Walk like a Man (22 page)

I don't know if I told Greg and John that I had sent the book out. I probably did. It was probably casual, like a
fait accompli.
I generally tried not to make too big of a deal out of anything to do with my writing. I couldn't let anyone see how important it was to me. How central to my being.

My mother, I'm sure, would have called it putting all of my eggs into one basket. Yet it was more than that, even. I had staked my whole life on one roll of the dice. One reader.

I had no idea what I would do if she didn't like it.

The show the next night was the show in which Springsteen allegedly audibled in “My Hometown” instead of “Incident on 57th Street.” It was the show where John and I got mildly hammered when we discovered—after buying the beers—that they weren't allowed on the floor. What option did we have but to pound through the eight beers in less than twenty minutes? It was the show where we stood in front of Clarence for the first time, and I got to sing along at the top of my lungs to the final lines of “This Hard Land.”

And it was the night I discovered I loved “Dancing in the Dark.”

It was the guitar heavy version that we had first seen in Tacoma the year before, but now it seemed different. When he hit the line “I'm sick of sittin' round here trying to write this book,” I laughed out loud. It was what I had been doing for months. It was exactly how I had been feeling.

That song's been a touchstone for me ever since. In 2008, at three shows in a row, I suspect my laughter might have been a little maniacal: I was mired in the depths of what would become
Bedtime
Story,
my second published novel, which was then just a stack of notebooks with no end in sight.

But that moment in 2003, that first laugh of recognition? My manuscript was away, being looked at by an editor, and I knew that no matter what happened, whether it got published or went back into the drawer, I was a writer. It was like the gypsy woman had promised. I was right on schedule.

I'm dying for some action

I'm sick of sitting 'round here trying to write this book

I need a love reaction

come on now baby gimme just one look

1
. Interestingly, none of the singles hit number one on the Billboard chart. “Dancing in the Dark” was blocked first by Duran Duran's “The Reflex,” then by Prince's “When Doves Cry.” Yes, I appreciate the irony of Springsteen's synth-pop gambit being chart-blocked by the pretty-boy synth kings in Duran Duran. And, hey, “When Doves Cry” is just a fantastic song.

2
. As I was writing this, I posted this observation on Facebook and Twitter—never have I posted anything that has started so much dialogue, or caused so much disagreement. Several people argued that “The River” was Springsteen's most existentially wrought song. Some argued “The Promise.” “State Trooper” and “Stolen Car” were both mentioned. These are all valid contenders, but I stand by my point. And fuck, it's my book, so . . .

3
. Yes, years. The songs that made up
Nebraska,
released in 1982, were, in many ways, the first demos of the
Born in the U.S.A.
sessions—those tracks date from early January of 1982, a home-recording session that also included early versions of “Born in the U.S.A.,” “I'm Goin' Down,” and “I'm On Fire.” It was only when the sessions with the band in early 1982 failed to transform the bulk of those demos into E Street Band songs that it was decided to release them in their original form. Which, given the bleak, gut-wrenching nature of
Nebraska,
should have really served as a hint of just how dark
Born in the U.S.A.
was, despite the cheery flag cover and synthesizers.

4
. I have never felt closer to my mother than I did the day she, upon being invited to visit the principal's office to discuss the issue, proceeded to lacerate the principal on my behalf. She's the reason I wasn't expelled, and why the film went on to represent the school in a province-wide competition.

5
. When I was in grade seven, I asked one of the English teachers to read one of my spy novels—thirty or forty pages of badly printed looseleaf in a Duo-Tang. He was generous and careful in his response, especially when I asked him what he thought of the sex scenes. “Well,” he said, measuredly. “There's a reason you don't buy shoes from a snake.”

6
. Of course, it is not that easy. One of my mother's recurring questions in those years was, “Why can't you write anything happy?” I suspect she still asks herself that, but she's given up on asking me.

7
. Over the Labor Day weekend in 1987, I entered the 3-Day Novel Contest, a marathon session that requires you to write a novel in, well, three days. The book I ended up with was a fractured collection of vignettes about couples making love in deserted boathouses, friends getting high and throwing rocks off of overpasses, parties down by the river's edge, and young lovers saying goodbye, all set on the Sunday of the Labor Day weekend. I called it
Soft Summer,
drawn from the first line in Bruce Springsteen's “Backstreets.”

8
. Well, that was the stated reason. We all know the truth by now, don't we?

9
. She did say it, in fact: we met up with her the next day, and “clusterfuck” was one of the first words out of her mouth.

Jesus Was an Only Son

Album:
Devils & Dust

Released:
April 26, 2005

Recorded:
1996–2004

Version discussed:
VH1 Storytellers, Recorded April 4, 2005

Album/released:
VH1 Storytellers DVD, Released September 6, 2005

D
ESPITE HIS POSITION atop the rock-and-roll pyramid, Springsteen has spent significant chunks of his career on the other, folkier side of the tracks.

As he recounts in his introduction to “Long Time Comin'” on the bonus DVD that accompanied the initial release of his
Devils &
Dust
album: “I was signed as a guy with an acoustic guitar when I was twenty-two . . . I always, even when I was in my late teens, had a band, and then on another night I would go down to the coffee shop with my twelve-string and I would sing a whole group of songs that wouldn't work in a bar, or needed more attention, or were just . . . different.”

With
Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town,
and
The River,
Springsteen largely embraced his rock side, distancing himself from the folk elements present in
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.
(on “The Angel” in particular), and in
The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street
Shuffle.
The folkie oompah of “Wild Billy's Circus Story” on the latter album is a jarring contrast to the rock-jazz elements of the other songs, but tunes like “Incident on 57th Street” and “New York City Serenade” reveal a singer-songwriter's eye for story.

