Bruce Springsteen was born in the USA 75 years ago today. Specifically he was born in Monmouth County, New Jersey, not terribly far in temperament or geography from my hometown of Northport, Long Island. I'm not bragging when I say there is a shared regional dialect, and I'm not complaining either. In 1949, when he was born, Harry Truman was president. Truman had succeeded FDR, and the idea was that he was a plainspoken plainsman from Missouri who wasn't afraid to bow up and give all the big interests hell. I was born many decades later, but I heard about all this from my parents and my grandmother who lived with us, after her husband got an untreatable-at-the-time case of PTSD following WWII. Kennedy was a god because he had delivered us to respectability as Catholics. I believe I was confirmed in 1987, the same year Springsteen released Tunnel of Love, still the greatest bruised referendum on tangling with anything Vatican-adjacent. There can be no love without guilt, there can be no guilt without love. It's almost like we are driving around a circular highway promising to bring us to deliverance, when it only just brings us back home.
That's not the tweet I'm here to talk about however.
Enough preamble: let's get to the tweet.
I think the cold shock of the Springsteen trajectory up to Nebraska attends from the sense that you were really watching a true believer recognizing his deception in real time. Unlike Dylan or Randy Newman, Bruce actually DIDN'T realize the joke was always on him, his values and his way of life. The symbolic distance between Asbury Park and Atlantic City is both closer and further than the handful of miles that separate them. In some ways parsing that small distance is his greatest theme.
I tried writing a long form piece about Nebraska for the Ringer, and it just ended up as an anxiety attack about the PATCO strike in 1980. Seriously, read it. (And thank you Chris Ryan for approving this story).
Here’s a photo I took to celebrate that Nebraska piece.
Here’s just a fun photo of me doing the thing that pretty much everyone who has ever been inside a record store does with a copy of The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle. And yes, for you fashion fans out there, I’m wearing a knockoff Nigel Tufnel shirt.
Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact! Happy birthday, Bruce!
"I think the cold shock of the Springsteen trajectory up to Nebraska attends from the sense that you were really watching a true believer recognizing his deception in real time."
A fascinating, challenging sentence that I'm really wrestling with. There's always a risk in thinking back becoming an exercise in nostalgia or distortion or that hindsight thing, but the best as I can remember those days, I think Bruce CHOSE to believe, to spit in the face of the Badlands, even knowing the reality. Choosing to believe and to get others to believe even knowing the odds against was/is a very brave thing and what I think really resonated with the the rest of us who dared to believe. We wanted to believe because it was better than giving in to the reality. Looked at this way, perhaps Nebraska represents more of a giving in or acceptance of gravity than the shock of the apple falling on his head. Or maybe I need more sleep. I guess I will find out in the morning :) Anyway, happy birthday, Bruce, thanks for the memories and thanks to you, Elizabeth for being the best.
A really beautiful short essay about a man
I admire!