Bruce Springsteen: Writer

But what does he write?

Either

1) describe it

or

2) enact it

Something along the lines of, "It's been so long since I've had a real job. I feel like a hypocrite writing songs about stuff that happened in 1975. Goodbye world." -BANG!

I wouldn't presume to be able to write like he does in a million years, so I'll describe - unfortunately, the scene in I picture is a rather sad one. He's wandering through the house, alone, after screaming at Patti, who is chiding him after another father-son row. "Why are you so hard on that boy, Bruce?" "The kid's got to learn not to talk so much. Say the wrong thing in this world to the wrong person, you can get killed. He's got to learn, don't you see?" "Bruce, you're starting to sound like your own..""That's enough." Bruce would never hit her, he's not Jackson Browne, so what he does is pick up a vase and launches it at the platinum 'Tunnel of Love' disc on the wall and storms out. (It had to be that one, there's no rage like the rage of someone who thought they had that adult stuff figured out until life did one of its inside-out flip- flops on your ass again.) But he can't go out. That would mean driving, and driving reminds him of those early songs of freedom and later songs of desperation, all of which he now wishes he'd never written, especially now that there's a war on and everyone out there is singing his songs without knowing what they're about. He wishes he'd never written them because they made sense of other people's lives and not his. The biz is like that, you give everything and they miss the difficult parts and distort the parts they like to suit themselves. Well, fair's fair after all. If he could take bubblegum garage trash and turn it into 'Darkness', then why can't the popsters take 'Darkness' right back and turn it into Garth Brooks? Sure, it's the most rational and understandable thing in the world, but it still hurts. Ah well, there's worse things that happen, thinks Bruce. He's calmed down a bit now that Patti's out of earshot. No problem making up to her, I'll just show up at the studio one day when she's doing an album, long enough to get a producer credit and maybe move 1,000 more units, 999 more than if I don't.
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.

Shit, I didn't actually answer the question did I. Sorry

crank!

jesus dave Q, that was brilliant.

Today's Guardian: idiot chief reviewer on the Boss. I don't trust him. Q - please have a look at it and tell us where he's wrong.

And tell us the truth about the new LP. We need to know!

Haven't heard new album yet - will shortly do so and report back...

Yeah - but meantime, check out that Guardian review - it's probably online. For one thing, he says all the Boss's songs are about Vietnam vets called 'Gary'. I know a lot of Boss #s, and I can't think of one about a Gary. Maybe there is one, but Garys do not dominate. Joe, Frankie, Billy - that would be nearer the mark.

He also says that the Boss has discarded ambiguity by writing re. 911. I'd say that the opposite might be true. He could be essentially UNambiguous by attacking US immigration policy etc - but for a liberal (esp in USA?), 911 precisely provokes ambiguity: ie. 1) yes wasn't it terrible, but 2) hey, we'd better not just go out and bomb more innocents to show how tough we are. Right?

That reviewer is a shmuck - he likes lousy records, then he knocks the Boss. Q, I seriously want to see what you think of him.

OK, Guardian review -

"Bellow in a voice that suggests you are about to leap offstage and punch a communist" - WTF!!!? Right-wingers don't growl and mumble and shout and stuff, they sing the boring Lee Greenwood way. Where is this reviewer from? "Gary"? OK there's a "Wayne" in 'Darlington County' but no Garys anywhere. No offense to people named 'Gary' but I don't think you're mentioned by the Boss ever. "Lyrics repetitious and sound wilfully dated", I imagine this guy gave Fischerspooner and Miss Kittin five stars tho. "There is no room for interpretation here?" I thought you were a critic! Basically it seems the guy tried to come up with some sort of definitive angle that I'm not sure he even believes.

He would write a remake of "Norma Rae" except with a different ending. Everybody gets killed in the local tavern by a rampaging horde of Viet Kong. And Charlie Starkweather is the only survivor (this is how he can write the sequel.)

