Tuesday, February 7, 2023 Entry #41
At the first show of the tour, in Tampa, Bruce Springsteen did not play one of his signature songs, “Thunder Road.” As excited as I was to be there, as ready as I was to hear whatever songs the Boss had planned for the setlist, as amazing as it was to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band once again after all the anticipation, and as high-octane awesome as that concert was, I admit to a bit of disappointment at the omission (by night two, Bruce was back to playing it at most of the concerts, including all the successive shows I’ve seen on the tour so far). I’ve known “Thunder Road” seemingly forever, so much that I think I had been taking it for granted some. That is until 2021, when I saw the intimate Springsteen on Broadway solo show. I was already reeling from the opening song “Growing Up” (“When they said ‘sit down’, I stood up!”), when though the monologue he was telling beforehand didn’t give it away, Bruce’s harmonica and acoustic guitar intro to the third number suddenly made it obvious he was about to take us down Thunder Road. I melted. Completely. I was in the front row and if Springsteen happened to look down at me he would have seen a grown man reduced to tears (a sight which he must be used to, actually). Thus began my “Thunder Road” renaissance, the video snippet I took from the Hollywood, FL concert posted here is but a small sample of the song’s magnificence.
“Thunder Road” has it all. Yearning, street-smart, poetic lyrics that occupy a great space in many souls (“Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night”/”The night’s busting open, these two lanes can take us anywhere” “I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk”/”Tonight we’ll be free, all the promises will be broken.”). A gorgeous ballad-like melody beginning with Roy Bittan’s plaintive piano echoed by Springsteen’s searing harp, and builds to the up-tempo full band treatment and rocks out. An adventurous, confident and wistful story with a hopeful ending (“We’re pulling out of here to win!”). Tender and bombastic all at once. Springsteen’s passionate, urgent and honest voice (he calls his vocal style “singing deeply.”).
After my road trip ended, and I was driving back and forth often between St. Louis and Chicago to help care for my mother, I listened to Springsteen’s memoir Born To Run, the audiobook which The Boss himself narrates. There are so many powerful passages in that book, but one stopped me cold, Springsteen analyzing his iconic Born To Run album, on which Thunder Road is the opening cut:
“I’d loosely imagined the Born To Run album as a series of vignettes taking place during one long summer day and night.”
I had not heard the album framed this way before, but of course! Springsteen often talks about his Jersey Shore upbringing with those youthful summers short on obligations and rules, but long on slow-motion beach days, high drama and action with friends and girlfriends, boardwalk cruising and hanging out. Then, warm late nights filled with epic adventure, listening to and playing live music, road cruising and more hanging out.
Born To Run definitely captures that whole gestalt. “Thunder Road” itself (“Waste your summer praying in vain for a savior to rise from thee streets.”), the “full-on block party” of “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out, “Night” (“Till you’re out on a midnight run, losing your heart to a beautiful one.”), and the “soft infested summer” of “Backstreets”, “forever friends” who are “sleeping in that old abandoned beach house, getting wasted in the heat.” “Born To Run’s” wild motorcycle ride until the “amusement park rises bold and stark, kids are huddled on the beach in the mist.” Then, there is “Jungleland,” the closing track, which is basically an epic rock opera about a spiritual battleground in the summertime with a teenage heart and soul (“Barefoot girl sitting on the hood of a Dodge, drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain/The Rat pulls into town rolls up his pants, together they take a stab at romance and disappear down Flamingo Lane/Kids flash guitars just like switch-blades, hustling for the record machine/The hungry and the hunted, explode into rock ’n’ roll bands/That faced off against each other out in the street, down in “Jungleland.”). Ok, that was a lot of lyrics, but quoting from “Jungleland” is like potato chips, you can’t eat just one!
The reason the notion of Born To Run as one long summer day and night hit me so hard is that since basically I was a kid, I have held that same romantic ideal of the endless summer day, clad just in shorts, t-shirt and sandals, in my head and heart. For me, that meant summer camp and outdoor living in Northern Minnesota with a full day of activities on land and in the water, a sunset swim and then a campfire under the stars (later, as a counselor I would add nights off drinking pitchers of beer at the woodsy tavern, and a post-midnight swim under the stars). As a young teen, it meant leisurely camping trips and lots of carefree and crazy time just hanging out with friends. More recently, as a dad (just ask my kids), I always wanted to pack as much into a 24-hour period with them in the summer as I could. One Father’s Day, we camped in the backyard, rode our bikes for a morning swim at the community pool, had brunch (‘al fresco’ obviously), went to a water park and then up the St. Louis Arch, followed by a concert at night! I even lump into this category hot and lazy winter vacation days in summer-like climates, including, come to think of it, this beach-Springsteen concert-Miami nightlife fueled February sabbatical of mine!
Suddenly, after hearing Springsteen’s analysis of his masterpiece, I had to wonder, did Born To Run, as that “long summer day and night,” Sprinsteen described, subliminally work it’s way into my youthful consciousness? After all, it was one of my very first album purchases, and I’ve been listening to those songs since I was around 12. In other words, did I love Born To Run because of its echoing of my own pre-existing proclivity for endless summer times, or was my desire for that perfect summer day actually formed by internalizing my repeated listening of the album? At the very least, I can say that Bruce Springsteen and I share this particular obsession.
