Wrecking Ball: hard times, loss and renewal; the lifetime conversation
Bruce Springsteen’s music, and particularly his live
performances, have always been about a lot more than just the songs. While every album and show is clearly of its time,
there is an on-going narrative that simultaneously reaches back through the
years and tries to look forward. As
Bruce has said (in an interview with Jon Stewart for Rolling Stone), he constantly keeps in mind that “I’m in the midst
of a lifetime conversation with my audience, and I’m trying to keep track of
that conversation” (Stewart, 2012, P.43).
The dialogue is multi-layered and complex. On the face of it the primary narrative is
about what is happening in the world, but there are multiple substrata of both
personal and political threads that interact and inform each other, and never
more so than on Wrecking Ball. Listening to Bruce is not just about hearing
the music, learning the lyrics and perfecting the melodies; it is also about
asking what is Bruce saying here? What are the messages and what do we need to
do with them?
The central theme of Wrecking
Ball is the state of the economy and the anger at the fallout and social
fragmentation that has resulted. But the consequences of lost jobs, broken
spirits and fractured communities speak not only of the victims of today’s
global recession, but also of the long history of struggle endured over
centuries. Such themes of continuity are
underlined by the deliberate use of strong elements of Celtic folk tradition,
gospel-style mantras and chorus chants. All
of Springsteen’s albums are anchored in their time and space; it is as if he
holds up a mirror to the world and reflects back the key political themes and
current discourse. In the Jon Stewart interview
Springsteen described how he had been working on a different album for a year
prior to Wrecking Ball that he then
set aside because “the songs had nothing to do with what was going on out there
at all.” Clearly, that is important to
him; it is imperative that he provides analysis and reflection on the issues we
all face each day. But it is more than
that; anyone who writes or commentates on political life knows how ephemeral
such matters can be. With some obvious
exceptions, the details of political and economic life that can be so immense at
the time soon fade from view and collective memory; today’s newspaper headlines
are tomorrow’s chip wrappings. So Wrecking
Ball is not only about the recession and austerity, the banking crisis or
the greedy bonus culture, it also references older crises, challenges and
enduring struggles reaching out across time. And fundamentally it is also about
ageing, loss and mortality.
Two key interviews given by Springsteen around Wrecking Ball have been enormously
revealing. The Rolling Stone interview with Jon Stewart has been referenced
earlier, and most recently David Remnick’s extensive profile for The New Yorker (July 30 2012) has lifted
the veil on the craft of the planned spontaneity of the live show through
observing the Fort Monmouth rehearsals for the 2012 tour. Both interviews give insight to the
complexity of Springsteen, but also perhaps reveal more than ever before of
what continues to drive his creativity, the enduring influence of his formative
experiences and his commitment to his work and audience.
The experience of being a celebrity is one that Springsteen
has clearly grappled with over the years.
Revisit some of his past (rare) interviews and what emerges is a young
man struggling to deal with the hype and stardom and ill at ease with the
trappings; but apparently vacillating between an intense dislike of attention
and being desperate for a platform to explain himself and to make sense of the
world. This is just one of the many
paradoxes of Springsteen: he opens the shutters just wide enough to give a
tantalising glimpse of what makes him tick and then he snaps them shut. The Storytellers
DVD (2005) illustrates the tension: here is Bruce perched on a stool before an
intimate audience and he is explaining his craft – how he goes about writing
his songs and what moves him. It can all
sound a bit pretentious and dry and he is careful not to take himself too
seriously but it is also a tremendously honest and exposing thing to attempt. In the Q&A session a member of the
audience explains how he has listened to all the songs down the years and “I
feel like I know you – do I?” “No”,
replies Bruce emphatically, “it is part of the job; that whole feeling like I
know you thing!” And there’s the
paradox again; he knows he is being disingenuous and so do we. But he has to preserve some private identity,
even while inviting us to share the public persona; to get down the highway
with him and visit all those landmarks of our collective Bruce hinterland. It is such tensions that Springsteen no doubt
had in mind when closing his keynote address to the South by South West event
in March 2012 and advising:
“Be able to keep two
completely contradictory ideas alive and well inside your heart and head at all
times. If it doesn’t drive you crazy, it
will make you strong.” (Springsteen, 2012)
The autobiographical quality of so many of his songs is to
blame for us all feeling we know this guy; more than that, he is our buddy. It
is an impossible demand to make of anyone to be all those things, and yet down
the years it is a responsibility that Springsteen has done more and more to
embrace and encourage.
