Bruce Almighty

By Vince Guerrieri
210 west Managing Editor [send email]

Hey, ho, rock ‘n’ roll, deliver me from nowhere
--Bruce Springsteen, “Open All Night”

When I was 10 years old, my mother tried to explain the deep personal, spiritual significance of Bruce Springsteen saying, “Tramps like us, baby we were born to run!”

I didn’t get it. But by the time I graduated high school, it made perfect sense.

Springsteen’s life in New Jersey and California (it was just a phase) is a generation and hundreds of miles removed from my own in Northeastern Ohio (although he saw fit to write a song about it – more on that later). He had a physical for the draft. I live in the age of an all-volunteer army. He had already set out on a musical career and his path to immortality at the age when I finished college. As I write this, I’m just shy of my 26th birthday. Springsteen was putting the finishing touches on possibly the best American rock album ever – Born To Run – as he was nearing his.

But if his music is any indication, he knows me – probably better than anyone.

During my senior year of high school, Bruce released his Greatest Hits album. As a child of the 1980s, I was already familiar with the man they call “The Boss” – a term of respect bestowed on him by bandmate Miami Steve Van Zandt, but a nickname he hated. We had “The River,” “Born in the U.S.A.” and his live boxed set on vinyl.

Springsteen’s Greatest Hits album was the first CD I ever bought (I know, I know, our family came late to the game of modern technology…I still don’t have a DVD player, but that’ll change come Labor Day weekend). It spoke to me. As I was readying to graduate high school, I wondered if I’d become one of those people who drank too much and remembered high school as my glory days (yes on the first part, no on the second). As I was going away to college, I felt like Youngstown was the town full of losers I was pullin’ out of to win, or if it was still my hometown…it turned out to be both. Who knew?

I wound up in Bowling Green with my meager collection of Springsteen music, and set out on the next adventure of my life. My first semester wasn’t always fun. In fact, it was downright traumatic at times. I had some bad luck in an affair of the heart, and my demons got a firm hold of me.

On my darkest days, I’d pop in the live boxed set and listen to the most miserable songs Bruce ever wrote (I know that as a reporter, I’m supposed to refer to him by his last name, but it seems to impersonal to me). When he said that at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe, well then, that was good enough for me. When I found myself in darkness, I listened to his howls from the darkness on the edge of town.

I didn’t see the same people I’d become accustomed to seeing every day in Youngstown. But Bruce was there, along with the Cleveland Indians, who were on their way to their first World Series appearance since the early days of the Eisenhower administration, when Chuck (my father, to the uninitiated) was a baby.

Chuck procured two tickets to the first round of the playoffs, pitting the Tribe against the Boston Red Sox. The Tribe won, their second win in what would become a three-game sweep, and we set off into the night back to Bowling Green. I nodded off on the Ohio Turnpike, waking up when we pulled into the tollbooth between Interstates 80 and 75.

“Jungleland,” the last song off of Born to Run, was coming to its ending, a tale of the Magic Rat and the Barefoot Girl finding love and then losing it.

Outside the street’s on fire in a real death waltz
between what’s flesh and what’s fantasy
And the poets down here don’t write nothin’ at all
They just stand back and let it all be

After the Tribe dispatched the Seattle Mariners in the American League Championship Series, Chuck secured tickets for Game 5 of the 1995 World Series – the last game the Indians played in Cleveland that year.

The Tribe won 5-4, on the strength of home runs by Albert Belle and Jim Thome (I think Thome’s shot off Brad Clontz in the 8th inning is still in orbit). People were dancing down East Ninth Street. Horns were honking, and “Glory Days” blared from the speakers at Jacobs Field.

That weekend, I wound up back in Youngstown, and I saw some friends from high school. I didn’t feel very close to a lot of people with whom I went to high school, but they welcomed me back with open arms. Springsteen’s words from “Adam Raised a Cain” hung heavy in my head:

All of the old faces ask you why you’re back
They fit you with position and the keys to your daddy’s Cadillac…

That fall, Bruce released an acoustic solo album, The Ghost of Tom Joad. It included a song called “Youngstown,” about the decline of the steel industry and the town around it. Growing up six minutes from downtown Youngstown (five if I caught all green lights), he’d made a fan for life out of me with that song.

I missed the good old days in Youngstown. Three weeks after I was born, the mills started closing down. My mother’s father and many of his brothers (and for a time, his sons) worked in the steel mills in town, as did Uncle Jimmy, my godfather. Grandpa and his brothers had retired by then. His sons had gone on to other things. Uncle Jimmy suddenly found himself jobless. I bore witness to the aftermath, but never to the days Bruce talked about, when gray skies led to a healthy paycheck for thousands of workingmen.

Of course, a performance in Youngstown was a natural. Bruce played Stambaugh Auditorium on the North Side of town, on the same stage where I had participated in several plays and had walked across to receive my high school diploma less than a year earlier. We were six rows back. I haven’t had seats as good for any Springsteen concert since…but then again, any seats at a Springsteen concert are good seats.

