Fever (21 page)

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Aesthetically, Springsteen crested as rock's conquering hero by burrowing down into a classic garage-rock sound to re-create rock's center in the midst of the trend-driven fragments he grew up with (metal, arena rock, singer-songwriters, laid-back folk-rock, and, as he developed, the dreaded disco). By 1978, during disco's chart triumph with the Bee Gees' helium-voiced
Saturday Night Fever,
and rock demigods like Led Zeppelin bloating the sound up to match their all-consuming “heaviness,” the communal covenant surrounding sixties rock was all but smothered by seventies commercialism and Fleetwood Mac's soft-core acquiescence. The grass-roots reaction was punk, which punctured grandiosity with do-it-yourself rampage. Punk songs were terse, three-chord manifestos; melodies were buried in the onslaught, and tempos stampeded ahead like gangbusters. Sex was passé, politics swamped harmonies and fashion, and traditional aesthetic quality (or production values) was not just frowned upon but despised. Ironically, this produced a lot of great music.

Although his rise paralleled punk's, Springsteen took his stand apart from it and, in many ways, acted like punk wasn't even happening all around him. He actually wrote 1980's “Hungry Heart” for the Ramones, but, ironically, it became his first top-ten single. While one huge segment of the pop field preoccupied itself with Britain's Sex Pistols, the Clash, and Elvis Costello, and American new-wave acts such as Blondie, Television, and Talking Heads, Springsteen worked a completely different crowd. Although his larger mission resembled punk's—to save rock from its own success, to save Mick Jagger's irony from all Andy Warhol's and Truman Capote's celebrity parties, and to save the music's cultural significance from show-biz irrelevance—he acted as if the stylistic ground wasn't shifting beneath him. He took to the stage night after night, building his audience show by exhausting show, inspiring his crowds as though making great rock constituted a higher calling.

Although he was a man of different stature, Springsteen was as much a revolutionary presence during the punk era as Johnny Rotten was: both took gigantic leaps backward in their music to infuse the style with heraldic energy, Rotten from the outside, Springsteen from within. Where Rotten was political, Springsteen was personal. Rotten would never have sung about something as intimate as his relationship with his father; Springsteen had no interest in taunting an easy target like the Queen. Springsteen couldn't separate his feelings about the world from his feelings about the daily grind his father had bought into, and what such a life meant for his family and son. Ironically, punk's influence worked its way into his writing when he broached more political than romantic subjects on 1982's
Nebraska.

Some argue that Springsteen's slow, steady rise to prominence in the early eighties paled in comparison to the sudden impact of cultural energy unleashed by Presley or the Beatles. But this had more to do with culture's timetable than Springsteen's aura; his old-fashioned dues upstaged some of his poetry. Word of mouth was his best hype, and it flourished long before Jon Landau wrote, “I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen,” after seeing him in 1974 at the Harvard Square Theater. His
Time
and
Newsweek
cover profiles in 1975, as he toured supporting
Born to Run,
reveal a rock figure inspired more by cars than by Pac-Man, and more committed to “classic” ideas than “reactionary” hubris. Like Rotten, Springsteen was of his era yet looked beyond it; while Springsteen's music has the lasting importance of Presley's or the Beatles,' the fact that his early impact created less of an all-consuming explosion says more about his times than about his sensibility.

In some ways, punk outrage helped give Springsteen's mission acceptability. While the imagery from his first four records was classic (cars, romance, driving around—real guy stuff), his political themes, while covert, were intimate (“Stolen Car,” “Atlantic City”) and in many ways more ominous—patricide (“Ties That Bind”), economic impotence (“The Price You Pay”), and working-class self-destructiveness (“Racing in the Street”)—precisely because they weren't dressed up in punk safety pins. Beneath his roof-raising exuberance sulked a brooding mama's boy, perplexed by his own moods, convinced that music could save him from an ordinary life, but confounded at where it might deliver him, and where that left everybody else.