FWIW - I was thinking that the Boss would be Kerouacian - romantic, restless, with an obtrusive authorial presence - and at some stage would actually write a sentence like -

"Meanwhile, out there, my America sleeps, beyond the stop-lights that flicker as the great trucks fly back and forth, beyond the barbed wire that can't stop Pablo and Angela for ever, because the land is for dreamers..."

but trucks don't fly: pinefox you are surely thinking of spaceships

but trucks don't fly: pinefox you are surely thinking of spaceships
Yeah, but thats in the novel by the guy in Styx who wrote the "Kilroy Was Here" rock-opera.

bruce tackles the the tragedy of the inarticulate; he does that peculiar trick of saying more by limiting the breadth of his language, sorta like george orwell. by which one could imply he was some kind of godless communist, who gets pushed there by circumstance. if you follow that. And if all he can do is write about Nam vet's it's still a whole lot more interesting than much other subject matter. goddamn shallow fuckstick glibly labelling the lives of the broken as passe. (mutter, grumble. too much beer)

Hey Q: tell us about the LP!

[Guardian reviewer = prick] (While waiting on Q...) I've been listening to The Rising this afternoon, I think it's moving and exciting but 3 or 4 songs too long. One defense of length, though, is that he's put all these tunes out there for us to pick through, rather than building a perfect collection. Just chucked out new stuff and going back on tour in a loose, very open-hearted album, even with the filler. I felt it's not really meant *for* me, Boss seems to be reclaiming the blue-collar voice role, placing himself in his neighbourhood ahead of other things, even at the expense of the patronage of the Left. I'd been unnerved by his ambigious, possibly pro-war comments, but the lyrics, angles and shades are all reassuring. Dips in the middle.

Don't worry, I'm on the case...

WTF? Apparently these are lyrics on the first song on the album:

Better ask questions before you shoot
Deceit and betrayal's bitter fruit
It's hard to swallow come time to pay
That taste on your tongue don't easily slip away
Let kingdom come

I think Bruce is trying to tell us something. I'll admit I never pegged him as the snowballing type.

Ha ha ha. A comma is removed, comedy ensues. Here's from "Worlds Apart" that's in the same vein: "I taste the seed upon your lips, lay my tongue upon your scars..."

The new album = classic. Tops even 'Darkness' and 'USA' for me. I have started a thread on it and will elaborate when time and conditions permit.

Les Inrocks slag it off too this week. Ergo it must be good.

"remember when I poured salt on your tongue and hung just out of reach"

Didn't he write loads of absolutely filthy songs in the early days and do them live but never release recordings? What's the Bishop in Bishop Danced?

15 listens in and The Rising is his best full-rock album since Born To Run.

Cumming in someone's mouth is one thing. (Unless salt = pee.) Tasting the cum (his own? someone else's?) in someone's mouth is cringe city.

I now admit that Springsteen, for the first time in about fifteen years, might hold some actual appeal. If only for reading the words and these enjoyable exegeses. ;-)

Here's a crummy review from the Weekly Standard. "The Oprah of Rock'n'Roll" he calls him. I haven't read a review yet, positive or negative, that's much better.

Actually, this is just an excuse for me to applaud the magazine for being in the vanguard of ironic kitsch reappropriation. The portrait of the writer, David Skinner, is a brave attempt at rehabilitating one of America's most unheralded vernacular arts: crappy big-head caricatures (the kind you find in parks division). James Lileks must be SO jealous.

Classic Q.

Also, 'Bruce Springsteen: Writer' = Bob Dylan: Writer?

pinefox he doesn't live in LA, he lives in new jersey again.

Good!

Boss Conference Time!

http://education.guardian.co.uk/conferences/story/0,14077,1558664,00.html

Wow, that Dave Q post is one of the most inspired things I've ever read on ILM.

yeah i think its one of my fave ilm posts. i wish *he* would write a book. his album reviews can be a bit too clever-clever for my liking though