Night Beat (35 page)

That idea comes across with resounding force at the group’s second Cobo Arena show, where the howl of the crowd often rivals the squall of the band, until the two meet and meld in one deafening, indivisible roar. But the biggest clamor occurs when Roth sings the opening verse from Van Halen’s current single, “And the Cradle Will Rock”—a smart and funny song about how the early 1980s heavy metal generation, like so many rock & roll upstarts that have preceded and will follow them, bewilder and frighten their elders. But it’s also a song about how those elders fail to understand their own children, and how the young people’s unrest amounts to a good deal “more than just an aggravation.”

The crowd sings along from start to finish, in the process appropriating the song and raising it to anthemlike status.

A little later, as Roth rests backstage, I share my theory of heavy-metal political intercourse with him. He doesn’t seem all that impressed.

“I don’t speak for kids,” he replies, “and I don’t represent people. I’m simply one
of
the people. But I’ll tell you this much: When that crowd out there tonight went nuts, they weren’t going nuts because David Lee Roth is so cool, or because Van Halen is so hot. They went nuts because they were enjoying
themselves.

“That’s what we mean when we say there’s a little Van Halen in all of us and we’re just trying to bring it out. It’s like something bursts inside of you, something that makes you not care what people around you are thinking. It makes you feel invincible—like, if a car hit you, nothin’ would happen. It should make you feel like the Charge of the Light Brigade, even if you’re just going to the bathroom. When you do that on a mass level, it becomes
hysterical,
not political. It expands to a large group of people not caring about conventions, just getting into the thrill of being themselves. That experience is about the audience, not us. All we do is provide the soundtrack.”

Roth decides it’s time to join the party in the outer room, but first he has a final comment to share about the audience: “When people ask how far I think I’ve come in this racket, I always say twelve feet—from the audience to the stage. And when this is all over—because you know how it goes in this business—I’m going back into that audience, and back to the streets.”

One could pass that off as just another bit of bravado on Roth’s part, but the statement says something vital and valid about Van Halen’s appeal. Like some other rock writers I know, I used to entertain the fantasy that the heroism of punk would eclipse, even negate, the mindlessness of heavy metal.

But heavy metal, quite plainly, has remained the music of choice for most of America’s young rock partisans, and Van Halen is a salient case in point why: They provide their audience with a heady, spectacular respite from the daily, drudging rhythms of common futility. That, plus an invitation to the party.

In the end, maybe that’s no different—no better, no worse—than an offer of shelter from the storm.

PART 4
dreams and wars

bruce springsteen’s america

O
n the night of November 5, 1980, Bruce Springsteen stood onstage in Tempe, Arizona, and began a fierce fight for the meaning of America. The previous day, the nation had turned a fateful corner: With a stunning majority, Ronald Reagan—who had campaigned to end the progressive dream in America—was elected president of the United States. It was hardly an unexpected victory. In the aftermath of Vietnam, Watergate, the hostage crisis in Iran, and an ongoing economic recession, America had developed serious doubts about its purpose and its future, and to many observers, Reagan seemed an inspiring and easy response to those hardships. But when all was said and done, the election felt stunning and brutal, a harbinger for the years of mean-spiritedness to come.

The singer was up late the night before, watching the election returns, and stayed in his hotel room the whole day, brooding over whether he should make a comment on the turn of events. Finally, onstage that night at Arizona State University, Springsteen stood silently for a moment, fingering his guitar nervously, and then told his audience: “I don’t know what you guys think about what happened last night, but I think it was pretty frightening.” Then he vaulted into an enraged version of his most defiant song, “Badlands.”

On that occasion, “Badlands” stood for everything it had always stood for—a refusal to accept life’s meanest fates or most painful limitations—but it also became something more: a warning about the spitefulness that was about to visit our land, as the social and political horizon turned dark and frightening. “I want to spit in the face of these badlands,” Springsteen sang with an unprecedented fury on that night, and it was perhaps in that instant that he reconceived his role in rock & roll.

In a way, his action foreshadowed the political activism and social controversy that would transform rock & roll during the 1980s. As the decade wore on, Springsteen would become one of the most outspoken figures in pop music, though that future probably wasn’t what he had in mind when he vaulted into “Badlands” on that late autumn night. Instead, Springsteen was simply focusing on a question that, in one form or another, his music had been asking all along. In a way it was a simple and time-old question: Namely, what does it mean to be born an American?

