has anyone EVER written anything worth reading about Bruce Springsteen?

Taking Sides: Bruce Springsteen vs. David Bowie

...But most people hate it.

BOOK REVIEW DESK
The Boss Bibliography
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: July 3, 2005, Sunday

Books about, inspired by or making reference to Bruce Springsteen are hardly a new, or especially rare, phenomenon. ''Born to Run,'' the first volume of Dave Marsh's quasi-authorized biography, appeared in 1979, and is now available along with its sequel, ''Glory Days,'' in a single volume called ''Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts.'' Springsteen's lyrics, which frequently, if modestly, display their own literary pedigree, resonate in the prose of writers like Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Ford, Stephen King (who prefaced his epic novel ''The Stand'' with a quotation from Springsteen's song ''Jungleland'') and T. C. Boyle, who took the title for his story collection ''Greasy Lake'' from imagery in a cut from Springsteen's first album. The basic Boss studies syllabus includes Daniel Cavicchi's ''Tramps Like Us,'' a sociological study of his fan base; Rolling Stone's omnibus ''Bruce Springsteen: The Rolling Stone Files''; and ''It Ain't No Sin to Be Glad You're Alive,'' Eric Alterman's knowledgeable and rousing elaboration of ''The Promise of Bruce Springsteen.''

In 1999, when he reunited the E Street Band for a long, triumphal tour, it seemed Springsteen's main enterprise would be the consolidation of his reputation as the greatest -- and perhaps also the last -- rocker to emerge from the ferment of the baby boom. His recent releases, apart from ''The Ghost of Tom Joad,'' had been mainly archival, and the reunion shows were devoted largely to breathing new life into old favorites and to a joyful, generous rock 'n' roll revivalism. But then came Sept.11, which called forth ''The Rising,'' his (and maybe anyone's) most convincing rock record since the Reagan era, and the 2004 election campaign, which occasioned Springsteen's first public endorsement (on the Op-Ed page of this newspaper) of a presidential candidate. Those events, and the release this spring of ''Devils & Dust,'' have sent the Bruceologists back to their desks, and the result is a spate of revisitings, reinterpretations, reissues and recyclings, from rock critics, psychiatrists, historians and fiction writers.

Two new story collections -- Tennessee Jones's Deliver Me From Nowhere (Soft Skull Press, paper, $12) and Meeting Across the River: Stories Inspired by the Haunting Bruce Springsteen Song (Bloomsbury, paper, $14.95), an anthology edited by Jessica Kaye and Richard J. Brewer -- serve mainly as reminders of Springsteen's own superior skill as a storyteller. Jones's slim volume contains 10 linked stories suggested by the lean, grim vignettes of Springsteen's ''Nebraska'' album, while ''Meeting Across the River'' comprises 20 variations on a noirish monologue that may be the least memorable cut on ''Born to Run.'' ''It's what's not in the lyric,'' Martin J. Smith writes in a foreword, ''rather than what is, that makes the song so intriguing,'' thus inadvertently establishing the superfluousness of the undertaking. What the various contributors, many of them crime novelists, put in amounts mainly to the tough-guy clichés that already hang too thickly over the song.

Jones, adding a dimension of sexual anxiety to the tales of hard luck and aimlessness in ''Nebraska,'' does a bit better. His versions of ''Highway Patrolman'' and ''My Father's House,'' in particular, go farther into the darkness on the edge of town than Springsteen himself has ventured. But you can't help wondering if Jones's imagination has been hobbled by the songs he's chosen to lean on. Since, for instance, he can hardly match the courtroom monologue that concludes ''Johnny 99'' (''Now judge, judge, I had debts no honest man can pay''), Jones pushes it offstage, into the hearsay testimony of another character: ''I don't remember exactly what he said,'' she confesses. ''I wish I had it recorded so I could just play it back for you.'' At that point, you may prefer to cue up the CD.

