SPRINGSTEEN ON ROLLING STONE

Articolo su Springsteen  tratto da un numero di Rolling Stone del 1990.

On the night of November 5th, 1980, Bruce Springsteen stood onstage Tempe, Arizona, and began a fierce fight for the meaning of America.
The previous day, the nation had fateful corner: With a stunning majority, Ronald Reagan - who campaigned to end the progressive dream in America - was elected president of the United States. It was hardly an unexpected victory. In the aftermath of Vietnam, Watergate, the hostage crisis in Iran and an economic recession, America developed doubts about its purpose and its future, and to many voters, Reagan seemed an inspiring solution. But when all was said and done, the election felt stunning and brutal, a harbinger of years of mean-spiritedness to come.

The singer was up late the night before, watching the election returns, and stayed in his hotel room the whole day, brooding over whether he should make a comment on the turn of events. Finally, onstage that night at Arizona State University, Springsteen stood silently for a moment, fingering his guitar nervously, and then told
his audience: "I don't know what you guys think about what happened last night, but I think it's pretty rightening." Then he vaulted into an enraged version of his most defiant song, "Badlands."

On that occasion, "Badlands" stood for everything it had always stood for - a refusal to accept life's meanest fates or most painful limitations - but it also became something more: a warning about the spitefulness that was about to visit our land as the social and political horizon turned dark and frightening. "I wanna spit in the face

of these badlands," Springsteen sang with an unprecedented fury on that night, and it was perhaps m that instant that he reconceived his role in rock & roll. 

In a way, his action foreshadowed the political activism that would transform rock & roll during the 1980s. As the decade wore on, Springsteen would become one of the most outspoken figures in pop music, though that future probably wasn't what he had in mind that night. Instead, Springsteen was simply focusing on a questionthat, in one form or another, his music had been asking all along: What does it mean to be born an American?

WELL, WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE BORN IN AMERlCA? Does it mean being born to birthrights of freedom, opportunity, equity and bounty? If so, then what does it mean that many of the country's citizens never truly receive those blessings? And what does it mean that in a land of such matchless vision and hope, the acrid realities of fear, repression, hatred, deprivation, racism and sexism also hold sway? Does it
mean, indeed, that we ~re living in badlands? Questions of this sort - about America's nature and purpose, about the distance between its ideals and its truths - are, of course, as old as the nation itself, and finding revealing or liberating answers to those questions is a venture that has obsessed (and eluded) many of the country's worthiest artists, from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Norman Mailer, from John Ford to Francis Coppola.
Rock & roll - an art form born of a provocative mix of American myths, impulses and guilts - has also
aimed, from time to time, to pursue those questions, to mixed effect. In the 1960s, in a period of intense generational division and political rancor, Bob Dylan and the Band, working separately and together, explored the idea of America as a wounded family in albums like The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding and The Band; in the end, though, artists shied from the subject, as if something about the American family's complex, troubled blood ties proved too formidable. Years later, Neil Young (like the Band's Robbie Robertson, a Canadian obsessed by American myths) confronted the spectre of forsworn history in works like American Stars 'n' Bars Hawks and Doves and Freedom. Yet, like too many other artists or politicians who have come face to face with how America has recanted its own best promises, Young finally didn't seem to know what to say about such losses. In some ways, Elvis Presley, a seminal figure for Springsteen, came closest to embodying the meaning of America in his music. That's because he tried to seize the nation's dream of fortune
and make himself a symbol of it. It's also because once Presley had that dream, the dream found a way of undoing him - leading him to heartbreak, decline, death.American callings, American fates.

