July 3, 2005The New York Times Book Review
Books about, inspired by or making reference to Bruce Springsteen are hardly a new, or especially rare, phenomenon. ''Born to Run,'' the first volume of Dave Marsh's quasi-authorized biography, appeared in 1979, and is now available along with its sequel, ''Glory Days,'' in a single volume called ''Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts.'' Springsteen's lyrics, which frequently, if modestly, display their own literary pedigree, resonate in the prose of writers like Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Ford, Stephen King (who prefaced his epic novel ''The Stand'' with a quotation from Springsteen's song ''Jungleland'') and T. C. Boyle, who took the title for his story collection ''Greasy Lake'' from imagery in a cut from Springsteen's first album. The basic Boss studies syllabus includes Daniel Cavicchi's ''Tramps Like Us,'' a sociological study of his fan base; Rolling Stone's omnibus ''Bruce Springsteen: The Rolling Stone Files''; and ''It Ain't No Sin to Be Glad You're Alive,'' Eric Alterman's knowledgeable and rousing elaboration of ''The Promise of Bruce Springsteen.''
In 1999, when he reunited the E Street Band for a long, triumphal tour, it seemed Springsteen's main enterprise would be the consolidation of his reputation as the greatest — and perhaps also the last — rocker to emerge from the ferment of the baby boom. His recent releases, apart from ''The Ghost of Tom Joad,'' had been mainly archival, and the reunion shows were devoted largely to breathing new life into old favorites and to a joyful, generous rock 'n' roll revivalism. But then came Sept. 11, which called forth ''The Rising,'' his (and maybe anyone's) most convincing rock record since the Reagan era, and the 2004 election campaign, which occasioned Springsteen's first public endorsement (on the Op-Ed page of this newspaper) of a presidential candidate. Those events, and the release this spring of ''Devils & Dust,'' have sent the Bruceologists back to their desks, and the result is a spate of revisitings, reinterpretations, reissues and recyclings, from rock critics, psychiatrists, historians and fiction writers.
Two new story collections -- Tennessee Jones's DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE (Soft Skull Press, paper, $12) and MEETING ACROSS THE RIVER: Stories Inspired by the Haunting Bruce Springsteen Song (Bloomsbury, paper, $14.95), an anthology edited by Jessica Kaye and Richard J. Brewer -- serve mainly as reminders of Springsteen's own superior skill as a storyteller. Jones's slim volume contains 10 linked stories suggested by the lean, grim vignettes of Springsteen's ''Nebraska'' album, while ''Meeting Across the River'' comprises 20 variations on a noirish monologue that may be the least memorable cut on ''Born to Run.'' ''It's what's not in the lyric,'' Martin J. Smith writes in a foreword, ''rather than what is, that makes the song so intriguing,'' thus inadvertently establishing the superfluousness of the undertaking. What the various contributors, many of them crime novelists, put in amounts mainly to the tough-guy clichés that already hang too thickly over the song.
Jones, adding a dimension of sexual anxiety to the tales of hard luck and aimlessness in ''Nebraska,'' does a bit better. His versions of ''Highway Patrolman'' and ''My Father's House,'' in particular, go farther into the darkness on the edge of town than Springsteen himself has ventured. But you can't help wondering if Jones's imagination has been hobbled by the songs he's chosen to lean on. Since, for instance, he can hardly match the courtroom monologue that concludes ''Johnny 99'' (''Now judge, judge, I had debts no honest man can pay''), Jones pushes it offstage, into the hearsay testimony of another character: ''I don't remember exactly what he said,'' she confesses. ''I wish I had it recorded so I could just play it back for you.'' At that point, you may prefer to cue up the CD.
Which, of course, you are likely to do anyway. Springsteen's command of his chosen themes, and the power and sophistication he brings to them, makes criticism largely a matter of saying amen. Books about Elvis Presley tend to traffic in either rootsy antiquarianism or slick mythologizing. Bob Dylan inspires exegetes and soothsayers. Springsteen encourages hagiography. Every fan knows it's hard to be a saint in the city, and every reader of the Bible (one of Springsteen's preferred storehouses of phrase and image) has heard that it's not easy to be a prophet in your own country. Maybe, in Springsteen's case, it only looks easy; God -- or anyone who has been to a Springsteen concert -- knows the man works hard. By now, though, 30 years after the release of ''Born to Run'' landed him simultaneously on the covers of Newsweek and Time, the mantle of prophet and oracle -- perhaps even of saint -- seems to rest as naturally on Springsteen's muscular shoulders as the strap to his blond Fender Esquire or Clarence Clemons's hand.
