Walk like a Man (21 page)

12
. As I reread this, I noticed something interesting. Throughout this book, Springsteen has been Springsteen, subject and object, held at a distance. As soon as I lost myself in the memory of that show, though, he became Bruce. This is how fans talk, with an intimacy that belies the divide between performer and audience.

13
. Cori's first question, upon hearing my description of the concert, was, “Did you get sweated on?” Yes. Yes I believe I was sweated on.

14
. Greg filled me in on a blank from that night as he was reading this manuscript: “During the Tacoma show, John was sitting forty rows up on the side of the stage in the upper deck, worried that we hadn't arrived. The houselights came on during ‘Born to Run' and he turned to his friend and said, ‘They're in the front row!'”

Dancing in the Dark

Album:
Born in the U.S.A.

Released:
June 4, 1984

Recorded:
January 1982–March 1984

T
RY THOUGH I might, there's no way I can reinvent history.

So it's like this, and always will be: Bruce Springsteen became a superstar not because of his best albums (like
Darkness on the Edge of Town
or
Nebraska
) or his finest songs (like “Racing in the Street” or “Incident on 57th Street”), but because of a hook-laden, synth-based, dance-friendly single written with the sole intention of producing a hit.

Late in the sessions for
Born in the U.S.A.,
Springsteen was harangued by manager and producer Jon Landau, who, upon examining the album's projected running order, discerned the absence of a breakout single. Springsteen initially resisted, but within a couple of days had delivered the final track, the song that would make him a household name around the world.

The success of “
Dancing in the Dark
” was fostered not only by its radio-friendliness, but also by the winning rock video directed by Brian De Palma and the seven- and twelve-inch dance remixes that earned the song heavy rotation in clubs over the summer of 1984.

As Springsteen's popularity picked up steam, new singles followed, including “Born in the U.S.A.,” “Glory Days,” “I'm On Fire,” and “My Hometown.” Eventually, seven of the album's twelve songs were released as singles, all of them reaching the Billboard Top Ten.
¹
“Dancing in the Dark” was the big one, though.

It's the song that changed everything.

It's the Springsteen song that everyone knows.

Despite this, it's pretty clear to me that not many people have actually listened to the words.

“Dancing in the Dark” is one of the poppiest, most radio-friendly, danceable and saccharine-sounding tracks you'll ever hear. But lyrically, it's one of the bleakest, most unrelenting songs in the Springsteen catalogue. The characters he created for the
Darkness
on the Edge of Town
album—hell, even the narrator of “Point Blank”—have nothing on the sheer, existential dread that is “Dancing in the Dark.”
²

Take out the liner notes—or visit brucespringsteen.net—and read the lyrics. Now, read them again.

Stripped of its poppy veneer, “Dancing in the Dark” is the sound of a soul in torment, a man dragging himself through life without passion, lacking any “spark” to “start a fire” that's long gone out. If it ever existed.

He lives in a dump, and he's getting nowhere; he wants to change everything about himself, but he's utterly helpless. As the song progresses, the tension mounts. He's looking for love, but more than that, he's looking for even a single person to glance his way, to assure him that he still actually exists. And there's no respite, no last-verse cry of defiance, just his growing desperation as he becomes more and more numb to everything in the world.

Springsteen has attempted, to little effect, to reclaim some of the inherent darkness of “Dancing in the Dark” over the last two decades. An acoustic version performed occasionally on the 1992– 93 tour highlighted the words, but it didn't really work as a song. The hard-rocking, guitar-driven version of recent tours is a welcome relief from the twee synthesizers, but the musical treatment lends the song an air of defiance unsupported by the words.

The song is harrowing, and hearing it done this way casts a new light on the album as a whole.
Born in the U.S.A.,
for all its chart-topping, trend-setting popularity, is almost uniformly bleak, from the traumatized veteran in the title song to the spurned lover in “I'm Goin' Down,” from the aching loss of “
Bobby Jean
” to the desperate search for a lover not for passion but for protection in “Cover Me,” from the good-times-turned-bad of “Darlington County” and “Working on the Highway,” to the passionate, nay, psychotic desire of “
I'm On Fire
.”

“Dancing in the Dark” reaches in to the listener, direct and unadorned. Springsteen's use of the first person in the verses establishes an intimacy, while the almost accusatory “you” in the chorus lends the song an air of complicity: I'm like this, and you know you're like this, too.

It's powerful stuff, and it's easy to imagine where it came from. Frustrated and tired at the end of a writing and recording process that spanned years,
³
Springsteen seems to have funneled his despair and exhaustion into a song he resolutely did not want to write. It's somewhat hard to imagine Springsteen as being this tortured—but perhaps the glossy trappings of the music are his way of attempting to hide it. In many ways, “Dancing in the Dark” is the song that most closely presages
Tunnel of Love,
his work in therapy, and the
Human Touch/Lucky Town
double-punch.

LURKING IN the shadows of Bruce Springsteen's songs and onstage monologues, only occasionally making an appearance, is a gypsy woman, a fortune teller. She's the woman who promises a happy ending to the soon-to-be-married couple in “Brilliant Disguise,” though it begins to seem, not too long after the wedding, that she was wrong, or that she lied. More promisingly, it is she who tells the singer, in the monologue during “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” on the reunion tour, that he needs a band (cue huge round of applause and band introductions).

It's easy to surmise that this figure is based, at least in part, on Madam Marie, the fortune teller on the Asbury Park boardwalk who is arrested in “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” though the fictional presence serves just as compellingly as a counterpoint to the Catholicism that runs rife through Springsteen's work.

There was a gypsy in my life, too.

Well, not so much a gypsy as a French teacher.

My French teacher in high school and I bonded early. She was nearly as unpopular with the administration as I was.