Someone said there were two types of people in the world: those who love Bruce Springsteen and those who’ve never seen him in concert. He performed for more than two hours, singing most of the songs off the new album and some classics that would soon become favorites of mine. He followed “Youngstown” with “The Promised Land,” which is my favorite Springsteen song of all time, and probably my favorite song as well.

I went back to Bowling Green for my second semester in college. The night before classes started, I found myself at one of the secondhand shops in downtown Bowling Green, and picked up Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town on vinyl for a total of about three bucks.

I dubbed tapes of those albums (turntables were hard to come by on campus) and was preparing to send them home with my friend Mike when he visited during Super Bowl weekend of 1996. Instead, I brought them home myself. I got the call on Super Bowl Sunday that Charlie (Chuck’s father, to the uninitiated) went to sleep Friday night and didn’t wake up.

I also brought Springsteen’s Greatest Hits, and we hit I-75 to the machine gun drum roll of “Born to Run.” Mike (who has accompanied me to two-thirds of the six Springsteen shows I’ve seen) tells me that to this day, he gets chills when he hears it.

I was a little off-kilter during my freshman year, as most freshmen who find themselves in a new place 200 miles away from home would be, but after returning from Charlie’s funeral, I was positively wrecked. I listened incessantly to my two new Springsteen albums, along with Tunnel of Love, which I picked up that semester. Tunnel of Love was Bruce’s first album without the E Street Band, and it was thoroughly depressing. Even Nebraska, bleak as it was, had “Open All Night,” a tune to a rockabilly beat. But Tunnel of Love spoke to me as I had women problems. I surrendered to the misery, hoping it would abate soon.

Winters are always tough for me. Any melancholy I evade the rest of the year catches up to me in the cold, gray days of winter, usually with a vengeance. But that winter was the roughest. As a result, there is no day in which I exult so much (with the possible exception of Opening Day of baseball season) as the first day of spring. I’m not talking about the vernal equinox; I mean that first day when the weather breaks and I find myself walking around and luxuriating in the world coming alive.

On that first day in the spring of 1996, I thought of “The Promised Land,” one of those Springsteen songs on Darkness on the Edge of Town I found myself listening to incessantly, looking for some hope in a situation I found hopeless.

The narrator of the song is an honest soul who’s looking for something better than the life he leads. Today, whenever I hear that song in the car, no matter what the weather is, I turn up the radio and roll down the windows, singing along that I ain’t a boy, no, I’m a man, and I believe in the Promised Land.

The last verse sustained me through days that no human being should ever have to live through, those days when you’re trapped in a prison of solitude, when even among a crowd you feel alone, and there’s no way out. It warns of an impending storm, a storm Bruce is headed into with no reservations.

Gonna be a twister to blow everything down that ain’t got the faith to stand its ground
Blow away the dreams that tear you apart
Blow away the dreams that break your heart
Blow away the lies that leave you nothin’ but lost and brokenhearted

I thought of that verse as I watched the campus in Northwestern Ohio come alive in the spring of 1996, and I felt alive. More than that, though, I felt like a survivor, like I had weathered that storm. I was no longer a boy, I was a man.

After that, I eagerly scooped up all of Bruce’s canon of works. I own every album he’s ever put out in some form (CD, vinyl or cassette), and they all speak to me in some fashion. I’ve even accumulated some bootlegs, as well as several books written about Bruce.

The winter before I graduated from college, Bruce came out with his second boxed set, Tracks. It was a collection of 60 songs that he’d never released on an album, as well as alternate versions of some classics (“Born in the U.S.A.” among them) and his first audition. On Christmas night, I went out with the crew from high school, the people who fitted me with position and the keys to my daddy’s Cadillac, and returned home.

Charlie’s chair sat in the living room. I sat in it and popped in the first of four discs from the boxed set. I watched the lights on the tree twinkle and heard Bruce sing about Growin’ Up. The world made perfect sense to me, and like Bruce, I swear I found the key to the universe.

During my senior year of college, Bruce was inducted into the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall of Fame. I misspent many evenings at the BW-3 on Wooster Street, and the night of the Hall of Fame concert was no exception. The first song Bruce played was “The Promised Land.” I danced around the bar. My friends just didn’t understand.

Springsteen went on tour with the full E Street Band that fall, and I bought tickets to see him in Detroit. The father of one of the girls with whom I went to high school told me after Bruce’s 1996 performance in Youngstown that it didn’t count unless I saw him with the full backing of the E Street Band.

I blew him off, but he was right. It was glorious! He started out with “Dancing in the Street,” and when he got to “Can’t forget the Motor City,” the crowd went nuts and he was off, performing for more than three hours.

