“Change — how do you change yourself? It’s easy to lose yourself or never find yourself. The older you get, the heavier that package becomes that you haven’t sorted through, so you run. I’ve done a lot of that kind of running. I’ve spent 35 years trying to let go of the destructive parts of my character and I still have days where I struggle with it.”
Bruce Springsteen
I spoke at some length in my last posting about finding peace, and being comfortable in my own skin at 52-years of age. Now I would speak about Bruce Springsteen and his observations about aging and seeking emotional equilibrium. Watch the trailer for the new movie designed to showcase the music from his new album:
Bruce Springsteen is currently 70-years old, and his new album “Western Stars” builds on his earlier album “Tunnel of Love.” In both these deeply personal albums Springsteen dives deep into himself to reflect on what it means to be a man. How does one make a commitment to try and love a woman for the long haul? Build a stable life and not panic and flee? Raise children in a more supportive and loving manner than you were raised? Springsteen’s characters struggle to overcome their demons. They are damaged and doubting men, and they fight against the temptation to run from lover and family. How many men abandon their families? The pressure gets to them and they run away. They abandon their wife. They rarely or never talk to their children. They run away towards — what? Run towards freedom? Away from responsibility? Away from themselves? The author of the iconic “Born to Run” anthem spent much of the earlier part of his youth running away from lovers (and himself?), doing immense damage to them and as well as himself. It is the all too common male trope of fear of commitment — “I just want to be free.”
Do wife, children, and bills trap a man? Or does embracing marriage, family, and mortgage in fact liberate him to be his best, most productive self? Did commitment limit Springsteen? Or did it free him up to become the fruitful and flourishing grown up who established a family and left a legacy? We write what we know, and Springsteen is no exception. His discography is his biography.
Springsteen’s 1987 “Tunnel of Love” album revolves around his breakup with his then wife, the actress Julianne Phillips, and a burgeoning romance with singer Patti Scialfa. This album has an edge to it which makes it the more powerful and dynamic album compared to “Western Stars.” There is the electrifying passion of romantic love and sexual connection in the track “Tunnel of Love,” as well as the songs that signify the confusion and self-doubt of a lover struggling with himself in “One Step Up,” “Two Faces,” and “Brilliant Disguise.” But then there is the example of contentedness and happiness offered by romantic love with a woman — “Aint Got You,” “Tougher Than the Rest,” and “Valentine’s Day.” Or self-immolation and bitterness in “Spare Parts.”
This is art of the very highest level, in my opinion. This is the power of Bruce Springsteen as a troubadour — engaging in songs that reach to metaphor in telling stories that resonate and one does not forget. Look at the song “Cautious Man.” Should Springsteen divorce his wife Julianne Phillips? Run away from her — and himself? Does he run to Patti Scialfa — the “true love” who offers peace and fulfillment to Springsteen, a safe harbor where he can build his adult life — marriage and children — the growing happy family to nurture and lead for decades? “Cautious Man” is the story of a man fighting himself, desperately in conflict over what to do. It is a haunting song. The actual music is minimal; it is mostly Springsteen telling a simple but powerful story. It is the mythos of a man unsteady on his feet — as his song “Brilliant Surprise” ends with, “God have mercy on the man / Who doubts what he’s sure of.”
I always loved the heartfelt honesty of that song which seems to suggest you never really can know anyone else, not even your spouse, maybe not even yourself. I love how in that music video Bruce looks straight into the camera and bears his soul. He stares at you and sings from the heart. Springsteen is not lip syncing in his music video, as do many; he is doing it live. They recorded the song in one take without any edits. How is that for simple honesty in an age of slick and soulless music videos? It is powerful art.
Springsteen had married Julianne Phillips in 1985 and promised to be faithful to her “until death do us part.” But that relationship was dying a slow natural death, and Springsteen saw that — especially as he was simultaneously attracted to Patti Scialfa. Phillips was money and Hollywood royalty; she came from an upper-middle class background and “privilege.” Phillips might have been a pretty and shiny thing, but I suspect she did not feel quite right to Springsteen. On the other hand, Scialfa was New Jersey with working-class roots, too, and that must have felt more like “home” to The Boss. He divorced Phillips, married Scialfa, had two children with her — and the rest is history. Springsteen passed through the crucible. He made his choices. Like his father before him — like all good fathers — he learned to live up to the expectations and responsibilities of wife, children, and employment. He would not become the haunted loner with $100 to his name wandering from town to town that populates so many of his songs. Springsteen, husband and father, learned to “Walk Like a Man.” So did I.