My notoriety resulted from a couple of . . . trends, shall we say . . . in my behavior. First, I had limited patience with what I felt—in retrospect, perhaps a little too self-righteously—were bullshit rules and regulations. I was always polite about it, but if something rubbed me the wrong way, I made my displeasure known, or simply ignored the rule altogether. Thus, not feeling I was getting anything out of my English 12 class, I would leave. I spent most of the year's worth of classes drinking coffee at Pang's Chinese restaurant. Second, I was unflinching in what I wrote, despite how it might be received, or what rules it might violate. Thus it was, for example, that I was almost expelled for a short film I wrote and directed that featured a student committing suicide.
⁴
Third, I was up front about what the administration seemed to consider bad behavior; it was common knowledge that my girlfriend and I were sleeping together, for example, a fact that didn't sit well with the devout principal (who happened to be the father of one of my closest friends).

My transgressions were clear; however, I was never sure what my French teacher had done wrong.

I do know she swore me to secrecy the day she read my tarot cards, warning me she would lose her job if anyone found out.

As if I would tell.

It was a quick reading, between classes one day. Three cards, focused on one question: would I become a writer?

It was the most important question I could ask. It was the only question that mattered.

As a kid, I was always scrawling in notebooks, taking inspiration from whatever I was watching or reading, ruthlessly plundering popular culture for inspiration. When I was obsessed with the
Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators
series, I wrote mysteries with boy detectives. When I fell into the thrall of James Bond, first the movies, then the original Ian Fleming novels, I wrote spy pastiches, loaded with sex and imaginative—though highly derivative—violence.
⁵

When the bullying was at its worst, I had my writing to retreat into, a world that was utterly my own. I wrote about the revenge I wanted to take, the violence I wanted to do in return for the violence done to me. I wrote about the mass murder of my tormentors, about torching the school, and about being “saved” by the girl who I had an incredible crush on.

When I was falling in love, I wrote love stories. When my heart was broken, I wrote sad stories.
⁶
When I was close to graduating, I wrote stories about kids leaving home or living out their last summers in their small hometowns.
⁷

I'd chosen UVic because it had the best creative writing program in the province at that time.
⁸
I had no vision of any future except that of being a writer. I didn't have the faintest idea what that might actually be like, except that there would probably be girls and I'd finally be popular. But I had to know. I had to know whether it was just a silly dream. I needed someone to tell me that I was on the right track.

So I asked the gypsy.

My French teacher looked at the cards carefully, then looked at me.

“According to the cards,” she said, “you're going to write a lot. A lot of short things. And it looks like there's a chance you'll be very popular very fast.”

I could feel my blood starting to rise.

“But,” she said, and I cooled, “if you don't have that early success, you're going to have to wait a long time. Ten years? Maybe more?”

She tucked the cards away, and we never spoke of it again.

Was she just being kind, and telling me what I wanted to hear while tempering it with caution? Was she just not very good at the whole tarot thing?

Or was it, in fact, my fortune? That I'd either make it right out of the gate or spend a long time trying?

I went to UVic and joined the creative writing program. I wrote stories and short plays, submitted things to magazines. I read voraciously, and I wrote for
The Martlet,
the student newspaper. Cori and I were seeing each other by that point, and she would take photos for my newspaper stories, and edit my fiction.

That instant success? It seemed to be a while in coming.

I transferred out of the creative writing program and into English. I wrote, a lot, keeping Cori busy with her red pen. I got a job in a bookstore. I read like a fiend. I submitted my stories around.

Still no instant success.

And somewhere inside me, a clock was ticking.

I graduated, and got caught up in the day to day, in work, in being married. The writing slowed down, then all but stopped.

The complacency of comfort.

I missed my window. I turned twenty-five, then twenty-six. Too old to be a wunderkind.

And then I got fired.

I could be colloquial and coy and say “I lost my job,” the one that I missed my convocation for, the one I chose over my honeymoon. But no, this is no time for coyness: I got egregiously shit-canned, there one minute, gone the next.

The following morning, I got out of bed and started writing a short story, the first story I had started in years. It was a story about pregnancy and childbirth, a mythic tale focusing on the male journey through what is usually seen as exclusively a women's experience.

After I finished that, I wrote a novel.

And then another short story.

And another.

And then Cori got pregnant. I responded to the news by going a little insane and channeling all of my fears, all of my worst-case scenarios, into a manuscript about a little girl who gets hit by a truck.

Before I Wake
was written in a white heat of fear over the first three months of 1999. I wrote it longhand, in the study of our new house, smoking cigarillos with the side door open in the middle of winter as I scrawled into my notebooks.

Once it was written, I left it. The notebooks sat undisturbed for a couple of years. There was no rush to go through the agony of transcribing it onto the computer: no one was waiting for it, and it was such a bizarre story it's not like anyone would be interested in publishing it anyway.

Eventually, though, I buckled down and did the typing. And when it was done, I was strangely pleased by what I had. It wasn't perfect, but I knew that with a little work it would be better. It might even be good.

So Cori and I worked it. Over and over, draft by draft, we made those notebooks into a novel.

We polished, and we honed, and when I thought it was ready, I sent the first section to an editor I had come to know over my past few trips to Toronto. That was March 2003.

The next month, I took the ferry over to Vancouver for the first show of the Canadian leg of the tour for
The Rising.
Greg and John picked me up, and we headed out to the old Pacific Coliseum. It was only eleven at night by the time we got there, but there were already more than fifty people in line.

It was, as Caryn would say,
⁹
a clusterfuck. The word was out about the pit, and everyone wanted to be in.

We got our names on the list, got our numbers, and crashed at Greg's in-laws' place for the night.