatest anthem. "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" made him a poet. Even the cover was epochal.
And, like many ambitious artists, when he saw he had the reach, he knew he had to reach farther. So he threw the folkies one more bone with The Times They Are A-Changing, a holding effort, and shut himself in the studio one summer night and turned out Another Side Of Bob Dylan. And he blew off the protest songs and threw off the suit the folkies had tried to sew him into. They were very pissed off. The songs were personal, and surreal, full of strange characters and stranger events, and imagery. His appearance had altered, too, and his attitude.
In the latter half of 1964 and 1965, Dylan's appearance and musical style changed rapidly, as he made his move from leading contemporary songwriter of the folk scene to folk-rock pop-music star. His scruffy jeans and work shirts were replaced by a Carnaby Street wardrobe, sunglasses day or night, and pointy "Beatle boots". A London reporter wrote: "Hair that would set the teeth of a comb on edge. A loud shirt that would dim the neon lights of Leicester Square. He looks like an undernourished cockatoo." Dylan also began to spar in increasingly surreal ways with his interviewers. Appearing on the Les Crane TV show and asked about a movie he was planning to make, he told Crane it would be a cowboy horror movie. Asked if he played the cowboy, Dylan replied, "No, I play my mother." (Wikipedia) Another Side Of Bob Dylan Biograph The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3
III. Bring It On Home (1965-1966)
So he bought himself an electric guitar. He showed up at the Newport Folk Festival with The Paul Butterfield Blues Band behind him. He got booed ... for playing electric, for poor sound, for too short a set ... reports vary. He was defiant. His new music owed as much to Chuck Berry, and the hard Chicago blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf as to Woody Guthrie. His songs were surreal beat poetry set to clanging, cacophonous blues-rock. He did not back down. Joan Baez trotted after him like a puppy until he finally kicked her off, ending his status as folk-darling forever (how dare you abuse the princess?!?). The folkies slagged him in print. He responded with "Positively 4th Street," a musical "go-fuck-yourself." "Something is happening and you don't know what it is," he sneered, at a hidebound audience that couldn't keep up with him. He didn't need them. He kept on getting bigger and better, and he blew minds. "that snare shot sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind" said Bruce Springsteen of "Like A Rolling Stone" He went to Nashville with members of Ronnie Hawkins backing band and laid down Blonde On Blonde, "that thin wild mercury sound". Al Kooper described the album as "taking two cultures and smashing them together with a huge explosion": the musical world of Nashville and the world of the "quintessential New York hipster" Bob Dylan. He toured Europe. Folk purists booed. He told the band to
"play fucking loud." Then he went back to upstate NY with his new wife, and threw himself over the handles of his motorcycle. And he vanished. And the world went psychedelic.
He holed up in Woodstock with his friends from Ronnie's band, and they sat around and recorded a bunch of lo-fi demos which built quite a rep, first as bootlegs, then in some official releases, as The Basement Tapes. Despite their glorious rep, they sound to my ears like a bunch of low-key, lo-fi demos of good songs that might have been great if they'd really cut loose on them. They didn't. Instead he went back to Nashville and cut John Wesley Harding, "a quiet, contemplative record of shorter songs, set in a landscape that drew on both the American West and the Bible. The sparse structure and instrumentation, coupled with lyrics that took the Judeo-Christian tradition seriously, marked a departure not only from Dylan's own work but from the escalating psychedelic fervor of the 1960s musical culture." It was his most mature album of the 60's. I think it's one of his very best.
He stayed off the road. He followed JWH with Nashville Skyline, one of his worst. But it was a huge hit.
He stayed home and cut a record just about every year. Most were modest. There were some good, but minor, songs. Some were outright bad. Rolling Stone savaged him. He had peaked. In `74 he did a tour with The Band, who needed their own shot in the arm. It proved he still knew how to rock.
VI. Lost But Now I'm Found (1975-1976)
He and Sara went their separate ways. He went to New York with a notebook full of new songs and winged it. "(he would) go from one song to another like a medley. Sometimes he will have several bars, and in the next version, he will change his mind about how many bars there should be in between a verse. Or eliminate a verse. Or add a chorus when you don't expect" said Phil Ramone, engineer on the session. The album was a classic, a collection of acoustic soul and blues, JWH with a harder edge, it told stories of men and women, the things we do (for)(to) love, love disguised as sex and sex disguised as love. It was heartache and heartbreak, anger and grief, despair. But it ended with a new morning, and a new love. It was classic.
He was on a good roll again. He did the Rolling Thunder tour. He cut Desire, a good follow-up. He got divorced. He did a half-hearted TV Special. He cut a much lesser album called Street Legal (like all Dylan albums, some people call it their favorite). He made a much-reviled live album in Japan (like all Dylan albums, some people call it their favorite). He was lost again.
VII. People Let Me Tell Ya `Bout The Kingdom Come (1979-1981)
One night he found a cross laying on the stage and picked it up. He got converted. He cut Slow Train Coming, a musically sold but often tiresome bit of evangelizing. Charles Shaar Murray wrote, "Bob Dylan has never seemed more perfect and more impressive than on this album. He has also never seemed more unpleasant and hate-filled." Greil Marcus wrote, "Dylan's received truths never threaten the unbeliever, they only chill the soul" and accused Dylan of "sell[ing] a prepackaged doctrine he's received from someone else." (Wikipedia). He followed it with the even more (self)righteous Saved. He toured, refusing to play any older songs. Fans booed and screamed they wanted Dylan. As Greil Marcus pointed out, they had him. As always, he was going his way and his way only as an artist. And you were welcome to come along. Or not.
Shot Of Love toned down his righteousness for a more listenable experience. Curiously, it contained his best song of faith, "Every Grain Of Sand". Infidels was supposedly his return to "secular" music. It was minor, but it was stronger (big blunder, he left "Blind Willie McTell," the best song he'd recorded since Blood On The Tracks, in the can for close to ten years). Late one night he turned up on David Letterman, and proved he still had it.
He began to open the vaults. The box set Biograph included a few crumbs from the cake of his wealth of unreleased material, from album outtakes and bedrooms pisstakes c. 1961-1964 to outtakes and live takes from the `65-`66 albums and tours. Much of this had been leaked on bootlegs, especially the grand Ten Of Swords, but here it was in good sound and on good vinyl, and you could buy it at the local record store, too!
He wandered. He made album after album. Most included an inspired moment or two, but most were weak. He often left his best songs on the cutting room floor. He toured with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, then G.E. Smith. He played Live Aid and Farm Aid. He joined the Traveling Wilburys. He starred in a bad, all-but forgotten movie (Hearts On Fire). His voice became pinched and sharp and nasal, as if he'd been sucking helium.
But the fire could never be completely quenched. Most often he was desultory, but occasionally, he could be brilliant. When he managed a bit of consistency on the album Oh Mercy in 1989, it was hailed as a return to form (as had every bright spot in this lean decade ... as had every bright spot in every lean decade). But Under The Red Sky (1990) was dismissed as a joke, his worst ever (and there was plenty of competition). When his next album was a collection of folk covers, even diehards like me figured it was over. I did fork over for The Bootleg Series Vol. 1, though.
(hey, he did "License To Kill" that night, and its awesome. Why that's not on Youtube I'll never know!)
IX. The Old, Weird America (1992-1998)
Sometime around 1994 I saw a video for "Blood In My Eyes," from his 1993 World Gone Wrong, his second album of folk covers (in a row). Originally performed by the Mississippi Sheiks. Son of a bitch it was beautiful. Okay ... maybe he would never write another great song. But damn ... the old fucker still had it. He had more of it than he a right to have. I heard something. I wasn't alone...
