When I was a kid, Bruce Springsteen was my idol. So many years later, we crossed paths again. I feel vindicated knowing that Bruce and I have gone through life together with the same vision of life in America. I found inspiration in his words so many years ago. Now, I hope that my inspired writing would one day provide assurance to him that this journey was all worthwhile.
This is a repeat of an earlier post. I am posting it again to celebrate his concert for Obama. It was moving, stirring, poignant, and most of all….right. My friend came through again.
My First Best Friend
The house was often quiet. A home with divorce on its mind gets really small. People aren’t talking. Nobody is visiting. The sounds of a suburban Philadelphia converted barn house could be as silent as the complexity of life could be deafening. A kid growing up with the pistol of divorce at his temple might feel like his voice had been extinguished in that place. A shy kid who dreamt of great places but longed for the connections to show him the way. A boy stretched out by turbo-puberty but feeling so small at home. The rush of insecurity and fears that come to a young son in that situation bring great visions of resolution, hopes of a new day, and dreams of that path showing the way to run. Everyone has their trials when they are growing up. It is a universally difficult journey. It is seemingly biologically cued in all of us that we reach a point where we dream of sunnier skies. But when parents get distracted and family is on the move, direction is hard to come by. The compass spins. The voices get dulled in the drone of complaints. The immediacy of the momentary break from sanity dismisses the simple fact that growing up dislodged from this continuum can spin anyone in crazy directions. I felt alone a lot in that period. I was a boy searching for my voice. I remember thinking to myself that I had so much to say and yet couldn’t muster the nerve to say it. It was a total frustration. In that home where the connections seemed to melt away, I was in search of a friend, but didn’t know where to find one.
School was part misery and part reward during that period. I was barely trying. I absorbed enough of my parent’s intellectual ramblings to fare very well in that place, but the inept social lessons stood side by side with my knowledge of music, culture, and politics. I was a ghost. A half-person who so comfortably could make the room laugh with his gift for comedy, while sitting paralyzed in the social structure of this affluent suburban high-school and not even registering on the social totem pole. When I would take the bus home, there were times when I wouldn’t be spoken to at all for the entire ride. One day, the bus rode past as I walked the block home and a kid in the back of the bus stuck his middle finger at me. It was my only interaction during that ride. Living in your head for most of the day can be exhausting, but you don’t learn the skills of life there. Your ability to touch people, or move people, or co-exist with people stops at the end of your tongue. It ends in your fingertips. Thoughts are self-indulgent if they never get expressed. The silence at home wasn’t always there. Dad was too tired anymore. And Mom was away now, and her return visits were reasons to hide more than reasons to express. I remember overhearing a cute girl in high school talking about me. She said, ‘He’s a really cute guy but he doesn’t have much of a personality.” I was crushed for weeks. If only she knew about the thoughts in my head. I never mustered up the courage to tell her that in my own head, I was a rock star.
We were a musical family. But like my mother’s favorite song said, the day the music died couldn’t be pin-pointed exactly. We used to sing Amazing Grace at the dinner table. I’d always take the soulful leads because around that family, I was hipper than James Brown. Every night I’d hear the voice of Don McLean putting me to sleep because he looked so much like the brother that my displaced mother missed so much. It reminded her of her home far away. But those lyrics were ringing in my head every morning when I went to school. Classical music was always in the background. Some of it would scare me on a windy night in that creaky place. The Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack was a staple in this home with confused and mixed religious background. Some of it was so dark that I’d pull the covers over my head. But when splits become canyons and patterns break, sometimes we forget that the music of your life makes your place in your home solid. The music just seemed to die one day. I can’t recall when. But I wanted it back. And I asked my parents if I could have my own stereo.
Ok, so Led Zeppelin was a bit heavy for my conservative brothers to handle and yes, they did insinuate that I was into devil worship when that was coming from my bedroom door. But I was eager to explore. I knew that all of the kids were finding solace in their music. The popular kids were wearing their black concert t-shirts. I’d never been to a concert before. Well, other than Don McLean and Peter, Paul and Mary. You don’t get much street cred from those concerts. And I saw the graffiti on the notebooks too. Rush logos. The faces of Kiss members in make-up. The Grateful Dead. Wow, they sounded scary to me…were they a heavy-metal band, I thought? It was the beginning of a journey. I had to find something that was about me.