I can hardly underestimate how influential Bruce Springsteen and his “Tunnel of Love” were to me when I was 22-years old. My first serious love affair had just ended, and I was heartbroken and confused. I was searching for some way to make sense of what I was feeling — what was happening to me. I would listen to that album over and over again and reflect. I remember one moment in late 1987 when I was with my beloved before the breakup — and we had rushed into my bedroom to make love, the physical and emotional need undeniable and uncontrollable — and Springsteen’s “Tunnel of Love” had been playing on the TV. Months later it was all over and I was left in the aftermath trying to understand what had happened and what I should do now. I wrestled with all this as I listened to Springsteen’s album. Bruce was wrestling with it, too.
All throughout the summer of 1988 I listened to Springsteen’s “One Step Up” and wondered to myself — “Who are you really Richard?” — looking deeply inward at my feelings, or examining my face in the mirror at length — a time of intense introspection —
— and significant growth. I listened to this music as I worked my summer job before my senior year of college when my beloved and I re-united in the fall.
I was struggling in the crucible of early manhood — struggling to become the man I am now. I was growing up. The themes introduced by Springsteen and his treatment of them in his “Tunnel of Love” album helped. I had a guidepost. As Henry David Thoreau wrote, “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.” The same that was said by Thoreau about books could be said about the songs of Bruce Springsteen.
Perhaps the trait I love most about literature is its interiority. When checking social media or gossiping with friends or reviewing the news, we are oriented almost entirely outward. So much of 21st century life revolves around scurrying from one quick task to another, often while staring at screens; we are distracted by our clever electronic toys, and it is one thing after another after another. We multitask continually; our attention span shrinks. Reading — and deep concentration — goes the opposite way. We move not outward quickly but inward at length to examine our thoughts and feelings. The mind slows down and fixes on a sustained narrative of words, dialogue, and story-line. You can lose yourself in reading a good novel and feel as if you really are living in the skin of someone else. What a pleasure! What a relief, occasionally, to escape into a novel and away from your own life! Springsteen’s lyrics provide the same sense of telling a complicated, archetypal story that resonates deeply. He makes up stories to get to the heart of human experience, as he sees it. Springsteen tells lies in his fictitious songs about the wandering wounded to communicate deeper human truths. He talks about love, commitment, confusion, self-doubt, betrayal, damage, abandonment, regret, and hope. Springsteen uses art to frame important questions about what it means to be a man, and those stories prompt the sensitive listener to reflect upon his own life. One moves inward in sustained introspection. I listen to Nine Inch Nails or Jane’s Addiction and my pulse accelerates to the drive of the beat and the thump of the bass, but I hardly pay any attention to the words the vocalist is singing. But with The Boss the music is almost secondary and I listen carefully to the literature of the lyrics. It approaches poetry.
Bruce Springsteen of “The Tunnel of Love” was a young and powerful artist in his late-thirties when he wrote and recorded those songs. Now at 70-years of age, in contrast, Springsteen is a different man. He is a more subdued artist. His “Western Stars” album is less potent and vital, in comparison. The enthusiasm and fecundity of youth are gone. Springsteen’s latest album arrived after five years of silence, and the tone is more austere. There is less emotion, but more wisdom. The music reflects his changed station in life. Instead of the restless angst and explosive passion of the young man wrestling with love found and love lost, there is the elderly man struggling with regret over the damage done by himself to himself, as well as to those he loves. As Springsteen the geriatric asserts,
“We all have our broken pieces. Emotionally, spiritually, in this life, nobody gets away unhurt. We’re always trying to find somebody whose broken pieces fit with our broken pieces and something whole emerges.”
This finding one person whose broken pieces fit with our own sounds more aspirational than actual to me. Springsteen’s songs are full of older “broken” men who are navigating the detritus of hard lives which have left scars. They look back and see injury and loss. There are aging cowboy actors, stuntmen, and hitchhikers — an Arizonan construction worker who left San Francisco and his lover because he was “tired of the pills and the rain” in the song “Tucson Train” —
We fought hard over nothing
We fought ’til nothing remained
I’ve carried that nothing for a long time
Now I carry my operator’s license
And spend my days just running this crane
My baby’s coming in on the Tucson train.
These men seem less to have conquered life than to have been conquered by it. They are hanging on, but just barely. Everything seems to have been taken from them, and if all they have left is hope that is a triumph of sorts. If there is hope, it is tentative and cautious. “It might still work out with a bit of luck.” And it is their own fault; these men are their own worst enemies. At its best, it is the Hemingway-esque vision of the scarred veteran who finds victory not in thriving but in simply surviving — “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” The world is a hostile place and it will chew you up. Nobody gets out alive. But some endure it more gracefully than others. Maybe you might catch a break.