(Greil) Marcus became a real fan again in the early 1990s when Dylan released “Good as I Been to You” and “World Gone Wrong,” two unassuming, acoustic albums of folk standards. “I can’t put too much emphasis” on those albums, Marcus told me animatedly. “Something different was going on. It’s the great turning point.” Marcus was dazzled by Dylan’s total performance on the two records – “he never played guitar like that before. He was going back to these very old songs that had been his repertoire in ‘59, ‘60, ‘61. He was saying, ‘These songs still have so much to tell me. I still have so much to tell about these songs. His own music remains an undiscovered country.” (Jon Friedman quoting Greil Marcus in Speakeasy). ...most of these old tunes he gooses or caresses to some kind of arousal--he clearly knows the sensitive spots of Stephen Foster's "Hard Times" and the antiredcoat jig "Arthur McBride." Not that he thinks such intimacy yields a self-portrait. Older than that now, he merely explores a world of song whose commonness and strangeness he knows he'll never comprehend. Dylan's second attempt to revive the folk music revival while laying down a new record without writing any new songs is eerie and enticing. He cherishes the non sequiturs, sudden changes of heart, and received or obscure blank spots in these buried songs--all usages he's long since absorbed into his own writing because he believes they evoke a world that defies rationalization. Me, I'm not so sure it doesn't just seem that way because there's no way we can be intimate with their worlds anymore. And while only a crank could resist his liner notes, that doesn't mean it isn't cranky in the extreme to hold, for instance, that the two-timing aristo who gets his in "Love Henry" is "modern corporate man off some foreign boat, unable to handle his `psychosis' responsible for organizing the Intelligentsia," und so weiter. We do not live in "the New Dark Ages." And if we did, Dylan would call out for rationalization right quick (Robert Christgau)
Something was happening. And I didn't know what it was.
In the summer of 1998 he was hospitalized with a heart infection. I thought we might lose him. I started to listen for pleasure again. In September, Time Out Of Mind was released. By now, with every other album a “return to form,” all but the most loyal Dylan-ists had long since given up the ghost. So, naturally, this time it turned out to be true. A mournful tramp through meditations on mortality and American folk culture, Robert Johnson meeting Robbie Robertson and leading a New Orleans funeral parade, all culminating in “Highlands,” an endless (16-minute) wander that left Dylan and the listener still lost, still searching, perhaps for all time.
He provided a song for the wonderful soundtrack of the even-more wonderful Wonder Boys. The wild rambler of “Highlands” returned, just as lost and mighty pissed off about what he’d found. But he stopped to collect his Oscar.
On September 11, 2001, he released Love and Theft. It was supposed to be a big deal ... there had even been commercials aired for its release (now that's a rarity). It’s much-anticipated release having the misfortune to fall on That Fateful Day, it ran the risk of commercial failure. It survived by virtue of being the funniest, sharpest, and most butt-rocking album he’d dished out since Blonde On Blonde. Hard, brutal blues, occasionally leavened by gentle, tongue-in-cheek 20’s pop parodies and some of the silliest wordplay ever (from a guy with a rep for silly wordplay). In typical Dylan fashion, it was also prophetic; “High Water Everywhere” was dedicated to Charlie Patton, but it’s ominous cadences recalled “All Along the Watchtower,” and were just as sure a warning of the stormy weather ahead.
Since then, he has released an album every few years. While none have quite risen to the heights of these last two, all have been good. Even the 2008 Tell Tale Signs, a collection of outtakes from this same period, is consistently damn good. His voice has gone to a hard, Tom Waits-ian rasp. His songs remain storm warnings.
He sounds like himself. He sounds sly, as he’s always sounded. He sounds as if there’s a twinkle in his eye; as if there’s a joke he’s letting you in on, maybe halfway, and you’ll have to find your way to the end of the joke yourself. That’s pretty much been his mode all along. And he sounds utterly eager to keep exploring the unanswered questions of the music that has captivated him for a long time. Mostly that has been the old, old American folk music that first transformed him when he left behind Robert Zimmerman and became Bob Dylan in Minneapolis in the late fifties and very early sixties.(Greil Marcus)
He remains who he is. He has become a great American artist. Whether you loathe or love him, his voice, his politics, or anything else, this is a fact.
Bono again: The really unusual thing about Bob Dylan was that, for a moment in the Sixties, he felt like the future. He was the Voice of a Generation, raised against the generation that came before. Then he became the voice of all the generations, the voices in the ground — these ghosts from the Thirties and the Dust Bowl, the romance of Gershwin and the music hall. For me, the pictures of him in his polka-dot shirt, the Afro and pointy shoes — that was a brief flash of lightning. His voice is usually put to the service of more ancient characters.
In the 1979 Rolling Stone Record Guide, Dave Marsh described Graham Parker at the end of the 70's perfectly:
Howlin' Wind and Heat Treatment, both released in 1976, are extraordinary works of neoclassic rock & roll that draw their anger and emotional intensity from Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and the Rolling Stones, and at the same time anticipate the unsullied, scabrous explosion of punk. These are tough, passionate and hungry albums in which Parker refuses to accept anybody's vision of himself except his own. What his first two albums share with punk is the frightening implication that the culture around him is collapsing, that there is nothing to hold on to. If Parker's abnegation isn't as extreme as the punks', his best songs bray with danger and defeat, and even his most romantic songs have a fierce edge. Where Parker differs from the punks, and what he shares with Bruce Springsteen, Southside Johnny and Mink DeVille - the new guardians of rock & roll past - is his relation to rock history. This is more than a matter of choosing heroes (Van Morrison versus Iggy, say) or forms (R&B versus minimalism or primitivism, or whatever you want to call it). Parker sees rock & roll as a way out-in his case, as a way of of being a gas-station attendant - and rock tradition as a way of establishing order in culture that has lost much of its meaning. The Rumour, Parker's five-piece band, turn almost every song into an epic stand of R&B belligerence and operatic intensity By placing so much emphasis on tradition al rock values, Parker avoids the pessimism of punk and the passivity of pop. The sound is steel-eyed and gritted-teeth.
Sadly, after Howlin' Wind, Parker lost his way. Greil Marcus, another early booster, nailed that one too:
Graham Parker's first two albums remain among the very finest of the decade: lyrical, intense, emotionally specific; a rough and untrained voice somehow merging perfectly with the Anglicized Blonde on Blonde/Stax-Volt classicism of the band. It was a signal debut, Howlin' Wind and Heat Treatment both arriving in 1976 along with a string of Let's-Conquer-the-USA club dates. Then Parker and the Rumour ahd to deal with commercial success, or rather the lack of it: to find themselves an audience or else face a foreclosed future of second-on-the-bill, short-term contracts and premature breakup, their best music perhaps ahead of them and out of reach. Things did not work out. English punk--which Parker had anticipated with his working-class fury, if not his style--appeared, and made him seem irrelevant, or, worse, tame. Elvis Costello (who, when I first heard him, sounded to me like a hoax that Parker and his sometime producer Nick Lowe had thought up in an inspired moment) emerged with music and an image that could at once take off from punk and escape its enemies. More obsessed, savvy and marketable than Parker, Costello absorbed the few fans Parker had won, and leaped right over him. And on its own terms, Parker's career stopped cold. Stick to Me, out in late 1977, featured a narrow, grating sound that made it impossible to listen to; determined to get out of the US contract with Mercury, Parker followed with a bad live LP. The strategy worked, but whether Parker would be able to pull himself out of the hole he'd felt forced to dig was another question.
Parker found his muse again the following year, with Squeezing Out Sparks - a spotty but damn impressive album. Marcus nailed that one, too:
Squeezing Out Sparks, produced by former Phil Spector arranger Jack "Lonely Surfer" Nitzsche, lets you hear what Parker was after on Stick to Me, for it's made in the same vein, though this time the music is full of presence: turn the record up and it gets more exciting, not more shrill. In 1977, Graham Parker and the Rumour were reaching for the harshest edge in their music, and that's what they offer here. They've put aside the grandeur and the richness — horns, keyboards and the romantic pessimism — of the first two albums in favor of fuzz tone, fast tempos, hard drumming and desperate, even paranoid singing. The proof of the band's depth is that this approach is most successful at its most extreme.
