Fandom, Faith, and Bruce Springsteen

...When he finally met Springsteen briefly, I imagine Alterman had to resist the impulse to gush like Wayne and Garth, who declared themselves "not worthy" at the feet of Alice Cooper in Wayne's World...

...The wandering worker, "down in the shadow of the penitentiary," has "nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to go...

...What the reader culls from Cavicchi's explorations is a sense of connectedness between the performer and his fans— a deep, felt, almost religious sense of meaning in his music and a tremendous level of participation and investment in Springsteen's performance and artistic choices...

...Few songs expose the tension between the power of the America story and its seamy underside better than Springsteen's biggest, and most misunderstood, hit, "Born in the U.S.A...

...The Carpenters fans...

...Having missed Yom Kippur morning with his family because he stayed late at Madison Square Garden for Bruce's appearance at the "No Nukes" concert, Alterman echoes one of Cavicchi's main themes, justifying his missed obligation on the grounds that he was already in the midst of a devoted community of epic proportions...

...I got something I need to witness to...

...The author never quite answers the large theoretical questions about the relationship between the production and reception of popular culture, but he does make a powerful and refreshing argument that this relationship has been over-theorized and under-appreciated...

...Alterman declares that his book It Ain't No Sin to Be Glad You're Alive contains everything he 114 n DISSENT / Winter 2001 BOOKS would have liked to have told his hero the evening of their brief encounter...

...with a subtle glance back in the other direction, he incites the remaining half of the crowd to screams and waves...

...Of rock 'n' roll...

...This was not just music anymore," he claims, "It was something bigger, more powerful, more . . . like religion...

...Bruce Springsteen doesn't provide any answers, they know...

...The author will certainly take some hits from critics who will see his work as more than a bit sycophantic, but, like Tramps, this book is a testament to the importance of faith and meaning in the everyday life of a thoughtful rock fan...

...It's not that the problems of social class or alienation have been solved since Springsteen's rise to the status of Dylan and Elvis, it's just that the combined sense of ennui and miscreant rage gripping the strip malls might better be captured in the fiery jabs of a Kurt Cobain, the anger of an IceT, or the gender-bending of a Marilyn Manson than the struggle "to find the key to the universe in the engine of an old parked car...

...Despite the quality of the performance that night, in which Springsteen led his loyal followers through classic hits and obscure treats like a Baptist preacher on a roll, I could not turn off my brain and surrender to the moment...

...There were any number of times since I had turned fifteen when I had felt as if Bruce were somehow saving my life," explains Alterman like another crazed devotee in Cavicchi's study of fandom...

...mania, cartoonist Berke Breathed lampooned the corruptibility of Springsteen's politics in his comic strip, "Bloom County" When the character Binkley was given a look into the future, Binkley's older self prattled on about his one moment of glory—a bit of organized resistance at the job—that is, until "President Springsteen" fired everyone...

...After a series of titillating pauses, he slips into his evangelical preacher/prison routine, whipping the crowd into a feverish revival: I'm here because I know you're downhearted...

...Part history, part rock criticism, part biography, part autobiography, part industry analysis, and part rumination on the state of the world, Alterman's breezy study defies simple categorization...

...The concert staple, complete with screeching guitars and a thumping baseline, comes to a complete and unexpected halt after about five minutes of driving rock 'n' roll...

...It was a place where my friends and I joked about who would be the first to succumb to a kid, a mortgage, and a job at the local machine works, Precision Twist and Drill...

...Yeah...

...Our fears were best expressed in Bruce Springsteen's haunting title cut to his 1980 album, The River...

...Would the workers still have deathly eyes if they were represented by powerful, militant unions . . .? What if the company established worker-ownership committees or employee stock options...

...I got something I need to testify to...

...I was reminded of this awkward turning point in my life when I, along with tens of thousands of other fans, sang those same words more than two decades later at New Jersey's 112 • DISSENT / Winter 2001 BOOKS Meadowlands during one of the fifteen soldout shows of the E Street Band reunion tour...

...THE TRAVAILS of Springsteen's characters may not offer any real solutions to concrete problems of working people, but they paint a portrait of alienation and a sensitivity to class not seen in popular culture since the passing of the elder Hank Williams...

...Following groundwork laid by dissenting wanderers from Walt Whitman to Jack Kerouac, I pointed the car toward the west-bound side of the interstate...

...Alterman, whose books have stuck it to the media punditry and challenged the foundations of the foreign policy establishment, whose contributions to the Nation rip into the body politic, is an incurable romantic on the subject of Bruce Springsteen...

