Chasing Some Mirage?
Thursday, February 9, 2023 Entry #45
Much as it pained me, as I drove closer and closer to Chicago, the reality of winter weather’s return set in and I had to (mostly) roll up the window so the (now much colder) wind wouldn’t anymore blow back my hair. I also continued listening to my Springsteen playlist, and I had driven so many hours that I was getting awfully close to contemporaneous material. The live recording I chose to represent Springsteen’s 2016 tour, Springsteen’s last time on the road before his stand on Broadway and then the COVID lockdown, was from a concert that I had attended, at the Chaifetz Arena in St. Louis. I’m driving along, doing some severe reflection upon hearing “Promised Land” on whether I had been “chasing some mirage,” spending all this time on the verge of turning 60, following a rock & roll star on tour. I had to wonder, beneath all my talk of my Springsteen Sabbatical as a spiritual quest, was it really basically a nostalgia trip, a wholly unrealistic desire to, as Springsteen sang a long while back, “grow young again?” Next thing I know, there on the car stereo, Bruce is talking in his hushed, sincere, and authentic tones over the haunting opening notes of “Independence Day.”
That 1980 Bruce Springsteen song is not about the 4’th of July at all, it is a song about the eternal gap between generations and leaving home (though in Springsteen’s unique case, his parents moved to California, while their 20-year old aspiring but struggling musician son chose to stay at their New Jersey home). I remember with utter clarity being 16 at my first Springsteen concert which I wrote about in the essay that begins this blog, and hearing the “Independence Day” monologue about his epic kitchen table battles with his father that night. It was one of the many highlights I have carried with me from that concert. Springsteen’s honesty, vulnerability, humor, and defiance hit a major chord with me. And, I was getting along pretty well with my own dad at the time! But, Springsteen reached some primal teen-age rebellious place not too far from my surface, and if my memory is correct, I surprised myself when I felt hot tears of recognition and resonance streaming down my cheeks, emotions I hadn’t realized could be part of going to a rock concert.
Thanks to “Brucebase Wiki” on the internet and it’s “Storyteller” feature, transcripts of many of Springsteen’s pre-song stories and messages are recorded. This is close to what I heard that fateful night when I was 16 and Springsteen was 30:
“When I was growing up me and my dad used to go at it all the time…..over almost anything, but, I used to have really long hair way down past my shoulders (chuckles). I was 17 or 18…. oh, man, he used to hate it….and we got to where we’d fight so much that I’d spend a lot of time out of the house. In the summertime it wasn´t so bad, as it was warm and your friends were out. But in the winter, I remember standing downtown and it would get so cold, and finally I’d get my nerve up to go home. I’d stand there in the driveway, and he’d be waiting for me in the kitchen, and I’d tuck my hair down under my collar and I’d walk in. He’d call me back to sit down with him and the first thing he’d always ask me was, “Bruce, what do you think you’re doing? And, he was always sure, I was only about sixteen or seventeen but he was sure that I’d wasted my life already and I was on my way downhill. And, the worst part about it was I could never explain it to him.
But now, my sabbatical short-circuited because of my mom’s health crisis but also after 4 life-affirming Bruce Springsteen concerts, I heard Springsteen again talking about his father while introducing “Independence Day” just seven years ago. But at the time of this concert he was a man in his 60’s, not too much older than I am right now, and his words carried a message than those early days:
“Independence Day” was the first song that I wrote about fathers and sons, I think I was 23 or 24. It was the kind of song you write when you’re young and you’re first shocked by your parents’ humanity, by the idea that they had their own dreams and their own desires and their own hopes that may or may not have played out as they hoped they might. And so you watch, but all you can see are the adult compromises that they had to make to build a life and you’re still too young to understand the blessings that compromise brings, so all you see is this small world tightening in around them and all you can think about is getting away. I had a very simple setting for this song, I wanted it to be a late night conversation around the kitchen table between two people that loved each other but who were struggling to understand one another.”
Wow, right? Same setting, same remembered circumstance, but told 35 years apart. And, I was present to hear both the earlier and the later versions of the “Independence Day” raps. Springsteen hasn’t lost the spirit and the values he brought to that kitchen table, but with age, he had gained an understanding and an empathy for what his father was going through (including a major bout of depression) that he just couldn’t or wouldn’t see as a teen and a young man. I don’t remember fully if I put all of that together at the Chaifetz Center that night in 2016, but right now hearing Bruce talk about his dad this way, with it’s altered echo from 1980, for sure stopped me cold.
Bam! I had to pull over. As I said, though I certainly felt emotional at various points at my recent string of shows, Bruce’s first since 2016, I strangely never got bowled over like I thought I might. Instead that catharsis happened on the side of a rainy highway, and I just sobbed. I was not chasing some mirage. I was just blessed to be on the receiving end of an ongoing communion with an artist who gives me nostalgia and growth points at the same time; singing many of the same songs, and telling the same stories from a ever-changing perspective, flavored by lessons learned and experiences gained. As he contains within him both how he felt as a younger man and what is going now, Springsteen sings and speaks directly to both the youngster I was in the early 80’s, that is still in there somewhere, as well as to the older husband and father (and adult son) I have obviously become in 2023. And, providing me an absolute blast of a time for my mind, soul and body, apart from all the meaning-filled, philosophical and spiritual stuff! This is what has been driving me and my connection to Bruce Springsteen, and I’m not finished, not for a long shot. And, fortunately, neither was Bruce Springsteen.
Day 12