The authority in Parker's voice — the way he commands your attention — and the momentum in Brinsley Schwarz' guitar playing can take your breath away. You can't tell if the song was written around Schwarz' riff — a searing, muscular attack that carries Parker past himself again and again — or if Schwarz pulled the riff out of something Parker showed him, be it melody or Parker's attack, but that riff is so strong and distinctive the band finally steps back and simply lets Schwarz take the song. Parker mutters in the corners as the track turns into an affirmation of emotion itself. ...Parker's vision is worth questioning; that of most performers is not. "Discovering Japan," the first cut on Squeezing Out Sparks and the number that best speaks for the album, rams home Parker's music-as-way-of-life by reducing it to a demand for meaning, for the fleeting revelations through which one makes sense of the world. This is a lyrically confusing and musically undeniable account of flight, of an adventure that seems more like an escape. It's as explosive a piece of rock & roll as we are likely to hear this year. Parker takes off on a jet for the land of cherry blossoms and Hiroshima, and when he confronts the time change — "My watch says 8:02 /But that's midnight to you" — he somehow makes that tiny fact seem as threatening and dangerous as the sudden memory of a murder he committed in his sleep. Images of American occupation and Tokyo street life clash and seem to go nowhere. You have only the pace of the song to carry you along, but with guitar from Schwarz on the order of the budda-budda-buddas that used to punctuate Sgt. Fury comic books, you don't stop to think. The sense of final adversity, of the need for emotional release and for some kind of clarity, hits with more power than anywhere else on the record. This song is struggle. When Parker leaps out of the chaos he's created, with a glimmer of displaced, fragmented insight: But lovers turn to posers Show up in film exposures Just like in travel brochures Discovering Japan!
you may not be able to figure out why those words end the song so perfectly, why they suddenly make emotional, not rational sense out of the fantasized quest the track now seems to have been all along, but you will be caught up in Parker's refusal of whatever it is life has in store for him. Squeezing Out Sparks is no landmark. The album, rather, is one chapter in the story Graham Parker and the Rumour are telling — a tale sometimes subverted by weaknesses of nerve, imagination or craft, a tale of true fear and drama. It's often been said that the work of those artists we most care about becomes part of our own autobiographies. Such work allows us to understand our own successes and failures. This has been true of the music of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Jimi Hendrix, Rod Stewart, Sly Stone, Janis Joplin — all people who have, at considerable risk, exposed themselves and allowed others to understand how little they were holding back, and thus allowed others to respond in kind. Whatever the flaws of Squeezing Out Sparks, this remains true of Graham Parker.
Unfortunately, Sparks was Parker's last indisputably great moment. The follow-up was weaker. He parted ways with The Rumour. I remember seeing his videos for "Protection" and "Local Girls" extensively on Videowest. But then he vanished into thin air. Parker has made many more albums since then, and none of them have been wretched - but none of them have even come close to the level of his early ones. Hey - I don't want to be unfair - I don't believe anymore that an artist is only as good as his last album - and Parker is still a good artist. He just isn't the great one I once thought he'd be.
(David Remnick, New Yorker, reprinted without permission)
Nearly half a century ago, when Elvis Presley was filming “Harum Scarum” and “Help!” was on the charts, a moody, father-haunted, yet uncannily charismatic Shore rat named Bruce Springsteen was building a small reputation around central Jersey as a guitar player in a band called the Castiles. The band was named for the lead singer’s favorite brand of soap. Its members were from Freehold, an industrial town half an hour inland from the boardwalk carnies and the sea. The Castiles performed at sweet sixteens and Elks-club dances, at drive-in movie theatres and ShopRite ribbon cuttings, at a mobile-home park in Farmingdale, at the Matawan-Keyport Rollerdrome. Once, they played for the patients at a psychiatric hospital, in Marlboro. A gentleman dressed in a suit came to the stage and, in an introductory speech that ran some twenty minutes, declared the Castiles “greater than the Beatles.” At which point a doctor intervened and escorted him back to his room.
One spring afternoon in 1966, the Castiles, with dreams of making it big and making it quick, drove to a studio at the Brick Mall Shopping Center and recorded two original songs, “Baby I” and “That’s What You Get.” Mainly, though, they played an array of covers, from Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” to the G-Clefs’ “I Understand.” They did Sonny and Cher, Sam and Dave, Don & Juan, the Who, the Kinks, the Stones, the Animals.
Many musicians in their grizzled late maturity have an uncertain grasp on their earliest days on the bandstand. (Not a few have an uncertain grasp on last week.) But Springsteen, who is sixty-two and among the most durable musicians since B. B. King and Om Kalthoum, seems to remember every gaudy night, from the moment, in 1957, when he and his mother watched Elvis on “The Ed Sullivan Show”—“I looked at her and I said, ‘I wanna be just . . . like . . . that’ ”—to his most recent exploits as a multimillionaire populist rock star crowd-surfing the adoring masses. These days, he is the subject of historical exhibitions; at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum, in Cleveland, and at the National Constitution Center, in Philadelphia, his lyric sheets, old cars, and faded performing duds have been displayed like the snippets of the Shroud. But, unlike the Rolling Stones, say, Springsteen refuses to be a mercenary curator of his past. He continues to evolve as an artist, filling one spiral notebook after another with ideas, quotations, questions, clippings, and, ultimately, new songs. His latest album, “Wrecking Ball,” is a melodic indictment of the recessionary moment, of income disparity, emasculated workers, and what he calls “the distance between the American reality and the American dream.” The work is remote from his early operettas of humid summer interludes and abandon out on the Turnpike. In his desire to extend a counter-tradition of political progressivism, Springsteen quotes from Irish rebel songs, Dust Bowl ballads, Civil War tunes, and chain-gang chants.
Springsteen came to glory in the age of Letterman, but he is anti-ironical. Keith Richards works at seeming not to give a shit. Springsteen is the opposite. He is all about flagrant exertion. There always comes a moment in a Springsteen concert, as there always did with James Brown, when he plays out a dumb show of the conflict between exhaustion and the urge to go on. Brown enacted it by dropping to his knees, awash in sweat, unable to dance another step, yet shooing away his cape bearer, the aide who would enrobe him and hustle him offstage. Springsteen slumps against the mike stand, spent and still, then, regaining consciousness, shakes off the sweat—No! It can’t be!—and calls on the band for another verse, another song. He leaves the stage soaked, as if he had swum around the arena in his clothes while being chased by barracudas. “I want an extreme experience,” he says. He wants his audience to leave the arena, as he commands them, “with your hands hurting, your feet hurting, your back hurting, your voice sore, and your sexual organs stimulated!”
So the display of exuberance is critical. “For an adult, the world is constantly trying to clamp down on itself,” he says. “Routine, responsibility, decay of institutions, corruption: this is all the world closing in. Music, when it’s really great, pries that shit back open and lets people back in, it lets light in, and air in, and energy in, and sends people home with that and sends me back to the hotel with it. People carry that with them sometimes for a very long period of time.”
The most shocking loss came last year, when Clarence Clemons, Springsteen’s saxophone player and onstage foil and protector, died of a stroke. Clemons was a colossus—six-four, a former football player. As a musician, he possessed a raspy tone reminiscent of King Curtis. He was not a great improviser, but his solos, painstakingly scripted over long hours in the studio with Springsteen, were set pieces in every show. Then, there was his sheer stage presence. Clemons gave Springsteen a mythic companion who embodied the fraternal spirit of the band. “Standing next to Clarence was like standing next to the baddest ass on the planet,” Springsteen said of him in tribute. “You felt like no matter what the day or the night brought, nothing was going to touch you.” At the funeral, held in a chapel in Palm Beach, Springsteen paid passionate homage to Clemons, recalling that he had put up with a “world where it still wasn’t so easy to be big and black.” He recalled his friend’s “raunchy mysticism,” his appetites, even his dressing room, which was draped in exotic scarves and dubbed the Temple of Soul: “A visit there was like a trip to a sovereign nation that had just struck huge oil reserves.” At the same time, Springsteen gestured toward Clemons’s erratic family life (he was married five times) and the occasional tensions in their relationship. Speaking to Clemons’s sons, he said, “C lived a life where he did what he wanted to do, and he let the chips, human and otherwise, fall where they may. Like a lot of us, your pop was capable of great magic and also of making quite an amazing mess.”