...INDEED, there are never collective or political solutions in Springsteen's lyrical world...

...I've got something I got to tell you...

...For the first time that evening, our focus was directed toward each other rather than the stage—a reminder of the ways in which music offered collective salvation from the isolation and loneliness of our seemingly individual struggles...

...In the end, his politics may be of "an old-fashioned New Deal social democrat" as Alterman believes, but his true gift is in presenting paths for individual deliverance to the disorganized armies of the faithless...

...The audience quickly catches on, attempting to energize him back into playing with chants of "Bruuuuuce...

...If the narrator of "Born in the U.S.A...

...Take Alterman's recollection of Springsteen's breakthrough album Born to Run...

...As Alterman rhetorically asks his idol, Is the problem capitalism...

...Springsteen knows that what was once his search is now his fans' search, and they relate to him because, first and foremost, he is the nation's number one fan of rock 'n' roll...

...We are left to ponder that if Springsteen fans have ignored or made their peace with the commerce of rock in their search for meaning, have Madonna fans...

...Yet it resonated with me more than any political message ever had...

...The stagehands threw on the house lights for "Thunder Road" as fans united in chorus...

...Beneath that canvas he sees the interconnectedness of white and black, worker and boss, native and immigrant, and men and women, not in nostalgic terms that seek to deny conflict, but in gritty terms that can only be explored on the level of individual despair...

...Although Cavicchi's anthropology wanders between laborious, undigested interviews with Springsteen followers and genuine insight into the nature of fandom, the issue of faith, in both the rocker's performances and the fans' understanding of them, is the most fascinating aspect of Tramps Like Us...

...With a crash of the cymbals the band brings the song home with the crowd on the verge of frenzy...

...Here we see Springsteen, the music fan, adopting the popular music around him for his own struggles just as Cavicchi argued that his fans continue to do to this day...

...who will push forward with a fierce conviction that borders on denial...

...His "show a little faith" message may have been a way out of the present, but it certainly was not one of collective emancipation...

...The president of the New York City Police Benevolent Association, for instance, called Springsteen a "dirtbag" and declared a security boycott of further shows on the assumption that the artist was mounting a direct assault on racial profiling and police violence...

...hey, ho, rock 'n' roll, deliver me from nowhere...

...Brother Bruce's revivalist tent is thus big...

...Radio's jammed up with gospel stations, lost souls callin' long distance salvation...

...Thunder Road," the classic opening song from Springsteen's 1975 album, Born to Run, evoked all that I sought to leave behind—front porches, tentative girlfriends, and Roy Orbison's lonely ones...

...Springsteen is suggesting something tied less to the political moment and more transcendental and historical...

...Fortunately, there is a paucity of academic theory in this otherwise scholarly book...

...I know you're disappointed...

...Yeah...

...At the height of the 1980s "Born in the U.S.A...

...In Springsteen's world, such faith clearly trumps politics, but that does not prevent others from searching for his political core...

...carries his birthright as a cross to bear more than a cause for celebration, so do the individuals in the new song "American Skin (41 Shots...

...This is, the songwriter seems to tell us, just the way things are...

...STILL, THE power and persuasiveness of both Springsteen's vision and Cavicchi's concept of fandom is best captured by the fact that as serious a critic of the American political economy as Eric Alterman is a "tramp" too...

...the canvas stretches above both Diallo and his murderers like the American skin of which he 116 . DISSENT / Winter 2001 BOOKS sings...

...he's still, above all, "a cool rocking Daddy in the U.S.A...

...Rolling down the on-ramp toward California, I punctuated the last line of the song, as we always did, with head out the window and my voice straining to compete with Bruce's: "It's a town full of losers/ And I'm pulling out of here to win...

...Puff Daddy fans...

...The story of a Vietnam vet searching for work and dignity amid the declining fortunes of an American dream gone awry is almost completely drowned out in the dominant chorus of patriotism...

...That album, he writes, "offered me an alternative context for my life, a narrative in which hopes and dreams that felt ridiculous were accorded dignity and, no less important, solidarity...

...He also happens to head up the best bar band in the country—an unbeatable combination...

...The opportunity for introspection, the sources for questioning of values, the foil for an exploration of meaning, all function to scrutinize the self in relationship to an artist and a larger society (both lyrical and real...