Which, of course, you are likely to do anyway. Springsteen's command of his chosen themes, and the power and sophistication he brings to them, makes criticism largely a matter of saying amen. Books about Elvis Presley tend to traffic in either rootsy antiquarianism or slick mythologizing. Bob Dylan inspires exegetes and soothsayers. Springsteen encourages hagiography. Every fan knows it's hard to be a saint in the city, and every reader of the Bible (one of Springsteen's preferred storehouses of phrase and image) has heard that it's not easy to be a prophet in your own country. Maybe, in Springsteen's case, it only looks easy; God -- or anyone who has been to a Springsteen concert -- knows the man works hard. By now, though, 30 years after the release of ''Born to Run'' landed him simultaneously on the covers of Newsweek and Time, the mantle of prophet and oracle -- perhaps even of saint -- seems to rest as naturally on Springsteen's muscular shoulders as the strap to his blond Fender Esquire or Clarence Clemons's hand.

Virtually all the books under consideration here are documents of faith, written by folks who will always find some reason to believe (as well as any excuse to quote some lyrics -- my apologies). But for this very reason it may be worthwhile to take note of the views of heretics and dissidents, in particular those who do not so much criticize the quality of Springsteen's music as question the authenticity of his oracular, populist persona.

John Lennon sang that a working-class hero was something to be. In England, maybe, but in this country, where money and mobility tend to dissolve and to mystify social divisions, a working-class hero may be a contradiction in terms. And so Springsteen, the son of a bus driver and a legal secretary, occasionally encounters suspicion when, from his current position as an unimaginably rich and successful rock star, he speaks up for, and in the voices of, the marginal and the downtrodden. His preacherly demeanor solicits accusations of bad faith, while his forays into political activism (including his mini-tour in support of John Kerry near the end of last year's presidential campaign) can be caricatured as the well-meaning sentiments of yet another wealthy show-business liberal. Springsteen's sincerity can also rankle those who prefer their pop culture affectless and ironical, or who are more attuned to the clever manipulation of sampled bric-a-brac than to the struggle for mastery over historical influences.

In a recent article in Slate, Stephen Metcalf made the provocatively revisionist claim that the real Bruce was neither the singer of quiet, Guthriesque ballads nor the purveyor of grand, operatic anthems, but rather the scruffy, mischievous New Jersey boardwalk habitué -- ''a scrawny little dirtbag from the shore'' -- who composed the verbose, playful, musically adventuresome shaggy-dog tales of his first two albums, ''Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.'' and ''The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle.'' In Metcalf's account, it was the rock critic Jon Landau, author of the most famous line of rock-critic prophecy (''I saw rock 'n' roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen'') and after that Springsteen's producer and mentor, who transformed the charming beach bum into a self-conscious man of the people and, consequently, into a darling of the intellectuals. For Metcalf, at the same time that Landau ''intellectualized Bruce, he anti-intellectualized him,'' minting a familiar, durable persona that turns out to be ''Jon Landau's middle-class fantasy of white, working-class authenticity,'' and the basis of what is ''in essence, a white minstrel act.''

Strong words. But authenticity is a peculiar criterion to apply to a rock musician, since American popular music since the 1950's has provided fertile ground for self-invention, contradiction and cross-pollination. The personas of the great popular musicians of the rock era -- from Elvis to Prince, from Bob Dylan to Madonna -- are hardly organic products of native soil. There are no pure products of America. Which is not to endorse Metcalf's cynical view of Springsteen's imaginative project of the past three decades, but rather to suggest that the idea of authenticity needs to be applied somewhat differently. Not to Springsteen's persona -- which I would argue even the most passionate and literal-minded fan understands to be, to some degree, an artifact, an act -- but rather to the experience of witnessing and participating in a Springsteen performance, and also to the musical, lyrical and conceptual integrity of the songs themselves.

