Brian Williams of NBC News, Eric Alterman of The Nation, Jon Stewart of Comedy Central. I could go on, but you get the idea. Frankly, it’s a little disturbing how many of the middle-aged white men shaping our public discourse through their prominent roles in major NYC-based media outlets were as teenagers and remain today unabashed fans of Bruce Springsteen.
Add to the list David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, who has a 17 page (in the online edition) essay in the magazine’s current issue about Springsteen and The E Street Band as they prepare to launch the 2nd American leg of their “Wrecking Ball” tour. As befits a long-time fan—and as befits The New Yorker—Remnick’s article artfully shuttles back and forth across the decades, weaving together the strands of Springsteen’s 40+ year career as a musician, singer, songwriter and bandleader to produce an in-depth and richly nuanced profile.
If you’re a Springsteen fan, it’s well worth reading, partly because Remnick writes so well and partly because he’s still a good reporter—interviewing everyone from the still-struggling Vini Lopez (the E Street Band’s first drummer, fired before the Born To Run album vaulted Springsteen to fame and forture) to newcomer Jake Clemons (Clarence’s nephew, working to fill his late uncle’s shoes as lead saxophonist with the band) to Springsteen’s 2nd (and current) wife, Patti Scialfa.
The excerpt that stayed in my mind after reading the article yesterday is the following one. Here’s Springsteen’s longtime friend and sidekick, Steve Van Zandt, talking about the argument (“one of the biggest fights of our lives”) the two men had in the late 1980s about “Ain’t Got You”, one of several songs on Tunnel Of Love that deals with the problems Springsteen faced as a fantastically wealthy man married to the wrong (young, gorgeous) woman:
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.”
It may have resonated, but that didn’t stop Springsteen from spending the next several years focusing on his own life, and not on what his fans wanted from him. He fired the E Street Band, divorced Julianne Phillips, married Patti Scialfa, started a family, and recorded not one, but two more albums (Human Touch and Lucky Town) that dealt almost exclusively with his own needs and interests.
Then, rather than reunite with the E Street Band after releasing a Greatest Hits album, Springsteen put out The Ghost of Tom Joad (an intensely quiet, almost rhythmless solo folk album), grew a goatee and went on what became know informally as the STFU tour—for Springsteen’s blunt admonitions from the stage to fans who wanted him to rock out with his old hits. It wasn’t until 1999, eleven years later, that Springsteen called the E Street Band back together and began the latest phase of his career.
Van Zandt isn’t wrong when he says “…that’s your gift. Explaining their lives to them.” But it’s a partial truth. Early in his career, Springsteen’s life was so much like the lives of his fans that by using his art to explain his own life, he illuminated their lives too.
Now that Springsteen is almost unimaginably rich and famous, it’s only because he’s continued to delve deeply into his own life (“I’m thirty years in analysis!” he tells Remnick) that Springsteen has been able to remain grounded and rooted enough to continue producing art that gives, as Van Zandt says, “some logic and reason and sympathy and passion to this cold, fragmented, confusing world“.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/