There have always been multiple tensions and paradoxes in
Springsteen’s writing and performances.
Alongside the commitment to having fun with music, there has also been
the serious side, and a conviction that rock music:
“was capable of
conveying serious ideas and that the
people who listened to it, whatever you want to call them, were looking for
something.” (Martin, 2010).
There are tensions too between Springsteen as a solo artist
and as a performer with the E Street Band. This has been evident many times over
the years, and heightened when Springsteen has toured on his own (notably in
1996 and 2005). Performing solo gives
him the opportunity to say things that may not be possible with the band
onstage, where the audience has an expectation of certain songs and a
particular dynamic. The tensions are nonetheless
ones that Springsteen recognises and makes explicit use of. The energy of the band provides the fuel that
powers and drives the epic shows, but it also has an edge:
“There were always two
sides to that particular band, there was a lot of dark material and yet there
was this explosion of actual joy; real, real happiness – whether it was being
alive or being with your friends or the audience on a given night. That was real but it was the devil-on-your-heels
sort of fun – laughing and running, you know what I mean?” (Martin, 1996)
Wanting to explore issues and ideas in his work is an
important driver, although Springsteen is careful not to claim that he has all the
answers, or that delivering the message is the most important thing. “I don’t like the soapbox thing” he remarked
in 1996; he doesn’t set out to make a statement, but to look inside himself at
the things that matter. Needing to find
a coherent narrative between songs and writing with purpose have long-defined
the approach to his craft. The
description offered in 1996 when explaining the origins of Tom Joad, is revealing:
“My idea wasn’t to get
the next 10 songs and put out an album and get out on the road. I wrote with purpose in mind, so I edited
very intensely the music I was writing.
So when I felt there was a collection of songs that had a point of view,
that was when I released a record.” (Martin, 1996)
Such a position has an integrity to it that rejects wider
commercial motivations (“I didn’t think my fundamental goal was to have hit
records”), and is more concerned with “honing an identity” and maintaining a
connection and commitment to the fan base:
“I had an idea y’know
and following the thread of that idea, when I thought I had something that
would be valuable to my fans, something enjoyable, something entertaining,
something that wouldn’t waste their time when I put a record out.” (Martin,
1996)
Making a conscious decision to steer away from simply
following the money and instead seeking to pursue work that matters and has
purpose is both brave and privileged. It
is easier to stand back from commercial pressures with a cushion of past
successes, but it is still astonishingly rare for someone in the rock business
to put craft and honesty before ‘success’:
“Right now I don’t
need records that are No.1. I don’t need
to sell records that are going to make millions. I need to do work that I feel is central,
vital, that sets me in the present (...) finding my place in the world as it stands.”
(Martin 1996)
It is easy to see why, for some, Springsteen’s ‘earnestness’
is a little too much. Many people don’t
get it, or don’t understand why a rock star should be concerned with anything
other than good music and making mega bucks.
But for Springsteen, it has always been about much more. He is an enigma: an intelligent but largely
self-educated observer and commentator; he is the eponymous ‘rich man in a poor
man’s shirt’ who – despite his huge success and significant personal wealth -
remains in touch not only with his origins but with the concerns of ordinary
working people struggling to get by day to day.