To my mind, no one has written better about the texture and rhythm of a Springsteen show than Jimmy Guterman. His new book, Runaway American Dream: Listening to Bruce Springsteen (Da Capo, paper, $15.95), is a collection of loose, energetic essays that, as they meander and overlap, add up to a passionate, highly subjective portrait of the artist in relation to his public. Guterman, whose other books include ''The Worst Rock 'n' Roll Records of All Time,'' makes some interesting and occasionally counterintuitive judgments about Springsteen's records, but his greatest knack is for using particular shows and tours to set up wide-ranging excursions into musical history. His perspective -- the one on which rock criticism was founded in the late 1960's -- is that of the smart guy in the audience, plucking ideas and emotions out of the stream of familiar songs and wondering what, beyond the price of the ticket, it all amounts to.

Guterman's understanding of the bond between Springsteen and his audience, a phenomenon empirically observed at who knows how many stadium, arena and club shows -- a comprehensive list of such events appears in the back of The Ties that Bind: Bruce Springsteen A to E to Z (Visible Ink, paper, $24.95), Gary Graff's spirited and comprehensive encyclopedia of Bossiana -- is both nuanced and incisive, as is his description of the songwriting ethic that guarantees that bond. Since ''Darkness on the Edge of Town,'' Springsteen, according to Guterman, has told ''accurate, unflinching stories of the people who weren't as lucky as he was. As he looked out at the vast stadium crowds, he must have known those were the people filling the stadiums. They still needed to see a reflection of themselves onstage; Springsteen still needed to deliver that.''

Of course, this has proven to be a complicated undertaking. For one thing, the scope of Springsteen's reference -- the kind of characters who show up in many of the songs on ''The Ghost of Tom Joad'' and his new album, ''Devils & Dust'' -- has broadened far beyond his core audience. And that audience itself may have narrowed as rock has left behind the last traces of youthful rebellion to become the soundtrack of wistful middle age. Still, no one who has stood in a stadium during the second verse of ''Promised Land'' or the opening of ''Hungry Heart'' can deny that the sense of identification between the singer, his subjects and his fans is powerful and deep. At those moments, Springsteen stops singing and listens as a hundred thousand people sing back his first-person lyrics.

This ritual transaction underlies Robert Coles's Bruce Springsteen's America: The People Listening, a Poet Singing (Random House, paper, $13.95). (It's one of the only entries in the Boss bibliography, by the way, that does not take its title from a Springsteen lyric.) The subtitle may overreach. This people is as likely to be listening to Toby Keith or 50 Cent as to the bard Coles places in the line of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. Even so, Coles's book, in spite of a certain wish-fulfilling, populist sentimentality, turns listening into an ingeniously literal-minded exercise in anecdotal sociology. Using the documentary method he has been refining since the early 1960's, Coles sits down with a cross section of Americans, not all of them especially interested in Bruce Springsteen, and listens to them talking about what they hear in particular songs. His style of transcription can be grating -- it is sometimes hard to believe that ordinary Americans talk in the ostentatiously folksy vernacular Coles puts between quotation marks -- but ''Bruce Springsteen's America'' nonetheless attempts something rare and valuable in the study of popular culture. It tries to record the complicated reactions people have to the music they hear, and the contradictory, free-associative ways we connect that music to our own lives. The book's best section presents a law enforcement officer contending with tracks like ''Johnny 99'' and ''Highway Patrolman'' that cut against his ideas about work, morality and crime. His response to ''American Skin (41 Shots),'' Springsteen's song about the shooting of Amadou Diallo by New York City police officers in 1999, is a précis of the contradictions that the song tries to explore, but that even Springsteen's generous, capacious personality has had a hard time containing.