One day, in school, a random kid who wasn’t a friend of mine seemed stuck with a concert ticket and asked me if I wanted to go with him. I never really understood why he chose me. Perhaps I was the sucker that would take it, or maybe he needed a ride. Yup, I think that he needed a ride. But I took it, and I didn’t even know the artist. For someone mired in this introspective self-evaluation, a concert was the first step towards freeing myself from the walls of that house gone still. Bruce Springsteen and the E-street Band was the name. We went to this concert that night. I was excited by the mystery of it all. What would it be like? Would I have to do drugs to fit in? Was I going to hell? Would I have to do anything on stage? I was naive. What can I say.
The buzz in that building at the old Spectrum in Philadelphia was palpable. It was like the vibration that you feel when you are a near a swarm of bees. I’d wonder if that was the heart beating of 20,000 people if only they were beating as loud as mine was. And then the lights went out and this skinny man proceeded to change my life forever. I always thought that a rock star was an obnoxious guy in an interview that barely tried on-stage and bitched a lot about being misunderstood. This face was something different. Like a pied-piper in a priest’s collar with the look of a dock worker, this man came on-stage and created community for me. It was the first time since before the deluge of private life travails that I had a neighborhood again. The feeling of friendship and common aims in that crowd was like going to the town square and being recognized. I shouted out loud and let my lungs fully exhale for the first time in years. We stood on our chairs while Bruce stood on his speakers. We jumped up and down. So did he. We shouted back and forth. And I didn’t know the words to any of it.
When I got home that night, it was late. Everyone was sleeping. I stared at my ceiling for hours as the ringing in my ears was made less painful by the opening in my head. The story would have to remain in my mind for a night. Again. But this was mine. I met a friend that night. And he never asked for my name. The next day, I had to get the album and I was shaking as I opened my first copy of a Bruce Springsteen double-album, The River. It was so much music that with every cut on the record, I felt like I grew an inch. I studied the album and practically wore out its grooves. Pretty soon, I had to find more of this musical cocaine. The lyrics were spot-on. It was the voice of me. It was my vision of the hopes and dreams that I had expressed. The blue-collar twist only made escape from this stale and silent suburban trauma seem more possible. Tramps like us, baby, we were born to run. Well, I didn’t have the baby yet, but I saw the path to run outside of my head. Born To Run was next up. It was a masterpiece. I would play it over and over again and relive the mysterious moments of Jungleland in concert that I now fully understood. The painful wail of Bruce at that moment was my voice soaring to the roof and bursting through the shingles. With every purchase, the devotion grew. It wasn’t music as much as it was Talmud. The themes and straight-forward approach to the music gave me the clues to how best to transfer the thoughts in your head to your mouth. This wasn’t just rock’n’roll but it was the beat of my heart, and the breath in my lungs. Hyperbole is the trap of the young, but for me, this music became my escape. It was the place where I felt most comfortable. With a mimicked howl at the moon, I had found my voice. It was time to take it to the stage.
I had an old Jack Kramer tennis racket that served as guitar. You could mimic the finger patterns of Dust in the Wind on that fingerboard and look like Hendrix. My old IKEA floor lamp with bendable top was the perfect microphone. A pile of books served as the doorstop should one of my nosey brothers break into the show. I wished that I had locks on my door. The scene was set. And for concert after concert, I was Bruce Springsteen while singing to my wall. Gesturing to the crowd. Jamming at all the right places. Back to back with Clarence on-stage. Jumping up on the bed and landing just as the final smash of Max Weinberg’s cymbals would crash. I was singing to my high school in an imaginary battle of the bands where I finally got to tell them, you overlooked me, but look at what I can be. Sometimes, I was really singing. Other times, in the interest of secrecy, I’d put on the headphones and nobody would know. If someone in school would cross me the wrong way, I’d go home that day and win them over with rock’n’roll. When the pressures of the family were getting me down, I’d be playing Madison Square Garden soon thereafter and finally getting the respect that I deserved. And when I wanted to change the world, I was changing my own world with the confidence in knowing that my friend, Bruce Springsteen would show me the way. The way to be free. The chance to scream out to the world that I can fly, if only you’ll listen to what I have to say. These sweaty concerts happened over and over again. I played more shows than the E-street Band and the Rolling Stones combined. Now remember, this was the time of LPs, so each song on my playlist was interrupted by replacing the LP, cleaning it, cueing it up, and rocking out as if the urgency was life-altering. It was. I was getting my groove back. Or maybe, I was finding it for the first time.