...I had only the slightest inkling at the time that the economic and political transformations gripping the country in the late 1970s were transforming what we most feared in life—a good manufacturing job and an affordable home—into one of the most coveted set of trappings in blue-collar America...

...Yeah...

...In the more melancholy and claustrophobic mood of "Open All Night," the message is the same: only music can save the narrator from the desolation of the open road...

...As Alterman suggests, Springsteen may be the last curious icon of social realism—a connection made explicit with his recent adoption of Woody Guthrie's mantle...

...He readily sees both the distance between the DISSENT / Winter 2001 n 115 BOO KS promise of the United States and the often painful reality, as well as the power of music to assist in making the voyage between the two...

...And they held out a promise, and it was a promise that every man has a right to live his life with some decency and some dignity...

...Hey, mister D.J., won'tcha hear my last prayer...

...As he has managed on a few other occasions, his empathetic portraiture cleverly toys with images and dialogue that privilege neither cop nor victim...

...As effectively as Cavicchi has penetrated the world view of the Springsteen fan, he never quite gets to the difference between Bruce fandom, which he argues has meaningful roots in the existential struggles of everyday life, and "regular" fandom...

...Springsteen himself may fear that he has slipped too far into the mold of a generic, aging spectacle...

...But, to quote a track from the dark and haunting Nebraska album, "Still at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe...

...Work itself...

...His tale of despair, entrapment, and unwanted pregnancy left him to lament, "And for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and wedding coat/ We went down to the courthouse/ And the judge put it all to rest/ No wedding day smiles, no walk down the aisle/ No flowers, no wedding dress...

...What about pure spectacles that draw increasing numbers of fans such as professional wrestling or monster truck rallies...

...Pauses for crowd to cheer and then a fullthroated scream] I'm just a prisoner...

...It was much easier to critique Springsteen's performances on political grounds or on the limits of his art in the context of race or gender than it was to understand his enormous appeal...

...If he rarely proselytizes about politics and collective action, his evangelical rock does preach a secular American faith through an appeal to what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature...

...Yeah...

...If the world is as desperate and deferential as the lonely Springsteen character slogging up the hill in the "darkness on the edge of town," then what is to be done...

...Springsteen's art and popularity would suffer if it were...

...He still was...

...With a twitch of his head he gets one side of the stadium to burst into a thunderous roar...

...there is rarely even a sense of the broader social fabric that his characters inhabit...

...In exchange, I believed myself to be embracing "faith" and "magic in the night...

...Springsteen sings with so profound a lack of irony," Alterman explains, "that his message is nearly impossible to give credence to in a postmodern universe...

...Nearly lost in the tidal wave of sound pouring from the thundering guitars and the hoarse, grinding voice chanting the title lyric, is a quiet tale of despair...

...Instead, he managed to keep his poise, simply thanking him for "everything...

...I know you're depressed...

...There is, however, a solidarity in the individual, perhaps uniquely American struggle to make one's way in an often mean world...

...Consider Cavicchi's account of Springsteen's performance of the rocking "Light of Day"—a description any fan would recognize...

...Yeah...

...It's explicitly not a path to the beloved community of the civil rights movement or the movement culture of the social gospel...

...Debuted amid national controversy at the end of his recent tour, the tense, stark song explores the New York City police shooting of an unarmed immigrant, Amadou Diallo...

...Springsteen sings not with metaphor, illusion, or detachment, but of populist struggles of the real and mundane...

...His live performances consistently tap into that alienation, but tease fans, at times reluctantly, into a broader sense of humanity—"nobody wins unless everybody wins" he used to shout before launching into "Born to Run...

...The hilarity of the contrast between the rocker's art, popularity, and lyrical themes against the backdrop of a political vision that has always been more presumed than real, begs volumes of questions about the content of his art...

...That may be why he appeals to a certain type of fan while others simply cannot relate to him...

...Or is Springsteen in his own category— or at least among a select few...

...And it's a promise that gets broken every day in the most violent way...

...As our separate lives came out of the darkness for one brief, and all too rare, moment of solidarity, I realized that Springsteen had done more to help me sever my roots than he had to help me learn about the reality of social class in America...

...He began inserting a revealing jeremiad into his recent tour: "I will not abide a lack of commitment...

...If the bulk of Springsteen's work uses class oppression as a vehicle for exploring themes of individual survival, it works so well because the rocker absorbed his history lessons deeply...

...It is an odd solidarity that one is not alone: that when the house lights go up, there are thousands of others singing the same lyrics and asking the same questions...

...Yeah...