He does, nonetheless, contain multitudes, and at this stage in his career there is no shortage of writers eager to place him in the broadest context of American cultural history. Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (Wesleyan University, paper, $22.95), Jim Cullen's 1997 study, newly updated to include Springsteen's response to 9/11, marshals impressive scholarship to assimilate the Boss into the main currents of American thought -- or at least into the canon of the American studies curriculum. (Cullen, currently on the faculty of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, has a Ph.D. in American studies from Brown.) Some of his readings are more persuasive than others. Much as I love the idea of Springsteen as torchbearer of a small-r republican tradition stretching back through Roosevelt and Lincoln into the Enlightenment, Cullen's argument has the effect of installing him in a stable full of academic hobbyhorses rather than in a vital constellation of ideas. The chapter on Springsteen's place within a tradition of American Roman Catholic writers and artists is more interesting, since it provides a cultural context for the dialectic of sin and grace, alienation and despair that has given structure to Springsteen's music since ''Born to Run.''

A more unusual kind of contextualization informs 4th of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land (Bloomsbury, $24.95), Daniel Wolff's wonderfully evocative history of the New Jersey resort town where Springsteen, after graduating from Freehold High School and briefly attending Ocean County Community College, served his rock 'n' roll apprenticeship. Among other things, Wolff's book footnotes some of the place names and geographical features in Springsteen's lyrics. (The narrator of ''Something in the Night,'' who's ''riding down Kingsley, figuring I'll get a drink'' is cruising one of the city's main thoroughfares, a block inland from the water, named for a 19th-century Methodist minister.) The chapters dealing with Springsteen himself also show how Asbury Park's music scene -- divided by race, class and taste -- influenced the intricate sound of his early records.

But really, Springsteen is less the subject of ''4th of July, Asbury Park'' than a kind of hovering spirit in the night, and perhaps also a marketing conceit. Wolff characterizes the book, which stretches back to the town's founding after the Civil War by an enterprising Methodist named James Bradley, as a ''rock 'n' roll history,'' a grand, sad story of racism and real estate, political hardball and seaside pleasure-seeking. It hardly explains Springsteen -- none of these books really do -- but it does remind us, in fascinating detail, where he comes from.

A. O. Scott is a film critic at The Times.

Take that, Rock! You old fatty!

this one is ok too, if somewhat petty & often wrong:
http://home.theboots.net/theboots/articles/esquire.html

honestly i think the best things about springsteen have been written in passing while writing about other ppl.

(this is the tate btw: http://www.villagevoice.com/music/9932,tate,7556,22.html harris' on "the rising" is also good -- the opening gag was pretty memorable: http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0232,harris,37182,22.html)

dave q is also k-brill here: Bruce Springsteen: Writer and here: Springsteen: The Early Years and here too: 'The Rising'

the first is the best: After a few cans of Bud work their predictable magic, Bruce decides not to wait, and make up with Patti right now. Beer is so good for that, even if one's reasons for wanting a post-beer reconcilation are somewhat suspect. She's having none of it. Maybe she gets off on being a redhead. "Bruce, I'm serious. You have to talk to that boy like a human being, he's afraid to come home." "Ah, fuck it." Bruce picks up the phone. "I'm gonna call my old man and go out for some beers. He's a stand-up guy, doesn't make me listen to this kind of emotional bullshit." Patti in his face. "BRUCE YOU NEED TO TALK TO YOUR SON! Not sit in a bar talking about baseball with some old Irish drunks who you always hated..." "DON'T SAY THAT ABOUT MY OLD MAN! HE DID THOSE THINGS BECAUSE HE HAD TO! MADE A MAN OUTTA ME!" But now this is the rage of the disoriented, not of the secure - dangerously close to getting out of control. There is still one heavy object on the table - but where to aim? He's got selective beer vision now. There it is, on the platinum 'Darkness' disc, side one, track two. "Adam Raised a Cain". Bingo. He collapses into his seat, muttering, "I wish I had cold blood. Maybe I do. Maybe I always did. Ahhh, fuck. Nobody understands me. Nobody. Ever. I have the dumbest fans in the world. My band are all cretins. For example, Miami Steve thinks he can sing and Max Weinberg thinks he can play jazz. Everyone thinks I'm a scam just because back in the 70s I wanted to hang out with more interesting people, how was I supposed to know it would look like a press mafia using me as a dupe? And that time I decided to stop writing about and for other people and write about MYSELF, everybody including the diehard fans - fuck 'em, they probably think 'Racing in the Streets' is an ode to the Petty brothers - ignored it, or got embarassed by it and the 'East of Eden' allusion and the Otis Day & His Knights- derived music - and what the fuck is so wrong with that, at least unlike some other chirper/cleffers I could name who might or might not be James Taylor with his 'Steamroller' shit I don't fall flat on my ass doing funky garage music - and now, irony of ironies, that fucking song is coming back to mock me. Fuck me and fuck my own records. Guess I'll call my old man." Independence Day has come and gone, and it was a weird one this time in America, but there's the same hot blood flowing thru their veins, after all. In fact, he's got a plan, maybe when the kid rolls in tomorrow morning he'll give him a copy of an old English punk single called "Gary Gilmore's Eyes" as a present. Kids like that kind of stuff. He likes it too, it's sort of like 'Nebraska' except not as embarrassing as listening to your old man's record. That can wait another thirty years or so, when Cain is released from the East of Eden Reformatory, having been rehabilitated into society, looking back on his glory days, and I'll stop here before any more hokey song titles creep in.

