Media:
McConnell, Frank
Media A ROCK POET FROM FITZGERALD TO SPRINGSTEEN IN HIS RECENTLY videotaped, brilliant live performance, Robin Williams concludes the act by giving his impression of "Bruce Springsteen as sung by...
...y of California, Santa Barbara...
...The "mansions of glory" (New Jersey's neon-lit highway culture) and the image of these desperate seekers of the dream "sprung from cages out on Highway 9" ensure, all by themselves, the power of the stanza...
...Hey ho, rock and roll, deliver me from nowhere": that is the last line of the song, "Open All Night," from his latest and most stunning album, Nebraska...
...In the same way, the disillusioned speaker of Springsteen's "The River" asks of his ruined marriage and ruined hopes, "Is a dream a lie if it don't come true, or is it something worse...
...At any rate, as initial evidence, I submit the first stanza of Springsteen's most famous song, "Born to Run," from the album of the same name: In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines Sprung from cages out on Highway 9 Chrome wheeled, fuel injected And steppin' out over the line Baby this town rips the bones from your back It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap We gotta get out while we're young Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run...
...Bruce is something else (all meanings of that locution implied...
...That is a cliche, and it is also the immitigable truth that broods over all our lives, redeemed from banality by Camus's art...
...FRANK McCONNELL (Frank McConnell is a member of the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara...
...Henry James once said (it is the wisest saying I know) that to be truly wealthy was to be able to satisfy every requirement of the imagination...
...The Promised Land" is a phrase that occurs again and again in his songs...
...I say that with some trepidation, since the last time I said it, when I was teaching at Northwestern University, the chairman of my department called me into his office and seriously suggested that I go into therapy...
...And the audience, quite properly, roars...
...Springsteen's great gift is just that he rearticulates that indispensable insight - and rearticulates it in the most contemporary, which is also of course the most permanent of terms...
...and Darkness is about, you're thirty and you didn't...
...Rock and roll singers have earned fame, after all, before Springsteen - or Bruce, as his fans call him (and I am a fan) - earned it...
...Donning the classic Fudd hunting cap from all those Warner Brothers cartoons, he slips also into the unmistakable Fudd lisp, and does Springsteen's great hymn to teenage eroticism, "Fire...
...Springsteen democratizes Fitzgerald...
...After ten years on the American scene, Springsteen is almost as deeply inserted into the national consciousness as the great Elmer Fudd...
...And that is quite correct, for as the American dream of infinite possibility has expanded, so has the attendant despair at the loss of that promise...
...Nevertheless, I think my chairman was wrong and I am right...
...But every town is full of losers: finding that out is also called growing up, and growing up is also called learning that Freedom Is Always Conditional...
...And notice the word "deliver": I think that Springsteen does mean it in the theological sense...
...But not even "fame" quite covers the Springsteen phenomenon...
...A friend asks the mad Roman emperor in Camus's Caligula what disturbs him so, and Caligula replies, "Men die - and they are not happy...
...It is a music made of cliches...
...Chuck Berry (virtually the founder of the art) sang thirty years ago "Long live rock and roll...
...The difference is that Springsteen's stories are shorter - they are, after all, rock lyrics - and that they are wiser...
...How in the world to reclaim them...
...If that isn't fame, I don't know what is...
...Life is a vale of tears, hope is almost always betrayed by its own realization, and the antinomy of gain and loss is the stuff of all great writing from Homer to Mickey Spillane...
...and they will again...
...Is it right to associate Springsteen's songs with Fitzgerald, James, and Whitman...
...His heroes are not the elegant, wealthy winners of Fitzgerald's twenties, but the lost, disappointed losers of America in the seventies and eighties...
...The great poignancy of that question, like the poignancy of Camus's line, comes from the deliberate simplicity with which it is uttered - a simplicity that is its own defense against our attempts to fend it off...
...A student of mine once paraphrased the difference between Springsteen's albums Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town by saying "Born to Run is about, you're twenty-one and you've got to get away...
...Media A ROCK POET FROM FITZGERALD TO SPRINGSTEEN IN HIS RECENTLY videotaped, brilliant live performance, Robin Williams concludes the act by giving his impression of "Bruce Springsteen as sung by Elmer Fudd...
...but Brace's line is different, is a prayer and not a blessing...
...He is a legitimate American mythologist, a storyteller of clear and authentic talent and, I would say, a major American poet...
...An Irish Catholic, obsessed with the dissonance between the American myth of success and the inevitable, ineluctable price of success (your soul, of course), and therefore compelled to invent fiction after fiction exploring the complexities of that dissonance: that description applies equally to the stories of Fitzgerald and those of Springsteen...
...Of course it is...
...And Whitman's dream of a truly democratic poetry can mean, among other things, that rock and roll, with its combination of childishly simple rhythms and harmonies and often acidul-ously intelligent lyrics, might be one realization of that visionary hope...
...In other words - as anyone who has ever tried to write knows - the big themes have all already been used up...
...Because he is so deeply encased in, surrounded by the culture of rock, he can do what no rock singer before him has done: raise it to the level of metaphor, which is to say the basis for a theological vision of the world...
...And all of us - at least all of us who have grown up - know that that is impossible...
...As Andre Le Vot suggests in his new, splendid biography, that was always Fitzgerald's theme as a writer and his fate, his psychic mistress as a man: to succeed on the world's terms is to fail, horribly and irrevocably, on the terms of one's own soul...
...Through rock and roll: at least, that is Springsteen's answer, and it seems to work...
...It's a town full of losers, I'm pullin' out of here to win," sings the narrator of "Thunder Road'' - again from the Born to Run album...
...Because he continues the American enterprise of struggling against the given, of resisting the world as it is in the expectation - the always deflected expectation - of a promise sometime to be realized...
...but Springsteen has discovered - as major writers do - that part of art's function is to rediscover the truth within cliche...
...Wordsworth and Whitman, the great original and the most outrageously, Americanly excessive of romantic poets, both insisted that the poetry of the future, if it ever came to be written, would be the poetry of the ordinary, even of the vulgar, raised to the level of imaginative urgency: a "simple product of the common day," as Wordsworth says...
...Fitzgerald was at the end swallowed, eaten up by the very mechanism of success he had anatomized so perceptively in his best fiction...
...The point of the joke is that both halves of the parody are equally well known...
...One last association: Reinhold Niebuhr, in The Irony of American History, argued that the essential irony of American history was its inability to distinguish between expectation and the inevitable disappointment of expectation: we hope for everything , forgetting that that hope itself is self-defeating...
...Springsteen's songs are about the impossibility and the tormenting ines-capability of that debased messianism...
...Well, o.k...
...And it is not just the Promised Land of the American dream - the same dream of infinite accomplishment that lured Gatsby to the quest of his Daisy and finally to his doom - but it is also the Promised Land of Christian expectation, mutated into the ideal of unlimited purchasing power...
...Springsteen understands, and articulates in song after song, the fact that the American quest for an infinitely expansive future is, in the end, a quest - or a compulsion - for failure...
...But there is also the immense undercurrent of melancholy - the autos, the instruments of escape, are after all "suicide machines" for all their power and beauty - and that undercurrent guarantees that this is writing of a high and humane order, indeed...
...I usually do...
...And that leads to another association, perhaps the most improbable and certainly the most revealing for Springsteen: F. Scott Fitzgerald...
...But the point, for me, is not just the comic genius of Williams...
Vol. 110 • August 1983 • No. 14