At its worst, Springsteen’s world is hopelessness, loneliness, and despair. Look at the following lyrics from the song “Moonlight Motel” —
Last night I dreamed of you, my lover
And the wind blew through the window and blew off the covers
Of my lonely bed, I woke to something you said
That it’s better to have loved, yeah it’s better to have loved
As I drove, there was a chill in the breeze
And leaves tumbled from the sky and fell
Onto a road so black as I backtracked
To the Moonlight Motel
She was boarded up and gone like an old summer song
Nothing but an empty shell
I pulled in and stopped into my old spot
I pulled a bottle of Jack out of a paper bag
Poured one for me and one for you as well
Then it was one more shot poured out onto the parking lot
To the Moonlight Motel
Yikes. It does not get much bleaker than that. The Boss certainly has a dark side. He showed that earlier in “Spare Parts” back in 1987.
Released 32 years after “Tunnel of Love,” the “Western Stars” album is a deeply personal vision of Springsteen’s experience of life as communicated through his songs. All such honest, effective art is produced from lived life experience as transmuted through the artistic medium — lyrics accompanied by sound, with Springsteen’s increasingly raspy voice. The “Western Stars” album taken together with the film offers an intimate and stylized vision of his interior life in 2019 when Springsteen finds himself much closer to his end than his beginning. That it is metaphor and not literal truth does not make it less “true.”
I never bought the New Jersey working-class Bruce Springsteen’s vision of himself as a “cowboy,” but that does not matter. That none of the “Western Stars” songs is strictly autobiographical also does not matter. What does matter is his aesthetic vision of what it means to be a man towards the end of life — “broken pieces” and all. The author Yukio Mishima was never really a Japanese imperial fanatic, although that is how he chose to pose (and die) as. I remember in the film “Working Girl” when one lady admonished her friend not to allow the fantasy she had of herself to get out of hand — “Sometimes, I dance around my apartment in my underwear… doesn’t make me Madonna, never will.” It is the same with Bruce Springsteen posing in cowboy boots and a bolo tie. Ronald Reagan bought a ranch in Santa Barbara where he would ride horses and play at being a cowboy, but really he was a B-movie actor turned GE spokesperson turned conservative politician. Similarly, Springsteen is a cowboy by conviction, not practice. Springsteen the artist has chosen the rural American West as his aesthetic, even though he neither lives there nor knows the culture first-hand. I could find a rundown aging cowboy in real life driving his old El Camino truck around Joshua Tree, California, as Springsteen’s protagonist does in the title track “Western Stars,” but I doubt he would have much in common with the real Bruce Springsteen, the New Jersey-based rock star. It doesn’t matter. The artistry abides. Ars longa, vita brevis.
Or maybe Bruce and some old cowboy would have much in common? The two could meet, share, and relate? Enjoy a beer and partake in conversation? Who can say?
I don’t know.
I read Springsteen’s autobiography last summer and enjoyed it. Springsteen is most honest in describing his difficult upbringing with a taciturn father who sat in the kitchen in a continual dark funk and drank too much. The Jersey working-class upbringing with little money and smoldering resentment at the dinner table. But was this why Bruce Springsteen grew up spent 35 years running away from his demons? The struggles he endured to keep from becoming his own worst enemy and ruining everything?
Later in his life Springsteen reveals he got a phone call out of the blue from a downtown LA bar owner informing him that his father was there. His dad was a manic depressive who had been arrested and then released from the county jail where he went straight to this bar. Bruce went and picked him up. By this point Bruce knew full well the nature of his father’s affliction. What a relief it must have been for Bruce to come to understand that his father suffered from profound mental illness! How much of his childhood must have suddenly made sense when Springsteen came to understand this fact. How much of this mental illness was transferred from father to son?
In his autobiography Springsteen has a whole chapter that deals with depression called “Zero to Sixty in Nothing Flat.” It starts:
The blues don’t jump right on you. They come creeping. Shortly after my sixtieth I slipped into a depression like I hadn’t experienced since that dusty night in Texas thirty years earlier. It lasted for a year and a half and devastated me. When these moods hit me, usually few will notice — not Mr. Landau, no one I work with in the studio, not the band, never the audience, hopefully not the children — but Patti will observe a freight train bearing down, loaded with nitroglycerin and running quickly out of track. During these periods I can be cruel: I run, I dissemble, I dodge, I weave, I disappear, I return, I rarely apologize, and all the while Patti holds down the fort as I’m trying to burn it down. She stops me. She gets me to the doctors and says, “This man needs a pill.” I do. I’ve been on antidepressants for the last twelve to fifteen years of my life, and to a lesser degree but with the same effect they had for my father, they have given me a life I would not have been able to maintain without them. They work. I return to Earth, home and my family. The worst of my destructive behavior curtails itself and my humanity returns. I was crushed between sixty and sixty-two, good for a year and out again from sixty-three to sixty-four. Not a good record.