bruce rilly brings out the best of dave q, now that i think about it.

Still too much balogna river of purple prose, rank bullshit. An "American studies" -- repeated twice so you don't forget it, some product taught at a school for "ethical culture," which you know must be right there with Michigan State in its enrollment. "American studies" was the curiculum the people who couldn't pass anything else, like the football and basketball team players, got tossed into at my undergraduate hangout. Deliver unto us the intellectual goods from the academy, so that we will know it as quality.

Springsteen encourages hagiography.

A one sentence review, this sentence, would have been more daring.

and perhaps also a marketing conceit.

Perhaps Bruce Springsteen is a marketing conceit? Perhaps? This is your standard New York Times hoax in print pawned off as heavy and thoughtful journalism, "installed in a stable of academic hobbyhorses," so to speak.

Now that's getting close to something I'd go out of my way to read.

1.'The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle is still, to me, one of the greatest records that anybody's ever made. It just left you feeling more alive.'

2. 'I like Bruce Springsteen tremendously. Cherie and I used to listen [to him] together. I had this extremely grotty flat in St John's Wood [in north London], just around the corner from where she used to live, and we would play Bruce there.'

3. 'He's the only iconographic figure in my life who ultimately didn't betray me. He keeps growing and changing.'

4. 'Initially, when I first heard Born to Run it didn't grab me. Later, though, the romanticism of 'Thunder Road' got to me. It sounded like the soundtrack to a teen movie that one day I'd hope to make. When the sax comes in, that's the guy running through the rain at the end to get the girl.'

5. 'America's future rests in a thousand dreams inside our hearts. It rests in the message of hope so many young people admire: New Jersey's own Bruce Springsteen.'

6. 'When I came home from school, instead of watching The Tweenies, I'd roll my sleeves up like him, put a band around my head and watch Springsteen live.'

7. 'It took me a long, long time to decide that I was going to be a songwriter myself, but 'Thunder Road' started the process.'

8. 'It's amazing how much he can do in just a few lines ... you know exactly where you are and you can follow the story.'

9. 'Springsteen makes me keep faith in America.'

10. 'Earlier on in the week that I met Bruce Springsteen, and before I knew I was going to meet him, I'd decided I was going to send him a copy of my new book.'

a)Eric Alterman Author
b)Stephen Merchant Comedy writer
c)Ronald Reagan
d)Damon McGough Badly Drawn Boy
e)Danny Jones McFly
f)Greil Marcus Author
g)Billy Bragg Singer
h)Dave Marsh Music critic
i)Tony Blair Prime Minister
j)Nick Hornby

A wet farting noise would be welcome here. Go to see the Stones this summer.

HOLY FUCK those Dave Q things RULE SO HARD. many many many thanks to Sterling for the links!

so the answer to the original question is still a resounding NO.