When Springsteen was touring behind the “Born to Run” album, in the mid-seventies, he would stand at the lip of the stage in a spotlight, vamping on a chord, and tell the story of growing up in a dingy two-family house next to a gas station in a working-class section of Freehold known as Texas, because it was first populated by hillbilly migrants from the South. I was in the balcony at a show, in November, 1976, at the Palladium, on Fourteenth Street, when Springsteen laid things out in the starkest terms:
My mom, she was a secretary, and she worked downtown. . . . And my father, he worked a lot of different places. He worked in a rug mill for a while, he drove a cab for a while, and he was a guard down at the jail for a while. I can remember when he worked down there, he used to always come home real pissed off, drunk, sit in the kitchen. At night, nine o’clock, he used to shut off all the lights, every light in the house, and he used to get real pissed off if me or my sister turned any of them on. And he’d sit in the kitchen with a six- pack, a cigarette. . . . He’d make me sit down at that table in the dark. In the wintertime, he used to turn on the gas stove and close all the doors, so it got real hot in there. And I remember just sitting in the dark. . . . No matter how long I sat there, I could never ever see his face. We’d start talking about nothing much, how I was doing. Pretty soon, he asked me what I thought I was doing with myself. And we’d always end up screaming at each other. My mother, she’d always end up running in from the front room crying, and trying to pull him off me, try to keep us from fighting with each other. . . . I’d always end up running out the back door and pulling away from him. Pulling away from him, running down the driveway screaming at him, telling him, telling him, telling him, how it was my life and I was going to do what I wanted to do.
At the end of the story, an entirely accurate one, Springsteen would segue into “It’s My Life,” by the Animals, a spine-jangling declaration of independence. In Springsteen’s voice, it was a declaration of independence from a household in which threats were shouted, telephones were ripped off the wall, and the police were summoned.
Doug Springsteen was an Army driver in Europe during the Second World War who came home and seethed at his crabbed circumstances. Van Zandt told me that Springsteen’s father was “scary” and best avoided. In those days, “all fathers were scary,” Van Zandt said. “The torture we put these poor guys through, when you think of it now. My father, Bruce’s father—these poor guys, they never had a chance. There was no precedent for us, none, in history, for their sons to become these long-haired freaks who didn’t want to participate in the world they built for them. Can you imagine? It was the World War Two generation. They built the suburbs. What gratitude did we have? We’re, like, ‘Fuck you! We’re gonna look like girls, and we’re gonna do drugs, and we’re gonna play crazy rock and roll!’ And they’re, like, ‘What the fuck did we do wrong?’ They were scared of what we were becoming, so they felt they had to be more authoritarian. They hated us, you know?”
Doug Springsteen grew up shadowed by the death of his five-year-old sister, Virginia, who was hit by a truck while riding a tricycle, in Freehold in 1927. His parents, according to a forthcoming biography of Springsteen by Peter Ames Carlin, were ravaged by grief. Doug dropped out of school after ninth grade. In 1948, he married Adele Zerilli. Bruce was born the next year. For long stretches of Bruce’s childhood, his grandparents lived with his family, and, as Springsteen told Carlin, he always sensed that much of the affection he received from them was a way “to replace the lost child,” which was confusing: “The dead daughter was a big presence. Her portrait was on the wall, always front and center.” Decades after the event, the whole family––the grandparents, Doug and Adele, Bruce and his sister Ginny––went to the cemetery every weekend to visit Virginia’s grave.
In biographies and clippings, Doug Springsteen is described with adjectives like “taciturn” and “disappointed.” In fact, he seems to have been bipolar, and he was capable of terrible rages, often aimed at his son. Doctors prescribed drugs for his illness, but Doug didn’t always take them. The mediator in the house, the source of optimism and survival, and the steadiest earner, was Bruce’s mother, Adele, who worked as a legal secretary. Still, Bruce was deeply affected by his father’s paralyzing depressions, and worried that he would not escape the thread of mental instability that ran through his family. That fear, he says, is why he never did drugs. Doug Springsteen lives in his son’s songs. In “Independence Day,” the son must escape his father’s house because “we were just too much of the same kind.” In the ferocious “Adam Raised a Cain,” the father “walks these empty rooms / looking for something to blame / You inherit the sins / You inherit the flames.” The songs were a way of talking to the silent father. “My dad was very nonverbal—you couldn’t really have a conversation with him,” Springsteen told me. “I had to make my peace with that, but I had to have a conversation with him, because I needed to have one. It ain’t the best way to go about it, but that was the only way I could, so I did, and eventually he did respond. He might not have liked the songs, but I think he liked that they existed. It meant that he mattered. He’d get asked, ‘What are your favorite songs?’ And he’d say, ‘The ones that are about me.’ ”
The past, though, is anything but past. “My parents’ struggles, it’s the subject of my life,” Springsteen told me at rehearsal. “It’s the thing that eats at me and always will. My life took a very different course, but my life is an anomaly. Those wounds stay with you, and you turn them into a language and a purpose.” Gesturing toward the band onstage, he said, “We’re repairmen—repairmen with a toolbox. If I repair a little of myself, I’ll repair a little of you. That’s the job.” The songs of escape on “Born to Run,” the portrait of post-industrial struggle on “Darkness on the Edge of Town” were part of that job of early repair.
Doug and Adele Springsteen left Freehold for northern California when Bruce was nineteen, and they were puzzled when, several years later, their son, a long-haired misfit in their eyes, came visiting, as he puts it, “lugging a treasure chest behind” and telling them to buy the biggest house around. “The one satisfaction you get is that you do get your ‘See, I told you so’ moment,” Springsteen said. “Of course, all the deeper things go unsaid, that it all could have been a little different.”
Doug Springsteen died in 1998, at seventy-three, after years of illness, including a stroke and heart disease. “I was lucky that modern medicine gave him another ten years of life,” Springsteen said. “T-Bone Burnett said that rock and roll is all about ‘Daaaaddy!’ It’s one embarrassing scream of ‘Daaaaddy!’ It’s just fathers and sons, and you’re out there proving something to somebody in the most intense way possible. It’s, like, ‘Hey, I was worth a little more attention than I got! You blew that one, big guy!’ ”
The redemptive moments in Springsteen’s youth were musical: the songs coming out of the transistor radio and the television set; his mother taking out a bank loan for sixty dollars to buy him a Kent guitar when he was fifteen. Springsteen became one of those kids who escape into an obsession. He believed, as he sings in “No Surrender,” “We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school.” At St. Rose of Lima, the Catholic school in Freehold, he was a screwup, disdained by the nuns. The hip, literary kids were far away. (“I didn’t hang around with no crowd that was talking about William Burroughs,” he told Dave Marsh, an early biographer.) After graduating from high school, Springsteen attended classes at Ocean County Community College, where he started reading novels and writing poems, but he quit after a nervous administrator, on the lookout for hippies and other undesirables, made it plain to Springsteen that there had been “complaints” that he was strange. “Remember, we didn’t go into this life because we were courageous or brilliant,” Van Zandt said. “We were the last guys standing. Anyone with a choice to do something else—be a dentist, get a real job, whatever—took it!”
The place where Springsteen went looking for his future was just a short drive east of Freehold—the Asbury Park music scene. In the sixties and seventies, there were dozens of bands that played in the bars along the boardwalk. Asbury Park became Springsteen’s Liverpool, his Tupelo, his Hibbing.
