BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND NARRATIVE ROCK

...A poet of profound emotional reach, Springsteen has none of Dylan's and Lennon's skill or interest 'in verbal special effects...

...By the early and mid-'70s, in the aftermath of Watergate and the youth movement, a number of rock's leading artists were trying less to snatch an archetypical moment from the lives of their personae than to convey through such a moment a sense of the entire emotional life—its reach and its limits—of those they sang about...

...Yet defense is not difficult...

...The question of The River, posed in the grief-ravaged title song, is the oldest American question: "Is a dream a lie if it don't come true, or is it something worse...

...He gave no tour centered on Nebraska...

...In a now famous endorsement, he testified: "I saw my rock and roll past flash before my eyes...

...His masculinity is assertive and embattled, his voice raw, his mood lunges from rage to seductiveness, from depression to exaltation...

...Every person of the thousands present wants exactly the same thing at the same time, and they are going to get it: Springsteen and his music, almost nonstop for a staggering three-and-a-half hours of enduring exhilaration...

...a man dreaming of a now impossible reconciliation with his father, and with God ("My Father's House"): all have discovered that "our sins lie unatoned" ("My Father's House...

...Their only alternatives to the deadening routine of what Springsteen calls "The Working Life" (Darkness) are the evanescent excitement of 7-11 stores, joyrides in souped-up cars, petty and not-so-petty crime, abortive romance and, for the lucky, a "band...

...Springsteen was to push these innovations to new limits...

...NARRATIVE FOLLOWS the scent of justice until the scent dies out, and then maps the vast terrain within the jurisdiction of justice but past its reach...

...Rock, in Springsteen's hands, brings to this literary narrative material an intensified expression of the drab and explosive dynamics of the wearing-out process and, more important, an insistent sense of the fierce vitality to be found only in "used-up...

...The nascent urge toward history, toward complete narrative, attenuated into nostalgia: the soft rock sound of Carly Simon, Cat Stevens, Gordon Lightfoot, and Rod Stewart, and the sentimental valorization of rock's preceding two decades...

...The evangelical forward thrust of Born to Run and Darkness is absent...

...The fiercely fraternal sound of the E—Street Band, a continuous musical pledge to a working community of the fervent, was irrelevant, even contradictory, to the eerie elisions of the solitary heart Nebraska elaborates...

...He has avoided drugs, celebrity, any curtailment of his power of sustained creative commentary...

...When Bruce Springsteen surfaced to national fame in the mid-'70s, two notions about rock held wide currency...

...Several rock artists before Springsteen have released albums over the years that are best grasped consecutively as a single sequence: perhaps the Beatles' records between 1963 and 1970, certainly Bob Dylan's entire corpus from the early '60s to the present...

...It is typical of Springsteen that neither the raves nor the attacks that inevitably followed Landau's tribute deflected his purpose...

...In his many incarnations, the protagonist must reach his pain: he is a latter-day, working-class Thomas with his own doubts and blood-stained hands...

...Some dreams come true only in dreams: that is their limit and their depth...

...Rock and roll, deliver me from nowhere," Springsteen fervently commands ("Open All Night," Nebraska), and it did...

...I believe in the promised land" (Darkness...

...He gives everything to his audience but his ability, drawn from his music, to cohere in his own eyes without theirs upon him...

...Born of poor working-class parents in Freehold, New Jersey, in 1949, a quick community-college dropout, Springsteen always frankly longed to be a "rock and roll star" ("When I was nine I couldn't imagine anyone not wanting to be Elvis...

...Springsteen conveys the lives and feelings of those he grew up with in back-town America: young men and women who have made rock the last form of heroism but have seldom been its heroes...

...His preoccupation with narrative, his acquiescence to its dictates, is everywhere apparent: from the legendary length of his concerts and the unusual amount of time he takes to bring out an album (7 in 11 years) to the phrasing of his individual songs and the connections between albums...