Howard Bloom is an avid Bruce Springsteen fan. Nothing unusual about that - especially around Freehold. But while most fans of The Boss plan their attendance at his concerts around their everyday lives, Bloom plans his everyday life around Springsteen's concerts - more or less.

Bloom and high school buddy Lawrence Kirsch have taken their admiration for Springsteen - the rock superstar from Freehold Borough and his music - and have decided to do something no one has ever done, at least not to Bloom's knowledge.

Bloom and Kirsch, natives of eastern Canada, have written a book which is not exactly about the rock icon, but about how his life and music have affected his fans. The book, "For You - A New Bruce Springsteen Book," is a tribute to Springsteen from the fans who stood by him and believed in him, according to Bloom.

"There are a lot of books about Bruce," Bloom said. "We thought it would be appropriate to write the experiences of the fans who are so devoted to him."

Bloom said the key to going ahead with a project like this is the entertainer's fan base, and according to Bloom, Springsteen has devoted fans who are willing to travel thousands of miles in some instances to see and listen to him. Springsteen's fans are all over the world and they attend concerts in cities around the globe, he said.

He said the book, which is due to be published in 2007, "turns the microphone over to Springsteen's legendary fans and lets them express what this icon of rock and roll means to them."

Bloom said he hopes the book will be a legacy to Springsteen's music and reveal the feelings his fans have for him.

A Web site, www.foryoubruce.com, includes stories that have been told by fans of The Boss.

Bloom said his fascination with and dedication to Springsteen began after he first heard the rocker singing on what he called a "grainy" tape in the summer of 1972. His admiration grew after Springsteen released the "Born to Run" album in 1975.

Bloom remembers the first time he saw Springsteen in concert: Dec. 19, 1975. In fact, he saw him three times; in Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto. His distinct memories of those shows include Springsteen at the microphone and Roy Bittan at the piano playing "Thunder Road."

He was enthralled by Springsteen himself and by "Thunder Road," in addition to what he called the "escapism" of the music and the message that a person should go wherever their dreams take them.

Bloom was in his second year of

college at the time and said the messages in Springsteen's work hit home. He said he has lived that message over the past 30 years.

"Bruce Springsteen is the John Steinbeck of music," Bloom said. "Steinbeck had the ability to use the written word to get his point across. Bruce does the same thing with his music."

He especially enjoys Springsteen's first three albums, "Greetings form Asbury Park," "The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle" and "Born to Run." Those albums came out at a time when Bloom said he was ready to grow up.

"Bruce made that journey much easier for me," he said. "Bruce has always been passionate and dedicated to his music, to his fans and to his community as well."

In those pre-Internet days, he said, obtaining concert information and tickets was not as convenient as it is today. He followed the concert listings in "Rolling Stone" and was happy to attend a concert anywhere. Bloom said he has seen Springsteen in concert 173 times, including 50 shows in New Jersey. He has only seen four shows in Canada - concerts he could reach by car, rather than by plane.

"I've traveled a lot of miles to see Bruce concerts," Bloom said.

Bloom met the woman who would become his first wife at a 1983 concert in Philadelphia that Springsteen's E Street sax man Clarence Clemons played with his band, the Red Bank Rockers. In 2003, he proposed to the woman who would become his second wife at a Springsteen show in Montreal.

Bloom currently edits and publishes www.sportsbusinessnews.com. He has worked in advertising, in the print and radio media, and in management in the communications and sports industries. He also worked as a security guard at concerts in order to see Springsteen up close and to collect enough "disposable income," as he calls it, to support his "Bruce Springsteen fund."

Bloom said friends and family tease him about how he chooses to spend that disposable income. Choice is the key word here, because Bloom and legions of other fans will admit that the disposable income they fork over on a regular basis to hear the magic they believe Springsteen creates is worth every cent.

That one New Republic piece was kinda devastating

The only possible non-embarrassing answer would be for all the quotes to be by Ronald Reagan and Tony Blair. Anyone else should be ashamed to have said any of that.

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031215&s=hajdu121503