On a spring afternoon, I stood out in front of the best-known club in Asbury Park, the Stone Pony, and waited for an aging drummer named Vini (Mad Dog) Lopez, the unluckiest man in the E Street saga. Lopez was thrown out of the Springsteen band just before they hit it big. Springsteen’s bandmates may be employees, but they have been handsomely paid and are worth many millions of dollars each. The drummer who made it for the long haul, Max Weinberg, owns houses in the New Jersey countryside and Tuscany. Lopez works as a caddy. On weekends, he plays in a band called License to Chill. The band’s mascot is Tippy the Banana. “We’re at the bottom of the food chain,” Lopez told me. “We like to say that we’re exclusive but inexpensive.”
In 1969, Lopez invited Springsteen to jam at an after-hours loft, called the Upstage, above a Thom McAn shoe store in Asbury Park. Eventually, Springsteen and Lopez formed a band called Child, which they soon renamed Steel Mill. It featured Lopez on drums, Danny Federici on organ and accordion, and Steve Van Zandt on bass. The boys lived for a while in a surfboard factory run by their manager. “Bruce lived in the front office, and Danny and I had daybeds in the bathrooms,” Lopez said. They made around fifty dollars a week. Some of the band members held manual jobs to make ends meet: Van Zandt worked construction, Lopez put in time at a boatyard and on commercial fishing boats. Springsteen declined. The future working-class clarion never really worked.
The Springsteen Lopez describes was a young man of uncommon ambition who was also prone to bouts of withdrawal. For all the girls around, for all the late-night Monopoly games and pinball marathons, Springsteen wasn’t easily distracted. “Bruce would come to a party where people were doing all kinds of things, and he would just go off with his guitar,” Lopez said. For Van Zandt, that intensity was a lure. He recognized in Springsteen a drive to create original work. In those days, he said, you were judged by how well you could copy songs off the radio and play them, chord for chord, note for note: “Bruce was never good at it. He had a weird ear. He would hear different chords, but he could never hear the right chords. When you have that ability or inability, you immediately become more original. Well, in the long run, guess what: in the long run, original wins.”
Asbury Park, for all its brassy bar bands and boardwalk barkers, was not immune to the times. On the July 4th weekend in 1970, race riots broke out. Young blacks in town were especially angry that most of the summer jobs in the restaurants and stores along the boardwalk were going to white kids. Springsteen and his bandmates watched the flames on Springwood Avenue from a water tower near their surfboard-factory home. Nevertheless, Bruce’s crowd remained almost completely apolitical. “The riots just meant that certain clubs didn’t open and certain ones did,” Van Zandt said.
As Steel Mill dissolved, Springsteen dreamed up a temporary lark: Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom, a kind of Noah’s-ark carnival act, with two of everything—guitarists, drummers, singers—plus Garry Tallent on tuba, a baton twirler, and two guys from the Upstage who played Monopoly onstage. Then Springsteen got serious. He formed his own band. He called it the Bruce Springsteen Band.
By 1972, Springsteen was fronting a band and writing songs to be performed solo. He wasn’t a big reader at the time, but he was so consumed by Bob Dylan’s songs that he read Anthony Scaduto’s biography. He was impressed by Dylan’s coming-to-New York saga: the snowstorm arrival, in 1961, from the Midwest; the pilgrimages to Woody Guthrie’s bedside at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital; the first appearances at Café Wha? and Gerde’s Folk City; and then the audition for John Hammond, the legendary Columbia Records executive. This was what he wanted, some version of it.
Columbia signed Springsteen to a record contract and tried to promote him as “the new Dylan.” He was not the only one. John Prine, Elliot Murphy, Loudon Wainwright III, and other singer-songwriter sensitivos were also getting the “new Dylan” label. (“The old Dylan was only thirty, so I don’t even know why they needed a fucking new Dylan,” Springsteen says.) To Hammond’s disappointment, Springsteen recorded his first two albums—“Greetings from Asbury Park” and “The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle”—with a band made up of his Jersey Shore mates, including Vini Lopez, on drums, and Clarence Clemons, on tenor sax. Hammond was convinced that the solo demos were better. Despite boosts from a few critics and d.j.s, the albums hardly sold at all. Springsteen was, at best, a gifted obscurity, a provincial who was running out of chances.
In June, 1973, when I was fourteen, I got on a Red & Tan 11-C bus in north Jersey with a couple of friends and went to the city to see a resolutely un-hip and unaccountably popular band called Chicago, at Madison Square Garden. I am not quite sure why I went. We were Dylan fanatics. “Howl,” the Stanley Brothers, Otis Redding, “Naked Lunch,” Hank Williams, Odetta—practically anything I knew or read or heard seemed to come through the auspices of Dylan. Chicago was about as far from the Dylan aesthetic as you could get.
All the same, I’d paid my four dollars, and I was going to see whatever I could glimpse from our seats. Out trundled the opening act: someone named Bruce Springsteen. The conditions were abysmal, as they often are for opening acts: the houselights were up, the crowd was alternately inattentive and hostile. What I remember was a bandleader as frenetic as Mick Jagger or James Brown, a singer bursting with almost self-destructive urgency, trying to bust through the buzzy indifference of the crowd. After that show, Springsteen swore to Appel that he would never open or play big venues again. “I couldn’t stand it—everybody was so far away and the band couldn’t hear,” he told Dave Marsh. It was time to woodshed, time to build an audience through constant, intense performance in clubs, small theatres, and university gyms.
“Born to Run,” which was released in August, 1975, transformed Springsteen’s career, and the ten-show stand at the Bottom Line early in the tour remains a rock date to rival James Brown at the Apollo or Dylan at Newport. At the Bottom Line, Springsteen became himself. By adding Van Zandt as a second guitar player, he was liberated from some of his musical duties, and he became a full-throttle front man, leaping off amps and pianos, frog-hopping from one tabletop to the next.
Landau quit his job as a critic and became, in essence, Springsteen’s adjutant: his friend, his adviser in all things, his producer, and, by 1978, his manager. After a prolonged legal battle that kept Springsteen out of the studio for two years, Appel was bought off and cast out.
Landau fed Springsteen’s curiosity about the world beyond music. He gave Springsteen books to read—Steinbeck, Flannery O’Connor—and movies to see, particularly John Ford and Howard Hawks Westerns. Springsteen started to think in larger terms than cars and highways; he began to look at his own story, his family’s story, in terms of class and American archetypes. The imagery, the storytelling, and the sense of place in those novels and films helped fuel his songs. Landau was also a catalyst in making Springsteen into a big business, pressing him to play bigger halls, overcoming his nightmarish early performances at Madison Square Garden. And he pressed him to think of himself the way Otis Redding did—as both an artist and an entertainer on a large stage.
Some critics have depicted Landau as an avaricious Svengali, a Colonel Parker, or worse. But the people I’ve talked to in the music business dismiss any idea of malign or overweening influence on Springsteen. “The idea that he’d be manipulated is so preposterous,” Danny Goldberg, who has known Springsteen for more than thirty years, says. As Goldberg, who has managed Nirvana and Sonic Youth, puts it, “It’s Bruce who uses Jon, to achieve complete artistic control.” Landau is sensitive to any claim that he is somehow controlling his client or responsible for his trajectory. “The first principle of being a manager is being a fiduciary for the artist—his interests come first,” he says. “So when you are working with him, no matter what the issue is, the first question is, What’s the best thing for Bruce?” Springsteen, he went on, “is the smartest person I’ve ever known—not the most informed or the most educated—but the smartest. If you are ever confronted with a situation—a practical matter, an artistic problem—his read of the people involved is exquisite. He is way ahead.”
At one point a decade ago, Springsteen rewarded Landau, who had once dreamed of becoming a rock star himself, by calling him onstage. “Bruce told me one night I should strap on a guitar when we got to ‘Dancing in the Dark,’ and for five or six nights I came out,” Landau told me one night backstage. “It’s just a tremendous high. But then on the seventh night he said, ‘You know, it’s great you comin’ out onstage. But I was thinking that maybe we should give that a rest tonight.’ ”
“You mean I’m fired?” Landau said.
