Night Beat (37 page)

To his credit, Springsteen did his best to make his true values known. In the autumn of 1985, he embarked on the final leg of his
Born in the U.S.A.
tour, this time playing outdoor stadium-sized venues that held up to 100,000 spectators. Playing such vast settings was simply a way of keeping faith with the ambition he had settled on a year or two earlier: to see what it could mean to reach the biggest audience he could reach. It was also an attempt to speak seriously to as many of his fans as possible, to see if something like a genuine consensus could be forged from the ideals of a rock & roll community. And of course, the gesture also entailed a certain risk: If Springsteen’s audience could not—or would not—accept him for what he truly stood for, then in the end, he could be reduced by that audience.

In some surprising respects, Springsteen’s ambition succeeded. At the beginning of the stadium swing, many fans and critics worried that he would lose much of his force—and his gifts for intimacy and daring—by moving his music to such large stages. But if anything, Springsteen used the enlarged settings as an opportunity to rethink many of his musical arrangements, transforming the harder songs into something more fervid, more moving, more aggressive than before, and yet still putting across the more rueful songs from
The River
and
Nebraska
with an uncompromised sensitivity. If anything, he made the new shows count for more than the election-year shows, if only because he recognized that addressing a larger audience necessarily entailed some greater responsibilities. In Washington, D.C., on the opening night of the stadium shows, Springsteen told a story about a musician friend from his youth who was drafted and who, because he did not enjoy the privilege of a deferment, was sent to Vietnam and wound up missing in action. “If the time comes when there’s another war, in some place like Central America,” Springsteen told his audience of 56,000, “then you’re going to be the ones called on to fight it, and you’re going to have to decide for yourselves what that means. . . . But if you want to know where we’re headed for [as a country], then someday take that long walk from the Lincoln Memorial to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where the names of all those dead men are written on the walls, and you’ll see what the stakes are when you’re born in the U.S.A. in 1985.” By the last few nights of the tour, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, he had added Edwin Starr’s 1970 hit “War” to the show, coming down hard on the line, “Induction, destruction/Who wants to die—in a war?” There was something heartening about watching a man who gazed into his audience and who—in defiance of the country’s political mood and perhaps even the beliefs of that audience—cared enough about them to hope they would not die in a futile or demoralizing military action.

But for all his intensified fervor, Springsteen was gracious at the end of the tour. At the end of “Dancing in the Dark,” in that moment when he generally pulled a female fan from the audience to dance with, Springsteen brought out his new wife, Julianne Phillips, danced with her sweetly, then took her in his arms and gave her a long kiss. Maybe it was his way of saying that this new relationship was where he would live, now that his tour was ending; or perhaps that his marriage was a way of attempting to live up to the best ideals of his own music. Later, at evening’s end, Springsteen stood before his band, his friends, and his audience and said: “This has been the greatest year of my life. I want to thank you for making me feel like the luckiest man in the world.” Indeed, Springsteen had begun the tour as a mass cult figure; he was leaving it as a full-fledged pop hero—a voice of egalitarian conscience unlike any rock had yielded before, with a remarkable capacity for growth and endurance.

In short, Springsteen seemed to emerge from the tour occupying the center of rock & roll, in the way that Presley, or the Beatles and Dylan and the Rolling Stones had once commanded the center. And yet the truth was, in 1980s pop, there was no center left to occupy. Rock was a field of mutually exclusive options, divided along racial, stylistic, and ideological lines, and each option amounted to its own valid mainstream. In fact, by the decade’s end, even the American and British fields of rock—which had dominated the pop world thoroughly for a quarter-century—were gradually losing their purism and dominance, as more and more young and adventurous musicians and fans began bringing African, Jamaican, Brazilian, Asian, and other musical forms into interaction with pop’s various vernaculars. In modern pop, as in the modern globe, America no longer overwhelmed the international sensibility.

In any event, Springsteen seemed to step back from rock & roll’s center at the same moment that he won it. In 1986, he assembled a multidisc package of some of his best performances from the previous ten years of live shows—a box set intended as a summation of his artistic growth and his range as a showman. In a sense, it was the most ambitious effort of his career, but also the least satisfying and least consequential. It didn’t play with the sort of revelatory effect of his best shows or earlier albums, and it didn’t captivate a mass audience in the same way either. Then, the following year, Springsteen released
Tunnel of Love.
Like
Nebraska,
the work with which he had begun the decade,
Tunnel of Love
was a more intimate, less epic statement than its predecessor—a heartbreaking but affirming suite of songs about the hard realities of romantic love. Maybe the record was intended to remind both Springsteen and his audience that what ultimately mattered was how one applied one’s ideals to one’s own world—or maybe the songs were simply about the concerns that obsessed Springsteen most at that time. In any event,
Tunnel of Love
was one of Springsteen’s most affecting works, and it fit into his life with painfully ironic timing. A few months later, Springsteen separated from his wife of three years, Julianne Phillips, and was rumored to be seeing the backing vocalist in his band, Patti Scialfa. Eventually, Springsteen divorced Phillips and married Scialfa. In life, as in music, sometimes one’s best hopes take unexpected, somewhat hurtful turns.

At the end of the decade, Springsteen was on tour again. Reluctant to continue playing oversized venues, he returned to the arena halls where he had done some of his most satisfying work in the years before, and restored a more human scale to his production. It was another election year, and while he still spoke out about issues from time to time, Springsteen seemed wary of being cast as merely a rock politician or statesman. Perhaps he realized that America’s political choices just couldn’t be affected very tellingly from a rock & roll stage, or maybe he was simply discouraged by what he saw around him. To be sure, there was plenty to be disheartened about: It was a season when Oliver North enjoyed status as a cultural hero, and when George Bush turned patriotism and flag-waving into brutal, vicious, and effective campaign issues. (Though one night in New Jersey, in a burst of inspiring temper, Springsteen went on record with an electoral choice of sorts. “Don’t vote for that fucking Bush,” he told his audience, “no matter what!”)

