The patriot acts

It’s Friday morning in Manhattan, not yet 9 o’clock. A 58-year-old man, clad all in black, is on a stage in the open air. A microphone is pressed to his lips.

Before him is a crowd that fills two city blocks and more. There is some kind of audience here every morning because this is where the outdoor segments of the Today Show – America’s most popular breakfast television programme, with about five million viewers – are shot.
The man in black has already jokingly told one of the show’s hosts that the people in front of him would turn up for anything, even “dancing bears”. That’s not true, though.
Today, the audience is at least twice as large as normal. It seems twice as impassioned too. Those who wanted to secure a front-row vantage point began arriving around 7pm last night.
The music swells as the band start the next song, their third. Honks from a saxophone bounce off the skyscrapers. Then the volume drops down again, and Bruce Springsteen starts to speak.
“Good morning, everybody,” he begins hoarsely. “I must really want to sell some records bad to be up here this early, singing these songs.
“This is a song called ‘Livin’ In The Future’. But it’s really about what’s happening now, right now. It’s about all the things we love about America – cheeseburgers, French fries, the Yankees battling Boston, the Bill of Rights, V-twin motorcycles, transfats, the Jersey Shore.”
The sentiments are unsurprising. Springsteen has long been the pre-eminent chronicler of America and of Americana – a mass-market songwriter capable of celebrating both the realities of US life and the country’s mythical heart.
But he has always been much more than a mindless patriotic booster. And now he proves it once again, as he turns on a rhetorical dime and his tone shifts.
“In the past six years,” he says, “we’ve had to add to the American picture: rendition, illegal wiretapping, voter suppression, no habeas corpus, the neglect of our great city New Orleans and our people, an attack on the Constitution, and the loss of our best young men and women in a tragic war.
“This is a song about things that shouldn’t happen here, happening here,” he goes on, passion rising. “And so right now, we plan to do something about it – we plan to sing about it. I know it’s early, but it’s late, so come and join us.”
There are plenty of prominent artists who believe that America is slipping and sliding into darkness. But Springsteen may well be the only one who can command the attention of five million breakfasting compatriots while saying so.
Bruce reiterated his on stage comments when he submitted to an interview with CBS News’s 60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley, who grilled the singer on the anti-war undercurrents running through new songs, such as the title tune and ‘Last To Die’.
“I think that we’ve seen things happen over the past six years that I don’t think anybody ever thought they’d ever see in the United States,” Springsteen told Pelley. “When people think of the American identity, they don’t think of torture. They don’t think of illegal wiretapping. They don’t think of voter suppression. They don’t think of no habeas corpus. No right to a lawyer… you know. Those are things that are anti-American.”
When Pelley put it to the singer that he’d be labelled unpatriotic for voicing such opinions, Springsteen responded, “Well, that’s just the language of the day, you know? The modus operandi for anybody who doesn’t like somebody, you know, criticising where we’ve been or where we’re goin’. It’s unpatriotic at any given moment to sit back and let things pass that are damaging to some place that you love so dearly.
“I think we live in a time when what is true can be made to seem a lie. And what is a lie can be made to seem true. And I think that the successful manipulation of those things have characterised several of our past elections. That level of hubris and arrogance has got us in the mess that we’re in right now. And we’re in a mess.
“But if we subvert the best things that we’re about in the name of protecting our freedoms, if we remove them, then who are we becoming, you know? The American idea is a beautiful idea. It needs to be preserved, served, protected and sung out. Sung out.”
None of these sentiments will be news to long-term Bruce aficionados. As far back as ‘Lost In The Flood’ from his debut album, he was pondering the fates of school friends and bandmates who were drafted and shipped to Vietnam.
His most famous pronouncement on the matter was ‘Born In The USA’, (the title derived from a Paul Schrader script) a vehement denunciation of the neglect and social exclusion of Vietnam veterans – although the song’s punch-the-air chorus led to widespread jingoistic misinterpretation, not least by Ronald Reagan, who namechecked Springsteen on his re-election campaign stop-off in New Jersey on September 19th, 1984.
“America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts,” Reagan said. “It rests in the message of hope in songs so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.”
Three days later at a concert in Pittsburgh, Bruce’s on-stage response was to preface ‘Johnny 99’ from the Nebraska album – a bleak acoustic indictment of Reaganonics-ravaged America – with the following comment: “The President was mentioning my name the other day, and I kinda got to wondering what his favorite album musta been. I don’t think it was the Nebraska album.”
