Tags
blue-collar, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Coming of Age, love story, The River Tour 2016
You always dream of the kind of love that comes without consequences, without struggle and without responsibility. It’s the kind that doesn’t exist.
Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” was released on this day 41 years ago. Shortly thereafter, it was part of my fledgling record collection. Mr. Jones, my English teacher had introduced me to The Boss. He knew – the way good teachers know – that something about Springsteen and his plainspoken poetry about New Jersey life would somehow appeal to me in ways that my school did not. He knew I liked poetry and music and I think he probably even understood that the most valuable lessons were those I picked up in Ronnie Millar’s Pop-In record shop – on vinyl. Mr. Jones knew I was trying to find my way and that while I had never seen a Cadillac or a State Trooper – most likely he hadn’t either – nor heard a screen door slam or the crack of a baseball bat, I knew about romance and romantic longing and rock ‘n’ roll. I heard it on the radio. And, I knew about rejection and disappointment. I knew about dead-end jobs and the dole. I knew about the men who worked at the factory, and when the factory stopped working, those men did too. I knew they would never be the same.
But lately there ain’t been much work
On account of the economy
I knew pregnant girls whose boyfriends married them. I knew Antrim Girls were just like Jersey Girls. I knew the drizzle of rain and the drumbeat of small-town life in a working-class town on the banks of the Six Mile Water – my river. Any river. Every river. I knew young people were leaving that life and that I would too, although at 17, I mostly had Friday on my mind – Out in the Street.
Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true?
On a summer evening four years after I first heard The River, I was in the crowd at Slane Castle watching fireworks light up the sky as Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band made their Irish debut. Close to 100,000 of us had made the pilgrimage through the sleepy – and disapproving – village of Slane to see him. Between assurances of increased security and a promise – as yet unfulfilled – that this would be the last rock concert to disturb them, the residents had been placated. Even the weather cooperated, delivering the kind of sun-drenched day we Irish pray for. Everybody was young that day, even the crotchety old farmers who let us park on their fields, and when the band burst on stage with Born in the USA, everybody was Irish too. Bruce turned his baseball cap backwards and bragged, “I had a grandmother from here.”
We basked in his pride, denying for a few hours the realities around us. Irish weather was rarely that sunny, and many of us would soon be forced out as economic immigrants, collectively the “brain drain” of the 1980s. But on that glorious day, in spite of the economic and political truths of Ireland, and the ever-diminishing possibilities before us, a defiant Springsteen held us aloft, and we believed in the idea of America. It belonged to us.
In his autobiography, he recalls
Precariously perched in a field fifty miles outside of Dublin were 95,000 people. The largest crowd I’d ever seen. They completely filled a grassy bowl bounded by the Boyne River at our stage’s rear and Slane Castle, perched in front on a high green knoll, in the distance.
Behind him and on the huge video screens, “The River” was the Boyne.
In the four decades since, I have been to ten or more Springsteen concerts, the most memorable one Thursday evening in Phoenix, Arizona. From up high in the cheap seats, I revisited “The River,” flashes of my teenage self showing up to find me a little tougher, and wiser maybe, hardened by the beginnings and endings that make up a full life – the marriage, the mortgage, the raising of a good person, the career, the cancer, the death of the man who had for so many years quickened my heart, the worry about what might come next and the waiting – always the waiting – for the other shoe to drop. In the middle of my life, it occurred to me that my parents – the people I had fought so hard at 17 – were once in the middle of theirs with beautiful dreams that were dashed like some of mine. I know now that sometimes the darkness got the best of us . . .
Papa now I know the things you wanted that you could not say . . . I swear I never meant to take those things away
Unloading every song, I wonder did Springsteen know how well he was telling the stories in which so many of us played a starring role. I thought about my dead husband and the stories he had told me, like the one about not being drafted to Vietnam because he was the only surviving son of a man who died in military service; the one about how he cut his hippie hair when his buddies didn’t return from that war; and, the one about trading in his beloved motorcycle and the muscle car and settling down when he and his girl were just too young. Settling. On they went, for 27 odd years, each of them compromising and taking care of what became obligations.
Then, a shot of courage one hot Saturday afternoon in a parking lot outside a place a bit like Frankie’s Joint – he showed his cards. All of them. And, in the space of a heartbeat, he turned from that life – because the alternative was like “dying by inches” – to follow instead a heart beating wildly.
Cause point blank, bang bang baby you’re dead.
Oh, the price you pay – a young man’s song.
He brought with him just the shirt on his back and a shiny Ford Thunderbird. Young then, he had the heart – and the stomach – for all of it. All of it. All in. He would drive all night just to buy me some shoes.
For as long as we could be young, we had a great run – born for it – raising the kind of hell that belongs in a rollicking Springsteen song. It lost much of its luster before he died and, had he lived, we may not have made it. The “in sickness” part of the deal was tough.
We were married for one day shy of 22 years, and together we knew we did something good – really good. He was in my corner – always – and any regrets are so tiny now that they don’t matter. The lesson? Well, it’s about time, isn’t it? It is always about time. We have only so much and not enough to waste to learn how to live and to live well with another person, a partner.
Going back to The River with Springsteen that night in Phoenix, I found myself believing that another opportunity to live and love better – to do something good or better – was just up the road.
The River is how you learn the adult life and you choose your partner and you choose your work and that clock starts ticking and you walk alongside not only the people you’ve chosen to live your life with but you walk alongside of your own mortality and you realize you have a limited amount of time to raise your family, to do your job, to try and do something good. That’s ‘The River.’
Word on the street is that Springsteen will be on tour again in 2022 and Ireland is on his itinerary. I hope so. Until then . . .