Bruce Springsteen followed his own version of the fleeting American dream. He grew up in the suburban town of Freehold, New Jersey, feeling estranged from his family and community, and his refusal to accept the limits of that life fuelled the songwriting in his early, largely autobiographical LPs. Indeed, records like Greetings
From Asbury Park, NJ., The Wild, the Innocent the E Street Shuffle and Born to Run were works about flight from dead-end small-town life and thankless familial obligations, and they accomplished for Springsteen the very dream that he was writing about:

That is, those records lifted him from a life of mundane reality and delivered him to a place of bracing purpose. From the outset, Springsteen was heralded by critics as one of the brightest hopes in rock ~ roll - a songwriter and live performer who was as alluring and provoking as Presley and as imaginative and expressive as Dylan. And Springsteen lived up to the hoopla: With his 1975 album, Born to Run, Springsteen fashioned pop's most form-stretching and eventful major work since the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. But for all the praise and fame the album won him, it couldn't rid Springsteen of his fears of solitude and it couldn’t erase his memory of the lives of his family and friends. Consequently, his next LP, Darkness on the Edge of Town, was a stark and often bitter reflection on how a person could win his dreams and yet still find himself dwelling in a dark and lonely place - a story of ambition and loss as ill-starred and deeply American as Citizen Kane.

With The River, released in 1980, Springsteen was still writing about characters straining against the restrictions of their world, but he was also starting to look at the social conditions that bred lives split between the dilemmas of flight and ruin. In Springsteen's emerging mythos, people still had big hopes, but they often served for delusional loves and fated family lives. In the album's haunting title song, the youthful narrator gets his girlfriend pregnant and then enters a joyless marriage and a toilsome job in order to meet his obligations. Eventually, all the emotional and economic realities close in, and the singer's marriage turns into a living, grievous metaphor for lost idealism. "Now, all them things that seemed so important," sings Springsteen. “Well, mister, they vanished right into the air/Now I just act like I don't remember/Mary acts like she don't care." In The River's murky and desultory world, people long for fulfilment and connections, but as often as not they end up driving empty mean streets in after-midnight funks, fleeing from a painful nothingness into a
more deadening nothingness.

The River was Springsteen's pivotal statement. Up to that point, he had told his
tales in florid language, in musical settings that were occasionally operatic and
showy. Now he was streamlining both the lyrics and the music into simpler, more
colloquial structures, as if the realities he was trying to dissect were too bleak to
support his earlier expansiveness. The River was also the record with which
Springsteen began wielding rock ~ roll less as a tool of personal mythology than as a
means of looking at history, as a way of understanding how the lives of the people in
his songs were shaped by the conditions surrounding them and by historical forces
beyond their control.

This drive to comprehend history came to the fore during the singer's
remarkable 1980-1981 tour in support of The River. Springsteen had never viewed
himself as a political-minded performer, but a series of events and influences - the
near disaster at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor and his subsequent
participation in the No Nukes benefit, at New York City's Madison Square Garden in
September 1979 - began to alter that perception. Springsteen read Joe KIein's
biography of folk singer Woody Guthrie and was impressed with the way popular
songs could work as a powerful and binding force for political action. in addition he
read Ron Kovic's harrowing personal account of the Vietnam War, Born on Fourth of
July. Inspired by the candor of Kovic's anguish - and by the bravery and dignity of
numerous other Vietnam veterans he had met - Springsteen staged a benefit at the
Los Angeles Sports Arena in August 1981 to raise funds and attention for the
Vietnam Veterans of America. On one night of the Los Angeles engagement,
Springsteen told his audience that he had recently read Henry Steele Commager and
Allan Nevins's Short History of the United States and that he was profoundly affected
by the book. A month earlier, speaking of the same book he had told a New Jersey
audience: "The idea [of America} was that there'd be a place for everybody, no matter
where you came from . . . you could help make a life that had some decency and
dignity to it. But like all ideals, that idea got real corrupted.... I didn't know what the
government I lived under was doing. It's important to know . . . about the things
around you." Now, onstage in Los Angeles, getting ready to sing Woody Guthrie's
"This Land Is Your Land," Springsteen spoke in a soft, almost bashful voice as he told
his audience: "There's a lot in {the history of the United States] . . . that you're proud
of, and then there's a lot of things in it that you're ashamed of. And that burden, that
burden of shame, falls down. Falls down on everybody."
IN 1982, AFTER THE TOUR ENDED, SPRINGSTEEN WAS poised for the sort of
massive breakthrough that people had been predicting for nearly a decade.The River
had gone to the top of Billboard’s album chart, and "Hungry Heart" was a Top Ten
single; it seemed that Springsteen was finally overcoming much of the popular
backlash that had set in several years earlier, after numerous critics hailed him as
rock & roll's imminent crown prince. But after the tour, the singer was unsure about
what direction he wanted to take in his songwriting. He spent some time driving
around the country, brooding, reading, thinking about the realities of his own
emotional life and the social conditions around him, and then he settled down and
wrote a body of songs about his ruminations. On January 3rd, 1982, Springsteen sat
in his home and recorded a four-track demo cassette of the new songs, accompanied
for the most part only by his ghostly sounding acoustic guitar. He later presented the
songs to Jon Landau and the E Street Band, but neither Landau nor the musicians
could find the right way to flesh out the doleful spare-sounding new material Finally,
at Landau's behest, Springsteen released the original demo versions of the songs as a
sob effort, entitled Nebraska. It was unlike any other work in pop music history: a
politically piercing statement that was utterly free of a single instance of didactic
sloganeering or ideological proclamation. Rather than preach to or berate his
listeners, Springsteen created a vivid cast of characters - people who had been
shattered by bad fortune, by limitations, by mounting debts and losses - and then he
let those characters tell the stories of how their pain spilled over into despair and,
sometimes, violence.