...Promises are cheap, promises run deep...

...It could create classics: singles like Chuck Berry's "Sweet Sixteen," the Five Satins' "In the Still of the Night," and Neil Young's "Helpless...

...What can he get, if anything, from America...

...As Dave Marsh, Springsteen's best critic, points out, this fast-food, hand-to-mouth apprenticeship is perhaps the most valuable method of mastery that the rock medium, with its constant supply of shortlived products, offers...

...The absolute fusion of his singing with the E–Street Band playing, one of the most exciting sounds in contemporary rock, is an achievement Springsteen does not always wish to bring off...

...Yet Springsteen's special timing is powerfully effective...

...Anger is his self-esteem...

...he has made himself responsible...

...Independence Day," a song Springsteen performed in 1978 but specifically saved for The River, announces the later album's mood: emotional reconciliation of sorts, the protagonist's acknowledged relatedness to his inescapable heritage of economic and emotional impoverishment...

...Flush times are protracted for those few who engineer and monopolize them...

...in his work the intensity of rock and the patience of narrative play off and sustain each other...

...Darkness represents a turning point for the Springsteen protagonist...

...He has chosen, for over a decade now, to remain in his home state, New Jersey, to keep working with the same band—all but one from working-class New Jersey backgrounds like his own...

...His songs phrase themselves most tightly through bursts of anger ("Sometimes I feel so weak, I just want to explode,/ Explode and tear this whole town apart,/ Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart" ["The Promised Land," Darkness]), more loosely in cadences of compassion ("You don't have to live that life" ["Point Blank," The River]), and almost garrulously in interpolated efforts at crucial explanation ("Lately there ain't been much work because of the economy" ["The River...

...Springsteen's ratio of words-to-music is not always melodic...

...The artifacts of mass culture, like those whose only recreation is to consume them, perish...

...and "No Surrender") to the need for intimacy in a hostile world ("Cover Me," "Dancing in the Dark...

...His dignity now depends in part on his capacity for forgiveness...

...Springsteen simultaneously evokes rock's past and validates its future...

...In Born in the U.S.A...

...Fittingly, the Born in the U.S.A...

...A disbeliever in memory-lane music, Springsteen plays "oldies" in concert with the same inventive intensity that marks his own work...

...Springsteen has written dozens of hard-hitting songs, classics of the glory of the single rock moment, but he is also rock's first sustained narrator...

...Springsteen's greatness lies in his grasp of the paradox of rock music in particular and mass culture in general: the quick but repeatable satisfaction of deep needs by expendable means...

...perhaps a hoax, but one that can offer genuine first aid for what feels like our incurable selves...

...the underclasses share in prosperity only in savagely seized, heavily penalized moments, and in their dreams...

...He conveys an urgency and an immediacy of contact that make sincerity a merely literary concept...

...Everything dies, baby, that's a fact," Springsteen sings in "Atlantic City" (Nebraska...

...By 1970, rock artists sang not only of love but of everything from political protest to their most intimate lives...

...The harddriving, stable sound of the E–Street Band and Springsteen's own fine if not riveting work on the guitar and harmonica grant support and leave room for the special fidelity, the utter loyalty of Springsteen's stories...

...yet they are always duplicated, sometimes remembered and, in moments of grace, revitalized in fresh transformations...

...albums like the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), Van Morrison's Astral Weeks (1968), and Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks (1975...

...In Born to Run, Darkness, The River, Nebraska, and Born in the U.S.A., Springsteen has completed the first rock pentalogy and given the primal American story a different ending...

...Nebraska was the utterly private moment of the Springsteen persona, and Springsteen instinctively planned the album accordingly...

...A rock star, Springsteen's career to date asserts, can find his soul in his music ("I was dead til I was thirteen [and bought my first guitar]," Springsteen has said) and not die or sell out...

...Contrary to the judgment of early skeptics, rock had demonstrated that, in its broadest sense, it was a musical genre as long-lived as one of its parents, jazz...