He constantly references his experience of growing up in a Catholic
household where his father was broken by his working life, and emasculated by
his worklessness, and where his mother just got on with the daily demands of
keeping the family together and food on the table, and instilled in Bruce the
central importance of a work ethic, of reliability and dignity. “I’m motivated by the issues of the day”
acknowledges Springsteen, “but ultimately for the reason I ask questions – go
back to the house I was brought up in” (Martin, 2012). Now in his early sixties
Springsteen is not afraid to push the boundaries and try new things. He has spoken about these years being ‘the
victory laps’ with nothing left to prove.
For some that would be a cue for complacency and trading on past
glories, but as Wrecking Ball makes
clear, Springsteen still has causes to fight, injustices to condemn, and
questions to try to answer.
The ‘lifetime conversation’ has become increasingly urgent
and loquacious over the past decade, with a regular outpouring of new (and
revisited) material. This was the narrative that burst out on The Rising (released in 2002); providing
a focus for cathartic collective grief in the wake of 9/11, and exploring loss,
loyalty, sacrifice and duty (Jones, 2010).
In the shock that consumed America and much of the western world when
the twin towers were brought down on that inappropriately sunny morning, Springsteen
was trying to make sense of the turmoil and loss, and finding a voice to ask
the questions on everyone’s mind – what is happening to our world and will we
ever be OK again? Unlike other
significant tone changes (Nebraska,
and The Ghost of Tom Joad for
example), The Rising was recorded
with the E Street Band, but under a new producer (Brendan O’Brien) the sound
was different and more constrained, allowing the lyrics to be at the centre, as
Springsteen told Adam Sweeting in 2002:
“This album is the
opposite end of the lyrical spectrum (...) The music was very necessary but it
wanted to be minimal, and so with ‘The Rising’ I was trying to make an exciting
record with the E Street Band which I hadn’t done in a long time, so that form was
kind of driving me.” (Sweeting, 2002)
Springsteen described the deliberate intentions he had with
the record – the mixing of personal stories and universal emotions, and then:
“you’re creating that
alchemy where your audience is listening to it, they’re hearing what they’re
feeling inside and they’re also feeling ‘I’m not alone’ you know? And that’s what you’re trying to do.” (Sweeting,
2002)
There was an explicit ‘life affirming’ quality to the album
despite the sombre tones and references.
The inclusion of some pop tunes lifts the mood and was a conscious part
of establishing balance. Springsteen
describes this as part of the craft of his best song writing – “like my verses are always the blues and my
choruses are gospel” – and it is this increasingly religious or gospel
quality that is a feature of more and more of his music. That may be less about faith (although ‘once
a Catholic, always a Catholic’) than it is about spiritual communion and
collective participation in this contemporary hymnal. The repeated ‘mantra’ (his own description) of
the chorus in The Rising certainly
has an enormous power, and the repeated ‘dream of life’ refrain underlines the
desperate transition between this life and the next, or this life and nothing:
“It’s sort of the
yin-yang of just what is (...) I think it’s the awareness of what is about to
be lost (...) just the magnitude of what you’re leaving behind, what you’re
giving up, and a last chance to speak to people that matter to you.” (Sweeting,
2002)
Above all, and through all his music, Springsteen is a
writer, and “as a writer you respond to the events of the day.” And somehow, it keeps authentic and
significant rather than contrived and hokey.
Because he believes it.
Devils & Dust
was released in 2005 and began to explore some of the despair and disillusionment
that would resurface in 2012. One
journalist has described it as:
“..arguably his most
fully realised record of social commentary, an unflinching study of a nation on
its knees, not knowing where, when or in what form salvation will come.”
(Staunton, 2010)
Magic followed in
2007 and continued to document Springsteen’s confusion, ennui and anger in the
face of political disillusionment and collective disenfranchisement. Such themes were underlined deliberately in
the live tour by Springsteen’s observations to his audience about watching “the
truth get twisted into lies”, and “lies get turned around until they sound like
the truth”, and explaining that “it’s not really about magic; it’s really about
tricks.” Similarly, introducing Living in the Future, Bruce reflected on
the experiences of rendition, illegal wire-tapping, reduced civil liberties and
“sleeping through changes that we never thought we would see.” This is Springsteen thinking aloud – trying
to figure things out for himself and perhaps for those of his audience who want
to listen (Scoppa, 2010).