Nebraska,
the 1982 album which followed up the blockbuster success of
The River,
was something completely different. The stark, mournful, at times nihilistic collection was actually recorded by Springsteen at his New Jersey home in early 1982 using only an acoustic guitar, a harmonica, and a primitive mixing board hooked up to a cassette deck. The songs were demos, rough versions intended for the band, and they weren't considered for public release until the recording sessions failed to exceed their raw power.

Although widely regarded as
Nebraska
's folkie successor,
The
Ghost of Tom Joad,
released in 1995, was intended for public consumption from the outset. For that reason, possibly, it lacks the naked intimacy of
Nebraska,
and feels overly self-conscious. It's also not a solo acoustic album; many of the tracks feature what you might call a folk-rock version of The E Street Band.
¹

The Ghost of Tom Joad
is a solid album, and the title track has become a Springsteen classic,
²
but to me it feels like a case of too much reportage, not enough insight. Springsteen had done a lot of reading about life in the border country, the difficult lives of illegal immigrants, their role in the drug culture, their fate, and he channeled his research into his lyrics, creating complex stories that, in the main, failed to connect.

Ten years later, Springsteen released his third “folk” album,
Devils & Dust.
Another small-ensemble album—this time with a string section as well as a folk group comprising mainly E Street mainstays—the album met with limited success before virtually disappearing. That's not really surprising: the album was all over the map stylistically, cobbled together from songs as much as fifteen years old.
³
It also lacked solid thematic unity. “Devils & Dust” is a political song, rooted in the American war in the Gulf, while “Reno” is a sad, frank song about an encounter with a prostitute. “
Leah
” and “
Long Time Comin'
” are among Springsteen's finest adult love songs, but “Matamoros Banks” is very much in the social-observation mode common on
The Ghost of Tom Joad.

For all that,
Devils & Dust
is a strong album, addressing a number of Springsteen's career- and lifelong concerns in highly distilled ways. The title song, for example, expresses his political leanings while never losing sight of the real individuals caught in the crossfire of ideologies. “Long Time Comin'” is rooted in the reality of a long-term relationship and a promise to learn from the mistakes of the past.
⁴
“
The Hitter
” is a folk-music short story, rich in pathos and hard-won wisdom, about a boxer whose great talent is taking a fall. “Matamoros Banks” scratched Springsteen's socially conscious itch with its account of desperate Mexican immigrants drowning as they attempt to cross the titular river.
⁵

And then there's “
Jesus Was an Only Son
.”

The strands of faith and family that had run so deeply through Springsteen's work reached an apotheosis with “Jesus Was an Only Son,” an account not only of Jesus's final hours, but also of the relationship between Christ and his mother. The song works on both levels, using imagery that is both domestic and canonical. A mother praying for her child is a powerful enough image, but it takes on a different hue when that child is Jesus. It's an intense, breathtakingly beautiful song.

Not that you would know it from the album proper. On
Devils
& Dust,
“Jesus Was an Only Son” is a bit of a dud. It's listenable, but the musical setting is banal, and Springsteen's delivery is largely dispassionate, undermining the words and their significance. And this isn't just an instance where the live version of a song is better (more energetic, more intense) or different (with a recast musical setting, say). In the case of “Jesus Was an Only Son,” the live version is a completely new song.

Typically, when Springsteen releases a song on a studio album, it remains largely fixed in that form; subsequent live versions might take a different musical approach, or contain minor lyrical variation,
⁶
but the song is “done.” He's too much of a perfectionist to give early drafts the imprinteur of official release.
⁷

It seems there was something about “Jesus Was an Only Son,” though.

Perhaps it was the lyrics. Perhaps Springsteen felt he hadn't yet said what he actually wanted to say. Perhaps it was the experience of exploring the song for VH
1 Storytellers.

Whatever the reason, throughout the
Devils & Dust
tour, “Jesus Was an Only Son” was a highlight, the quietest showstopper in the Springsteen canon.
⁸
Every night, he cracked the song open.

Early on, as he'd done on
Storytellers,
Springsteen interrupted the song with spoken word bits between the verses about what it means to be a parent, and what it must have been like for Christ, imagining a life of running a seashore bar in Galilee, preaching on the weekends.
⁹
As the tour progressed, the song accreted meaning. Springsteen took to introducing the song by talking about his family, the Italian and the Irish sides, what it was like growing up in a small town in different shades of faith.
¹⁰
Within the song, he'd expand on his feelings about both parenthood and sacrifice.

By the time he hit Seattle and Vancouver in August 2005, the stories that accompanied the song had been developing for months. I had no idea. I'd kept myself largely ignorant of the format and the setlists for the shows, wanting to maintain a sense of suspense right up to the moment Springsteen took the stage.

Nothing could have prepared me anyway.

SUNDAY MORNING, a little past nine. There wasn't a car on the road, and the heat shimmered off the asphalt in gasoline waves as it stretched into the distance. Any dust I kicked up hung in the still air. God, it was hot. First thing in the morning and already my shirt was sticking to me. Again. How many times had I sweated through my clothes in the last twenty-four hours?

It was August 14, 2005, and I was walking down to my grandmother's house. She wanted to go to church, so if we were going to have a visit, just the two of us, it needed to be early. She'd baked muffins with fresh blueberries; they were waiting for me. She was waiting for me.

Cori and Xander were still asleep, snuggled together in the room that used to be Dave's, before that Mom and Dad's. Just across the hall from my old room, now given over to storage and garage sale finds.

My legs were killing me.

It feels sometimes like I've spent my whole life walking down that road. That morning, though, it all seemed different somehow. More real. I'd only had a couple of hours sleep—Greg had dropped me off pretty late after the concert—but I didn't feel tired, just different.