Happy Birthday Bruce Springsteen.

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It’s always a bit jarring to hear that someone like Springsteen has been around for three quarters of a century? He’s one of those someones that we associate with being young and ‘glory days’ and the very idea of America. He’s a self-proclaimed “cool-rockin’ daddy in the U.S.A.”

Even today, when someone asks why I left Ireland for the United States of America, I know there’s something in my response that suggests Bruce Springsteen is part of the reason, part of the dream.

On June 1, 1985,  Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band made their Irish debut. I had spent the previous summer working in the United States, with the Born in the USA tour in full swing. I was lucky to have been upstate New York at the same time as Springsteen, and saw him perform at Saratoga Springs and again in the Fall, when a trip to Niagara Falls with an American cousin included a Springsteen show in Buffalo.

I knew Ireland was in for a treat.

When the tickets went on sale, I also bought one for my little brother. It would be his first concert – a seminal moment in his musical education, and probably the first time he drank wine.

Even now, almost 40 years later, I smile at the memory of almost 100,000 of us making our pilgrimage through the sleepy and disapproving village of Slane to see The Boss. 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 with the kind of sun-drenched day we Irish pray for. Some said it was the hottest day on record in Ireland.

Whenever I look at this picture, I know what we were thinking at the moment it was taken. We are forever young. It’s forever summer. We’re in a Bruce Springsteen song. 

I am young, and had I not been awake, I would have missed it

. . . the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it

~ Seamus Heaney

Everybody was young that day, even the weather-beaten old farmers who let us use their fields as parking lots. And, everybody was also Irish. When the band burst on stage with a thunderous “Born in the USA,” Bruce turned his baseball cap backwards and bragged, “I had a grandmother from here.” The crowd erupted.

In retrospect, although we basked in his Irish pride that day, the reality was that our weather was rarely that sunny, and thousands of us would soon be forced out of Ireland as economic immigrants, collectively the “brain drain” of the 1980s. Across the water, Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister; farther afield, the Berlin wall was still standing; and, in Ireland, divorce was still illegal and condoms had barely become available without a prescription.

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 America.

Almost 40 years later, and with only 42 days until the General Election, my vote already cast, I’ve begun believing in the idea of America again. The truth is that I’ve always counted on the likes of Springsteen to stand up and articulate it for people like me, immigrants seeking America. I’ve always known I could count on Springsteen more than a presidential contender hell-bent on almost convincing me that the idea of America is unraveling.

Bruce Springsteen will never be an elected official; he will never be a politician who would vilify immigrants or the working poor or women. But he will remain an inspiration. Just last year, Tim Walz, Governor of Minnesota—and Vice Presidential nominee— signed a proclamation declaring March 5 Bruce Springsteen Day, which reads in part:

Springsteen’s music is a source of inspiration for many people in Minnesota, reminding us of the values we hold dear, including kindness, compassion, and fairness.

Then there’s the man at the top of the Republican ticket who fancies himself as America’s first King, and who has a well-documented problem with those values. He also has a problem with Springsteen who once said that  he didn’t think our democracy could stand another four years of Trump’s custodianship. At a rally, Tump recently said of Springsteen:

I’m not a huge fan. I have a bad trait. I only like people that like me.

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When Springsteen announced he was going to tour again in 2022, I knew I’d fly back to the States to see him. I knew I’d probably be sitting somewhere in the nosebleed section, but I didn’t care. I had a ticket. As it turns out, our seats were great for the first night of his American tour in Phoenix. “Do you feel the spirit?” a happy and healthy looking 74 year old Springsteen asked when he took the stage right on time, and about 20,000 of us roared back that yes, yes we did. We felt it for the next few hours and you could see it on our faces when we emptied out onto Jefferson Street.

Bruce Springsteen is still touring, back in Asbury Park this past weekend after playing in places some Americans are considering as escape destinations pending the outcome of the general election.

When I mentioned to someone I’d seen Springsteen over a dozen times, she responded by telling me she didn’t mind his music but he was “way too into politics” for her. To be fair, Springsteen has not always been into politics. He played a fundraiser for George McGovern at a New Jersey drive-in in 1972, and author Marc Dolan writes that in 1984 interview, he indicated that he might only have voted once, perhaps in that 1972 election.

Politics, on the other hand, has been into Bruce Springsteen, since 1984 when Ronald Reagan dropped his hame at a campaign stop in New Jersey:

America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts. It rests in the message of hope in the songs of a man so many young Americans admire — New Jersey’s own, Bruce Springsteen.

Yes. There was Ronald Reagan telling a New Jersey audience that he and Bruce shared the same American dream. No. They didn’t, and because they didn’t, Springsteen would have to get “into politics” – human politics.

At his first concert, following being name-dropped by Reagan, he made $10,000 donation to a food bank for unemployed steelworkers. He asked his audience to do the same. Ever since, on every Springsteen tour, there have been tables for local charities at every venue, usually food banks.

In 2004, he jumped right in, supporting John Kerry’s presidential bid. He would subsequently campaign for Obama, HIllary Clinton, and during the last election, he reworked his “My Hometown” song for a President Biden ad.

Two decades since getting into electoral politics, we’ve come full circle with Donald Trump dropping Springsteen’s name in New Jersey, calling the singer a “wacko,” before claiming at the Wildwood rally that The Boss and other “liberal singers” would vote for him if only they came to a Trump rally. Then Trump falsely added—because of that weird obsession with crowd size— that his crowds outnumbered Springsteen’s.

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Thinking back to his concert in Phoenix last year, it occurs to me that he wasn’t “into politics” that night. He wasn’t even into his trademark monologues between songs. He walked on stage, with “Good evening, Arizona. 1-2-3-4” and he didn’t really say much until after he’d sung fourteen songs, when he told the crowd about how he started out at 15 with The Castilles, his first band; how sixty years had slipped by in an instant; and, how he is the last living member of that first band.

I’ll see you in my dreams
When all our summers have come to an end
I’ll see you in my dreams
We’ll meet and live and laugh again
I’ll see you in my dreams
Yeah, up around the river bend
For death is not the end
And I’ll see you in my dreams

Alone on stage, he sang that “death is not the end.” In the end, I suppose that dream, more impossible than the American one, has been so much easier to believe.

Happy Birthday.

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