Springsteen smiled and said, “Well, yeah. That’s about the size of it.”
As Springsteen grew more worldly, he became far more political. He did not start out that way. In 1972, he played a small benefit for George McGovern, at a movie theatre in Red Bank, but, as a young man, his interest in the music was almost completely as a source of personal liberation. He had not made the connection between his father’s drift and the politics of unemployment, the depression of Freehold and the wave of deindustrialization.
A political consciousness could be felt on “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” and it grew in the years that followed. He began to find the voice for that by reading—Landau’s enthusiasms played a role here—and by travelling, and, crucially, by listening to country and folk music: to Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie. Springsteen knew he had run out of things to say about desperate nights on the Turnpike; he wanted to write songs he could sing as an adult, about marriage, about being a father, and about larger social issues. As he listened again and again to Hank Williams, he said, the songs went from “archival to alive.” What had seemed “cranky and old-fashioned” now had depth and darkness; Williams represented “the adult blues,” and the music of the working class. “Country by its nature appealed to me, country was provincial, and so was I,” Springsteen said in a recent speech, in Austin. “I felt I was an average guy with a slightly above-average gift . . . and country was about the truth emanating out of your sweat, out of your local bar, your corner store.” He read Joe Klein’s biography of Guthrie. He read memoirs by the civil-rights lawyer Morris Dees and the antiwar activist Ron Kovic. All this fed into the working-class anthems of “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” the acoustic howl of “Nebraska,” and even the anthemic pop of “Born in the U.S.A.” He was singing now about Vietnam veterans, migrant workers, class, social divisions, deindustrialized cities, and forgotten American towns, but never in an idiom that threatened “Bruce”—the iconic family-friendly rock star. From the stage, he began to deliver paeans to his causes and ask for donations to local food banks, but the language was never threatening or alienating, and the gate receipts and record sales were beyond fabulous.
Some detected in all this the stink of sanctimony. In 1985, James Wolcott, a punk and New Wave enthusiast, found himself weary of Springsteen’s “cornball” sincerity and the level of praise accorded him by the “city-slick Establishment.” “Piety has begun to collect around Springsteen’s curly head like mist around a mountaintop,” Wolcott wrote in Vanity Fair. “The mountain can’t be blamed for the mist, but still—the reverence is getting awfully thick.” For Tom Carson, the problem was insufficient radicalism—the fact that Springsteen remained, at heart, conventionally liberal. Springsteen “thought rock and roll was basically wholesome,” Carson wrote in L.A. Weekly. “It was an alternative, an escape—but not a rebellion, either as a route to forbidden sexual or social fruit, or, by extension, as a rejection of conventional society. To him, rock redeemed conventional society.”
In the marketplace of arena rock, that measure of conventionality was a strength, not a limitation. By the mid-eighties, Springsteen was the biggest rock star in the world, capable of selling out Giants Stadium ten shows in a row. He was so unthreatening to American values that, in 1984, George Will went to see him. Wearing a bow tie, a double-breasted blazer, and earplugs, Will watched Springsteen perform in Washington and wrote a column called “A Yankee Doodle Springsteen”: “I have not got a clue about Springsteen’s politics. . . . He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seems punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: ‘Born in the U.S.A.!’ ” A week later, Ronald Reagan went to New Jersey to give a campaign speech. Taking his cue from Will, Reagan said, “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts; it rests in the message of hope in songs so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen.”
Springsteen was appalled. He later said that “Born in the U.S.A.” was “the most misunderstood song since ‘Louie, Louie,’ ” and he began to sing an acoustic version that leached it of its bombast and made its dark shadings plainer. From the stage, he said, “Well, the President was mentioning my name in his speech the other day, and I kind of got to wondering what his favorite album of mine must’ve been, you know? I don’t think it was the ‘Nebraska’ album. I don’t think he’s been listening to this one.” Springsteen played “Johnny 99,” the bleak story of a laid-off Jersey autoworker who, in drunken despair, kills a night clerk in a botched robbery.
Someone once said to Paul McCartney that the Beatles were “anti-materialistic.” McCartney had to laugh.
“That’s a huge myth,” he replied. “John and I literally used to sit down and say, ‘Now, let’s write a swimming pool.’ ”
With the “Born in the U.S.A.” album, Springsteen combined political virtue and popular appeal, protest and party time. When he was writing the songs for the album that became “Born in the U.S.A.,” Landau told him that they had a great record, but they still didn’t have a swimming pool. They needed a hit.
“Look, I’ve written seventy songs,” Springsteen replied. “You want another one, you write it!” Then he sulkily retreated to his hotel suite and wrote “Dancing in the Dark.” The lyrics reflected the played-out frustration of an artist who “ain’t got nothing to say,” but the music—a pop confection buttressed by a hummable synthesizer line—went down easy. “It went as far in the direction of pop music as I wanted to go—and probably a little farther,” Springsteen recalled in a text for his book of lyrics, “Songs.” “My heroes, from Hank Williams to Frank Sinatra to Bob Dylan, were popular musicians. They had hits. There was value in trying to connect with a large audience.” “Born in the U.S.A.” went platinum and became the best-selling record of 1985 and of Springsteen’s career.
When Springsteen and Van Zandt were young, they had “pink Cadillac” dreams, fantasies of wealth and rock-and-roll glory. “I knew I was never going to be Woody Guthrie,” Springsteen recalled, in Austin. “I liked Elvis, I liked the pink Cadillac too much, I like the simplicity and the tossed-off temporary feeling of pop hits, I like a big fuckin’ noise, and, in my own way, I like the luxuries, and the comforts, of being a star.” He bought a fourteen-million-dollar estate in Beverly Hills. He remained friends with his old running mates from Jersey, but he also made new friends, famous friends. When he married an actress named Julianne Phillips, in 1985, they honeymooned at Gianni Versace’s villa on Lake Como. Later, there were vintage cars and motorcycles, a state-of-the-art home recording studio, horses, and, the ultimate sign of class ascent, organic farming. Tours grew to corporate scale: private jets, five-star hotels, elaborate catering, massage therapists, efficient management.
Springsteen was aware of the comical contradiction: the multimillionaire who, in his theatrical self-presentation, is the voice of the dispossessed. Very occasionally, twinges of discomfort about this have leaked into his lyrics. In the late eighties, Springsteen played “Ain’t Got You,” which appeared on his album “Tunnel of Love,” for Van Zandt. The lyrics tell of a fellow who gets “paid a king’s ransom for doin’ what comes naturally”—who’s got “the fortunes of heaven” and a “house full of Rembrandt and priceless art”—but lacks the affections of his beloved. Van Zandt recognized the self-mockery but didn’t care. He was aghast.
“We had one of our biggest fights of our lives,” Van Zandt recalled. “I’m, like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ And he’s, like, ‘Well, what do you mean, it’s the truth. It’s just who I am, it’s my life.’ And I’m, like, ‘This is bullshit. People don’t need you talking about your life. Nobody gives a shit about your life. They need you for their lives. That’s your thing. Giving some logic and reason and sympathy and passion to this cold, fragmented, confusing world—that’s your gift. Explaining their lives to them. Their lives, not yours.’ And we fought and fought and fought and fought. He says ‘Fuck you,’ I say ‘Fuck you.’ I think something in what I said probably resonated.”
Springsteen was also experiencing intervals of depression that were far more serious than the occasional guilt trip about being “a rich man in a poor man’s shirt,” as he sings in “Better Days.” A cloud of crisis hovered as Springsteen was finishing his acoustic masterpiece “Nebraska,” in 1982. He drove from the East Coast to California and then drove straight back. “He was feeling suicidal,” Springsteen’s friend and biographer Dave Marsh said. “The depression wasn’t shocking, per se. He was on a rocket ride, from nothing to something, and now you are getting your ass kissed day and night. You might start to have some inner conflicts about your real self-worth.”