There was a timeless, folkish feel to Nebraska's music, but the themes and
events it related were as dangerous and timely as the daily headlines. k was a record
about what can occur when normal people are forced to endure what cannot be
endured. Springsteen's point was that until we understood how these people arrived
at their places of ruin, until we accept our connection to those who had been hurt or
excluded beyond repair, America could not be free of such fates or such crimes. “The
idea of America as a family is naive, maybe sentimentally or simplistic ," he said in a
1987 interview, "but it's a good idea. And if people are sick and hurting and lost, I
guess it falls on everybody to address those problems in some fashion. Because
injustice, and the price of that injustice, falls on everyone's heads The economic
injustice falls on everybody's head and steals everyone's freedom. Your wife can't
walk down the street at night. People keep guns in their homes. They live with a
greater sense of apprehension, anxiety and fear than they would in a more just and
open society. It's not an accident and it's not simply that there are 'bad' people out
there. It's an inbred part of the way that we are all living: It's a product of what we
have accepted, what we have acceded to. And whether we mean it or not our silence
has spoken for us in some fashion"

‘NEBRASKA ATTEMPTED TO MAKE A SUBSTANTIAL STATEment about the modern
American sensibility in an austere style that demanded close involvement. That is, the
songs required that you settle into their doleful textures and racking tales and then
apply the hard facts of their meaning to the social reality around you. In contrast to
Springsteen's earlier bravado, there was nothing eager or indomitable about
Nebraska. instead, it was a record about people walking the rim of desolation who
sometimes transform their despair into the irrevocable action of murder. It was not
exulting or uplifting, and for that reason, it was a record that many listeners
respected more than they "enjoyed.” Certainly, it was not a record by which an artist
might expand his audience in the fun-minded world of pop.
But with his next record, Born m the U.SA., in 1984, Springsteen set out to find
what it might mean to bring his message to the largest possible audience. Like
Nebraska, Born in the U.S.A. was about people who come to realize that life turns out
harder, more hurtful, more close fisted than they might have expected. But in
contrast to Nebraska's killers and losers,Born m the U.SA.'s characters hold back the
night as best they can, whether it's by singing, laughing, dancing, yearning
reminiscing or entering into desperate love affairs. There was something celebratory
about how these people face their hardships. It's as if Springsteen were saying that
life is made to endure and that we all make peace with private suffering and shared
sorrow as best we can.

