Tuesday, February 7, 2023 Entry #39
I tend to be pretty emotional anyways, and live performance moments that resonate with me in particular hold the power to warm my heat and often move me to tears.
Springsteen played his 2012 song “Wrecking Ball” at each of the four concerts I attended down south in early February. Near the end of that song, Bruce repeats the simple but poignant phrase, “Hard times come and hard times go” five times, like a jackhammered mantra. I was surprised to find how powerfully this particular section of the song hit me, the repetition let the words settle in and that allowed me time to reflect on that particular truism, to name and feel the challenges that I face and those that face all of us. By the time I heard “Wrecking Ball” and my 20th “Hard times come and hard times go” at the Hard Rock Casino (where I took that portion of the video above), I kind of lost it and bawled for a few seconds, catharsis style.
From those “Wrecking Ball” depths, Bruce always jumps right into “The Rising,” the song he wrote in the aftermath of the human devastation that was 9/11/2001 (the video from that portion of the compilation above is from concert #3 in Orlando). Just like that, my tears dried, my heaviness lifted, and my arms were up in the air, embodying, gospel church testimony style, the hope and renewal message Springsteen was imparting. Despite all the wreckage, it seemed possible I and we could once again rise above those hard times (before they come again, as the song promises).
This “Wrecking Ball”-“Rising” couplet within the setlist serves as another undergirding theme for this tour. “Bring on your wrecking ball,” Springsteen brashly rages, and I am thinking, ‘bring on Trump, bring on COVID, bring on losses, disappointments, etc. If it is not one “hard time,” we’ll inevitably have another to battle. The chord Springsteen thrusts from his guitar at the end of that line (check out the video!) emphasizes the point with a slam, as if the music itself is staring adversity down and pledging never to give up. Problems big and small will always be coming, but they will just as surely be followed by risings, as this is the rhythm of our human condition. As Springsteen himself has said, “We rise above uncertainty and find something to stand on.”
One aspect of Bruce Springsteen’s songwriting has always been an ability to articulate the challenges and frustrations people go through, and the resilience that helps us cope with and even transcend our problems. Again and again and again. In his memoir, Springsteen writes that in some of his songs,
“I dreamt the dreams of refugees and strangers. Their dreams were somehow also mine. I felt their fears, their hopes, their desires. (In these instances), My voice disappears into the voices I’ve chosen to write about.”
The two 21st century Springsteen albums whose title songs express the 1-2 punch of hardship to transcendence in these shows also demonstrate this arc as coherent artistic statements. The songs that are contained in the 2002 album release The Rising (with the title song I’ve been referencing) don’t spare us the fear, loss, and human toll of 9/11 (“You’re Missing,” “Empty Sky,” and “My City of Ruins”), but there are others that allow for hard-earned hope and gratitude (“Into The Fire,” “The Rising”), and even eventual celebration of redemption even after what we, and particularly the survivors, have been through (“Waiting On A Sunny Day,” “Mary’s Place”). The angry songs of 2012’s Wrecking Ball tell stories of economic inequality, the sense that the American Dream has been made unattainable for some, and the demand for and refusal to give human recognition and the cost of that refusal. This is how Springsteen describes the impetus behind Wrecking Ball songs like “We Take Care Of Our Own,” “Shackled And Drawn,” “Rocky Ground,” and “Death To My Hometown”:
“After the crash of 2008, I was furious at what had been done by a handful of trading companies on Wall Street. Wrecking Ball is a shot of anger at the injustice that continues on and has widened with deregulation, dysfunctional regulatory agencies and capitalism gone wild at the expense of hardworking Americans.”
However, true to form, in the last three songs on the album, Springsteen points us in a more positive direction. “We Are Alive,” which not only expresses optimism that as long as we are breathing, feeling and caring, we can help overcome our challenges, but also the more mystical conviction that the spirits of social justice activists of the past are still with us, speaking to us, rabble-rousing from beyond the grave, death having given them an eternal voice of inspiration and motivation. And, then “Land of Hope and Dreams” and “American Land,”” utopian statements of unity through diversity, as Springsteen describes it: The human longing for a return to wholeness; the resilience, survival and commitment to a dream that lives on through storm, wreckage and ruin.”
Springsteen used entire albums in those cases to take us on hard earned journeys from damnation to redemption, but he even achieves that same trajectory within the space of some of the individual songs that are included in in these concert setlists. The very title of “Badlands” uses a specific landscape to describe the sometimes unsparing roughness of our lives that we must ‘live every day’, where our ‘broken hearts stand as the price we gotta pay’. Yet, in the same song Bruce exclaims that despite all of that, “I wanna go out tonight, I wanna find out what I got.” and “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.” Ultimately, we are inspired to believe that faith, hope and love can help us transcend our very real badlands. The song “Promised Land,” too, makes this case. In the face of ‘chasing mirages’, of sometimes being ‘so weak we feel like exploding’, and withstanding the ‘pain that needs to be cut from our hearts’, there is enough within us and around us that is life-affirming, sensory-delighting, and joy-inducing that can ‘blow away all that leaves us lost and brokenhearted’ and help us actually believe in that Promised Land filled with the blessings of life.
Some of Springsteen’s songs are pure energy and fun rave-ups, ‘roadhouse music’ he sometimes calls them (“I ain’t here on business, baby, I’m only here for fun!”). But Bruce has also said, “Yes, I want to entertain, but I also aim to communicate something of value.” Such as. “Hard hard times come and hard times go, just to come again.” Right next to. “Come on up for the rising, come on up lay your hands in mine.
Together, those lyrics, especially heard up close and personal, have been more valuable to me than Bruce Springsteen will ever know.
Day 10