WELL, WHAT DOES IT mean to be born in America? Does it mean being born to birthrights of freedom, opportunity, equity, and bounty? If so, then what does it mean that so many of the country’s citizens never truly connect with or receive those blessings? And what does it mean that, in a land of such matchless vision and hope, the acrid realities of fear, repression, hatred, deprivation, racism, and sexism also hold sway? Does it mean, indeed, that we
are
living in badlands?

Questions of this sort—about America’s nature and purpose, about the distance between its ideals and its truths—are, of course, as old as the nation itself, and finding revealing or liberating answers to those questions is a venture that has obsessed (and eluded) many of the country’s worthiest artists, from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Norman Mailer, from D. W. Griffith to Francis Coppola. Rock & roll—an art form born of a provocative mix of American myths, impulses, and guilts—has also aimed, from time to time, to pursue those questions, to mixed effect. In the 1960s, in a period of intense generational division and political rancor, Bob Dylan and the Band explored the idea of America as a wounded family in works like
The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding,
and
The Band;
in the end, though, the artists shied from the subject, as if something about the American family’s complex, troubled blood ties proved too formidable. Years later, Neil Young (like the Band’s Robbie Robertson, a Canadian with a fixation on American myths) confronted the specter of forsworn history in works like
American Stars ’n’ Bars, Hawks and Doves,
and
Freedom.
Yet, like too many artists or politicians who come face to face with how America has recanted its own best promises, Young finally didn’t seem to know what to say about such losses. When all is said and done, it is chiefly pre-rock singers (most notably, Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Charley Patton, and a few other early blues and country singers) and a handful of early rock & roll figures—Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis—who have come closest to personifying the meaning of America in their music. In particular, Presley (a seminal influence on Springsteen) tried to seize the nation’s dream of fortune and make himself a symbol of it. But once Presley and those others had seized that dream, the dream found a way of undoing them—leading them to heartbreak, decline, death. American callings, American fates.

Bruce Springsteen followed his own version of the fleeting American Dream. He had grown up in the suburban town of Freehold, New Jersey, feeling estranged from his family and community, and his refusal to accept the limitations of that life fueled the songwriting in his early, largely autobiographical albums. Records like
Greetings from Asbury Park; The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle;
and
Born to Run
were works about flight from dead-end small-town life and thankless familial obligations, and they accomplished for Springsteen the very dream that he was writing about: That is, those records lifted him from a life of mundane reality and delivered him to a place of bracing purpose. From the outset, Springsteen was heralded by critics as one of the brightest hopes in rock & roll—a consummate songwriter and live performer, who was as alluring and provoking as Presley, and as imaginative and expressive as Dylan. And Springsteen lived up to the hoopla: With his 1975 album
Born to Run,
Springsteen fashioned pop’s most form-stretching and eventful major work since the Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
But for all the praise and fame the album won him, it couldn’t rid Springsteen of his fears of solitude, and it couldn’t erase his memory of the lives of his family and friends. Consequently, his next work,
Darkness on the Edge of Town,
was a stark and often bitter reflection on how a person could win his dreams and yet still find himself dwelling in a dark and lonely place—a story of ambition and loss as ill-starred (and deeply American) as
Citizen Kane.

With
The River,
released in 1980, Springsteen was still writing about characters straining against the restrictions of their world, but he was also starting to look at the social conditions that bred lives split between dilemmas of flight and ruin. In Springsteen’s emerging mythos, people still had big hopes, but often settled for deluded loves and fated families, in which their hopes quickly turned ugly and caustic. In the album’s haunting title song, the youthful narrator gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then enters a joyless marriage and a toilsome job in order to meet his obligations. Eventually, all the emotional and economic realities close in, and the singer’s marriage turns into a living, grievous metaphor for lost idealism. “Now, all them things that seemed so important,” sings Springsteen, in a rueful voice, “Well, mister, they vanished right into the air/Now I just act like I don’t remember/Mary acts like she don’t care.” In
The River’s
murky and desultory world—the world of post-Vietnam, post-industrial America—people long for fulfillment and connection, but often as not, they end up driving empty mean streets in after-midnight funks, fleeing from a painful nothingness into a more deadening nothingness. It’s as if some dire force beyond their own temperaments was drawing them into inescapable ends.