It took the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq to prompt Springsteen to nail his political colours to the mast, embarking on the 2004 Vote For Change swing states tour alongside REM, Pearl Jam and the Dixie Chicks (no strangers to Bush-whackery themselves). Springsteen also sanctioned the use of ‘No Surrender’ for John Kerry’s campaign, and even performed the song at rallies. More recently, the We Shall Overcome album re-imagined Depression-era revivals by way of Pete Seeger’s songbook.
Consequently, Springsteen occupies an odd position these days. He’s the defiant dissenter slap-bang in the middle of the mainstream. From that apparent paradox springs much of his power and – no small thing for a man of his age – his relevance.
His populism and his peculiarity stay side-by-side as the song kicks back in. Musically, it’s a contemporary take on the kind of bar band pop that helped Springsteen climb the commercial heights in the first place, decades ago.
Lyrically, however, what begins like a standard depiction of love gone stale quickly spirals and twists into something very different: an anguished meditation on America’s ills.
“My ship Liberty sailed away/On a bloody red horizon/The groundskeeper opened the gates/And let the wild dogs run.”
By now, Springsteen is looming over a stage-side camera, his face jutting into its lens, his left arm snapping from side to side, index finger prodding and poking. The effect is strange – as though an Old Testament prophet and a pissed-off hip hop artist have come together in the same body – but also utterly compelling. The intensity peaks again as he delivers the song’s key lines:
“My faith’s been torn asunder/Tell me, is that rolling thunder/Or just the sound/Of something righteous going under?”
Bruce Springsteen’s appeal – the intense, devotional loyalty he inspires among fans – has always rested on several pillars. One of them has been his capacity to articulate and even embody a particular idea of America.
That idea is based around nebulous values rather than specific political policies: hope, faith and, above everything else, a sense of freedom.
All those things seem in scarce supply in the US of 2007. Springsteen – only three years younger than George W. Bush – told Sunday’s New York Times that he thought what had happened to his country over the past six years was “disheartening and heartbreaking”. Then he added: “Not to mention enraging.”
He didn’t sound like a man about to go gently into the good night.
All that said, the feeling of renewed vitality around Springsteen is not rooted primarily in politics. It has a much more straightforward source: his music.
His new record, Magic, is garnering some of his best reviews in years. “A truly mature and memorable album,” pronounced the Los Angeles Times; “His greatest album since The River and Nebraska,” concurred Britain’s Sunday Times; “One of the most upbeat, accessible records he has made,” the New York Times said.
It’s easy to see why the plaudits are flying. Magic is Springsteen’s return to what he does best.
For much of the past two decades, he has immersed himself in solo albums and side projects. The results have often been impressive – 1995’s solo acoustic The Ghost Of Tom Joad especially so – but they have never quite satisfied in the same way as his best work with the E Street Band.
Springsteen did bring the E Streeters back into the studio for 2002’s The Rising, an excellent album that was, to all intents and purposes, a response to the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Magic might best be seen as a follow-up to The Rising. It has the same lean feel, presumably owing in large part to producer Brendan O’Brien. O’Brien has proved himself adept at shearing off the elements that had begun to most date Springsteen’s sound without altering the essential chemistry of the man and his band.
The new album’s propulsive opening track and first single ‘Radio Nowhere’, which finds Springsteen raging against the corporate homogenisation of the airwaves and longing for “Pounding drums/A million different voices speaking in tongues”, sets the tone for much of what is to follow.
The song may not break new ground nor set the charts ablaze, but it is difficult to imagine any of Springsteen’s contemporaries producing anything that sounds even half as urgent.
Among the other standouts are the anti-war ‘Last To Die’ and the elegiac ‘Long Walk Home’. Filler material is conspicuous by its absence (with the arguable exception of the underwhelming ‘You’ll Be Comin’ Down’) and ‘Girls In Their Summer Clothes’ is the closest to a pure pop song Springsteen has written in years.
Throughout the album, hooks and choruses abound, often sugaring otherwise bitter lyrics. Springsteen has already acknowledged the odd juxtaposition: “I took these forms and this classic pop language and I threaded it through with uneasiness,” he told the New York Times.
Bruce, contrary to the popular caricature of him, is no stranger to complexity.
Almost 20 years ago, his semi-official biographer Dave Marsh argued that his particular genius lay in his capacity to absorb all the great elements of music that had come before – whether the lyricism of Dylan, the stellar production of Phil Spector or the live dynamics of an R’n’B show – and spit them back out in a unique way.
