Bring on Your "Wrecking Ball"

I first heard the song "Wrecking Ball" several years ago, when the official Bruce Springsteen web page posted the video of its first performance at the old Giants Stadium. Springsteen wrote the song to mark the impending destruction of the stadium to make way for the new, corporately-named one that would replace it. Having seen Springsteen at that venue several times, I enjoyed the song for what it seemed to be: a novelty, tossed off quickly for the occasion, and--if not for the video--never likely again to see the light of day, like some others known only to the truly fanatical fan (e.g., "Pilgrim in the Temple of Love," a Christmas song that is decidedly not for the entire family).

After 35 years of obsessive attention to Springsteen's career, I should have known better. Even songs that initially seem to be something just quickly dashed off have a way of circling back and taking on new and deeper meanings.

That has happened with the release of Springsteen's new studio album. Not only has the song returned, but it earns its status as the title track. It is the emotional turning point of the record, the moment when Springsteen pivots from the questions, the anger, the frustration, the despair, and the depression of the first half, to its defiant, hopeful, and life-affirming second half.

This is Springsteen's most coherent, most powerful, most passionate album in years. Springsteen has always been a story teller--not just in individual songs, but in albums, even in concerts. Long time fans (at least those paying attention) can see that the set list for a Springsteen show is not a haphazard thing. While some songs come and some songs go, there is a always a discernible storyline. He always has a story to tell.

That has never before been more true of a Springsteen album. In an excellent interview he gave some weeks ago in Paris, Springsteen said the album begins with a question (do "We Take Care of Our Own"?) and pursues it throughout. The songs that follow ("Easy Money," "Shackled and Drawn," "Jack of All Trades," "Death to My Hometown," "This Depression") all examine the last several difficult years of American life with an unsparing gaze.

"Easy Money" echoes the timeless theme of Woody Guthrie's "Pretty Boy Floyd": "Some will rob you with a six-gun/And some with a fountain pen." In Springsteen's telling, the example set by the fountain pen men is emulated by the man with the six-gun. Musically, the violin riff echoes that in "Into the Fire," Springsteen's tribute to the firefighters who ran into the World Trade Center on 9/11 when others were running out. The contrast the music evokes--between their selfless service and the greed of "them fat cats" who "just think it’s funny"--is incredibly jarring and effective.

"Shackled and Drawn" tells the story of the working man who foregoes the easy money ("Let a man work, is that so wrong"). But it doesn't really pay off for him:

Gambling man rolls the dice, workingman pays the bill
It’s still fat and easy up on banker’s hill
Up on banker’s hill, the party’s going strong
Down here below we’re shackled and drawn

In "Jack of All Trades," the slow cadence, the repetition of the rolling piano line, and the reassuring chorus ("I’m a jack of all trades, honey we’ll be all right") lulls the listener initially into thinking the narrator is simply resigned ("The banker man grows fat, working man grows thin/It’s all happened before and it’ll happen again"). That is, until the song explodes with rage at the end ("If I had me a gun, I’d find the bastards and shoot ’em on sight"). This is Springsteen's warning: Americans are a patient people, but they want to see justice done.

In a musical turn that made my Irish heart dance, Springsteen seems to discover some hitherto unsuspected Irish roots in "Death to My Hometown."

Springsteen has long had a tendency to place some of his darkest lyrics in some of his most rollicking tunes, and this is a prime example. Marking the devastation left behind by the financial "vultures," Springsteen's anger reaches its crescendo:

Send the robber barons straight to hell
The greedy thieves who came around
And ate the flesh of everything they found
Whose crimes have gone unpunished now
Who walk the streets as free men now
They brought death to our hometown, boys
Death to our hometown

The uplifting music is the only saving grace left. The next track, "This Depression," seems to mark the apogee of despair. "Baby, I've been down, but never this down/I've been lost, but never this lost."

And then he defiantly sings, "Bring on your wrecking ball." Watching the performance of the song on Jimmy Fallon's show last week, I thought: leave it to Springsteen to take a song ostensibly about the demolition of a stadium and transform it into a ringing affirmation of the value of the struggle despite every setback, of the value of life in the face of the inevitability of death.



In this song, as in the album as a whole, the anger is real, the anger is earned. But the anger can be constructive, even in the face of the destruction: "Hold tight to your anger/And don’t fall to your fears." Even when "When your best hopes and desires/Are scattered to the wind," they can't tear down the things that truly matter.

In the closest thing to a throw-away on the album, "You've Got It" seems to serve mostly as a romantic/sexual interlude, a bridge to the greater rejuvenation of the subsequent tracks. From this suggestion of the profane, the record shifts to the explicit spirituality of "Rocky Ground."

You use your muscle and your mind and you pray your best
That your best is good enough, the Lord will do the rest
You raise your children and you teach them to walk straight and sure
You pray that hard times, hard times come no more

And in the end, there's the promise of "a new day coming."

Much to my surprise, the real highlight of the record was another song I already knew, and one that to me best represents the living, beating heart of Bruce Springsteen's work: "Land of Hope and Dreams."

I'd first heard the song at what was only its second public performance, in Asbury Park in March 1999. It has been a staple of Springsteen's live performances and a favorite of mine ever since.

Nearly seven years ago, I was invited to give a talk on Springsteen at Freiburg University in Germany. I choose the theme, "Bruce Springsteen's American Dreams." My argument in a nutshell was this: earlier in his writing and recording, the dream was the individual's dream of escape from circumstances, the freedom of the open road. But as he grew, the dream became a more collective one: "Nobody wins unless everybody wins." The dominant metaphor in his lyrics shifted from the car to the train.

