At the risk of revealing myself to be the troglodyte that I am, I’m only vaguely aware of Bruce Springsteen. Sure, I once bought one of his CDs a lifetime ago. I also once dated a man who was childhood friends with Springsteen; they and their friends roamed the boardwalk and bars together in Asbury Park. “We knew he was good, but we didn’t know he was that good,” he told me.
In this lifetime, I’m aware that Springsteen and President Obama started a podcast together. I’ve listened to my CD a handful of times, the podcast never. My careful titration of news via scrolling New York Times headlines informs me that Springsteen had a one-man show on Broadway until the pandemic shut it and everything else down last March, and that it has just reopened.
Which is why Terry Gross’s 2016 interview with Springsteen about his memoir, on which the Broadway show is based, just popped up on my Fresh Air queue again. So I gave it a listen.
The Boss was quite charming. He recounted with wry amusement that his father, taking advantage of Bruce’s helpless dependency following a serious motorcycle accident, brought in a barber to chop off his long hair, a source of constant Vietnam-era contention. At the time this act of butchery enraged him. But the decades bring perspective, which brings memoirs, which, if you’re famous enough, bring Broadway shows.
I also learned from Fresh Air that said show had been made into a 2018 film, Springsteen on Broadway, now streaming on Netflix. So I gave it a watch.
I didn’t much like the man who had so charmed me on Fresh Air. Springsteen’s self-mockery came across as arrogance. Plus he seemed kind of shouty, angry. This was probably due to Netflix’s close-in camera work of a lone performer far away from an audience of thousands. He knew what it took to be loud and brash enough to hold a crowd. Still, Springsteen came across as too well rehearsed to feel authentic. This impression was no doubt further cemented when he talked about being a fraud–hero of the working man who had never spent a day of his life on a factory, nor even worked five days in a row until doing this Broadway show. Still, Springsteen clearly comes by his pain and anger honestly, as story after story tells of his difficult relationship with his hard-drinking, constantly wandering father.
So I’m not that much of a fan, but any real fan would be thrilled to get a two-and-a-half hour concert, the songs augmented by the spoken word. Springsteen has the same inability to carry a tune as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, but he shares their gift for poetry.
I gradually warmed to the show, the man. Then midway through, his wife, Patti Scialfa, came on for a couple of duets, and I was electrified. Springsteen softened, transforming from wayward rebel into a mature man who was burnished rather than undone by his pain. Springsteen first met Patti when she was performing in the same bar. He recounted that the first words he heard her sing were, “I know something about love.”
Evidently.
The intensity of their music-making, their chemistry burned through the screen. But it was when Springsteen stood alone and began to talk that I was won over:
“Trust in a relationship is a fragile thing,” he began. “Because trust requires allowing others to see as much of our real selves as we have the courage to reveal . . . it means allowing others to see behind our many masks, the masks we wear, overcoming the fear. Or rather, learning how to love and how to trust in spite of it. That takes a little courage, and a very strong partner.
This seemed like a great toast for our daughter’s wedding next year! Until Springsteen continued:
“‘Cause in this life you make your choices, you take your stand, and you awaken from that youthful spell of immortality where it feels like the road is gonna go on forever. And you walk alongside your chosen partner with the clock ticking. And you recognize that life is finite, that you’ve got just so much time. And so together you name the things that will give your life in that time its meaning, its purpose, its fullness, its very reality. And this is what you build together. This is what your love consists of. This is your life. And these are things you can hold onto when the storms come, as they will.”
Hmm, maybe a little dark for first-time newlyweds? But it was perfect for people who have been together for a long time, and later on I read what I’d jotted down thanks to the miracle of closed-caption TV to my husband, who agreed.
The part of Springsteen’s performance that really slayed me, though, was about a surprise visit from his father. Right before Springsteen’s first child was about to be born, his father drove 500 miles unannounced (“As was his style,” Springsteen remarked). They were sitting together at 7:30 a.m. over beers (“That was also his style”), and suddenly, “My dad, never a talkative man, blurted out, ‘You’ve been very good to us.’ And I nodded that I had. And then he says, ‘And I wasn’t very good to you.’”
This fleeting, sort-of apology was almost imperceptible. But Springsteen’s perceptions are keen:
We are ghosts or we are ancestors in our children’s lives. We either lay our mistakes, our burdens upon them and we haunt them. Or we assist them in laying those old burdens down, and we free them from the chains of our own flawed behaviors. And as ancestors, we walk alongside of them, and we assist them in finding their own way, and some transcendence. My father, on that day, was petitioning me for a role in an ancestral life after being a ghost for a long, long time. He wanted me to write a new end to our relationship, and he wanted me to be ready for the new beginning that I was about to experience. It was the greatest moment in my life with my dad. And it was all that I needed.
I knew Springsteen was good. But I didn’t know he was that good. He is an ancestor for us all.