Taking in the great range of his writing, his subject matter, and the epic proportions his songs acquired in concert, Springsteen's sensibility is as colossal and unwieldy as the performer himself, and riddled with contradictions: his exuberance is inseparable from his working-class dread; his fraternal eros inseparable from the trouble he has with women; his drug-free aura (he lived for the music) a glaring anomaly in the rock business, yet inseparable from his lingering anxiety.

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Springsteen sings more songs to his father than any other rock writer. In fact, Springsteen's anger may be some of the most potent and righteous anger in rock simply because it's fueled by this universal father-son tension. His men are fiercely resentful fathers' sons, angry about the disappointment reflected in their fathers' eyes, and exasperated at how such feelings reveal even deeper contradictions, and more complex binds from which to disentangle (“You're born into this life paying for the sins of somebody else's past,” he sings in “Adam Raised a Cain”).

Instead of revealing in teen freedoms like Chuck Berry's more innocent teens, Springsteen's adolescents try to act like adults, overreaching with charm only to fall hard on their defeats.

Romance comes to symbolize several key values: independence, freedom, fantasy, and an alternative world of affection that cushions day-to-day dread. When Springsteen sings “It's a town full of losers, I'm pulling out of here to win” at the end of “Thunder Road,” it rings out on several levels: sure, he's serenaded one Mary “from the front porch to [his] front seat,” but he exacts revenge on the whole town, not just the two souls who find redemption through confiding in one another. If earlier rock 'n' roll touted sexual bravado (in the Stones' “Satisfaction”), Springsteen added world-class pride, the kind that gives kids the bluster to leave home and take on the world. There's a way to find a better life than your parents', his music promised, and hitting the road is the first step.

As a boy, he both admired and felt ashamed for his father (“I ain't gonna let them do to me what I watched them do to you,” he sings in “Independence Day”). Springsteen's fictional father is a lonely, dependent figure, a man whose best days are long past, who's been made hard by the world, yet still clings to basic values and familial ties as a measure of self-worth. Springsteen watches him meander through songs like “Factory,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” and chases his ghost in
Nebraska
's “My Father's House.” This Springsteen father is usually a victim of the corporation he gave his life to, and yet an iron resolve keeps him intact, if only to his son; Dad is both a disappointment and an iron pillar to rebel against. Typically, some Company has usurped this father's professional power (Springsteen has surprisingly few songs about unions), yet he remains all-powerful in the family; he contracted low self-esteem from his economic status and can't fathom his son's escapist flights. Onstage, the key Springsteen father quote usually had him scolding Bruce to “turn down that goddamn guitar.” In song, Springsteen is torn between seething resentment for his father and embittered respect. “Adam Raised a Cain” distills every angry adolescent's fantasy of rebellion, a way of saying, “I'm your son—and I refuse to follow your example!” This anger is fueled by the loss of what the son hoped the father would be, and the terrifying gap between that hope and the reality. The unstated friction is twofold: between how much the son identifies with his father's compromises and the knowledge that this father-son bond would be passionless unless both sides shared enormous affection for one another beneath the surface.

There was no peace between father and son in the Springsteen home, and escape—flight toward romance—became his great early theme. Springsteen blew romance up in so many ways, into such a powerful symbol of freedom, that he makes odd sense of Elvis's tireless romantic smarm in retrospect—as if smooth talk could be just another form of rebelling against your father. In the early songs, like “Rosalita,” it's almost a tie as to which is pitched higher: his yen to break free or how he idealizes the women who make freedom possible. Fathers not only get in the way of freedom, they symbolize everything but freedom. And his own dad is such a mule that defying other dads is a breeze (from “Rosalita”):

Now I know your Daddy he don't like me

'Cos I play in a rock 'n' roll band

And I know your Momma she never dug me

But she never did understand.