Springsteen began questioning why his relationships were a series of drive-bys. And he could not let go of the past, either—a sense that he had inherited his father’s depressive self-isolation. For years, he would drive at night past his parents’ old house in Freehold, sometimes three or four times a week. In 1982, he started seeing a psychotherapist. At a concert years later, Springsteen introduced his song “My Father’s House” by recalling what the therapist had told him about those nighttime trips to Freehold: “He said, ‘What you’re doing is that something bad happened, and you’re going back, thinking that you can make it right again. Something went wrong, and you keep going back to see if you can fix it or somehow make it right.’ And I sat there and I said, ‘That is what I’m doing.’ And he said, ‘Well, you can’t.’ ”
Extreme wealth may have satisfied every pink-Cadillac dream, but it did little to chase off the black dog. Springsteen was playing concerts that went nearly four hours, driven, he has said, by “pure fear and self-loathing and self-hatred.” He played that long not just to thrill the audience but also to burn himself out. Onstage, he held real life at bay.
“My issues weren’t as obvious as drugs,” Springsteen said. “Mine were different, they were quieter—just as problematic, but quieter. With all artists, because of the undertow of history and self-loathing, there is a tremendous push toward self-obliteration that occurs onstage. It’s both things: there’s a tremendous finding of the self while also an abandonment of the self at the same time. You are free of yourself for those hours; all the voices in your head are gone. Just gone. There’s no room for them. There’s one voice, the voice you’re speaking in.”
Springsteen’s life in the past two decades has been, from all appearances, notably stable. In 1991, he married Patti Scialfa, a denizen of the Asbury Park music scene who had joined the band as a singer. Scialfa’s father was a real-estate developer, and she had studied music at N.Y.U.
While Springsteen was on the road, I drove to Colts Neck, where he and Patti live on a three-hundred-and-eighty-acre farm. They have three children, two sons and a daughter, and when the kids were small the family lived closer to the shore, in Rumson, New Jersey. Rumson is wealthy in a suburban way. Colts Neck looks more like Middleburg, Virginia. Horsey people live there. So does Queen Latifah. The Springsteens also own houses in Beverly Hills and in Wellington, Florida.
On the last couple of tours, Scialfa has been an intermittent presence. She skips concerts to be with the children: the eldest, Evan, just graduated from Boston College; their daughter, Jessica, is at Duke and rides on an international equestrian circuit; and the youngest, Sam, will be a freshman this fall at Bard College. Being around for the kids has been a priority. “When I was young, I felt really, really vulnerable,” Scialfa said. “So I wanted things to be relaxed and stable and have somebody in the house and make sure they felt supported when they went off to school.” She added, “The hardest part is splitting yourself, the feeling that you’re never doing any one job really well.”
It took some doing to get Springsteen, an “isolationist” by nature, to settle into a real marriage, and resist the urge to dwell only in his music and onstage. “Now I see that two of the best days of my life,” he once told a reporter for Rolling Stone, “were the day I picked up the guitar and the day that I learned how to put it down.”
“Wrecking Ball” is as political a record as “What’s Going On?,” “Rage Against the Machine,” or “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.” After Springsteen’s political run-ins in the eighties, he grew even more engaged with social issues. He sang of AIDS (“Streets of Philadelphia”), dislocation (“The Ghost of Tom Joad”), abandonment (“Spare Parts”), and Iraq (“Last to Die”). He made speeches from the stage about “rendition, illegal wiretapping, voter suppression, no habeas corpus.” For his trouble, he was attacked by Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and even a Times columnist, John Tierney, who wrote, “The singer who recorded ‘Greetings from Asbury Park’ seems to have made an ideological crossing of the Hudson: ‘Greetings from Central Park West.’ ” In 2004, he campaigned for John Kerry and, in 2008, he was even more enthusiastic about Barack Obama, posting a statement on his Web site saying that Obama “speaks to the America I’ve envisioned in my music for the past 35 years, a generous nation with a citizenry willing to tackle nuanced and complex problems, a country that’s interested in its collective destiny and in the potential of its gathered spirit.” At a concert at the Lincoln Memorial before Obama’s inauguration, Springsteen sang “The Rising” with a gospel choir and, with Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” including, at Seeger’s suggestion, the two last, “radical” verses. (“There was a great high wall there / that tried to stop me; / A great big sign there / Said private property; / But on the other side / It didn’t say nothing; / That side was made for you and me.”)
One night, I asked Springsteen what he hoped his political songs would do for people who come to concerts for a good time. He shook his head and said, “They function at the very edges of politics at best, though they try to administer to its center. You have to be satisfied with that. You have to understand it’s a long road, and there have been people doing some version of what we’re doing on this tour going all the way back, and there will be people doing it after us. I think one thing this record tries to do is to remind people that there is a continuity that is passed on from generation to generation, a set of ideas expressed in myriad different ways: books, protests, essays, songs, around the kitchen table. So these ideas are ever-present. And you are a raindrop.”
Springsteen has been faulted for taking himself too seriously, and the microworld around him takes him so seriously that to an outsider it can occasionally seem like a cocoon of piety. But Springsteen can also be funny about himself. Two years ago, on Jimmy Fallon’s show, he agreed to dress up as himself circa “Born to Run”—beard, aviator shades, floppy pimp cap, leather jacket—and went on with Fallon, who was dressed as Neil Young, to sing a mock-serious version of the Willow Smith ditty “Whip My Hair.” It’s hard to imagine, say, Bob Dylan putting on a Bob Dylan work shirt circa “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” and sending up his younger self. In a more recent show, Fallon, again dressed as Neil Young, again brought out Springsteen, this time dressed in his muscled-up eighties regular-Jersey-guy regalia—complete with sleeveless denim shirt. They sang a duet of the party-song pop duo LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It”: “I’m in a Speedo tryin’ t’ tan my cheeks. . . . I’m sexy and I know it!”
As a writer and as a performer, Springsteen is in command of a variety of themes and moods: comic and grandiose, political and mindless. As the tour developed, he altered the set lists so that each show felt specific to the occasion. At the Apollo, he declared that soul music had been the band’s education: “We studied all our subjects. Geography? We learned the exact location of ‘Funky Broadway.’ History? ‘A Change Is Gonna Come.’ Math? ‘99 and a Half Won’t Fucking Do.’ ” In Austin, Springsteen celebrated the centenary of Woody Guthrie’s birth by opening the show with Woody’s itinerant worker’s lament “I Ain’t Got No Home” and closed it with “This Land Is Your Land.”
In Tampa, Springsteen played “American Skin (41 Shots),” which was written in the wake of the police shooting of Amadou Diallo, but was now for Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teen-ager who was killed in Sanford, Florida. On the first of two nights in Philadelphia, Springsteen paid homage to his Shore roots by playing two semi-obscurities from his first years as a recording musician, “Seaside Bar Song” and “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?” On one foray into the audience, he found Max Weinberg’s ninety-seven-year-old mother and gave her a kiss. The next night, he pulled his eighty-seven-year-old mother, Adele, onto the stage and danced with her to “Dancing in the Dark.” In New Jersey, Springsteen heightened the tribute to Clarence Clemons. During the final song, “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out,” he stopped the music after the line “The Big Man joined the band,” and a film of Clemons rolled on the screens above the stage. (“Man, I could barely stand that,” the percussionist Everett Bradley told me later. “I was crying so bad!”)
