In Harlem late last night
The magic rat drove his sleek machine
Over the Jersey state line
“Jungleland,” from Bruce Springsteen’s 1975 album “Born to Run.”
I first heard “Born to Run” on a cassette that my buddy Noel made me in the summer of 1984, nearly a decade after the album came out. I was late to the Springsteen party but I’ve well more than hung around.
Early on, I didn’t much analyze why I liked him. He was cool. He wasn’t Cyndi Lauper. I can picture our group of seven guys in high school, gathered in a basement, putting our heads back and singing “Badlands” at the top of our lungs.
In retrospect, I think Springsteen let us be guys while still giving us permission to feel. Something inimitable in the combination of lyrics and music and that rugged, edgy voice let us retain the aura of cool, brave – whatever we imagined we should be – but still be on our knees begging for mercy. He could make me want to die with someone in an everlasting kiss and yet feel, far from a whiny romantic, like Gen. George Patton tilting at adolescence.
Or like one of Patton’s men. Springsteen seemed so confident in owning his yearning, in his candor, that how could we not follow him into battle?
It’s also taken a third of a lifetime to appreciate another aspect of Springsteen’s genius: his best stuff shows and doesn’t tell. “Rosalita” took me to a bar down San Diego way. “Jungleland,” my favorite on any given day, showed me the magic rat and the barefoot girl on the hood of the Dodge.
By telling stories, not spouting adages or commands, he let me fill in the blanks, interpret, reach my own conclusions about life, keep my dignity intact.
He turns 63 this week. A gift to us.
Yet I’ve been thinking about whether something has changed with him. Or with me. I’m not connecting with him the way I used to.
I am slightly less wowed by his new stuff, for a decade or more. I still play the albums out, sure. I just don’t feel the way I once did. I’m older. Not surrounded by the guys in the basement. How much can you take on the night when you’re cranking up the stereo in the Volvo to three?
This is so, even though Springsteen is more polished than ever as a musician. Given that his pocket is a few years shy of a Social Security card, he’s more astounding on stage. His peerless muse has neither boundaries nor fatigue.
He’s more political for sure, something I’m hardly the first to observe. The 2007 album “Magic” took on the Bush administration, “The Rising,” dealt with the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. “Wrecking Ball,” which came out earlier this year, has big, catchy anthems, explosive reminders of economic hardship and resilience, but it tends to miss details, characters, the hollows and images where I can insert myself and interpret. On the whole, it feels less personal to me.
Springsteen’s been very frank about his evolution, talking about how artists need to reinvent themselves, and about his feeling of responsibility to the world, his community.
I wonder how easy it is for him, for any artist at his stage and station of life, even for the listener, to fully connect with the rawness of everyday life – given the stability, spouse and children. He’s far removed, I presume, from the injuries that drove him four decades ago.
I personally find it a little harder to connect to politics or ideas, which tend to be informed by true emotion but are not its equal.
And while Springsteen still introduces us to characters, there are more pronouncements, packaged less as narrative than lesson. In “Land of Hope and Dreams,” he writes about a train bound for glory that “carries saints and sinners, losers and winners.” It’s incredibly catchy but I feel more like a pupil than a camper swept up in a ghost story.
I guess it’s not so much that I miss Springsteen. He’s a genius out there doing his thing, what feels right, and more power to him. But I do miss us.
And I need us. Who else but Springsteen could bring the kind of catharsis and belonging that he brought to adolescence, to parenting, marriage, frailty? Who else could match music to quirky characters, idiosyncratic and pointed images, gritty settings, so that I could be swept up, taken on a final journey, shown, not told, and, in turn, able to lose myself completely but keep my dignity intact?
When I’m in the Volvo with the two car seats in the back, I listen to whatever Springsteen is handy, old or new. The old stories never get old, even keep revealing themselves. The newer stuff still beats just about anything else going. The children like “Land of Hope and Dreams.” They call it “the train song.” They like songs about trains.
It’s just I feel like we’ve got another gear, Springsteen and me. I want to hear him weave his stories, our stories, stories, then, overcome, leap to my feet and tilt with him at mortality.