Walk like a Man (5 page)

Springsteen's instincts were spot on: there is a marked difference in tone and theme between the two albums.
Human Touch,
with songs like the title track and “Real World,” highlights the movement from the fear and the difficulties of relationships explored on
Tunnel of Love
toward acceptance and trust. It's a difficult journey, and the album's final track, a hushed, intimate version of “Pony Boy,” serves as a grace note—a sign that perhaps, just this once, the journey ends in the safety and comfort of a home and family.

If
Human Touch
is the journey,
Lucky Town
is the destination. The record has its roots in “Living Proof,” which begins by chronicling Evan's birth, but also explores the power of the singer's own mind to imprison him, and his escape from his own self-imposed bonds to find a family, “a close band of happy thieves.” The album also pokes good-natured fun at Springsteen's fame, celebrates the singer's current happiness, acknowledges the risks of trust, and confirms the faith and confidence he has in the relationship. Yet it's not all hearts and flowers. “Souls of the Departed” is a political anthem rooted in the deaths of soldiers in the Gulf War and a child in Compton.

It's useful to consider
Human Touch
and
Lucky Town
alongside
Tunnel of Love
when measuring of Springsteen's developing inner consciousness. While they are unquestionably the work of the same man, one can see, vividly, the changes worked by and within those five missing years. As Springsteen told
Rolling Stone,
“
Human
Touch
was definitely something that I struggled to put together . . . At the end, I felt like it was good, but it was about me trying to get to a place. It sort of chronicled the post–
Tunnel of Love
period . . . I'd spent a lot of time writing about my past, real and imagined, in some fashion. But with
Lucky Town,
I felt like that's where I am. This is who I am. This is what I have to say. These are the stories I have to tell. This is what's important in my life right now.”

Given that there hadn't been a Springsteen tour since 1988, it was crucial for him to go back on the road. With no E Street Band, Springsteen held auditions, and relied on Bittan's input to assemble a group of young players; Bittan would take on the role of onstage coach, which Van Zandt had held so long in The E Street Band. After much rehearsal and several preview gigs, the new band headed to Europe to open the tour.

Before they left, though, the fate of the two albums was already in motion. They both debuted near the top of the charts, but they didn't linger there long, falling off the top forty almost as soon as they had reached it. In addition to the poor sales, the albums also received something else which Springsteen hadn't faced in several decades: decidedly mixed reviews.

Despite the poor reception accorded the new albums, and the general scorn of the fan community for Springsteen choosing to tour with a new band (especially behind material which would—to their ears—have been a comfortable fit for The E Street Band
²¹
), the tour was, generally speaking, a commercial success, and included such benchmarks as eleven shows at New Jersey's Meadowlands Arena selling out in little more than two hours.

Early in 1993, Springsteen was approached by director Jonathan Demme about the possibility of his contributing a song to the soundtrack of a film he was making about a lawyer, played by Tom Hanks, who contracts aids and sues his firm for wrongful dismissal.
Philadelphia
would go on to become one of the first mainstream film treatments of the disease, and earned Hanks his first Academy Award for Best Actor.

Springsteen wrote and recorded his contribution to the soundtrack in the summer of 1993. “
Streets of Philadelphia
” was a top ten single upon its release in early 1994,
²²
and became something of an anthem for the gay community despite the fact that, lyrically, there is nothing in the song even implicitly about aids, gay rights, or homophobia. Indeed, it lyrically and thematically resembles some of the sadder songs on
Human Touch.
It is, however, tremendously moving, a plangent prayer set against a heavy rhythm track.

And in March of 1994, it won Bruce Springsteen the Academy Award for Best Original Song (he had won the Golden Globe too, earlier).

Aside from the flurry around “Streets of Philadelphia,” and his new role as a Hollywood celebrity, 1994 was a quiet year for Springsteen. He and Scialfa's youngest child, Sam Ryan, was born in January, and Springsteen was largely out of public view.

Rumor has it that Springsteen was suffering from writer's block over the course of 1994, which shines light on his decision, in early 1995, to re-form The E Street Band for a week of studio sessions to record several new songs for a planned
Greatest Hits
album. Three of the four “new” songs released on the album were written years before, although “Secret Garden” was a new work (and had a labored quality one might expect from a writer working his way through a block). The sessions were filmed for a documentary, which is illuminating in that it demonstrates just how conscientious Springsteen was with the image he wanted to present to the world. One would never know, from
Blood Brothers,
the level of anger many of the E Street Band members were still carrying over their sacking. An abbreviated performance with the band at the end of the week at a New York bar provided footage for the video for “Murder Incorporated,” and served as a reminder for those in the audience
²³
just how much had been lost when Springsteen parted ways with the E Streeters.

Springsteen apparently didn't see it that way. Following the February release of
Greatest Hits,
²⁴
he once again turned his back on The E Street Band and began working on the songs that would be released in the fall as
The Ghost of Tom Joad.
²⁵
These songs demonstrate a different approach to songwriting for Springsteen.

Perhaps as a way of circumventing the rumored writer's block, Springsteen begin building his songs based on external influences, rather than internal inspiration. It's a more journalistic approach, with the song “The Ghost of Tom Joad” updating the classic character from John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath
²⁶
into the poverty-stricken, contemporary southwest, while “Balboa Park” and “Sinaloa Cowboys” were drawn from newspaper coverage of illegal Mexican immigrants drawn into child prostitution and the crystal meth trade, respectively.

The Ghost of Tom Joad
is seen as the spiritual heir to
Nebraska,
more than a decade later. Certainly the approach is similar, rooted in acoustic instrumentation, but
Joad
had very much a deliberate album-making process, lacking the accidental wonder that was
Nebraska.
It's a comfortable album, its warm textures and rich tonalities at odds with the starkness of its material.