...they matter too much to the speaker...

...All Springsteen's lyrics—several of them virtual anthems of the anger of protest and the hope for deliverance—suggest that America must come back and through for its abandoned...

...The wild, random killer of "Nebraska" who tells his judge why he "did what [he] did": "Well, sir, I guess there's just a meanness in this world" ("Nebraska...

...Springsteen planned to record the Nebraska material with his band...

...He wakes "up in the night/ with a fear" that he'll "spend [his] life waiting,/ for a moment that just don't come...

...0 489...

...Narrative is preoccupied with subsiding, the settling of accounts over time, with what is found and lost in sheer duration...

...The question of the debt of Springsteen's protagonist to America, long and painfully overpaid at home and in Asia, is not of interest...

...What does America owe him...

...The songs range from the memory of the "wildest" times of youth ("Bobby Jean") to the ongoing awareness of the facts of the laboring life ("Working on the Highway" and "Downbound Train"), from protest against oppression ("Born in the U.S.A...

...He considers his albums "for at least the last six or seven years" (from Darkness through Born in the U.S.A...

...Springsteen had released two albums, Greetings from Asbury Park (1973) and The Wild, the Innocent, and the E—Street Shuffle (1973), both more widely praised by critics than bought by rock fans...

...In "Badlands," on Darkness on the Edge of Town, the protagonist has "learned his facts real good": "poor man wanna be rich,/ rich man wanna be king,/ a king ain't satisfied/ till he rules everything...

...Joe Robert, a cop who can't arrest his "no-good" 'Nam veteran brother because he understands his torment and remembers the good days they shared ("Highway Patrolman...

...Everything depends, in the mid-1980s, in Springsteen's world, and ours, on the word "gotta...

...Maybe everything that dies someday comes back...

...the working classes and, more particularly, their young in-house spin-offs, sullen and stoic by turns...

...I was very concerned about gettin' a group of characters and followin' them through their lives a little bit...

...Older and yet reborn, he is here intent on carrying the still pressing case against every kind of injustice, not to the courts, but to the people whose representatives Springsteen's protagonists are...

...And yet this depression is going on in America, the land Springsteen believes to be "a real big-hearted country, real compassionate...

...and he knows and loves what holding that title entails...

...His career has defied the quasi-legendary boundaries of the rock star's creative energies, and the limits this glamorized doom places on rock music's reach for historical and emotional extension...

...Hence his quietly obsessive use of the titles "Sir," "Boy," and "Mister": people must ascertain and assert their places in relation to each other...

...The Springsteen protagonist is one of those "powerful illiterate persons" Perry Miller found at the center of America's most important writing...

...Transience and permanency, interlocked in a working contradiction, is the name of the rock game, and the soul of Springsteen's music...

...Not one ever told in rock before, certainly not at such length and depth...

...Of all the arts, rock alone still allows for complete and open credulity in the American dream...

...WHAT IS "THE WHOLE DAMNED STORY" that Springsteen unfolds with such scrupulous prodigality...

...But the momentum was broken and lost by the decline of a number of the artists involved, by shifts in the record industry, by changing needs in the rock audience itself...

...1984), Springsteen returned to his band, his audience, his public self...

...Particularly in his early albums, but here and there in all of them, the words at times escape or, rather, redefine musical phrasing: there are too many of them, their enunciation seems clumsy...

...Those discarded objects that are used-up human lives...

...He himself must "find out what I got" ("Badlands," Darkness...

...In all his incarnations, his chief demand is for the commodity that goes up in value as incomes, and lives, go down: other people's respect and, most of all, his own...

...The record itself, Born in the U.S.A., a retrospective of Springsteen's career and a promise of its future, is equally inclusive...

...He can leave nothing out...

...he ended by working alone for the only time in his career, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar and harmonica...

...We hear in these words the essential Springsteen protagonist...

...The River (1980) marks a new chapter...