At the same time, Springsteen remained committed to the idea of turning the rock & roll audience into an enlightened and active community. After the
Tunnel of Love
tour, he headlined Amnesty International’s Human Rights Now! world tour in the fall of 1988. Along with Live Aid, the Amnesty tour was one of the most ambitious political campaigns in rock’s history. And the fact that it could occur at all and could reach an audience that was both massive and ready was in some ways a testament to the sort of idealism for which Springsteen had fought throughout the 1980s.

WITH HIS FIRST records in the 1990s, Springsteen retreated further from his role as an icon and spokesperson, and attempted to redefine the scope of his songwriting.
Human Touch
and
Lucky Town
(the double offering from 1992), worked on smaller scales: They were dark and complex works about personal risks, and as such, they seemed to say much about the internal realities of Springsteen’s own life, as he went from a highly publicized failed marriage to an apparently sounder second one, in which he became the father of three children. It was as if, in both his art and his life, Springsteen was attempting to say that to make your best hopes and ideals count for anything real, you have to bring them into your own home and heart, and see if you can live up to them.

Meantime, though, much changed about the larger family that Springsteen and the rest of us live in—that tormented home we still call America—and too little of it for the better. Back in the 1980s there was a vital argument to be waged about what it meant to be an American, and which visions and dreams best delineated our collective soul and destiny. In the 1990s, that argument hasn’t been settled so much as it’s been shunted to the side, or compromised between the maleficence of a Republican Congress and the artful ambitions of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Some of our most valuable and necessary instruments of economic opportunity and social justice have been curtailed or ended—tools such as affirmative action, immigration rights, and welfare protection for children and families in poverty conditions—and our criminal justice system is imprisoning poor and young people at increasing rates (indeed, no other democracy in the world locks up as many of its citizens as America). The message is clear: No more help for people on the fringe, no more chances for the losers. These are pitiless times, and there have been too few voices in either our arts or our politics who dare to tell us that the America we are making will be a more perilous, bloodier place than we might ever have imagined.

The 1995 album
The Ghost of Tom Joad
was Bruce Springsteen’s response to this state of affairs—you could even call it his return to arms. In any event, it was his first overtly social-minded statement since
Born in the U.S.A.,
eleven years earlier.
Joad
isn’t an easy record to like immediately. Its music is often sorrowful and samely, its words soft-spoken, sometimes slurred. In addition, it creates an atmosphere as merciless in its own way as the world it talks about. That is, it is a record about people who do
not
abide life’s ruins—a collection of dark tales about dark men who are cut off from the purposes of their own hearts and the prospects of their own lives. In this album, almost none of the characters get out with both their beings and spirits intact, and the few who do are usually left with only frightful and desolate prayers as their solace. “My Jesus,” Springsteen intones at one song’s end, “your gracious love and mercy/Tonight I’m sorry could not fill my heart/Like one good rifle/And the name of who I ought to kill.” At the end of another song, a man prays: “When I die I don’t want no part of heaven/I would not do heaven’s work well/I pray the devil comes and takes me/To stand in the fiery furnaces of hell.” Plaintive, bitter epiphanies like these are far removed from the sort of anthemic cries that once filled Springsteen’s music, but then, these are times for lamentations, not anthems.

On the surface,
Tom Joad
bears obvious kinship to
Nebraska.
Like that album,
Joad
’s musical backings are largely acoustic, and its sense of language and storytelling owes much to the Depression-era sensibility of Guthrie and such authors as John Steinbeck, James M. Cain, John Fante, and Eric Knight (the author of
You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up
). The stories are told bluntly and sparsely, and the poetry is broken and colloquial, like the speech of a man telling the stories he feels compelled to tell, if only to try and be free of them. That’s where the similarities end. In
Nebraska,
Springsteen wrote about people living their lives at the edges of hopelessness and suppression—people whose lives could turn dangerous and explode—and the music conveyed not just their melancholy but, at moments, also their escape into rage. In
Tom Joad,
there are few such escapes and almost no musical relief from the numbing circumstances of the characters’ lives. You could almost say that the music gets caught in meandering motions, or drifts into circles that never break. The effect is brilliant and lovely—there’s something almost lulling in the music’s blend of acoustic arpeggios and moody keyboard textures, something that lures you into the melodies’ dark dreaminess and loose mellifluence. But make no mistake: what you are being drawn into are scenarios of hell. American hell.

Many of
Tom Joad
’s characters are caught in this place, waiting for some event to make sense of their existence, or to explain to them their fates. You get the picture right at the start, in the broken cadences of the title track. A man sits by a campfire under a bridge, not far from endless railroad tracks. He is waiting on the ghost of Tom Joad, the hero of John Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath,
who at the end of John Ford’s 1940 film version of the novel, says: “ ’Wherever there’s somebody fightin’ for a place to stand/Or decent job or a helpin’ hand/Wherever somebody’s strugglin’ to be free/Look in their eyes . . . you’ll see me.’ ” But such hopes of salvation in the mid-1990s aren’t really much more palpable than ghosts, and the man sitting, praying by the fire, will wait a long time before his deliverance comes. In “Straight Time,” an ex-con takes a job and marries, and tries to live the sanctioned life. But the world’s judgments are never far off—even his wife watches him carefully with their children—and he waits for the time when he will slip back into the deadly breach that he sees as his destiny. In “Highway 29,” a lonesome shoe clerk surrenders to a deadly sexual fever that leads him into an adventure of robbery and murder and ruin, and he realizes that it is
this—
this dead-ended flight of rage and self-obliteration—that his heart has always been headed for.