Night Beat (36 page)

There was a timeless, folkish feel to
Nebraska
’s music, but the themes and events it related were as dangerous and timely as the daily headlines of the 1980s—or of the 1990s, for that matter. It was a record about what can occur when normal people are forced to endure what cannot be endured. Springsteen’s point was that, until we understood how these people arrived at their places of ruin, until we accepted our connection to those who had been hurt or excluded beyond repair, then America could not be free of such fates or such crimes. “The idea of America as a family is naive, maybe sentimental or simplistic,” he told me in a 1987 interview, “but it’s a good idea. And if people are sick and hurting and lost, I guess it falls on everybody to address those problems in some fashion. Because injustice, and the price of that injustice, falls on everyone’s heads. The economic injustice falls on everybody’s head and steals everyone’s freedom. Your wife can’t walk down the street at night. People keep guns in their homes. They live with a greater sense of apprehension, anxiety, and fear than they would in a more just and open society. It’s not an accident, and it’s not simply that there are “bad’ people out there. It’s an inbred part of the way that we are all living: It’s a product of what we have accepted, what we have acceded to. And whether we mean it or not, our silence has spoken for us in some fashion.”

NEBRASKA ATTEMPTED TO make a substantial statement about the modern American sensibility in a stark and austere style that demanded close involvement. That is, the songs required that you settle into their mournful textures and racking tales and then apply the hard facts of their meaning to the social reality around you. In contrast to Springsteen’s earlier bravado, there was nothing eager or indomitable about
Nebraska.
Instead, it was a record that worked at the opposite end of those conditions, a record about people walking the rim of desolation, who sometimes transform their despair into the irrevocable action of murder. It was not exulting or uplifting, and for that reason, it was a record that many listeners respected more than they “enjoyed.” Certainly, it was not a record by which an artist might expand his audience in the fun-minded world of pop.

But with his next record,
Born in the U.S.A.,
in 1984, Springsteen set out to find what it might mean to bring his message to the largest possible audience. Like
Nebraska, Born in the U.S.A.
was about people who come to realize that life turns out harder, more hurtful, more close-fisted than they might have expected. But in contrast to
Nebraska
’s killers and losers,
Born in the U.S.A.
’s characters hold back the night as best they can, whether it’s by singing, laughing, dancing, yearning, reminiscing, or entering into desperate love affairs. There was something celebratory about how these people faced their hardships. It’s as if Springsteen were saying that life is made to endure and that we all make peace with private suffering and shared sorrow as best we can.

At the same time, a listener didn’t have to dwell on these truths to appreciate the record. Indeed, Springsteen and Landau had designed the album with contemporary pop style in mind—which is to say, it had been designed with as much meticulous attention to its captivating and lively surfaces as to its deeper and darker meanings. Consequently, a track like “Dancing in the Dark”—perhaps the most pointed and personal song Springsteen has ever written about isolation—came off as a rousing dance tune that had the effect of working against isolation by pulling an audience together in a physical celebration. Similarly, “Cover Me,” “Downbound Train,” and “I’m on Fire”—songs about erotic fear and paralyzing loneliness—came off as sexy, intimate, and irresistible.

But it was the terrifying and commanding title song—about a Vietnam veteran who has lost his brother, his hope, and his faith in his country—that did the most to secure Springsteen’s new image as pop hero and that also turned his fame into something complex and troubling. Scan the song for its lyrics alone, and you find a tale of outright devastation: a tale of an American whose birthrights have been torn from his grasp, and paid off with indelible memories of violence and ruin. But listen to the song merely for its fusillade of drums and its firestorm of guitar, or for the singer’s roaring proclamation,
“BORN
in the U.S.A./I was
BORN
in the U.S.A.,” and it’s possible to hear it as a fierce patriotic assertion—especially in a political climate in which simpleminded patriotic fervor had attained a new and startling credibility. Watching Springsteen unfurl the song in concert—slamming it across with palpable rage as his audience waved flags of all sizes in response—it was possible to read the song in both directions at once. “Clearly the key to the enormous explosion of Bruce’s popularity is the misunderstanding [of the song ’Born in the U.S.A.’],” wrote critic Greil Marcus during the peak of Springsteen’s popularity. “He is a tribute to the fact that people hear what they want.”

One listener who was quite happy to hear only what he wanted was syndicated conservative columnist George Will, who in the middle of the 1984 campaign that pitted Walter Mondale against Ronald Reagan attended a Springsteen show, and liked what he saw. In a September 14, 1984, column that was read by millions, Will commended Springsteen for his “elemental American values” and, predictably, heard the cry of “Born in the U.S.A.” as an exultation rather than as pained fury. “I have not got a clue about Springsteen’s politics, if any,” Will wrote, “but flags get waved at his concerts while he sings about hard times. He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seem punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: ’Born in the U.S.A.!’ ”

Apparently, Reagan’s advisors gave a cursory listening to Springsteen’s music and agreed with Will. A few days later, in a campaign stop in New Jersey, President Ronald Reagan declared: “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts. It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.”