Back in school, I was walking around the halls like a longshoreman. Working the docks and pained by the misery that the union boss wasn’t telling me. I was wearing plaid button down shirts and rolling up my sleeves. Wearing boots just like Bruce wore, and walking around as if I was waiting for the Promised Land to arrive, or something to come up over the Rise. So, years later, I was also wearing a Jackson Browne black tuxedo jacket but the Bruce period seemed much more authentic. The fact remains that those moments with my friend helping me to see the bigger world and to finally let the air out of my lungs turned a shy boy into a talking fool. It was a dose of confidence when I needed it most. It came in the form of a vinyl record recorded by a humble man with a penchant for saying the right thing and caring just a little bit more about that quiet kid in the stands who just wanted a new reality.
When I went to college, my relationship with Bruce had to change. First off, I had roomies who might not be as excited about my impromptu concerts as I was. Secondly, it was a time when it seemed like the pressure to not like Bruce was mounting. I never understood why I couldn’t like the Cure’s brooding and self-absorbed music, or the Clash’s rebellious rock, or David Bowie’s gender-bending sarcasm, and at the same time find my piece of humble, simplicity in the music of my youth. But the New Wavers wouldn’t have any of it. Bruce wasn’t cool, I guess, he wasn’t cynical enough. I had to go underground. So my concerts continued whenever I could get the chance. If the roomie was away, I’d have to do a quick set before the doorknob turned again. Some close calls in those days. When I moved off campus, in my old room, I’d have posters of Elvis Costello on the walls, or reference the great Sex Pistols song that I’d heard, but spend the half hour before sleep playing to the Meadowlands, and trying to teach them the true meaning of Born in the U.S.A. Through this whole period, because of my mom’s radio connections, I was seeing concert after concert. Those concerts were my church. Coming from mixed religious and very confused spiritual underpinnings, this was the place where the best message was ringing true to me. It was a place where I could stare a guy in the face and see the genuineness that some others might find in their place of worship. I didn’t find it there. I found it here. The lessons are the same,only the chord progressions are a little different.
As I’ve gotten older, I still open every Bruce Springsteen record with the same sense of excitement. It is the trembling anticipation that comes from the respect that these records have for their audience. You know that the time and consideration is there. Nothing is thrown at us without regard for how we are feeling at that moment. As a troubadour of our times, he knows what these times are doing to us, and he sings about it. He gives voice to the moments of our lives when we are too choked up to talk. Again. He did it for me before, and he still does it today. My musical tastes have changed and become more varied. But when The Ties That Bind comes through my speakers, I’m transformed to that excited kid that found hope in the words of a rock song, and saw the horizon for the first time in a power chord.
Bruce Springsteen has a new album coming out. I don’t know if everyone gets him. Frankly, I don’t care that much. It was my thing. A friendship that has lasted for over 25 years. At every crossroads of my life, every breakup, every lost loved one, and every traumatic turn of events, Bruce Springsteen has come to my aid. There is great inspiration in words. A great wordsmith knows when the combination is like an amazing pill that you can take at a moment’s notice to inspire the healing process. I took that pill once from the floor of my bathroom after a painful life’s moment and got instant power from the grace of its message. The hook of a song can sometimes take you back on a ride through time to a better place or an easier moment. And sometimes, the poignant expression of love or of love lost comes from the soundtrack of your life. For me, that soundtrack has been supplied by my old friend, Bruce Springsteen. He doesn’t know me but he must live with the knowledge that he is my oldest friend on this planet. And he has been there for me through thick and thin. I found my ability to dream big on a rock record. I learned the power of words from a rock star. And I found my earliest sense of community from a rock concert. That’s what friends are for, I guess. Sure, it is an odd thing to say when he doesn’t even know my name. But you know, I’ve played thousands of concerts with him and we never once missed a beat.