...Nebraska explores the search for what a lived, even a partially livedout, life has left at its source: the well is dark but not dry...

...His is perhaps the most extended coherent expression of urgency in rock annals...

...What had been in the 1950s 485 and 1960s the unprecedented collective autobiography of a generation's bodies and souls in motion was providing in the mid-1970s the structure and dynamic of memory and inspiration for that generation and its successors...

...And . . . I saw rock and roll's future and its name is Bruce Springsteen...

...Yet, if he is no longer "Born to Run," or not for long, he is born to fight for and against "the promised land...

...SPRINGSTEEN GREW UP in America's dumping grounds, a world he found paralleled in AM radio with its infinite fast-vanishing, self-assertive singles...

...He was a rock craftsman, and a fanatic of rock, from the start...

...The struggle is difficult, ceaseless, and dramatic...

...The chorus of "The Promised Land" turns on the defiant line: "Mister, I ain't a boy, no, I'm a man...

...He appeared on the mid-'70s scene not to reminisce but to revive, maintain, and further a commitment to telling what Jon Landau has called "the whole damned story...

...All his resources are available to him and to us...

...In wildly aching lyrics and music as powerful as its subject, Springsteen has enhanced rock's power to fulfill America's deepest artistic purpose, one long familiar to such writers as Dreiser, Farrell, and Kerouac: its drive toward grotesquely commercial and heartbreakingly spiritual autobiography, its often frustrated impulse toward a complete account, the story of the neglected as well as the celebrated...

...those who did the fighting, and the losing, in Vietnam...

...lives...

...And Landau's inflated claim holds some truth...

...He chronicles the maturation, not the vitiation or abdication, of passion and protest...

...In a Rolling Stone interview published December 6, 1984, Springsteen said to Kurt Loder: "I was always interested in doing a body of work, albums that would relate and play off of each other...

...an America still vital if only with their yet unquenched hope in it...

...Yet if the music lasted, it was observed, the musicians did not—with important consequences for the long-term nature of their art...

...The singer of "Independence Day," leaving home, tells the father he bitterly fought: "Papa, now I know the things you wanted that you could not say/ . . . I swear I never meant to take those things away...

...In Nebraska's last cut, which presents vignette after vignette of loss and futility, Springsteen's protagonist tells us: "at the end of every hardearned day, people find some reason to believe...

...Yet Springsteen has performed the task with a unique, masterful combination of instinct and self-consciousness...

...Yet the chorus, courageously collective in contrast to the stanzas, vows: Badlands, you gotta live it every day, Let the broken hearts stand As the price you gotta pay, We'll keep pushing til it's understood, That those badlands start treating us good...

...Between his boyhood in the 1950s and his twenty-first birthday in 1970, rock writing was revolutionized...

...SINCE 1975, IT HAS BEEN Springsteen's distinction to perpetuate rock as music and a culture, in archetypical rock fashion, by breaking rules...

...Very unlike the Beatles' "Hard Day's Night" with its witty inversion of narrative logic, this "hardearned day," another cheap yet precious mass commodity, is rock narrative's central unit...

...Like Farrell, Dreiser, and Kerouac, Springsteen's American literary forebears in unedited narrative art, he asserts that the reality of American life for many of its inhabitants is economic and emotional depression: material deprivation, chronic irritation and sorrow, and difficult, feckless feats of elation and acting-out...

...Yet he never stands on the firing line that has enticed predecessors like Joplin...

...Most dreams don't come true and they are more valuable because of it, both as evidence against the prosecution, should this perpetually deferred case of injustice ever come to court, and as sustenance for the wiser, yet still "hungry heart" of the hit song of The River...

...Nebraska (1982), Springsteen's next album, picks up the story at precisely this point...

...At his concerts, in the moments while the band is gathering on stage and the audience starts to croon "Bruce," the air vibrates with the shared happiness —a hybrid of liberation and dependency— only great mass art can bring...