At the same time, a listener didn't have to dwell on these truths to appreciate
the record. Indeed, Springsteen and Landau designed the album with contemporary
pop styles in mind - which is to say, it was designed with as much meticulous
attention to its captivating and lively surfaces as to its deeper and darker meanings.
Consequently, a track like "Dancing in the Dark" - perhaps the most pointed and
personal song Springsteen has ever written about isolation - came off as a rousing
dance tune that worked against isolation by pulling an audience together in a physical
celebration. Similarly, "Cover Me," “Downbound Train" and "I'm on Fire" - songs
about erotic fear and paralyzing loneliness came off as sexy, intimate and irresistible.
But it was the terrifying and commanding title song about a Vietnam veteran
who has lost his brother, his hope and his faith in his country - that did the most to
secure Springsteen's new image as pop hero and that also turned his fame into
something complex and troubling. Scan the song for its Iyrics alone, and you find a
tale of outright devastation: a tale of an American whose birthrights have been paid
off with indelible memories of violence and ruin. But listen to the song merely for its
fusillade of drums and firestorm of guitar, and in a political climate in which simpleminded
patriotic fervor had attained a startling credibility, it's possible to hear the
singer's roaring proclamation - "I was born in the U.S.A." as a fierce, patriotic
assertion. Indeed, watching Springsteen unfurl the song in concert - slamming it
across with palpable rage as his audience waved flags of all sizes - it was possible to
read the song in both directions. "clearly the key to the enormous explosion of
Bruce's popularity is the misunderstanding {of the song "Born in the U.S.A."]," wrote
critic Greil Marcus during the peak of Springsteen's popularity. "He is a tribute to the
fact that people hear what they want."

One listener who was quite happy to hear only what he wanted to was the
syndicated conservative columnist George Will, who, in the middle of the 1984
campaign that pitted Walter Mondale against Ronald Reagan, attended a Springsteen
show and liked what he saw. In a September 14th, 1984, column, Will commended
Springsteen for his "elemental American values" and, predictably, heard the cry of
"Born in the U.SA" as an exultation rather than as pained fury. "I have not got a clue
about Springsteen's politics, if any," Will wrote, "but flags get waved at his concerts
while he sings about hard times. He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed
factories and other problems always seem punctuated by a grand, cheerful
affirmation: 'Born in the U.S.A!"

Apparently, Reagan's advisors gave a cursory listening to Springsteen's music
and agreed with Will. A few days later, in a campaign stop in New Jersey, President
Ronald Reagan declared: “America's future rests in a thousand dreams inside your
hearts. It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans
admire: New Jersey's Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come
true is what this job of mine is all about."

It was an amazing assertion. clearly, to anybody paying attention, the hardbitten
vision of America that Springsteen sang of in “Born in the U.S.A." was a far cry
from the much-touted "new patriotism" of Reagan and many of his fellow
conservatives. And yet there was also something damnably brilliant in the way the
president sought to attach his purpose to Springsteen's views. It was the art of
political syllogism, taken to its most arrogant extreme. Reagan saw himself as a
definitional emblem of America; Bruce Springsteen was a singer who, apparently,
extolled America in his work; therefore, Springsteen must be exalting Reagan - which
would imply that if one valued the music of Springsteen, then one should value (and
support) Reagan as well. Reagan was manipulating Springsteen's fame as an
affirmation of his own ends.

A few nights later, Springsteen stood before a predominantly blue collar
audience in Pittsburgh and, following a rousing performance of "Atlantic City."
decided to respond to the president's statement. "the president was mentioning my
name the other day," he said with a bemused laugh, "and I kinda got to wondering
what his favorite album might have been. I don't think it was the Nebraska album. I
don't think it was this one." Springsteen then played a passionate version of "Johnny
99," a song about a man who commits impulsive murder as a way of striking back at
the meanness of the society around him - a song he wrote, along with other Nebraska
tunes, in response to the malignant political atmosphere that had been fostered by
Reagan's social policies.

