Walk like a Man (13 page)

The thing is? It took you longer to read the above paragraph than it took me to say no. Far longer. I said no without even thinking about it.

Dan looked stunned.

Peter looked even more stunned.

“We're staying,” I said.

Dan and Dana wandered away, shaking their heads. Peter stared at me. “How are we going to get home?”

“Fucked if I know,” I said, as the lights went down for the second set.

There's lots I don't remember about that show, but the highlights stuck with me: “Roulette,” the long-lost song Springsteen wrote in the wake of the Three Mile Island incident; a raging “
Light of Day
” to close out the show; “Sweet Soul Music” in the encores; “Ain't Got You” blending seamlessly into “She's the One.”

But there are two things I recall clearly.

The first was Bruce and Patti: the chemistry between them was palpable, even across the length of an arena. Constant eye contact, sultry expressions, an electric sense that anything could happen; Springsteen's marriage was clearly over.

The second was what happened in the encores. When Springsteen sang “Born to Run” in that stripped down, pleading, searching version, something broke inside me, cracking the walls I had built up around myself.

I was seventeen. I'd soon be leaving home. I was finishing school and going away, across the water to the University of Victoria. I had chosen UVic to put as much distance as I could between myself and everything I knew without getting on a plane.

I was terrified.

“Born to Run” had once inspired me to dream of blowing the dust and shit-smell from my little town off me as quickly as I could. But the reality had changed. I knew what I was running from, but what was I running to?

When I glanced over at Peter, as the song was ending, he looked devastated, sad and desperate, deeply uncertain and confused.

He looked like I felt.

The rest of the encores passed in a blur; they were designed to. Every Springsteen show has its own dynamic, but the plan seems to be the same: to wring every last bit of energy from the audience before releasing them into the night. I screamed myself raw, begging for just one more song.

Peter and I staggered out into the spring night, shredded by the concert but oddly subdued. That version of “Born to Run” . . . We were both carrying it with us.

And outside, we ran smack dab into our conundrum.

“So, how are we gonna get home?” Peter asked.

“I have no idea,” I said, trying to see around the throngs of fans spilling out of the building.

“You have no—”

“Come on,” I said, leading him through the crowd, up a hill into the parking lot.

I had seen the buses on the rise from the doors of the arena. A small army of near-identical charters, all with their engines running. Peter and I had to try two or three before we found one of the coaches that had been rented by cfox for the night.

We threw ourselves on the mercy of the driver, recounting our tale of woe: the dope smoking, the poor condition of the car, and, perhaps most damningly, the decision to leave a Springsteen concert early.

After a quick consultation with a woman with a clipboard, the bus driver waved us aboard.

I was unconscious before the bus was even finished loading. The next thing I knew I was stumbling, sleep-clumsy, into a parking lot in downtown Vancouver at about three am.

Peter and I walked for hours, not going anywhere because there was nowhere for us to go. We talked about the future, about what we figured was going to happen next for each of us. We talked about how excited we were, and how scared. We found an all-night restaurant, where we split an order of fries and gravy.

We sat in that restaurant as the sun came up. Nobody in the world knew where we were. Nobody was worrying about us. And we were fine.

It felt like what I had always imagined being a grown-up would feel like.

Baby this town rips the bones from your back

It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap

We gotta get out while we're young

'Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

1
. Watch me, I'm about to do it.

2
. This being the 1970s, before the rise of the indie rock underground, you were either a major-label artist or you were in a bar band, playing on the weekends within an easy drive of your house. There was no in-between.

3
. An effect that has been replicated live over the last decade's worth of tours to considerably less positive effect. Seriously—how many guitarists does a band need? Surely the four or five of Springsteen's recent tours are excessive?

4
. His distaste for the hype was so intense that, upon arriving in London prior to his first English shows—one of which is documented on the
Hammersmith Odeon
dvd— Springsteen grew enraged at the billboards announcing “At last, London is ready for Bruce Springsteen!” and the leaflets on every seat at the concert hall. He famously tore down every poster with his picture on it he encountered. He has, since then, gotten considerably more comfortable with hype.

5
. I suppose it depends on how you feel about heavily orchestrated, wall of sound studio products versus live from the floor recordings.

6
. If you ever happen to be at a Springsteen show, clinging to the lip of the stage, you should spend at least part of “Born to Run” with your back to the band, facing out into the audience. The crowd seems to become a living, unified organism, and to witness that while being a part of it is an experience almost religious in its intensity.

7
. Springsteen has, in recent years, tried to replicate that moment with the mass sing-along, houselights on, to “Badlands.” It's a similar moment, but nowhere near as powerful: for many fans, “Born to Run” is
the
song, and that moment of a concert is singular and unmatched.

8
. I asked my mother this very question a few weeks ago. I assumed she would say something along the lines of, “Well, you were very mature for your age, and I knew if there were any problems you'd be able to think your way out of them and act responsibly.” Well, she sort of said that. What she really said was “Actually you've been pretty self-sufficient since birth and you did whine and cajole a lot!! I just inherently felt that it would be okay and you were capable of looking out for yourself. However, there may have been difficulties that I'm not aware of, and even now, I'm not sure I want to know!” Mom, you might want to skip this chapter.

9
. The t-shirts were captioned “This is not a dark ride”—the t-shirts lied.

10
. I have no idea if “Dan” is his actual name, but I need to use something, right?

11
. The fan in me says, of course, “Cool.” My parental side, though, keeps repeating something along the lines of “Are you kidding me?”

