I knew as early as the summer of 1985 that I would never be the raddest kid in the neighborhood. That honor might have gone to Tall Jim Brantley, who was a grade ahead of me. Or to Glenn Crumpler, on those odd weekends and Wednesdays when he lived with his mom on Fantasia Street. Or to Frankie Kata, whose death in 1992, along with my parents’ concurrent divorce, persuaded me to break off all diplomatic contact with God and declare a war that would last through junior high. Not having ever been initiated into the appurtenances of cool, I’m still not really qualified to say who, exactly, was the king of the hill; lord of the barnyard. All I know is that my BMX bike lacked the mag wheels I coveted, I never got to be Han Solo, and when it came time to decide how we would waste an afternoon, my voice hardly registered.
Only in private did my nascent self-consciousness fall away. I remember long afternoons that summer when my mom and dad were out of the house—perhaps no further than the garden, but invisible to me. In their room the blinds were perpetually drawn, and toward evening the yellow light would strain at the translucent fibers as though on the verge of bursting through. Being in that room at that time of day—seeing the mounded bedclothes and coffeecups and earrings and other evidence of adulthood etched in the overspill of illumination—was like entering one of the secret sanctuaries I always suspected existed on the other side of movie screens. Charged with the nervous friction that arises where waking life and dream life rub up against one another, I would creep into the walk-in closet and fetch my dad’s bomber jacket and tennis equipment. Then I’d stand bejacketed in front of the long mirrored door of the bureau and watch myself strum the black Dunlop racket. Had the dying sun, like a projector bulb, suddenly scorched through the film of the shades, my mother, looking up from the flowerbeds outside the window might have laughed to see her gangly six-year old in a Bjorn Borg headband and outsized coat. In my mind, though, I was invincible, impervious to ridicule. In my mind I was Bruce Springsteen.
In a child’s world, every gesture is a movement of the spirit; every object is suffused with mystery. The solitary hours I stole that summer, playing “Born in the U.S.A.” to a capacity crowd at Giants Stadium, constituted my first fumblings toward religion. Christ was an abstraction, foreshortened by history and stained by the dull light of church. Bruce was, in that multiplatinum year, as close as the nearest cable TV. In Technicolor and stereo, Bruce radiated a charisma that revealed Jim and Glenn and Frankie as the little kids they were, and I, then as now easily distracted from the big picture, needed that. In the person of Bruce Springsteen, that word charisma came close to its original, Greek meaning, a fusion of the cool I craved and the holiness to which I didn’t yet aspire.
While my parents were outside distracted by yardwork, by the insatiable weeds and the plagues of bugs, some sort of transubstantiation took place in my interior, a confusion of the rock star with the Messiah that I’ve never fully untangled. Though I’ve managed to cleanse my understanding of Christ of the taint of the devil’s music, I’ve never quite been able to abstract Springsteen from the halo of divinity that surrounded him in my eyes when I was six. Instead of being Christlike, I wanted to be Brucelike, and I still feel I could have done worse for a false idol.
For example, Springsteen taught me compassion—something neither Def Leppard nor Father Price at St. Timothy’s Episcopal could have accomplished. Jumping around or flopped in beanbag chairs in Jesse Miller’s stifling attic, we wore out a cassette tape of Born in the U.S.A., and what I heard, in almost every lyric on the album, was more disturbing than the jubilant melodies would suggest. In the title track, in “Downbound Train,” in “Workin’ on the Highway” and “Dancing in the Dark,” and, especially, “I’m on Fire,” I heard anger and desolation and bleakness that, like all things I was too young to understand, both frightened and seduced me. I couldn’t stop listening. I couldn’t stop dancing. And I credit this forced exposure to moral ambiguity, to convicts and deadbeats and drifters, with teaching me sympathy for the downtrodden. Which proves, incidentally, that there are six-year-olds with more moral imagination than certain Republican presidents of the United States.
Now, a quarter-century old, I like to flatter myself that I’ve put away childish things. Certainly, my faith has deepened and changed since the callow and profound days of the mid-80s. I can laugh at myself now, for example. I can critique the market forces at work in the fetishization of celebrity. I can recognize how illusory the feeling of knowing another person can sometimes be. And I can question whether it’s sinful to worship what you see as divinity manifesting itself through someone who is, in the end, just another human being like you, prone to error. Still, I must admit that, in a crisis of faith, I turn to Bruce more often than to the church. The spiritual transport I felt listening to Bruce sing “The Rising” at the Meadowlands this past September was no different, no less meaningful to me, than the shiver I get at the end of the Nicene Creed, when we look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
I’ve been thinking about this recently—about whether circumstances exist under which it’s okay with God that we worship at the altar of art; about why Bruce means what he means to me. I’ve arrived at no definitive answers—twenty years after the tennis racket it remains shrouded in mystery—but, at the least, I’ve arrived at an inkling of an idea which I’ll share with you.