Springsteen's comments were apt: Was this the America Ronald Reagan heard
clearly when he claimed to listen to Springsteen's music? An America where dreams
of well-being had increasingly become the province of the privileged and where
jingoistic partisans had determined the nation's health by a standard of selfadvantage?
When Reagan heard a song Like "My Hometown," did he understand his
own role in promoting the disenfranchisement the song described?
But Reagan's attempt to co-opt Springsteen's message also had some positive
side effect. For one thing, it made plain that Springsteen now commanded a large and
vital audience of young Americans who cared deeply about their families, their
futures and their country and that Springsteen spoke to - and perhaps for - that
audience's values in ways that could not be ignored. The imbroglio also forced
Springsteen to become more politically explicit and resourceful at his performances.
After Pittsburgh, he began meeting with labor and civil-rights activists in most of the
cities he played, and he made statements at his shows, asking his audience to lend
their support to the work of such activists. He also spoke out more and more plainly
about where he saw America headed and how he thought rock & roll could play a
part in effecting that destiny. One evening in Oakland, when introducing "This Land Is
Your Land," he said: "If you talk to the steelworkers out there who have lost their jobs
I don't know if they'd believe this song is what we're about anymore. And maybe
we're not. As we sit here, {this song's promise] is eroding every day. And with
countries, as with people, it's easy to let the best of yourself slip away. Too many
people today feel as if America has slipped away and left them standing behind." Then
he sang the best song written about America, in as passionate a voice as it had ever
been sung.

But none of this was enough. In November 1984 Ronald Reagan was reelected
president by an even more stunning mandate than the first time. It seemed plausible
that many (if not most) of the millions of fans of voting age who made Born in the
U.S A. such a huge success cast their votes for the man to whom Springsteen so
obviously stood in opposition. Perhaps it nettled him. but Springsteen was finally
facing the answer to the question he had been asking during the length of the decade:
To be born in America, to be passionate about the nation's best ideals meant being
part of a nation that would only believe about itself what it wanted to believe. It also
meant that one still had to find a way to keep faith with the dream of that nation
despite the awful realities that take shape when that dream is denied.
IN 1984, AMERICA HAD NOT HAD enough of Ronald Reagan, or it would not
have reelected him. It had also not had enough of Bruce Springsteen: After an
international tour, he returned to the States a bigger, more popular artist than ever.
It may seem like a contradiction that a nation can embrace two icons that differed so
dramatically, but the truth is, Reagan and Springsteen shared an unusual bond: Each
seemed to stand for America, and yet each was largely misunderstood by his
constituency. Reagan seemed to stand for the values of family and improved
opportunity at the same time that he enacted policies that undermined those values.
Springsteen seemed to stand for brazen patriotism when he believed in holding the
government responsible for how it had corrupted the nation's best ideals and
promises.

To his credit, Springsteen did his best to make his true values known. In the
autumn of 1985, he embarked on the final leg of his Born in the U.S.A. tour, this time
playing stadium-size venues that held up to 100,000 spectators. Playing such vast
settings was simply a way of keeping faith with the ambition he had settled on a year
or two earlier: to see what it could mean to reach the biggest audience he could
reach. It was also an attempt to speak seriously to as many of his fans as possible, to
see if something like a genuine consensus could be forged from the ideals of a rock &
roll community. And of course, the gesture also entailed a certain risk: If
Springsteen's audience could not or would not- accept him for what he truly stood
for, then in the end he could be reduced by that audience.
In some surprising respects, Springsteen's ambition succeeded. At the beginning
of the stadium swing, many fans and critics worried that he would lose much of his
force - and his gifts for intimacy and daring - by moving his music to such large
stages. But if anything, Springsteen used the enlarged settings as an opportunity to
rethink many of his musical arrangements, transforming the harder songs into
something more fervid, more moving, more aggressive than before and yet still
putting across the more rueful songs from The River and Nebraska with an
uncompromised sensitivity. If anything, he made the new shows count for more than
the election year shows, if only because he recognized that addressing a larger
audience necessarily entailed some greater responsibilities. In Washington, D.C., on
the opening night of the stadium shows, Springsteen told a story about a musician
friend from his youth who was drafted and who, because he did not enjoy the
privilege of a deferment, was sent to Vietnam and wound up missing in action. "If the
time comes when there's another war, in some place like Central America,"
Springsteen told his audience of 56,000, "then you're going to be the ones called on
to fight it, and you're going to have to decide for Yourselves what that means. . . But
if you want to know where we're headed for {as a country], then someday take that
long walk from the Lincoln Memorial to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where the
names of all those dead men are written on the walls, and you'll see what the stakes
are when you're born in the U.S.A. in 1985". For the last dates of the tour, at the Los
Angeles Memorial Coliseum, he added Edwin Starr's 1970 hit “War" to the show
coming down hard on the lines “Induction destruction/Who wants to die.”
Later at the end of the last show in L.A., Springsteen stood before his band, his
friends and his audience and said: is has been the greatest year of my life. I want to
thank you for making me feel like the luckiest man in the world." Indeed, Springsteen
had begun the tour as a masscult figure; he was leaving it as a full-fledged pop hero --
a voice of egalitarian conscience unlike any that rock had yielded before, with a
remarkable capacity for growth and endurance.