Working on a Dream
(2009) arguably captured the hopes for the future with the new Obama
administration (a point underlined by Springsteen performing on the steps of
the Lincoln Memorial at the inauguration, and by his increasing readiness to speak
truth to power and be overtly critical of the Bush regime). The release of Wrecking Ball some three years later provided
clear testimony to the major transitions that had occurred in that period. Wrecking
Ball was much darker and angrier; an anguished howl against the
fragmentation and inequities of society following the worldwide financial
meltdown. Springsteen speaks of the
distance that he is trying to measure “between American reality and the
American dream”, but his social criticism and conscience has a far wider
resonance than this might infer. Indeed,
it is striking that Springsteen has a colossal following in the UK and
throughout Europe (as evidenced in his sell-out concerts whenever he tours
beyond the States). His popularity in
these parts goes beyond rock and roll and is similarly caught up in the ongoing
dialogue with his audience; the questions he addresses are not only a
reflection on the state of the union back home, but are – powerfully – about
the universal truths of the human condition, of life and death, of people – in
Springsteen’s words – whose souls are in danger (Staunton, 2010).
It is remarkably rare these days to find a writer providing relevant
social commentary in music. The legacy
of folk music and protest songs is evident throughout the album and
Springsteen’s immersion in the work of Woody Guthrie has left a ghostly
signature, particularly on Shackled and
Drawn, and Jack of All Trades. The homage to Stephen Foster’s ‘Hard Times
Come Again No More’ embedded in the title track of Wrecking Ball and resurfacing in Rocky Ground is also a nice touch.
This is not a bleak collection that harks back to Darkness on the Edge of Town (reprised
so brilliantly on The Promise in
2010). Rather it rages with defiance – take your best shot, let me see what you’ve
got – and a refusal to give up.
Much has been written about the likely misinterpretation of We take care of our own for a flag
waving patriotic anthem. This was the
same fate that infamously befell Born in
the USA almost thirty years ago.
Springsteen is unfazed about such matters, telling a press conference in
Paris that anyone who thinks this is about celebrating national glory is
missing the message and “not quite thinking hard enough” (Smyth, 2012). But this, like many of the songs, demands
that people pay attention and listen to the lyrics; don’t be taken in by some
of the upbeat and apparently rousing chorus lines, or the lilting waltz
melodies, these belie a tough and gritty narrative. Explaining his thinking to Jon Stewart,
Springsteen elaborated:
“’We Take Care of Our
Own’ is where I set out the questions that I’m going to try to answer. The song’s chorus is posed as a challenge and
a question. Do we take care of our own?
What happened to that social contract?
Where did that go over the past 30 years? How has it been eroded so terribly? And how
is it that the outrage about the erosion is just beginning to be voiced right
now?” (Stewart, 2012, P.41)
These are big issues – albeit ones that Springsteen
recognises he has followed through the past three decades, and that stretch
back in history. But it is the events of
the past few years and the lack of accountability in politics and financial
services that has seen the widening of inequalities and which lights the fuse
of this album. Springsteen described Wrecking Ball as:
“an opportunity to
bring the questions that have obsessed me for a large part of my life to the
forefront” (Stewart, 2012, P.42)
But he acknowledges it is the actions of those involved in
Occupy Wall Street and similar protests that have begun to change the national
discussion.
Despite the hard and angry roar of the album, the music is
often remarkably light and uplifting and ambitious. The Irish folk influences of tin whistles and
drums that characterised The Seeger
Sessions recordings feature here once more, but there are also new and
innovative techniques: a robust horn section, the extraordinary electric guitar
of guest Tom Morello, and a looping electronic drumbeat.