His albums provide plenty of evidence to back up that theory, but the conclusive proof has always come in his live shows. The famous four-hour marathon gigs are now a thing of the past but – at least if the evidence of two ‘rehearsal’ performances in the past ten days is anything to go by – Springsteen remains a potent force.
Last Monday and Tuesday, he played two gigs on home turf. The Asbury Park Convention Hall is a now-decrepit venue on the boardwalk of the down-at-heel New Jersey town with which Springsteen is most associated. Warm-up shows for his tours customarily take place there.
On Monday, even some dedicated fans had complained about poor sound quality. The Tuesday night gig, by contrast, was little short of astonishing.
Part of its intensity no doubt lay in the fact that only about 2,000 people could be jammed into the small hall. The atmosphere was ratcheted up another notch by the combination of a hot, humid night and a lack of air conditioning. Sweat was dribbling off Springsteen’s forehead, his fingertips, and even his elbows about five songs into the 21-song set.
The rivers of perspiration did not dissipate his focus, however, from the opening ‘Radio Nowhere’ (presaged by a cheery cry of “Hello, guinea pigs!”) to the rousing close of ‘American Land’.
In between came songs from every phase of his career: the title-track of the new album; the old crowd-pleasing oddity ‘Thundercrack’; a version of ‘Born In The USA’ that managed to be both sombre and defiant; and an earth-shaking rendition of ‘Badlands’.
Friday night’s show in the Continental Airlines Arena, also in New Jersey, had a less feverish atmosphere – only 3,000 tickets were released despite the cavernous venue’s 20,000 capacity. But if the show lacked the manic energy of Asbury Park, it at least boasted fresh, muscular re-arrangements of old songs, including ‘Reason To Believe’ and ‘The Ties That Bind’.
Perhaps most strikingly of all, both shows displayed Springsteen’s unwillingness to coast. He could be forgiven for doing so. He has nothing more to prove. Yet he continues to perform like a man who will be in mortal danger if he gives less than his all. Such commitment has earned him an enduring fan base, and continues to pull new admirers in.
The first rows of the Today Show audience, for example, included Tom Mahon, a fellow New Jerseyan who said he'd first seen Springsteen in the early 1970s, and 20-year-old Richard Hernandez, clutching a copy of Born To Run and watching Springsteen for the first time.
Hernandez became a fan when he was 17. “My uncle Jimmy said, ‘Listen to this guy’, and I was just blown away,” he said. Other 20-year-olds, he added, “are not really aware of him and they need to be. They need to know his music is relevant to now.”
Kerry Smith travelled from Connecticut with her friend Paulette Preble, and camped out overnight to see Springsteen’s early morning performance. “We left at eight last night and left six children behind between us, and our husbands,” Smith said.
Of the object of her enthusiasm, she added: “I saw him for the first time eight years ago and I've seen him 12 times since. There is so much depth to his music, so much more to him than ‘Born In The USA’ and ‘Dancing In The Dark’. And, you know, he's just very fiery about life. It’s as if he never wants you to give up in your own life.”
It’s always easy to mock what sound like gushing examples of fandom. But, in Springsteen’s case, sometimes you can hear a chord, just below the surface of his admirers’ words, that resonates with more than just supercharged enthusiasm for the man’s music.
It speaks of the kind of passion that only a few artists or bands – the likes of The Clash, Nirvana and Radiohead – can spark. And, in Springsteen’s case, that chord also seems to vibrate with yearning – for old hopes and lost times perhaps, but also for a vision of America that seems these days to be sputtering and all but extinguished.
In Asbury Park and in the Continental Arena, Springsteen gave a disenchanted speech before ‘Livin’ In The Future’, similar to the one he made on the Today Show.
But, at both gigs, he followed the new song with an older touchstone, ‘The Promised Land’. Each time, he imbued the latter’s deceptively simple chorus (“I ain’t a boy, no, I’m a man/And I believe in a promised land”) with real ferocity.
To grow up, his roar and bark seemed to say, need not leave you weakened, compromised or defeated. It need not mean the surrender of ideals, about your life or about your country.
Springsteen ended the final warm-up show, at the arena, with a shout. “E Street boot camp is over!” he proclaimed.
A little corny? Sure. But the military metaphor also summoned up something else – the sense of a man headed back into the fray, back to fight for something precious.
Once more unto the breach, it seemed to say. Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.