Your papa lowered the boom—locked you in your room

I'm coming to lend a hand

I'm coming to liberate you, confiscate you

I want to be your man

Someday we'll look back on this and it will all seem funny …

In early Springsteen songs, breaking free is all, more important even than finding an ideal partner (there always seemed to be plenty of options). His first three records are about all kinds of escape, from work, family, home, industrial small-town life (Springsteen visits school only once: “We learned more from a three-minute record baby than we ever learned in school,” he sings in “Bobby Jean” on his sixth recording,
Born in the U.S.A.
). Those early records promised plenty from this new rock “savior”: they were liberated as much in theme as they were in structure.
Greetings from Asbury Park
was so verbose that Lester Bangs simply hailed it a triumph of words and let the rest slide.
The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle
featured three songs stitched together on side 2, a street opera about romantic corner types and their fatalistic lives. Yet it was done with such affection that he romanticized his characters beyond what even they might have recognized.

This ambition played into his early song structures, too: “Born to Run” plays multiple sections off of one another as they expand and enlarge the typical ABABCAB pop-song diagram, and the harmonic adventurousness coils back on itself in the song's return to the final verse, pounding its way down a gigantic chromatic scale with defiant gusto before a
grand pause
(the kind of in-joke only a musician's musician could pull off). Suddenly, rock romance was rugged and promising again in a way it hadn't been since perhaps
Layla,
which was a downer, and full of new musical possibilities.

With his fourth album,
Darkness on the Edge of Town
(1978), Springsteen abruptly broke from this musical ambition and shifted into lower gear. This lurch, while dramatic, was actually a more ambitious gambit. As his protracted legal battle with his first manager, Mike Appel, prevented more recording, Springsteen discarded adolescent themes and run-on narrative to adopt a rootsier approach. Appel had been Springsteen's first champion in the early 1970s, and saw himself quite literally as a John the Baptist figure in bringing Springsteen's talent to the world. But Springsteen had outgrown Appel's management and took him to court after
Born to Run
to sever the relationship. So Springsteen had unwittingly replicated his family life in his professional life by hooking his wagon to a strong-willed manager whom he then rebelled against.
Darkness on the Edge of Town
had the aroma of a costly battle, won but hard fought; it's easily the angriest of Springsteen's records.

Darkness
brought a toned-down, lean-and-hungry rock style to the working-class worldview (an overhaul that would continue through 1980's
The River
and 1982's
Nebraska
). It's sung in the voice of his father as a younger man; the son imagines his own life rutted and empty, and confronts his father's emotional traits by discovering them in himself. In “Racing in the Street,” the album's centerpiece, a man pores over his lifeless relationship, his passion for cars, and the addictive thrill he still chases with the boys at night—cruising, distracting one another through illicit sport, competing for thrills on the edge of what their girlfriends thought safe (what Hollywood used to call “testing their manhood”). By echoing Martha and the Vandellas' “Dancing in the Street,” Springsteen is doing more than paying homage: his song is a negative image of all the heights of feeling that Motown original inspired in him (if dancing equals community, racing equals alienation). Also during this period, Springsteen wrote his own “Fever” with “The Fever,” much the same way he reworked Chuck Berry stories (in “Johnny Bye Bye” or “Promised Land”). You get the feeling Little Willie John whispered it into his ear one night, and coaxed him into saving the Romeo and Juliet verse for “Fire.”

On the streets of
Darkness,
escape is only temporary: the system simply eats you up and there's little to be done about it. He's not known for his irony, but “Badlands,” the opening song, is irrefutably optimistic while mapping out the moil of working-class life (“Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king/And the king ain't satisfied until he rules everything…”). The dull plodding of “Factory,” the least of the songs here, makes the drudgery plain enough: “Factory gives him life … It's the working, the working, just the working life…” And the early Springsteen hilarity is present in energy but not in tone: “Badlands” is a tirade about the impossibility of escape, a grinding down into the muck of working-class life as a way of distraction; “Promised Land” is the most hopeful song on the record (at the beginning of side 2, it's an antidote to side 1's “Badlands”), about how the best things in this life are worth dreaming about even if they're out of reach (“Mister I ain't no boy, no I'm a man/And I believe in a Promised Land”).