Religious imagery steeps this album with its references to
confession, judgement day and blood on our hands. The gospel choir style of Rocky Ground is stunningly punctuated
with the unexpected input from a background female rapper, and the strangled
cry from Springsteen of ‘I’m a soldier!’
Sometimes the messages are too complex and layered to be immediately
obvious but the resulting blend is less about the apocalypse than about hope
and redemption (‘you pray that hard times, hard times come no more’). It is a perfect segue from Rocky Ground to Land of Hope and Dreams.
This has long been a rare gem of the live shows, and the reworking for
the album suits the mood. Saints and
sinners, losers and winners, whores and gamblers; lost souls and broken
hearted, we’re all there. And we’re not
alone; among the ‘sweet souls departed’ on this train is the late Big Man
Clarence Clemons, and his haunting saxophone, magically inserted in the album’s
mix. The long time member of the E-Street Band whose death last summer
Springsteen described as “losing something elemental,” and like losing “the sea
and the stars.” His ghostly presence on
the album is a fitting tribute to all the years of standing shoulder to
shoulder with Bruce. The void that Clemons has left is still obvious and the
nature of the band and its line-up have changed forever, but “the currents of
life affect even the dream of popular music; there’s no escape.”
Springsteen describes Land of Hope and Dreams as something he
wrote when the E Street Band got back together in 1998, and which stood as the
Band’s manifesto:
“In other words, we
have stood for these things in the past.
This is our current statement of how we will try to stand for these
things in the future. That’s what our
band is about.” (Stewart, 2012, P.42)
The live tour of Wrecking
Ball has seen Jake Clemons (Clarence’s nephew) stepping up to the plate
with the Band, and providing opportunities not only to celebrate that continuity,
but as Springsteen describes it, to gather together “and we try to heal the
parts that God broke and honor the parts that are no longer with us.” This is clearly important for the band to
acknowledge as a community, but it is also a vital shared experience that the
audience participates in. “Are we missing anybody?” asks Bruce on the live
tour when he has finished introducing the band.
He asks it again, persistently, repeatedly. It is a practised routine – one honed in
rehearsal – but it is no less honest (or vital) for all that, as Remnick
describes:
“When he finishes the
roll call, there is a long ellipsis. The
band keeps vamping. ‘Are we missing anybody?’
Two spotlights are now trained on the organ, where Federici once sat,
and at the mike where Clemons once stood.
‘Are we missing anybody?’ Then
again: ‘Are we missing anybody?..That’s right.
That’s right. We’re missing some. But the only thing I can guarantee tonight is
that if you’re here and we’re here, then they’re here!’ He repeats this over and over, the volume of
the piano and the bass rising, the drums hastening, the voices rising, until
finally the song overwhelms him, and, if Springsteen has calculated correctly,
there will not be an unmoved soul in the house.”
It is high risk; it could come across as shtick or as
insincere parody (Bruce in full tub-thumping revivalist preacher mode), but it
doesn’t; it is actually incredibly powerful and for the core audience that has
been there in the lifetime conversation with Bruce for 20, 30, 40 years or
more, it is a vital moment of shared grief and comfort. Springsteen understands that this is the
level the conversation needs to progress to at least for a time, as he
explained to Remnick post-rehearsal:
“You’re setting out
your themes. You’re getting them
comfortable, because, remember, people haven’t seen this band. There are absences that are hanging
there. That’s what we’re about right
now, the communication between the living and the gone. Those currents even run through the dream
world of pop music!”
It is exposing stuff; to embrace the feelings of loss and
grief in public, and to give permission to an audience to do the same (and a
process for doing so) is brave. It hints
at a mature and self-aware Springsteen who not only understands the journey he
is on, but has worked hard at staying true and real. Remnick’s piece for The New Yorker included an interview with Mrs Springsteen, Patti
Scialfa, in which she acknowledged Bruce has worked things through with the
support of therapy. Gaining insight to
his relationship with his father, and fearing repeating it with his own family
have clearly been major battles in his adult life. He makes light of it when talking to Jon
Stewart and admitting his past habits of putting his creative needs above all
other demands, but realisation dawned.
