Excerpt: Bruce Springsteen and the Long Walk Home 0 comments

Andy Whitman’s full essay on how he finds both visceral thrill and a call to repentance in Bruce Springsteen’s music appears in Image issue 66. He is a senior contributing editor for Paste and a contributor to Image’s daily blog, Good Letters.

I was twenty years old when I discovered Bruce Springsteen. He was on the cover of Time and Newsweek in the same week in October, 1975, and I read about how his music would reenergize a flagging rock industry. His new album, Born to Run, was supposed to change my life. That sounded good to me, because my life needed changing. I was pondering what to do with my impending, nearly useless creative writing degree, and I was clueless about what to do with my next fifty years. I was full of passion and energy and general piss and malaise. Nixon was a crook and Ford wasn’t much better; progressive rockers and sixties hippie dinosaurs were ruining everything I cared about in music. I was scared to death about the future, my girlfriend had dumped me, and the radio played nothing but lousy songs.

So I bought the album. And into that swirling vortex strode Bruce Springsteen, a scruffy kid from the Jersey Shore who sang about chrome-wheeled, fuel-injected hotrods and gang warfare and redemption. I was a middle-class Midwestern kid from the suburbs with a rusting ’68 Ford Fairlane, but it still made perfect sense to me. I knew nothing about the mean streets of Jersey, but I already knew more than I wanted to about towns that rip the bones from your back and life as a deathtrap and a suicide rap, and I understood all too well the longing to be somebody, to make my mark, to push through the mediocrity and the spoken and unspoken expectations and live life to the fullest, like I was born to run, ready to head off down the highway with Bruce at the wheel and never look back.

He had me at “The screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves,” the opening line of the opening song. Springsteen understands the power of myth, and that some myths are archetypically American. In that song, “Thunder Road,” he taps one of the great ones: the power of the open highway, horsepower harnessed beneath a hood, Woody Guthrie riding the rails and Jack Kerouac careening across the countryside, James Dean and Marlon Brando in their leather jackets, barreling down the interstate. It’s a myth fostered by Detroit and Madison Avenue, but one fashioned deep within human souls. It calls out to anyone who has ever been stuck in a dead-end town, working a dead-end job, who has ever experienced that insistent longing for something new, something different, something better. It’s a big country, so get in the car and go.

It is a myth that has been handled badly in countless rock songs, but not on “Thunder Road.” I loved the lyrics, loved the slow camera pan that opened the song. Springsteen set the scene cinematically, focusing in on a young woman, or perhaps a not-so-young woman, slow dancing to the radio. A young man in a car watches her. Maybe he is James Dean, but probably he is someone more prosaic. And the car is no hotrod, just a car, a beat-up Ford or Chevy with a dirty hood. It is a scene out of a mundane American landscape. What is not normal is the way two lives come into sharp focus; all the commonplace moments funneling down to a white-hot point, the interchangeable days and weeks building to this choice on which everything hinges: get in the car, or stay behind; stay on the porch and lead a dull, safe life, or climb in the front seat and risk it all for love. It touched something deep inside me, and I wanted to tell Bruce Springsteen about it.

Within a few months, I had my chance. In the spring of 1976, he came to my alma mater, Ohio University, and played a gritty, sweaty, three-and-a-half hour concert that just about convinced me that I was not alone in the universe, and that if rock and roll was not a substitute for divine revelation, then it was at least the product of ministering angels. After the concert, ears still ringing and heart pounding, I wandered to the Bagel Buggy, a popular late-night haunt near the university. Somebody jostled me from behind. I turned around, saw Bruce Springsteen, and knew that my shining moment was at hand.

“Great show, Bruce,” I stammered.

“Thanks, man,” he said. And then he was gone. I’ve never spoken to him since. It doesn’t matter much. He’s spoken to me on quite a few occasions.

To read the rest of the essay, please purchase the issue here.