...Springsteen freezes on his knees in the middle of the stage in complete silence...

...As Springsteen told an audience in 1981: It wasn't until I started listening to the radio, and I heard something in those singers' voices that said there was more to life than what my old man was doing and the life that I was living...

...But it's a promise that never, ever dies, and it's always inside of you...

...Is it a gun?/ Is it a knife?/ Is it a wallet?/ This is your life," declares Springsteen, "Ain't no secret/ My friend my friend/ You can get killed just for living in your American skin...

...And Springsteen understands that his audiences are looking to him as he looked to Elvis, Dylan, Sam Cooke, Mitch Ryder, and a host of one-hit wonders to fuel the visceral rebelliousness that is at the core of rock 'n' roll...

...The title of his song is literal: a singularly troubled American skin given shape by a history of racial unrest...

...Random may figure in the power of the mass culture industry, and it may also be a kind of twentieth-century cult," he claims, "but for fans, it is about devotion, creating meaning in daily life through sustained attention to musical performance...

...Well now I'm no hero/ That's understood/ All the redemption I can offer, girl/ Is beneath this dirty hood . . . take hold/ Thunder Road...

...Forty-one shots my boots caked in mud," he sings in the last stanza, "We're baptized in these waters and in each other's blood...

...Or, as the neo-Marxists argue, do fans appropriate the performer for their own purposes, sifting through the record-machine hype to appropriate their own meaning in some sort of closet counter-hegemonic struggle...

...None of these questions are asked, much less answered...

...Springsteen shoulders his responsibility to his fans with enormous fortitude, grace, and commitment—illustrated most obviously by his tremendous physical output during shows that often last into the wee hours and continue to amaze even the most jaded critic...

...So the harder project was not to criticize him but to understand what drew us to this "rich man in a poor man's shirt" (his own lyrical description...

...Despite such religious overtones to Springsteen's performance and the dedication of his fans who read his lyrics with the intensity of Talmudic scholars, Cavicchi is careful not to argue that fandom is a religion, but that the deep-seated sense of belonging, shared values, and search for renewal all address concerns and engage people in the same way that religion does...

...JEFFERSON COWIE teaches history at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations...

...Are the legions of Bruceheads mere dupes for an over-sold, prepackaged pop commodity as Fred Goodman argued in his analysis of rock and commerce, The Mansion on the Hill...

...As Springsteen exclaimed in his recent tour, he's "reborn, rededicated, resuscitated, reinvigorated and rejuvenated with the magic, the mystery and the ministry of rock 'n' roll...

...While it would be ludicrous to see popular music as religion, the mechanisms he describes do serve as a sort of constructive, therapeutic worldview for congregants that gather in the house of rock...

...He is the author of Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor...

...Instead, as death weighs on both characters equally, the central actor is the abstract burden of race itself...

...What drew all of these people together and for what purpose...

...Seeking to escape such a fate, I rolled out of town in a chartreuse Volkswagen detailed with cancerous rust and crammed with the possessions that only an adolescent male might deem essential...

...Increasingly, as the themes of adolescence, cars, and solitary escape have faded from Springsteen's performances, in their place has risen a sense of bigtent revivalism that was never far from the surface in his early work...

...I slipped into the battered tape deck the anthem that served as the bedrock of my psychic survival throughout the trying years of adolescence...

...he proclaims to fans who are too often drifting out for beer during his performance of the overtly political "Youngstown...

...Those who have heralded the piece as a way to keep attention on a police force out of control have also missed the point...

...Like the Springsteen listener, however, his faith in the American project remains unshaken...

...Yeah...

...DISSENT / Winter 2001 n 113 BOOKS And I'm here tonight because I—(Yeah...

...In my own little world, Springsteen, even in his full pop presentation, had shaped a sort of modern and personalized folk culture among the alienated—a shared discourse, a set of assumptions, a world of values that we could adopt for our own...

...AN IMPRESSIVE effort to understand the collective mind of those who have been snapping up tickets around the world in the last two years is Daniel Cavicchi's Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning Among Springsteen Fans (his fans often call themselves "tramps...

...And that, in essence, may be what attracts people like Alterman and the countless tramps in Cavicchi's study...

...He had been a source of hope and inspiration," Alterman continues, "of friendship and fortitude, of therapy and solidarity, of consolation and exhilaration...

...I know you're low in spirit...

...The mention of "skin," in the highly racialized discourse of American politics has been presumed to mean black by both critics and celebrants of the song...