Springsteen grasped that life is transient and ephemeral and you have to
seize it while you can:
“One day I
realized. ‘Wait, I’ve got it. I’ve got more music in my head than I’m going
to live to put out.’ But your son or
your daughter, they’re going to be gone tomorrow or the day after. This is what’s going to be gone, and this is
what’s going to always be here, not the other way around.” (Stewart, 2012,
P.44)
Springsteen acknowledges the necessity of therapy – “I’m
thirty years in analysis!” – and the significance of ‘self-loathing’ and his
dark side in driving his creativity and the constant search for renewal and
reinvention. At the same time he
recognises the contract he holds with his audience (the ticket as a
metaphorical handshake); his commitment to always doing his best and for some
mutual benefit:
“You are isolated, yet
you desire to talk to somebody. You are very disempowered, so you seek impact,
recognition that you are alive and that you exist. We hope to send people out of the building we
play in with a slightly more enhanced sense of what their options might be,
emotionally, maybe communally. You
empower them a little bit, they empower you.
It’s all a battle against the futility and the existential
loneliness! It may be that we are all
huddled together around the fire and trying to fight off that sense of the
inevitable. That’s what we do for one
another.” (Remnick, 2012)
Springsteen has never talked about the band stopping;
stating instead that they will keep going “until they open up the ground for us
and we march on down the hole” – they are there for the whole ride, right to the end.
“It’s never going to
be wrapped up. You’re never going to
hear anything called an E Street Band farewell tour – that’s never going to
exist. It just goes until it stops, and
then it keeps going.” (Stewart, 2012, P.45)
Even then it may not be over; “We are Alive” proclaims the closing track of Wrecking Ball, giving voice to the ghostly dead of past conflicts
and battles and offering hope of resurrection, or at least of spiritual rebirth
and renewed solidarity. When he performs
it on tour he introduces the song with a story about how he and his sister used
to play in the lengthening shadows of the cemetery where they went regularly
with their family, particularly to visit the grave of his father’s infant
sister who was hit by a truck and whose death cast a long shadow not only on
Douglas Springsteen’s life but on that of Bruce and his sisters in the next
generation. The ghosts are both imagined and real; their presence is tangible.
It is the connections with the past that also give hope for
the future. There is a cycle and balance
to everything and the faith that ‘we stood the drought, now we’ll stand the
flood’ gives a reason to carry on. The
belief in survival is complex and the rebirth is both physical and
spiritual. The ‘sweet souls departed’
from all our lives, including those from the E-Street Band, are still here -
standing ‘shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart’. We may be facing hard and challenging times,
but together – artist and audience - we have a duty to ‘carry the fire and
light the spark.’
References
Jones A (2010) ‘The Rising’, in The Ultimate Music Guide Springsteen
(Uncut)
Martin G (1996) ‘Bruce
Springsteen’, NME March 9.
Martin G (2010), ‘Tunnel of
Love’, The Ultimate Music Guide
Springsteen (Uncut)
Martin G (2012), ‘Why Bruce
Springsteen is still attacking the ‘fat bankers’ and ‘robber barons’, The Mirror, February 24 2012.
Remnick D (2012), ‘We are Alive’,
The New Yorker, July 30
Scoppa B (2010), ‘Magic’, The Ultimate Music Guide Springsteen
(Uncut)
Smyth D (2012), ‘Wrecking Ball’, Evening Standard, February 17 .
Springsteen B (2012), keynote
speech to South by Southwest, March 15.
Staunton T (2010), ‘Devils &
Dust’, The Ultimate Music Guide
Springsteen (Uncut)
Stewart J (2012), ‘Bruce
Springsteen’s State of the Union’, Rolling
Stone, March 29.
Sweeting A (2002), ‘Into the
Fire’, Uncut, September.