During the concert, he spoke of the majesty, the mystery and the ministry of rock ‘n’ roll. Once, when I was about 10, Chuck taught me of the healing power of rock ‘n’ roll. He’d take off the T-tops on his 1978 Corvette Silver Anniversary Edition (Springsteen’s last televised concert was sponsored by Chevrolet…I was never prouder to drive a Lumina) and let rock ‘n’ roll blare. He said that all the problems he might have had disappeared into the air. Being 10, I didn’t have that many problems. Today, the same remedy works for me. I’ll roll down all the windows and let Bruce’s music blare.

“Unlike my competitors,” he’d say of other ministers in their respective faiths, “I can’t promise you life everlasting. What I can promise you is LIFE! RIGHT! NOW!!”

The following year, I saw him in Pittsburgh. Again, it was a religious experience.

The year after that, some people of Middle Eastern descent decided to fly some planes into some buildings as their idea of a religious experience. At that point, I subscribed to The New York Times and subjected myself to the daily heartbreak of reading their Portraits of Grief. I, along with Springsteen, read the portraits and marveled at the number of people, who died at the hands of terrorists, that had Springsteen songs played at memorial services. (In one of the low points of my career, I had the sad duty of talking to a woman who’d settled from England to the Pittsburgh area. She survived the Blitz, a husband dying and open-heart surgery to outlive one of her daughters, who died in the World Trade towers.)

Springsteen played “My City of Ruins” to open the telethon for victims of 9/11. He said that someone yelled at him across the street in New York City, “We need you!” He turned out an album called The Rising and toured. I saw him twice on that tour, in Cleveland and in Pittsburgh.

I saw him again on Wednesday, when he christened PNC Park with its first concert and drew more fans than the Pirates ever will. His performance ran the gamut, starting with the first song off his first album, “Blinded by the Light,” recorded just after my parents graduated high school, and ending with songs from an album that came out seven years after my own high school commencement.

I realize that there are naysayers that still aren’t convinced. They think I’m weird (and they’re not wrong). But Bruce’s music spoke to me, and if you let it, it’ll speak to you.

I was in Manhattan on midnight on a Saturday night, and it sounded just like “New York City Serenade.” It’s not Christmas until I hear him sing that Santa Claus is comin’ to town (and when he closed his show last December in Pittsburgh with that, 20,000 screaming fans almost tore the Mellon Arena down!). I’ve left orders with my friends (and really, anyone else who’ll listen) that when I die, I want them to play “Glory Days” at my funeral Mass. I’m still waiting for the day when I sell my first novel, so I can paraphrase Bruce, telling my friends that the publishing company just gave me a great big advance! I’m still looking for a girl I can love with all the madness of my soul.

One of Bruce’s high school classmates told Rolling Stone that he wouldn’t have remembered Bruce if he didn’t become Bruce Springsteen. As somewhat of a loner in high school, I sought solace in his music. He appeals to the loser in all of us, and gives hope. As a rock ‘n’ roller, he walks with kings without losing the common touch. He’s still one of us. At his concert in Youngstown, someone yelled out “How’s the family,” and Bruce answered him!

As Adam Sandler said, Bruce Springsteen isn’t Jewish, but his mom thinks he is. Springsteen’s of Italian descent, and we Italians make the best storytellers. Charlie spun tales of gangsters, gamblers and hustlers from the same tableau from whence Bruce gave us his first three albums. As a professional writer, I’d kill to be able to turn a phrase like Bruce did in “Spirit in the Night,” about being hurt and a girl saying, “Honey, let me heal it.” She later kissed him just right, like only a lonely angel can. (I got a kiss like that once…just once.)

Michael Chabon, a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist who called Pittsburgh home for a while (I hope someday that’ll be said about me as well) said that Born to Run is the most Catholic album ever made. Springsteen, a failed altar boy and someone who came through Catholic school with scars, evoked images of what a decent Catholic should be (I’m a practicing Catholic, and I hope someday to get it right). The litany he offers in songs like “The Rising” or “Land of Hope and Dreams” (which my buddy Mike wants played at his funeral) is straight out of any Mass. The Catholic honor worn by Chuck (who, like Bruce, was an altar boy from the days when the Mass was said in Latin and ran afoul of several pastors) is evident in Bruce’s music, and they both carry a deep-seeded sense of right and wrong that transcends politics (which I inherited from Chuck and can appreciate in Bruce’s music). He believes in atoning for his sins (any song from Nebraska will tell you that much), but also believes in reveling in the glorious world around him (it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive!). He believes in a Promised Land, and goddammit, so do I!

The reality Bruce creates in his music appeals to all of us because we all experience it, but his idealism appeals to all of us because we can experience it, and if we say our prayers and eat our Wheaties, we just might.

“He didn’t buy the mythology that screwed so many people,” U2 frontman Bono said at Bruce’s induction into the Rock Hall. “Instead, he created an alternative mythology, one where ordinary lives became extraordinary and heroic.”