In short, Springsteen seemed to emerge from the tour occupying the center of
rock & roll, in the way that Presley or the Beatles had once commanded the center.
And yet the truth was, in the pop world of the 1980s, there was no center left to
occupy. Rock was a field of mutually exclusive options, divided along racial stylistic
and ideological lines. In fact, by the decade's end, even the American and British
fields of rock - which had dominated the pop world thoroughly for a quarter-century
- were gradually losing their purism and dominance as more-adventurous musicians
began bringing African, Jamaican, Brazilian, Asian and other musical forms into
interaction with pop's various vernaculars. In modern pop, America no longer
overwhelmed the international sensibility.

In any event, Springsteen seemed to step back from rock & roll's center at the
same moment that he won it. In 1986, he assembled a multidisc package of some of
his best performances from the previous ten years of live shows - a box set intended
to he a summation of his artistic growth and his range as a showman. It was the most
ambitious effort of his career but also the least consequential. It didn ‘t play with the
sort of revelatory effect of his best shows or his earlier albums, and it didn't
captivate a mass audience in the same way, either. Then, the following year
Springsteen released the album Tunnel of Love. Like Nebraska, Tunnel of Love was a
more intimate less epic statement than its predecessor - a heartbreaking but
affirming suite of songs about the hard realities of romantic love. Maybe the record
was intended to remind both Springsteen and his audience that what ultimately
mattered was how one applied one s ideals to one‘s own world - or maybe the songs
were simply about the concerns that obsessed Springsteen most at that time.
At the end of the decade, Springsteen was on tour again. Reluctant to continue
playing oversize venues, he returned to the arena halls where he had done some of
his most satisfying work in the years before and restored a more human scale to his
production. It was another election year, and while he still spoke out about issues
from time to time, Springsteen seemed wary of being cast as merely a rock politician
or statesman. Perhaps he realized that America's political choices just couldn't be
affected very tellingly from a rock & roll stage, or maybe he was simply discouraged
by what he saw around him. To be sure, there was plenty to he disheartened about: It
was a season when Oliver North enjoyed status as a cultural hero and when George
Bush turned patriotism and flag-waving into viciously effective campaign issues.
At the same time, Springsteen remained committed to the idea of running the
rock & roll audience into an enlightened and active community. After the Tunnel of
Love tour, he headlined Amnesty International's Human Rights Now! world tour in the
fall of 1988. Along with Live Aid, the Amnesty tour was one of the most ambitious
political campaigns in rock's history And the fact that it could occur at all and could
reach an audience that was both massive and ready was in some ways a testament to
the sort of idealism that Springsteen had fought for throughout the 1980s.
Which is to say, despite the currents of history, Springsteen kept faith with a
difficult quest. In the midst of a confusing and complex decade, he wrote more
honestly, more intelligently and more compassionately about America than any other
writer of the decade. And after he did so, he set about the business of tending to his
own life. An act like that is neither a retreat nor a failure. Instead, it is a way of
refusing to be broken by the dissolution of the world around you. It is a way of saying
that, sooner or later, you have to bring your dreams of a better world into your own
home and your own heart, and you have to see if you can live up to them All in all,
that isn't such a bad way to finish off one decade. Or to begin another.