The culmination of that shift, I argued, came with "Land of Hope and Dreams," the song he wrote originally as the set-ender for the E Street Band reunion tour. When I saw that song listed as a track on the new album, I had a reaction I suspect was shared by many fans: we know this one. A live version was released years ago, we've been hearing it in concert for over a decade. Couldn't we get a new song instead?

But once again, Springsteen's judgment proves impeccable. As the penultimate track, it is an ideal song to mark the climax of the more hopeful second half of the album.

Well, I will provide for you
And I’ll stand by your side
You’ll need a good companion now
For this part of the ride
Leave behind your sorrows
Let this day be the last
Tomorrow there’ll be sunshine
And all this darkness past

Springsteen's work never denies the darkness. But it also never gives up hope for the day when you can "leave behind your sorrows," a time when the darkness will be in the past. It is by fully embracing the darkness in life that Springsteen earns his romantic dreams.

The song also contains what to me is the epitome of Springsteen's inclusive American vision:

This train... Carries saints and sinners
This train... Carries losers and winners
This train... Carries whores and gamblers
This train... Carries lost souls
This train... Carries broken hearted
This train... Thieves and sweet souls departed
This train... Carries fools, carries kings
This train... All aboard!
This train... Dreams will not be thwarted
This train... Faith will be rewarded
This train... Hear the steel wheels singing
This train... Bells of freedom ringing

This is Springsteen's America. One that says to everyone--every one--"all aboard!"

If for no other reason, the song needed to be there for the presence of the late Clarence Clemons' saxophone. Though I knew it was coming, the first notes brought tears to my eyes. For over 40 years, the Big Man was the living proof--on stage, every night--of the inclusivity of Springsteen's vision. He had to be there. And he is.

Over the last several years, Springsteen has suffered the deaths of several people close to him: bandmates Clemons and Danny Federici, as well as his friend and personal assistant Terry Magovern. What he seems to have taken from that is though the losses are painfully real, the things the people we love leave with behind with us are real too. As he said in his moving eulogy for Clemons,"Clarence doesn’t leave the E Street Band when he dies. He leaves when we die." We carry the souls of the departed with us.

The last track of the album, fittingly, is a song of resurrection, which weaves together personal loss and losses of our common history. The voices in the song are of the dispossessed dead: the striking union man in 1877, the young black girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church, the immigrant crossing the river today. They have all died, but they nonetheless sing out: "We Are Alive."

We are alive
And though our bodies lie alone here in the dark
Our souls and spirits rise
To carry the fire and light the spark
To fight shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart
To stand shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart
We are alive

For nearly 40 years now, Bruce Springsteen has been telling the American story. There is still no one who tells it better. Bruce Springsteen's America is the one I believe in, and the one I want to live in.

Reagan at 100: Listen to the Music

As anyone who has read this blog would know or could guess, Ronald Reagan has never been one of my favorite presidents.  My first vote for president was cast in 1980, and it wasn't for him.  (It wasn't for Jimmy Carter either, but for Republican Congressman John Anderson who ran as an independent.)  I cut my political opinion writing teeth at my college newspaper, penning pieces often critical of Reagan.

Today is Reagan's 100th birthday, and that has prompted lots of reconsiderations of the man and his presidency.  I concede that my opinion of both today is not as harsh as it was in the 1980s, though it is still predominantly negative.  And what I consider to be the relatively positive aspects of his administration are ones that most modern-day conservatives either deny or ignore.

But I was listening to Chris Matthews Friday night in his commentary on Reagan, and he had one eloquent line that I agree with whole-heartedly.  Reagan, he said, "heard our music even when it faded."  I think that captures beautifully why the memory of the man still resonates with so many Americans, even as the details of his actual record fade into myth.  He sang America's song, and many people loved him for it.

That same line, however, also captures for me what was so lacking in the man and his presidency.  As an unabashed and unashamed Bruce Springsteen fanatic, I cannot hear the words "Reagan" and "music" without thinking of the infamous Reagan misuse of Springsteen's music during the 1984 campaign.  Springsteen had released the "Born in the U.S.A" album, the one that would launch him into rock superstardom, in June.  That fall Reagan tried to appropriate Springsteen for his campaign.    While campaigning in New Jersey, Reagan said:

America's future rests in a a thousand dreams inside your hearts; it rests in the message of hope in songs so many young Americans admire:  New Jersey's own Bruce Springsteen.

Now, I realize that line was written for Reagan and not something he came up with on his own.  He didn't know the first thing about Springsteen or his songs, other than that he was wildly popular at the time and perhaps that his new album had the American flag on the cover.

But that's my point.  Yes, Reagan heard the music.  He just didn't hear the words.  He didn't listen to the words, or care what they actually said.  The title song of that album, despite the misinterpretations of people like George Will (and legions of superficial fans), is not a proud, patriotic anthem.  It is not a song with a message of hope.  It is one of rage and despair.  The Vietnam veteran who narrates it ends with the line:

I'm ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to go

It's a song about someone who has been used up and cast aside by the country he was born in and loves.  It's a song, as so many of Springsteen's songs are, about someone whose dreams have been crushed, but who desperately still wants to believe. 

When told of Reagan's words, Springsteen said that while Reagan was not a bad man, he was afraid that "there are people whose dreams don't mean much to him."  Those are the people Springsteen was writing about.  Those are the people Mario Cuomo was talking about in his memorable 1984 convention speech: "There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you don't see, in the places that you don't visit in your shining city."

There are things you miss when you only hear the music.  Truly great leaders need to know the words.  I admire Reagan's ability to hear our music.  But I want my leaders to listen to our lyrics, too.