The River
was Springsteen’s pivotal statement. Up to this point, Springsteen had told his tales in florid language, in musical settings that were occasionally operatic and showy. Now he was streamlining both the lyrics and the music into simpler, more colloquial structures, as if the realities he was trying to dissect were too bleak to bear up under his earlier expansiveness.
The River
was also the record with which Springsteen began wielding rock & roll less as a tool of personal mythology—that is, as a way of making or entering history for personal validation. Instead, he began using it as a means of
looking
at history, as a way of understanding how the lives of the people in his songs had been shaped by the conditions surrounding them, and by forces beyond their control.

This drive to comprehend history came to the fore during the singer’s remarkable 1980-81 tour in support of
The River.
Springsteen had never viewed himself as a political-minded performer, but a series of events and influences—including the near-disaster at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor, and his subsequent participation in the No Nukes benefit, at New York City’s Madison Square Garden in September 1979—began to alter that perception. Springsteen had also read Joe Klein’s biography of folk singer Woody Guthrie and was impressed with the way popular songs could work as a powerful and binding force for social consciousness and political action. In addition, he read Ron Kovic’s harrowing personal account of the Vietnam War,
Born on the Fourth of July.
Inspired by the candor of Kovic’s anguish—and by the bravery and dignity of numerous other Vietnam veterans he had met—Springsteen staged a benefit at the L.A. Sports Arena in August 1981, to raise funds and attention for the Vietnam Veterans of America (a group whose causes and rights the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars had steadfastly refused to embrace). On one night of the Los Angeles engagement, Springsteen told his audience that he had recently read Henry Steele Commager and Allen Nevins’
Short History of the United States
and that he was profoundly affected by what he found in the book. A month earlier, speaking of the same book, he had told a New Jersey audience: “The idea [of America] was that there’d be a place for everybody, no matter where you came from . . . you could help make a life that had some decency and dignity to it. But like all ideals, that idea got real corrupted. . . . I didn’t know what the government I lived under was doing. It’s important to know . . . about the things around you.” Now, onstage in Los Angeles, getting ready to sing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” Springsteen spoke in a soft, almost bashful voice, and told his largely well-off audience: “There’s a lot in [the history of the United States] . . . that you’re proud of, and then there’s a lot of things in it that you’re ashamed of. And that burden, that burden of shame, falls down. Falls down on everybody.”

IN 1982, AFTER the tour ended, Springsteen was poised for the sort of massive breakthrough that people had been predicting for nearly a decade.
The River
had gone to the top of
Billboard
’s albums chart, and “Hungry Hearts” was a Top 10 single; it seemed that Springsteen was finally overcoming much of the popular backlash that had set in several years earlier, after numerous critics hailed him as rock & roll’s imminent crown prince. But after the tour, the singer was unsure about what direction he wanted to take in his songwriting. He spent some time driving around the country, brooding, reading, thinking about the realities of his own emotional life and the social conditions around him, and then settled down and wrote a body of songs about his ruminations. On January 3, 1982, Springsteen sat in his home and recorded a four-track demo cassette of the new songs, accompanied for the most part only by his ghostly sounding acoustic guitar. He later presented the songs to producer Jon Landau and the E Street Band, but neither Landau nor the musicians could find the right way to flesh out the doleful, spare-sounding new material. Finally, at Landau’s behest, Springsteen released the original demo versions of the songs as a solo effort, entitled
Nebraska.
It was a work like very few in pop music history: a politically piercing statement that was utterly free of a single instance of didactic sloganeering or ideological proclamation. Rather than preach to or berate his listeners, Springsteen created a vivid cast of characters—people who had been shattered by bad fortune, by limitations, by mounting debts and losses—and then he let those characters tell the stories of how their pain spilled over into despair and, sometimes, violence. In “Johnny 99,” he told the story of a working man who is pressed beyond his resources and in desperation, commits robbery and impulsive murder. Johnny doesn’t seek absolution for what he’s done—he even requests his own execution, though more as an end than a payment—but he does earn our compassion. Just before sentence is passed, Johnny says: “Now judge I got debts no honest man could pay/The bank was holdin’ my mortgage and they was takin’ my house away/Now I ain’t sayin’ that makes me an innocent man/But it was more’n all this that put that gun in my hand.” In “Highway Patrolman,” Springsteen related the tale of an idealistic cop who allows his brother to escape the law, recognizing that the brother has already suffered pain from the country he once served.