12
. In retrospect, of course, Dan was just a young guy, probably only a couple of years older than we were, working a shitty retail job, with a shitty car that was only barely going to make it to Tacoma, with a girlfriend who was . . . well, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

13
. The apartment was a lot like the one I lived in my first year out of student housing in Victoria.

14
. Let's call her, in the absence of any memory of her real name, Dana.

15
. Especially if you're a music fan, with a habit of going to shows. On my first date with Shawna, my high school girlfriend, we went to a Bob Dylan/Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers show in 1986. When I was recounting this story to some friends years later, everyone nodded. “Oh, right. 1986. Summer of the Great Pot Drought.” That's how deeply it runs in the culture: they remembered the Great Pot Drought before they remembered Expo 86.

16
. One of my fondest memories is of being part of such a circle with a group of biker-stoners, watching a pbs special about nasa. But that's not my story to tell.

17
. Or, if you were one of my friends, you adulterated your homemade cigarettes with weed, and took great delight in toking up in the smoking area between the main school and the industrial ed shops.

18
. This was brought crashingly home to me a year or so ago. I was downtown, catching a bus back to work after a radio appearance. I was smoking a cigarette a good twenty feet from the nearest bus shelter. An elderly woman pushing a wire cart gave me the stink-eye all the way down the sidewalk and all the way into the shelter, where she sat down on the bench next to two nouveaux punks who were passing a joint back and forth. She smiled and talked to them for the several minutes before her bus arrived. I can only assume she came downtown that day to pick up some glaucoma medication. Nudge nudge, wink wink.

19
. This statement is only true, however, if you are not high yourself. Speaking as someone who has flushed more than a couple of grams of weed down a toilet in his life, when you're high, there is nothing funny about this. Not a goddamn thing.

20
. The plan for our return to Agassiz was so convoluted I can't actually piece it together. As best as I can recall, Dan was supposed to drop us off at Sue's parents' (my step-grandparents') place in Surrey where we were going to crash for a few hours before getting a ride to the Skytrain to take it to go catch a bus from downtown Vancouver. Though I could be making all that up. I honestly have no idea.

4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)

Album:
The Wild, the Innocen t & the E Street Shuffle

Released:
September 11, 1973

Recorded:
June–August 1973

N
OSTALGIA IS, by its very nature, bittersweet, the happiest memories laced with melancholy. It's that combination, that opposition of forces, that makes it so compelling. People, places, events, times: we miss them, and there's a pleasure in the missing and a sadness in the love.

The feeling is most acute, sometimes cripplingly so, when we find ourselves longing for the moment we're in, the people we're actually with.
¹

That nameless feeling, that sense of excruciating beauty, of pained happiness, is at the core of “
4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)
.”

As a song, it's an impressionistic wonder, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the carnival life of the Asbury Park pier and beach in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The people in the song are as varied, and bizarre, as some of Dylan's characters, with the significant difference that some of these people are real: the Latin lovers and bikers and factory girls are types, but Madam Marie, for example, opened her fortune-telling parlor on the boardwalk in 1932 and didn't close it until 2008.

The narrator is keenly aware of his time, their time, perhaps an epoch, passing, and he balances a wise acceptance with one last night of desperate resistance. He's lost his job, and his days of hanging on the boardwalk are coming to an end, but he's going to go down fighting. He also uses that sense of transience to make one last play for Sandy. You have to admire his moxie.

This is one of Springsteen's most gorgeous songs, and it captures that heady combination of joy and yearning. The arrangement is lush and romantic, both a complement and a counterpoint to the longing expressed in the lyrics.

The song, like the whole of
The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle,
is firmly rooted in both personal experience and the changes in Springsteen's life. Recording once again at the miserable 914 Sound Studios, Springsteen's days of sleeping on the Asbury Park beaches by day and playing at night were behind him. He had a band to support, and a career to build: his carefree days were a thing of the past, and it's difficult not to hear that loss in “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy).”

Stepping back, it's also a powerful song on the social level. In 1970, part of downtown Asbury Park was destroyed by fires and race riots. This, after years of slow decline for the once-thriving beach destination. As Springsteen was writing the song, the town itself was dying.

My one reservation? This is going to sound persnickety, but I don't think it should be set on the Fourth of July. I understand the richness of context the date provides: the significance of the holiday, the fireworks, the crowds. But it doesn't work thematically or fit the narrative. The Fourth of July is almost the beginning of the summer. There are weeks of sun and sand and factory girls taking off their pants to come.

Surely the elegiac feeling of the song is more suited to Labor Day?

. . .

I HAVE A PROBLEM with people who can say, with a straight face, that their high school years were the best years of their lives. I have issues with high school being remembered as anything other than a trial by fire, but the assertion also makes me feel sad, in a strange way. Pitying, even. I want to ask, “If high school was the best part of your life, what have the last twenty years been? How does it feel to live like that, in a perpetual state of disappointment?” But I don't. I'm too polite.
²

Greg and I have this conversation fairly often. He doesn't buy into the “high school as the best years” mindset, but he is a guy, it must be said, who left his small town to go to school in Vancouver, who moved to a different small town in the hinterland to get some seniority and experience, and then moved back to Agassiz at the earliest opportunity. He lives there still: as a homeowner, a doting father, and an administrator-teacher at the high school we attended.
³

I can't wrap myself around spending much more than a weekend in Agassiz, let alone moving back there, but his experience of the town while growing up was vastly different from mine. He was an athlete, a star basketball player on the team that, in our senior year, won the Provincial Boys aa championship. He had an easy, casual way of being that seemed to allow any digs or teenage cruelty (usually directed at his height) to roll off him.