...As a working-class boy, Springsteen learned his trade through an apparently undisciplined process of total saturation—he calls it "assimilation" as opposed to "study"—in the cheapest media outlets of rock, the AM radio station and the single...

...He is aware that his earlier defiance against a world that "beats back hope for sport," as Dave Marsh puts it, is unlikely to succeed...

...He is now the major rock artist in the United States...

...Springsteen's relative lack of interest in musical innovation, in the breakthroughs of his major predecessors, can provoke defensiveness in his admirers...

...the non-street people periodically and obsessively ready for the street (their anthems are "Out on the Street" on The River and "Streets of Fire" on Darkness...

...The unconscious process of the decision to take on another "hard day," which all Springsteen's protagonists make, is rock narrative's essential dynamic...

...tour is his longest and most widely attended to date...

...Could he possibly live up to or, for that matter, live with, such an accolade...

...For him depression is a reality, and a betrayal...

...Presenting in his music an exploration of rock history, he has kept alive the basic insistent beat and the upsurge of euphoric excitement familiar in rock since the 1950s...

...he was at work on what was to be his first bigselling album, Born to Run (1975...

...Without dropping entirely into the heavily patterned forms of country or blues, retaining rock's emphasis on musical and lyrical shock, they pushed toward farther and stronger resonance...

...You gotta hope," Springsteen recently told Rolling Stone's Kurt Loder, "you're headed for higher ground...

...Intermittent awkwardness is an important and carefully mastered part of Springsteen's art: it suggests and engenders vulnerability in his protagonist and his audience...

...Springsteen, like his predecessors, like the best purveyors of mass consumption, promises, first and foremost, to bring it home to you, to deliver...

...ROCK HAS ALWAYS DRAMATIZED the evanescent and emotionally permanent moments of experience: the 486 peaks and lows of finding and losing love, making it and failing, times when life is too acute to find perception an adequate response...

...They covered both the explosion and the terrain on which it occurred...

...It ultimately concerns itself with waste, with what Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49 mocked and mythologized as W.A.S.T.E., junkyards and scrap heaps filled with the debris of a land in which opulence and impoverishment are allocated by capricious yet collusive design...

...We recognize his music...

...Since his break, in 1978, from his first manager, Mike Appel, he has retained complete control over the production of his music...

...With Springsteen's new emphasis on the local politics and local lives of the places where he performs, the tour has taken on limited but genuine populist overtones...

...Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), Springsteen's fourth album, marked his entrance into a period unbroken to this day, a period, in Pete Townshend's words, of "fucking triumph...

...You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)," Springsteen warns, and jeers (The River...

...Springsteen's protagonists often must labor while they know their work under487 utilizes and overworks them...

...They routinely exceeded the old standard three-minute length of a song, and they produced albums musically and lyrically conceived as a single piece of work...

...When the singer of The River 488 looks to the future or "dreams of a better world," he sometimes wakes up "so downhearted, girl" ("Jackson Cage...

...Dylan's Blood on the Tracks (1975) and Neil Young's astonishing threerecord selection of his own work emblematically entitled Decade (1977) were the high signs of this new rock trend...

...The new possibilities of rock narrative rather than those of rock music have mattered most to Springsteen's art...

...The deaths of Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, the battle with drugs and relative decline of Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan, the total, if at moments fascinating, commercialization of the Rolling Stones: all suggested that, as an ongoing process, rock was as much a splendid collage of peaks and collapses as a tradition...

...Above all, in Frederic Jameson's words, narrative presents the world of "worn things...

...By 1985 it is clear that Springsteen, unlike John Lennon and Bob Dylan, his peers among rock lyricists, is writing the bulk of his best, most deeply interwoven songs in his thirties...

...bound together by common "themes...

...Carrying the full messianic charge of the greatest rock performers—Little Richard, Elvis, Joplin, Hendrix—Springsteen puts himself on the line in concert and on record...