The Boss & Me

by whiteray

I came late to all things Springsteen. 

I remember seeing his picture on the covers of Time and Newsweek in late October 1975, when both magazines examined the hoopla surrounding the release of Born to Run. The cover stories were more about the hype than the music, but still, I was a little intrigued, tempted but constrained by the realities of college-age finances. So I didn’t buy the album or look into Springsteen’s music at all. 

I think I was waiting to see what happened with his career, to see what came next. And, as is well known, a conflict with his manager and the resulting legal entanglements kept Springsteen from recording for a couple of years. When Darkness on the Edge of Town came out in 1978, I heard “Badlands” on KQRS in the Twin Cities. I thought it was all right, but I wasn’t really in a rock frame of mind, so I let the album slide. 

And slide they continued to do: The River, Nebraska, and Born in the U.S.A. came out and were, for the most part, ignored. The last of those could not truly be ignored, of course, what with seven of its twelve tracks being Top Ten hits. I liked what I heard, but still, I didn’t go out and buy it. I wasn’t buying much new music at all in those years. 

It was an odd time; I was listening but I wasn’t collecting. So it wasn’t until 1988, after I’d started a new chapter of my life in Minot, North Dakota, and had my interest in music and record collecting revived, that I bought my first Springsteen album: Tunnel of Love. And I thought it was great. 

By the time I left Minot a little more than a year later, I’d caught up: I had everything from Greetings From Asbury Park through the massive live collection released in 1986. And since then, I doubt that more than a few weeks have elapsed between the time of a new Springsteen release and its arrival at my home, all the way through last year’s Letter To You. (Well, it took longer than that for 1992’s In Concert/MTV Plugged to make its way home as I never saw it on vinyl; it had to wait until 2002, after I had made the shift to CDs and was filling gaps.) 

So what do I find in Springsteen’s music? What is it in his work that has, over the last thirty-some years, elevated him to the top position of my music preferences, past the Beatles, my adolescent faves from the time I began to dig into the Top 40 and other pop music; past Bob Dylan, who inspired me to write and sing; and past The Band, whose early version of Americana still provides me with a kind of homespun satisfaction? 

I think that coming to Springsteen’s music as an adult with some life experience had a lot to do with it: I was thirty-four when I bought Tunnel of Love, an album about how we build and sometimes repair relationships that – come to think of it – came into my life just as I began to see that the main relationship of my life was about to become unrepairable. 

I saw myself and the people in my life reflected in Springsteen’s characters: flawed men and women who strive for better times and better places and frequently fail. The working-class roots that shine through much of Springsteen’s work didn’t quite touch me; except for a few jobs during my college years, I have never worked with my hands, and I grew up in a very middle-class milieu. But the internal struggles, the quest for meaning, acceptance, peace and some sort of grace expressed by almost all of Springsteen’s characters and music, those are universal. 

A speaker at my Unitarian Universalist Fellowship told us one Sunday that each of us has a question, one question that can then form or illuminate each of our lives. I’m not sure what my question is, but a critic whose name I have forgotten in effect offered in an essay an assessment of what Springsteen’s question is. The critic highlighted the second verse of Springsteen’s most iconic song, “Born to Run,” in which the narrator tells Wendy, “I wanna know if love is wild, babe. I wanna know if love is real.”

Consider that: “I want to know if love is real.” 

The writer went on to say that Springsteen has spent nearly fifty years moving from song to song and album to album, trying to answer that question. I agree, and maybe it’s that quest, that yearning, that pulls me into Springsteen’s work.

The music matters, too, of course. From the E Street Band in full bore on most of the albums to the softer, more pensive and sometimes sad tones on the solo albums (and not forgetting the Americana roots sound of the Seeger Sessions Band albums), Springsteen’s music supports the tales he tells and the questions he asks. 

I have seen Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band in concert just once, in St. Paul in May 2009. I would like to see another concert, but if I never do, once was enough. As the Texas Gal and I were driving home from St. Paul that night, as that Monday turned into a Tuesday, we reviewed the show. 

And the thought occurred to me as we rode through the Central Minnesota darkness: If I had bought Born To Run when it came out in 1975, as I was a little tempted to do, my life would have been much richer. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it was an interesting idea to chew on as we drove through the dark toward home. 

So what song do I post here to represent those things that Bruce Springsteen has brought to me (and taught me)? I love the mammoth production of “Born To Run,” and I likely always will; the ambition and yearning and hope for a better tomorrow will always appeal to me musically and lyrically.  But the song that made Springsteen matter to me for the first time is found on Tunnel of Love, that first album I bought in February 1988. It reflects how I wanted my life to be at the time, a wish that didn’t come true then but did come true about twenty years later, with my Texas Gal.