This is powerful writing — candid, honest, and painful. The demons Bruce Springsteen has been running from — his dark side — is no small thing. His struggles with depression seems to have worsened with age. Shades of his father and his struggles? Springsteen continues:
At first I thought it [depression] might have been all this death around me. But as deeply as I loved all of these people, death I can handle; it’s this other . . . thing. This thing I have studied and fought against for the better part of sixty-five years. It comes in darkness or in broad daylight, each time wearing a subtly different mask, so subtle that some like myself who have fought it and named it multiple times welcome it in like an old friend. Then once again it takes up deep residence in my mind, heart and soul until it is finally routed out after doing its wreckage.
Springsteen finds himself heavily depressed and crying all the time. The tears flow here, there, and everywhere. Mundane problems arise that normally would not have brought much of any reaction, and Springsteen can’t stop crying. It is this way for some time. Springsteen goes for professional medical attention:
I told my doc I could not live like this. I earned my living doing shows, giving interviews and being closely observed. And as soon as someone said “Clarence,” it was going to be all over. So, wisely, off to the psychopharmacologist he sent me. Patti and I walked in and met a vibrant, white-haired, welcoming but professional gentleman in his sixties or so. I sat down and of course, I broke into tears. I motioned to him with my hand; this is it. This is why I’m here. I can’t stop crying! He looked at me and said, “We can fix this.” Three days and a pill later the waterworks stopped, on a dime. Unbelievable. I returned to myself. I no longer needed to paddle, pump, play or challenge fate. I didn’t need to tour. I felt normal.
Wow!
Bruce Springsteen does others who suffer from mental illness a real service in so honestly describing his own struggles and medical treatment. They can follow his example and get professional medical help. They can feel better. Depression is an eminently treatable illness. Look at Bruce! The stakes are high. “You can get a little too fond of the blues,” the song “Hello Sunshine” warns. “You fall in love with lonely, you end up that way.” Again the meme of the troubled man who is his own worst enemy laying waste to his life.
In this song is Springsteen regarding his alter ego? One suspects Bruce sees his shadow-shelf and shivers with fear in recognition. They never really go away, your demons.
Has Springsteen struggled against the darkness of depression for much of his life because of the family dysfunction he endured as a child? Or it is because of his DNA — partially given to him by his father — that results in brain chemistry imbalances which result in depression? Is it nature? Or nurture? Both? Can anyone say for sure?
There is probably no answer to these questions. And it probably does not matter. Bruce Springsteen is who he is. At seventy years of age he has struggled through much of the past decade — barely hanging on. In “Western Stars” Springsteen is chastened, weathered, but still waking up each morning alive — “glad his boots are on” — and ready for the day. He is hopeful, although cautiously so. Parts of Springsteen might be “broken,” but he is still alive and making music. He has a wife of 28-years and three adult children who love him. He claims in the “Western Stars” film that ”we got a 100-year old barn filled with the best kind of ghosts and spirits. We got to play for a few friends, you never know what’s going to happen with new music.” If Springsteen is depressed and teary in his darker moments, he is completely the opposite when performing live music. “A certain kind of magic took place, the music began to take on a life of its own. Life’s mysteries remain and deepen. Its answers unresolved, so you walk on through the dark because that’s where the next morning is.”
Yes, indeed. Ecce homo, The Boss: watch Bruce Springsteen in his “Western Stars” film and behold the man and his music. At 70-years of age Springsteen is a national treasure. He is a decent man. A truth teller, as he sees it. As honest a human being as he can be. A survivor. In a pop culture obsessed country where aggressively slick and superficial youthful performers are the rule, Springsteen is a singer for mature adults. He writes songs for grown ups.
I would gladly shake his hand and say, “Thank you.”
And fare thee well, Mr. Springsteen.
There is life left in you yet, Bruce. There remains quality music to be made and good times to be had.
I will listen to anything you have to say.
P.S. Bruce Springsteen has often been vocal about his politics. He is a passionate liberal and has used his celebrity and money to help political causes where he could. I disagree with most of Springsteen’s politics, but I never saw that as a reason not to appreciate his art. Unless their art is their politics, I never saw reason to dislike an artist because I disagreed with his or her politics. That seems to me the very definition of small-mindedness. It is petty. I will leave such for the dogmatists.
