After 18 months, “Springsteen on Broadway” has closed and is available on Netflix. The one-man, two-hour show, with appearances by Patti Scialfa on two songs, who is also his Bruce Springsteen’s wife, is a biography of his music. Springsteen recounts the highlights of his childhood and early adulthood and the effect it had on his music.
I saw “Springsteen on Broadway” a year ago and have seen him and the E Street Band in concert at least eight times since 2009. I liked his music from first hearing “Born to Run” in 1975, bought his five-record album in the 1980s but did not make time to study his songs until much later. In the past 10 years, reading and listening to Springsteen has been one of the pleasures of my semiretirement.
A benefit of YouTube is that footage of early Springsteen concerts and videos makes it easy to see how Springsteen as a person and songwriter has changed over the decades. The E Street Band’s 2009 Super Bowl performance of “Working on A Dream” is three decades of growth away from his early performances of his classic “Badlands.”
Springsteen is two years older than I am, and we share several experiences: Catholic grade schools, small declining hometowns an hour away from East Coast big cities where we really wanted to be, hated grade school, keen memories of our hometowns, dealing with the Vietnam era and cheerful, optimistic mothers. We also had strong fathers but who were very different. Unlike Bruce, I never saw my father drunk in the kitchen or at a bar and never saw a mean streak of depression. My father, who died when I was in graduate school, was my idol whom I loved to be with. My favorite words from my childhood were “we have a project to do.” Either way, as Springsteen says, for most men, “fathers stand like beacons” to whom we always measure ourselves.
Springsteen’s being the only boy in a family of three, compared with my being one of five boys and three girls, must have given Springsteen more individual attention than I received. My childhood was too chaotic to practice a music instrument, but I learned to get along with different ages and personalities. His hero was Elvis Presley; my heroes were John F. Kennedy and Roberto Clemente.
Viewing “Springsteen on Broadway” allowed me to compare his experiences and youthful ideas with mine. An overarching mystery we have in common is a focus on the American Dream, patriotism and what it means to be brought up in America during the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era. We both escaped the draft by good fortune, had friends killed in Vietnam and were confused about how our leaders could let the war go on long after we knew it was unnecessary and wrong.
We also have a deep connection to our hometowns. We were both “Born to Run,” but he ran farther and has not stayed away so long. I was ready to leave my hometown not because of rejection or lack of opportunity but because of curiosity about other places. Like Springsteen, I remember every crack in the sidewalks and every big tree where we used to play. Springsteen now lives 10 minutes from his hometown, and I have never resided again in mine since leaving high school nearly 50 years ago. My memories are as alive and precious, however. In his Broadway show, Springsteen tells of recently returning to his neighborhood only to see that the tree in front of his house had been cut down by the city. His intimal sadness did not last long when he realized that the tree was so great and its impact so strong that it will never be gone.
Springsteen articulated a yearning, a searching for “the promised land of hopes and dreams” that I recognize. He jokes about singing about “Thunder Road” and “Racing in the Streets” while not even knowing how to drive when he was 21. I worked at a new car dealer (my dad was the general manager) and enjoyed the envy of “the greasers” in my high school because one of them saw me driving a Pontiac GTO one time.
While I am no Bruce Springsteen, he helped me understand my academic and philosophical interests. He says he wanted to celebrate his country, to criticize it in order to understand and to share that understanding with others. Of all the creative artists I have read about, Springsteen explains the creative urge the best: When you are there, you want to stay there; when you aren’t there, you are afraid you won’t return there. Springsteen says it is that “being afraid that you won’t return” that makes writers and artists selfish with their time and thoughts and hard to get along with.
Unlike the stereotype of a rock star, Springsteen is quite conventional in his lifestyle and personal relationships. He has apparently lived drug-free and been loyal to his family and to his band. Perhaps the major surprise about him is his recognition of the deep and continuing influence of his Catholic upbringing on his life and music. Surprisingly, Springsteen ends both his biography and his Broadway show with the “Our Father.”
Springsteen helped me understand our times and my life. He helped me recognize that I believe in “the promised land” and in “the land of hopes and dreams.”
David Webber joined the MU Political Science Department in 1986 and wrote his first column for the Missourian in 1994.
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