Setting aside the sheer majesty of the music, which multiple drafts of this essay have convinced me is beyond the power of words to describe, the spiritual importance of Bruce Springsteen lies in his ‘I’ voice. See, I’m the kind of person who, if you tell me I should try a bite of your meal, I literally can’t force my mouth open. While I’ve come, painfully, to accept God’s “Thou Shalt,” everything else must be on my terms. Everywhere I turned, growing up in the Bible Belt, it seemed like someone was using the second and third person to tell me what to believe, about politics, about fashion, about religion. “You need to …” “You should …” “Kids these days are …” Even the first-person testimonies of evangelicals barely disguised an imperative mood that rankled. I always sort of assumed that the claim to absolute truth was a regional affliction, like the bland Down East cooking, the unlovely accents. What I found when I went away to college was that, in America, almost everybody was evangelical. Even atheists. Even nihilists. Even me.
But not Bruce. He may, in fact, have the most compelling ‘I’ voice I’ve encountered in mass media. Unlike many of those vying for that distinction, however, the singer and his narrators bear witness not to the truth of an ideology but to the sanctity and mystery of everyday existence. As far as I can tell, that’s why Springsteen’s views on faith and politics and living are easy for me to entertain while those of the churches or pundits or the Apostle Paul are difficult to stomach.
Springsteen’s ‘I’ voice has always been there—wrestling semi-coherently with the legacy of Catholicism in the Dylanesque spill of Greetings from Asbury Park, sharply sketching youth and desire and the Jersey Shore in The Wild, The Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle, gleaming beneath the automythology of Born to Run, like pale flesh visible beneath armor. It’s the essential honesty of that first-person impulse that gives Springsteen’s anthems and ballads their staying power; anyone who’s ever attended a Springsteen concert will tell you that the magic lies in the transaction between Bruce and his audience, the sense that they know him and he knows them. In the last two decades, as his sales have leveled off, Bruce has pushed his ‘I’ voice farther than anyone else in pop music, offering his audience what may be the first compelling depiction of adulthood in rock music.
In Tunnel of Love and Human Touch and the vastly underrated Lucky Town, Springsteen has set the first-person character sketches that are his stock in trade beside stripped-down, autobiographical songs about marriage, divorce, fatherhood, friends, aging, and his own status as “Local Hero.” Running through these songs is an explicit prayerfulness, free from self-conscious piety. For example, Tunnel of Love ends a series of songs about infidelity and mistrust with “Valentine’s Day,” as song in which an estranged husband dreams: “my eyes rolled straight back in my head / And God’s light came shining on through / I woke up in the darkness scared and breathing and born anew. / It wasn’t the cold river I felt rushing over me / It wasn’t the bitterness of a dream that didn’t come true / It wasn’t the wind in the gray fields I felt rushing through my arms / No no baby, it was you.” Lucky Town wrings similar magic from scenes of weddings and sex and fatherhood. After the existential desperation of Springsteen’s youth, his later work testifies to the possibility of grace in American life.
Which has turned out to be important to a guy like me. Amid all of the controversy that has surrounded the institution of marriage since the sexual revolution, I was tempted as a young man to swear off marriage forever. Springsteen, alone among the cultural forces that determine the texture of my days, offered me the thoughtful, agenda-less reflection I needed on the power and pitfalls of commitment. The ‘I’ voice of Tunnel of Love, never pushy, never didactic, helped me work through my desire to marry the woman I love. Similarly, in the wake of the Eleventh, it was Bruce who pierced the miasma of politics and commercialism and received opinion and helped me grieve as I needed to. For all the hype surrounding the release of The Rising, the sentiments of the singer and his surrogates struck in me the chord I had gone to church in search of. “With these hands I pray, Lord … for the faith, Lord … for your love, Lord.” What I needed, it seems, was not someone to tell me how to feel, but someone to articulate how they were feeling.
Is it blasphemous to continue looking for religious instruction from a rock star at an age when I should know better? Somehow, I doubt it. After all, even in the bellicose years of middle school, my faith in God’s existence has never wavered. Nor has my conviction that what God asks of us, fundamentally, is to love him with our whole hearts and to love our neighbors as ourselves. But a religion must be something more than a faith: not only theory, but practice. And it is in the realm of practice where Bruce Springsteen has been a valuable guide. Here is my attempt to love God with my whole heart, his music says to me. Here is my attempt to love my neighbor. Where is yours?
Springsteen’s songs do not take the place of the Scripture in my life, and, unlike many of the voices I hear in American culture, they do not propose to. Rather, my shelf of Springsteen CDs, their white spines upright, appear to me as a series of hurdles, of spiritual dares. Do I dare face down depression? Do I dare fall in love? Do I dare get married, have kids, grow old? Do I dare feel so much, love so deeply? It seems to me, as I rise toward each, that these are God’s dares too, and that when we say yes—even when it takes a killer melody to decide us—God, who sees us even when the blinds are drawn, must be well pleased.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 1.1.