Also very different from the
Nebraska
experience was that Springsteen chose to tour in support of the album. The
Joad
tour was a staid affair: solo, acoustic shows performed in concert halls and theatres around the world over the period of a year and a half.

The shows mixed new songs from
Joad
with radically re-envisioned versions of some of his classics (including an intense version of “Born in the U.S.A.” that clarified once and for all the actual meaning of the song, for anyone still unclear). Springsteen definitely had a vision in mind for the concerts, and it shows in his performance style. For once, he's not loose. He downplays and under-sings at every opportunity, and this, combined with often simplistic arrangements, forces the lyrics into stark relief. These are stories he is telling, and he wants his listeners to focus on every word. To this end, he began almost every show by admonishing the audience not to sing or clap along, and generally to “shut the fuck up.”
²⁷
Springsteen, the reluctant student, had become something of a stern teacher.

As the tour progressed, Springsteen gained something that had, thus far in his career, eluded him: credibility. He had long been loved and admired, cheered and fawned over, but in a way, he had never been respected. With the
Joad
tour, Springsteen became the thinking man's rock star, which was perhaps an odd role for a community college dropout. The
Joad
album and tour, with its central literary allusion and its journalistic rootedness, placed him in the American literary continuum in the footsteps of Steinbeck himself.

Springsteen's nomination for a second Academy Award, for “Dead Man Walkin',” the title song to the Sean Penn film about the awakening of anti–death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean, only added to his credibility.

The tour stop on the night of November 8, 1996, was, in many ways, a typical
Joad
show. All of the elements were the same—a small hall, the twang in Springsteen's voice (which he adopted when he started writing about the American southwest), the often-pinched vocals—and the setlist included most of the usual numbers. What set the show apart was the venue itself.

On the night of November 8, 1996, Bruce Springsteen went home.

The show at St. Rose of Lima school was a benefit for the school and a community center, and it was the first time Springsteen had stood on the stage of his primary school since the mid-sixties when, as a member of The Castiles, he had played covers for youth dances there. This time, he was one of the world's most famous men, a multi-millionaire in his mid-forties who managed to still be the voice of the people; a man who had spent the better part of the last decade coming to terms with his life and his psyche and addressing his demons, many of which could trace their roots back to Freehold, if not to that very school.

In Freehold, with the substitution and addition of a few songs, the basic
Joad
setlist is
²⁸
transformed—to my mind, at least—into something of a summation of Springsteen's life and concerns. In many ways, the performance at St. Rose of Lima brings everything full circle.

Springsteen certainly seems to have been aware of this, even in the moment. That night, Springsteen opened the show with “The River,” rather than “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” While the familiar opening lines, about growing up in the area, elicited a cheer from the crowd, the song as a whole shifted the meaning of the night: this wasn't going to be an outward-looking show, focusing on the tragedies of others. It was going to be personal.

From the stage of his former parochial school, he sang about his mother and her struggles and her inspiration to him (“The Wish”). In front of a hometown crowd, perhaps including some of the very people who had ostracized him and called him weird, he spoke about how he used to skulk around to avoid getting beaten up. In front of the nuns, the spiritual descendants of the women of God who had tormented him and called him trash, he sang one of the defiant anthems of his youth (“Growin' Up”). In the very place where his faith was shattered, he performed songs drawing on the shards of that faith (“Adam Raised a Cain,” “The Promised Land”). He dedicated “This Hard Land” to Marion Vinyard, widow of Tex Vinyard, the manager of The Castiles, who had opened her home to the teenage band.

And over the course of the evening, in the very town where his father grew angry and bitter under the weight of poverty and intermittent work, he sang a number of songs about Douglas, and their relationship. From the stark filial despair of “Adam Raised a Cain” to the simple, touching “Used Cars,” from the haunting “Mansion on the Hill” to a conciliatory “My Hometown,”
²⁹
Springsteen put his relationship with his father into the forefront that night.

The show is remarkable to listen to, knowing what we know of Springsteen and his life. It's a low-key and careful performance, every song performed deeply and intently, as if ensuring that none of his meaning is overlooked. Over the course of twenty-four songs, Springsteen takes a look back, and a look out, reconciling himself not only to his past, but to the town itself. It's exorcism by music.

The extent to which this is true is demonstrated by the final song Springsteen performed that night, a new song he said from the stage he would perform only once
³⁰
: “In Freehold.”

The song itself is something of a throwaway. It's virtually a spoken folk track, with clunky rhymes and awkward meter, clearly composed for the occasion. It hardly panders, though. In fact, in one song, Springsteen seems to address the concerns of his entire adult life. With a metronomic refrain of “In Freehold,” Springsteen talk-sings about his childhood, including how his sister got pregnant as a teen, how the town broke his father, how he learned his love for music, how he had his first kiss on a Friday night, and his heart broken many times, how it was a redneck town, cruel to those who didn't fit in, and about his education in that very school.

It's one of the keys to therapy: you need someone to listen, someone to whom you can tell your stories. For one night, Springsteen was able to tell his stories to the people in them. He was able to finish the circle, to come home again, not as a conquering hero—though he was certainly treated as one—but as a kid from the neighborhood, grown up and at peace with the course of his life, reconciled to his past, comfortable in the present, and looking to the future.

After he finished the song, Springsteen posed on stage for photos, as he had promised he would. Later that night, he left town, and headed home.

FIFTEEN YEARS later, it's possible to see that night as something of a turning point in Springsteen's career.

The time since has seen an almost unprecedented level of productivity from the singer, and a daring that wasn't there early in his career. What's missing in the years since is the palpable sense of conflict that was so apparent
³¹
earlier on.