Wednesday, May 24, 2023 Entry #30
I have more Springsteen shows to report on, and more reflections from the road, but I’m jumping to the present for a moment to offer some of my thoughts and feelings about the connection and friendship between two of my personal heroes, President Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen. I’ve been ruminating on possibly including an entry like this recently, and then came reports of Barack and Michelle Obama traveling to Spain to dine with Bruce and his wife Patti and to attend Springsteen’s first show on the European leg of the current tour in Barcelona at the end of April. The Boss even called up the former First Lady to sing backup and play tambourine at the show during “Glory Days” (Springsteen didn’t even have Paul McCartney join him onstage when the later was in the audience at Madison Square Garden a few weeks earlier). President Obama took to social media to post the video of Michelle backing up The Boss and exclaim, “How cool is my wife!” I took this latest highlight in their relationship as a sign it was indeed a good time to go back and take a look at the some of the significant moments of the journey of The Boss and The President.
The first time I caught wind of Barack and Bruce’s mind-blowing (to me) connection was when my kids and I attended President Obama’s first inauguration, in 2009. We arrived the day before the historic swearing-in and celebration, but one day after an incredible pre-inaugural concert was held at the Lincoln Memorial, called We Are One, with President-Elect Obama and his family watching from the front row. The stellar line-up included such major stars as Stevie Wonder, U2, John Mellencamp, James Taylor, Beyonce, Mary J. Blige, and more. But, the musician who was tapped to perform both the opening song (accompanied by a gospel choir) as well as the concert finale (joined by folk music legend/social justice activist Pete Seeger singing “This Land Is Your Land”) was none other than Bruce Springsteen. As Zoey, Gabe and I walked up and down the mall soaking up the building excitement, the large screens that were set up to live stream the next day’s events were showing the video of We Are One concert on a loop, and I was mesmerized (and more than a tad upset that we hadn’t flown out in time to attend).
Knowing that Obama and Springsteen of them had been in such close proximity to one another (and to me as well, by dint of my standing at the site less than 24 hours later) warmed my already heated up heart. Just hearing the voices of Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama often makes me immediately well up emotionally and shed real and cathartic tears. This is based on the content on what they communicate (more on that later), but also simply because of the resonance that comes through in each of their vocal tones-passion, compassion, hope, faith, prose intertwined with poetry. For me, when it comes to Springsteen and Obama, almost everything they say (and sing) is perfectly articulated, perfectly reflective of my world-view, cultural reference points and values; nothing more really ever needs to be added. President Obama later looked back on Springsteen’s participation in the “We Are One” concert and remarked, “I watched him on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial when he rocked the National Mall before the inauguration, and I thought it captured as well as anything the spirit of what America should be about. On a day like that I remember: I’m the President, but he’s The Boss.”
During the 2008 campaign that preceded Obama’s victory and inauguration, Bruce Springsteen endorsed Barack Obama’s candidacy for President of the United States saying, “When I first heard Senator Obama, I thought, “Yeah that’s the language I want to speak, that I have been trying to speak all these years. I feel an enormous commonality with his vision of our country, it’s the America I’ve envisioned in my music for the past 35 years.” Their common vision has been mine as well for as long as I can remember, and the partnership between The Boss and The President provides for me an almost unfathomable representation of my deepest held values. President Obama once said about Bruce Springsteen, “He knows how to make you feel, at least for an instant, we could all be better than we are. That’s a talent.” It’s actually true about both of them.
There were a number of milestones in the Obama-Springsteen relationship following that initial connection forged during Obama’s meteoric rise to the presidency. In December 2009, President Obama presented Bruce Springsteen with a Kennedy Center Honor. In doing so, Obama remarked, “In the life of our country only a handful of people have tapped the full power of music to tell the real American story-with honesty; from the heart, and one of those people is Bruce Springsteen.” He further said of their kinship: “We both constantly reference straddling between two places, here’s where the country is, and here’s where I want it to be.”
Then, during the 2012 campaign, Springsteen campaigned extensively for President Obama’s re-election, telling an Ohio crowd that he’s spent his career “writing about the distance between the American dream and the American reality” and believed Obama was the one to close the gap between the two. Springsteen was one of the closers of the campaign, appearing with Obama at three events the day before the election (and traveling with the President aboard Air Force One all day), including the stop in Madison, Wisconsin shown on the video with Springsteen singing and Obama praising The Boss’s efforts that begins this post. At each stop, Springsteen sang his songs, filled with characters who live through the struggles and triumphs of working and family life, and who are often at the mercy of political forces that can undermine their best efforts.
During that frenetic November 5, 2012 day (one writer from Slate stated that, in the final days of the campaign, it was almost as though Springsteen was “on the ticket, Obama’s spiritual VP”), Obama and Springsteen were joined on one of the stops by the rapper Jay-Z. Beyond the campaign, that event had special resonance for Springsteen because of the diversity of the crowd and Bruce often refers back to the expereince:
“I only played three of four songs, but it was a deeply thrilling performance. This is the audience of my dreams, the audience I imagined playing for; I was playing to white faces and Black faces, a lot of people who didn’t know me from the man on the moon, probably hearing me for the first time…We were playing for a huge cross section of America, which is something that I always aspired to, but we never quite got to in the E Street Band outside of these massive events, such as the Super Bowl or political rallies, particularly with President Obama. That was a great experience.”
According to both men, Bruce and his wife Patti visited Barack and Michelle at the White House during President Obama’s 8 years in office more than a few times, including at a dinner where apparently Springsteen played piano and Obama sang Motown and some Broadway tunes. But perhaps the most impactful of all such occasions occurred during the last month of Obama’s presidency, January 2017. Obama invited Springsteen to do a “small, quiet and private” concert as an outgoing gift to his staff. Springsteen decided to play some songs acoustically and tell stories from his newly released memoir Born To Run. Afterwards, as Springsteen tells it, President Obama approached Springsteen and said how special and unique he felt the performance had been, but that it was something that other people ought to have the privilege to hear and experience. That exchange is why Bruce Springsteen always gives Barack Obama credit for what became a full-fledged one person Broadway show (“Springsteen on Broadway”), a huge smash that had Springsteen singing songs and delivering monologues five nights a week at the Walter Kerr Theater for a year and change.
(To be continued on the next entry)
The Boss and The President (Part 1)