Bruce Springsteen is who we were supposed to have grown up to be. I don’t necessarily mean a rock and roll star, although I hear the pay is good, the benefits even better and the furloughs all self-imposed.
What I mean is, Springsteen is the baby boomer ideal — the man who grew up to be not only a serious musician, but also a serious person with serious ideas, while not really having to grow up at all. He succeeded where so many in his — my — generation have failed (see: Clinton, Bill; Bush, George W.).
Springsteen is a mega-multimillionaire who somehow remains a credible voice for those left behind in hard times — and, more important, a voice for the idea that there’s hope for those left behind to catch up.
It’s a strange irony — one of my favorite kinds — that the boomers helped bring down the financial markets, but from the inside, where they ended up running/ruining things. The ’60s generation has been so thoroughly rejected that when John McCain (pre-’60s) and Barack Obama (post-’60s) became the presidential candidates, who didn’t welcome the change?
And then there’s Bruce. I went to see Springsteen on Friday night for the upteenth time, going back about 30 years. I went for the music, of course, but while I’m a Bruce fanatic, I love a lot of different music. And yet I always see Springsteen — and for the same reason: He is the hips-shaking, earth-quaking, nerve-breaking, Viagra-taking, history-making (quoting from Bruce’s nightly paean to the E Street Band) antidote to cynicism.
You can’t see Springsteen and not leave feeling good. He ended the show — three hours of a rock-and-roll endurance test, won handily by the guy who’s nearly 60 — with 15 minutes of “Glory Days,” now a self-mocking tale of nostalgia that takes us a step or two beyond the original rock ideal, the hope to die before you get old.
Part of Springsteen’s appeal is his long-standing embrace of his inner rock star, and that three hours into the show, he’s swinging his guitar around his neck, still trying to impress the little pretties in the front row and screaming with Little Steven (who grew up to be Silvio in “The Sopranos”), “What time is it?” It was, of course, “Mile High Boss Time.” He’s too old, too serious, for this kind of cheesiness, and yet, if he’s not, neither are the 20,000 middle-agers filling the Pepsi Center.
But there’s more going on, more than the music and more, too, than Springsteen’s appeal to contribute to Food Bank of the Rockies. You can’t separate Springsteen’s music from his politics.
Springsteen first turned to politics in an explicit way in 2004, embracing John Kerry. I don’t have to tell you how that imagery doesn’t quite work. Neither did the embrace. But Obama was a better fit. Springsteen is in Obama’s iPod and was the headliner for his inauguration weekend. And if Obama wants to bow to royalty, he can safely bow to the Boss.
Now Springsteen is touring behind a new album, “Working on a Dream,” a pop album at a time when the national mood is not exactly upbeat. Springsteen finds himself in a similar position to Obama. As chronicler of the working class, Springsteen wants you to understand the seriousness of the economic situation, but he also doesn’t want you to translate that into hopelessness. For Springsteen, it’s always been about redemption, about the town full of losers and pulling out of here to win.
He figured out romance early in his career, but not just young love — also romance the way Steinbeck wrote it. In his show, there’s a place some call the recession arc, where he sings songs like “Youngstown,” about the mill town in Ohio that stands forgotten, and about “Johnny 99” — a killer put away by the judge for 98 plus one. And while the music explodes in pain and joy, Springsteen sings:
Now judge I had debts no honest man could pay
The bank was holdin’ my mortgage and they was takin’ my house away
Now I ain’t sayin’ that makes me an innocent man
But it was more ‘n all this that put that gun in my hand
In Springsteen’s rock and roll, it’s the ideas that are dangerous. And in his six-song encore set, he’ll mix a full-out, 12-piece, Big-Man-blowing rock anthem — “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” — with a 19th-century “Hard Times Come Again No More,” with 20,000 people on their feet, gospel-style, singing along.
The show was about the music, of course, but also what is and what should be and what can be. For me, the highlight was “Racing in the Street,” a minor Springsteen epic about cars and girls and hormone- fueled dreams and how these dreams can’t last and how his girl is crying on her daddy’s porch, waiting for a new dream, and how Springsteen sings, “Tonight my baby and me, we’re gonna ride to the sea/And wash these sins off our hands.”
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost. com.