At each show, the most striking musical difference between the old E Street Band and the new was the increasing prominence given to Jake Clemons. His playing grew stronger, his willingness to take center stage more pronounced. After a few performances, he was moon-walking across the stage. And yet every time Springsteen paid tribute to Clarence Clemons Jake seemed overcome, pounding his chest with a double tap of respect for his uncle and appreciation of the crowd’s response. “Everyone wants to be part of something bigger than themselves,” Jake said. “A Springsteen show is a lot of things, and it’s partly a religious experience. Maybe he comes from the line of David, a shepherd boy who could play beautiful music, so that the crazy become less crazy and Saul the king finally chills out. Religion is a system of rules and order and expectations, and it unites people in a purpose. There really is a component of Bruce that is supernatural. Bruce is Moses! He led the people out of the land of disco!”
One night, as Springsteen was waiting to perform, I asked how he thought his inner constitution led to his being the artist and performer he is. “I probably worked harder than anybody else I saw,” he said. But there was, he thought, a core psychological component as well: “I searched out something that I needed to do. It’s a job that’s filled with ego and vanity and narcissism, and you need all those things to do it well. But you can’t let those things completely swamp you, either. You need all those things but in relative check. And in relative check for me, if you ask some of my friends or some members of my family, might not be considered in check to them! It’s in relative check as far as people who do what I do. But you need those things, because you are driven by your needs out there—the raw hunger and the raw need of exciting people and exciting yourself into some higher state. People have pursued that throughout the history of civilization. It’s a strange job, and for a lot of people it’s a dangerous job. But those things are at the root of it.”
In May, the tour set off for a three-month run of stadium performances in Europe. In Barcelona, Springsteen was staying in a suite, with a private deck and a Jacuzzi, at the Florida, a glorious hillside hotel overlooking the city; the band and the crew stayed at the Hotel Arts, a five-star hotel on the beach. A caravan of black Mercedes vans whisked the musicians (some band members have their own travelling assistants) to the Olympic Stadium in the afternoon for sound check. Banish any images of rock legend: forget about dissipated drummers slumped in a junkie haze in some stadium locker room, forget roadies hurling televisions and empty bottles of Jack Daniels from hotel balconies into the pool. The Springsteen road show is about as decadent as the Ice Capades. Band members talk about missing their kids, jet lag, Wi-Fi reception at the hotel.
“To be a success these days, you are more likely to be an athlete than a drug addict,” Van Zandt told me. “You go through the phase of drugs and drinking, and if you get through it you see that all the rewards are in longevity. Longevity is more fun than the drugs. Then, there’s the business. For that you need a clean head.”
The upper echelon of the pop-music touring business is, like Silicon Valley, dominated by a small number of enterprises: Lady Gaga, Madonna, U2, Jon Bon Jovi, Jay-Z, and a very few others. The drop-off in scale from there is precipitous. Springsteen is no longer in the Beatlemania phase of the mid-eighties—a period of mini-riots around his hotels—but he is still able to sell out stadiums on the I-95 corridor and other cities in the United States. He is even more popular in Europe. The rhythmic stomping of his fans at Ullevi, a football venue in Gothenburg, in 1985, damaged the foundation, an episode known in Springsteen lore as “the time Bruce broke a stadium.” In Europe, that spirit persists.
The “Wrecking Ball” tour is likely to go on for a year. James Brown played many more shows a year, but he never played so long or with such absolute exertion. Some nights, Springsteen stays a little longer in his dressing room, ginning himself up for all the running, jumping, and screaming, but there is never the thought of taking a pass.
“Once people have bought those tickets, I don’t have that option,” he told me. We were alone in a vast, makeshift dressing room in Barcelona. “Remember, we’re also running a business here, so there is a commercial exchange, and that ticket is my handshake. That ticket is me promising you that it’s gonna be all the way every chance I get. That’s my contract. And ever since I was a young guy I took that seriously.” Although there are nights when, in the dressing room, he feels tapped out, the stage always works its magic: “Suddenly the fatigue disappears. A transformation takes place. That’s what we’re selling. We’re selling that possibility. It’s half a joke: I go out onstage and—snap—‘Are you ready to be transformed?’ What? At a rock show? By a guy with a guitar? Part of it is a goof, and part of it is, Let’s do it, let’s see if we can.”
Thousands of fans, many of whom had been waiting outside since morning, were allowed to enter the stadium grounds at six o’clock for a show that would not begin until ten. I noticed a few young Spaniards carrying a sign, in English, reading, “Bruce, Thanks for Making Our Lives Better.” I tried to imagine a sign like that for—whom? Lou Reed? AC/DC? Bon Jovi? (“Richie Sambora, Thanks for making our lives better.” Doubtful.) The ultra-sincere interchange between Springsteen and his fans, which looks treacly to the uninitiated and the uninterested, is what distinguishes him and his performances. Forty years on, and an hour before going onstage yet again, he was trying to make sense of that transaction.
“You are isolated, yet you desire to talk to somebody,” Springsteen said. “You are very disempowered, so you seek impact, recognition that you are alive and that you exist. We hope to send people out of the building we play in with a slightly more enhanced sense of what their options might be, emotionally, maybe communally. You empower them a little bit, they empower you. It’s all a battle against the futility and the existential loneliness! It may be that we are all huddled together around the fire and trying to fight off that sense of the inevitable. That’s what we do for one another.
“I try to put on the kind of show that the kid in the front row is going to come to and never forget,” he went on. “Our effort is to stay with you, period, to have you join us and to allow us to join you for the ride—the whole ride. That’s what we’ve been working on the whole time, and this show is the latest installment, and, in many ways, it’s the most complicated installment, because in many ways it has to do with the end of that ride. There are kids who are coming to the show who will never have seen the band with Clarence Clemons in it or Danny Federici—people who were in the band for thirty years. So our job is to honor the people who stood on that stage by putting on the best show we’ve ever put on. To do that, you’ve got to acknowledge your losses and your defeats as well as your victories. There is a finiteness to it, though the end may be a long time away. We end the night with a party of sorts, but it’s not an uncomplicated party. It’s a life party—that’s what we try to deliver up.”
A little while later, having changed from his regular jeans to his stage jeans, Springsteen walked with the band through a stadium tunnel and toward the stage. The last thing he saw before heading to the mike and a blast of stage lights was a sign taped to the top step that read “Barcelona.” A few years ago, at an arena show in Auburn Hills, he kept greeting the crowd with shouts of “Hello, Ohio!” Finally, Van Zandt pulled him aside and told him they were in Michigan.
Springsteen glanced at the step and stepped into the spotlight.
“Hola, Barcelona!” he cried out to a sea of forty-five thousand people. “Hola, Catalunya!”
Essential Listening Springsteen isn't especially well served by anthologies, and many of his allegedly classic albums are spottier than the faithful will admit - though most are well worth hearing. Here's my favorites: The River - the best roots-rock album since Creedence Clearwater Revival called it a day. His most disciplined album, before self-importance and the call of the Top 40 got to him. Born To Run - the last of his great romantic albums, when he still indulged in what Dave Marsh called "wraparound lyrics to go with his wraparound shades." A certain amount of 70's-itis infects it, but its easy to see why this put him on the map. Nebraska - frankly, a lot of its fairly monotonous - the longer songs are undone by a lack of interesting guitar playing or composition. But when it kicks in: "State Trooper," "Reason To Believe" - it's really something. And those songs are best heard in context. So... Darkness On The Edge of Town - another one I find at times dull. These songs were correctly labelled as "dour" by critic Marc Dolan. But the best ones are still essential. Especially the title track. Human Touch and Lucky Town- generally regarded as his nadir by fans, but I disagree. Although a certain amount of slickness affects them (especially the first), the songs are among his best, mainly because they're unassuming, and Springsteen's a lot better with the small aside than the Grand Statement, most often. A good live set? I'm not that fond of the box 1975-1985 - it jumps around too much and in too many of the later cuts he just sounds overwrought. There are several forums dedicated to sharing Springsteen live shows ... hunt `em down. My own opinion is that he was at his peak c. 1978-1979-1980, so look for the best-sounding show you can find - they're out there. Essential Reading Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock and Roll by Marc Dolan quite decent bio/analysis, and much better than the enthusiastic but fawning books by Dave Marsh.