It was an amazing—even brain-boggling—assertion. Reagan’s tribute to Springsteen seemed about as stupefying as if Lyndon Johnson, during the awful uproar over Vietnam, had cited Bob Dylan for his noble influence on America’s youth politics, or as unnerving as if Richard Nixon, with his strong disregard for black social realities, had honored Sly Stone for the cutting commentary of his 1971 classic,
There’s a Riot Goin’ On.
Clearly, to anybody paying attention, the fierce, hard-bitten vision of America that Springsteen sang of in “Born in the U.S.A.” was a far cry from the much-touted “new patriotism” that Reagan and many of his fellow conservatives claimed as their private dominion. And yet there was also something damnably brilliant in the way the president sought to attach his purposes to Springsteen’s views. It was the art of political syllogism, taken to its most arrogant extreme. Reagan saw himself as a definitional emblem of America; Bruce Springsteen was a singer who, apparently, extolled America in his work; therefore, Springsteen must be exalting Reagan as well—which would imply that, if one valued the music of Springsteen, then one should value (and support) Reagan as well. Reagan was manipulating Springsteen’s fame as an affirmation of his own ends.

The president’s gambit left Springsteen with a knotty challenge: Could he afford to refute Reagan’s praise without also alienating his newly acquired mass audience? Or should he use the occasion to challenge the beliefs of that audience—maybe, in the process, helping to reshape those beliefs?
Or
should he simply ignore the hubbub, and assume that his true fans understood his viewpoint?

A few nights later, Springsteen stood before a predominantly blue-collar audience in Pittsburgh and, following a rousing performance of “Atlantic City” (a song about American decay), decided to respond to the president’s statement. “The president was mentioning my name the other day,” he said with a bemused laugh, “and I kinda got to wondering what his favorite album might have been. I don’t think it was the
Nebraska
album. I don’t think it was this one.” Springsteen then played a passionate, acoustic-backed version of “Johnny 99”—the song about a man who commits impulsive murder as a way of striking back against the meanness of the society around him—a song he wrote, along with other
Nebraska
tunes, in response to the malignant public and political atmosphere that had been fostered by Reagan’s social policies.

Springsteen’s comments were well-placed:
Was
this the America Ronald Reagan heard clearly when he claimed to listen to Springsteen’s music? An America where dreams of well-being had increasingly become the province of the privileged, and in which jingoistic partisans determined the nation’s health by a standard of self-advantage? When Reagan heard a song like “My Hometown,” did he understand his own role in promoting the disenfranchisement the song described? If Reagan
truly
understood that the enlivening patriotism of “Born in the U.S.A.” was a patriotism rooted in pain, discontent, and fury, perhaps he would have been either a better president or an angrier man. More likely, of course, he probably would have dismissed any such notions with his characteristic shrug of contempt—which is no doubt what he did when he finally heard of Springsteen’s response.

But Reagan’s attempt to co-opt Springsteen’s message also had some positive side effects. For one thing, it made plain that Springsteen now commanded a large and vital audience of young Americans who cared deeply about their families, their futures, and their country, and that Springsteen spoke to—and perhaps
for—
that audience’s values in ways that could not be ignored. The imbroglio also forced Springsteen to become more politically explicit and resourceful at his performances. After Pittsburgh, he began meeting with labor and civil rights activists in most of the cities that he played, and he made statements at his shows, asking his audience to lend their support to the work of such activists. He also spoke out more and more plainly about where he saw America headed, and how he thought rock & roll could play a part in effecting that destiny. One evening in Oakland, when introducing “This Land Is Your Land,” he said: “If you talk to the steelworkers out there who have lost their jobs, I don’t know if they’d believe this song is what we’re about anymore. And maybe we’re not. As we sit here, [this song’s promise] is eroding every day. And with countries, as with people, it’s easy to let the best of yourself slip away. Too many people today feel as if America has slipped away, and left them standing behind.” Then he sang the best song written about America, in as passionate a voice as it had ever been sung.

But none of this action was enough. In November 1984, Ronald Reagan was reelected president by an even more stunning mandate than the first time. It seemed plausible that many (if not most) of the millions of fans of voting age who had made
Born in the U.S.A.
the year’s biggest success had cast their votes for the man to whom Springsteen so obviously stood in opposition. Perhaps it nettled him, but Springsteen was finally facing the answer to the question he had been asking during the length of the decade: To be born in America, to be passionate about the nation’s best ideals and to be concerned over the betrayal of those ideals, meant being part of a nation that would only believe about itself what it wanted to believe. It also meant that one still had to find a way to keep faith with the dream of that nation, despite the awful realities that take shape when that dream is denied.

IN 1984, AMERICA had not had enough of Ronald Reagan, or it would not have reelected him. It had also not had enough of Bruce Springsteen: After an international tour, he returned to the States a bigger, more popular artist than ever. It may seem like a contradiction that a nation can embrace two icons who differed so dramatically, but the truth is, Reagan and Springsteen shared an unusual bond: Each seemed to stand for America, and yet each also was largely misunderstood by his constituency. Reagan seemed to stand for the values of family and improved opportunity for the working class at the same time that he enacted policies that undermined those values. Springsteen seemed to stand for brazen patriotism when he believed in holding the government responsible for how it had corrupted the nation’s best ideals and promises.