Springsteen has certainly not stopped ruminating on the subject in this later part of his career as his artistry has matured either. His 2002 song “Waiting On A Sunny Day” has become a standard at Springsteen’s outdoor stadium concerts, complete with some cute kid from the crowd always being invited up to help out sing the chorus (passing the dream on through the generations). “Girls In Their Summer Clothes,” from his 2007 album Magic, finds Springsteen wrestling with the difference between loving summer now and how it was when he was younger (now, the girls just pass him by-you can look but you better not touch, lol). For a look at “Springsteen’s Top 20 Songs Of Summer,” from 1972’s gorgeous “4th of July Asbury Park (Sandy) to 2019’s majestic “Hello Sunshine,” check out this article Summertime Bruce from Jay Lustig’s NJArts.net, an indispensable resource for Springsteen and other New Jersey and adjacent music news and reviews.
Springsteen devoted two episodes of his excellent COVID lockdown era satellite radio show, From My Home To Yours to this topic. In “Summertime, Summertime,” which dropped on July 15, 2020, he played summer songs by The War On Drugs, The Beach Boys (of course), Lana Del Ray, Sly & The Family Stone (“Hot Fun In The Summertime”), Kendrick Lamar, and more, including his own “Sheery Darling,” “Sandy,” “County Fair,” and Backstreets.”
Springsteen waxed poetic about summer in between spinning discs (Note-because these quotes are severely excerpted from the show, I played around with the order of some of them to make a coherent whole, but they are all Springsteen’s own words from the broadcast):
“I loved and love summer. As a child, I became summer. I melted into the hot tarmac, I rolled into a sand ball at the beach…I sat in the tops of trees, feeling the summer breeze trickle over my freshly cut flattop…And then, at early light, like magic, we’d be carried back into the house, sandy-haired from our beach sleep…Nights so hot…no rumor of a breeze in sight. You’d sit on that porch…barely human, a creature of the earth, and the rain, and the sun, and summer…I take my hitchhiker's stance…take the occasional few steps backwards towards my destination; the beaches and bikinis of Manasquan, NJ,,,And then an hour, three or four rides later, I will be deposited at the main beach…After a few moments in the sun, I head for my morning baptism in the wonderful, God-given Atlantic Ocean. Summer’s on!”
There is also a meditation on naked swimming at night, accompanying the REM song “Nightswimming,” but I am going to save that for the next post (stay tuned). If you are interested in a full transcript of the Summertime broadcast (including videos of the songs), here it is, again curtesy of NJArts: Summertime, Summertime
Springsteen’s second summer-themed broadcast was released on September 16, 2020 (In between, on a much different note, Springsteen also dedicated a show to George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests that were among the defining events of that particular summer). This episode was titled “Summer’s End,” and Springsteen as DJ chose a similarly eclectic playlist as on the first. His spoken word offerings, appropriately for the end of summer, were a little heavier, signaling a turn to the busier, more serious nature of autumn:
“It is always a bittersweet time of year…the season whose end is most pronounced, truly the end of something wonderful, it always felt like a small death, the loss ached at me, the tanned, unfamiliar skin of all those out-of-state girls, who’ve now returned...and who’ve put you away, with all the other townies, in a box labeled “Summer.”...Until we meet again, treat yourself to one more late-summer swim, another grilled hamburger and French fries, and if the ice cream man is still running through your neighborhood, pick one up for me….As for me, I’m going for an ocean swim right now, so stay strong, stay smart, stay healthy, stay safe, and stay summer. And, I’ll see you at the beach…with dry air, west winds, good waves, and warm fires …we have crossed paths with wild, feral magic. Summer is over.”
Here’s the link for the full transcript of this one: Summer's End
Finally, for Springsteen, the concept of summer is about even more than his favorite season, it is a major metaphor. Summer is life, and life is summer. The good stuff, the blessings of life, that is. Thus, “summer’s end” for The Boss symbolizes and portends the end of life itself. On his most recent song that name-checks summer, 2020’s “I’ll See You In My Dreams,” Springsteen invokes his compatriots who have died before him, a major theme of the Letter To You album and of this current tour.
“I’ll see you in my dreams, when all our summers have come to an end. I’ll see you in my dreams, we’ll meet and live and laugh again. I’ll see you in my dreams, up around the river bend. For death is not the end, and I’ll see you in my dreams.”
To Springsteen, summer means good times, adventures, sun, water, sensory vividness, joyful abandon, moments both lazy and eventful; those long, seemingly endless days and nights. When summer is over, those pleasures take a bow. And, “when all my summers have come to an end” is Springsteen’s way of understanding that eventual time of the final curtain call for those blessings, when we are done and gone except in the dreams of those still alive who survive us.
So while we still can, let’s roll down the windows and let the wind blow back our hair.
Day 10