Virtually all the books under consideration here are documents of faith, written by folks who will always find some reason to believe (as well as any excuse to quote some lyrics -- my apologies). But for this very reason it may be worthwhile to take note of the views of heretics and dissidents, in particular those who do not so much criticize the quality of Springsteen's music as question the authenticity of his oracular, populist persona.
John Lennon sang that a working-class hero was something to be. In England, maybe, but in this country, where money and mobility tend to dissolve and to mystify social divisions, a working-class hero may be a contradiction in terms. And so Springsteen, the son of a bus driver and a legal secretary, occasionally encounters suspicion when, from his current position as an unimaginably rich and successful rock star, he speaks up for, and in the voices of, the marginal and the downtrodden. His preacherly demeanor solicits accusations of bad faith, while his forays into political activism (including his mini-tour in support of John Kerry near the end of last year's presidential campaign) can be caricatured as the well-meaning sentiments of yet another wealthy show-business liberal. Springsteen's sincerity can also rankle those who prefer their pop culture affectless and ironical, or who are more attuned to the clever manipulation of sampled bric-a-brac than to the struggle for mastery over historical influences.
In a recent article in Slate, Stephen Metcalf made the provocatively revisionist claim that the real Bruce was neither the singer of quiet, Guthriesque ballads nor the purveyor of grand, operatic anthems, but rather the scruffy, mischievous New Jersey boardwalk habitué -- ''a scrawny little dirtbag from the shore'' -- who composed the verbose, playful, musically adventuresome shaggy-dog tales of his first two albums, ''Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.'' and ''The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle.'' In Metcalf's account, it was the rock critic Jon Landau, author of the most famous line of rock-critic prophecy (''I saw rock 'n' roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen'') and after that Springsteen's producer and mentor, who transformed the charming beach bum into a self-conscious man of the people and, consequently, into a darling of the intellectuals. For Metcalf, at the same time that Landau ''intellectualized Bruce, he anti-intellectualized him,'' minting a familiar, durable persona that turns out to be ''Jon Landau's middle-class fantasy of white, working-class authenticity,'' and the basis of what is ''in essence, a white minstrel act.''
Strong words. But authenticity is a peculiar criterion to apply to a rock musician, since American popular music since the 1950's has provided fertile ground for self-invention, contradiction and cross-pollination. The personas of the great popular musicians of the rock era -- from Elvis to Prince, from Bob Dylan to Madonna -- are hardly organic products of native soil. There are no pure products of America. Which is not to endorse Metcalf's cynical view of Springsteen's imaginative project of the past three decades, but rather to suggest that the idea of authenticity needs to be applied somewhat differently. Not to Springsteen's persona -- which I would argue even the most passionate and literal-minded fan understands to be, to some degree, an artifact, an act -- but rather to the experience of witnessing and participating in a Springsteen performance, and also to the musical, lyrical and conceptual integrity of the songs themselves.
To my mind, no one has written better about the texture and rhythm of a Springsteen show than Jimmy Guterman. His new book, RUNAWAY AMERICAN DREAM: Listening to Bruce Springsteen (Da Capo, paper, $15.95), is a collection of loose, energetic essays that, as they meander and overlap, add up to a passionate, highly subjective portrait of the artist in relation to his public. Guterman, whose other books include ''The Worst Rock 'n' Roll Records of All Time,'' makes some interesting and occasionally counterintuitive judgments about Springsteen's records, but his greatest knack is for using particular shows and tours to set up wide-ranging excursions into musical history. His perspective -- the one on which rock criticism was founded in the late 1960's -- is that of the smart guy in the audience, plucking ideas and emotions out of the stream of familiar songs and wondering what, beyond the price of the ticket, it all amounts to.
Guterman's understanding of the bond between Springsteen and his audience, a phenomenon empirically observed at who knows how many stadium, arena and club shows -- a comprehensive list of such events appears in the back of THE TIES THAT BIND: Bruce Springsteen A to E to Z (Visible Ink, paper, $24.95), Gary Graff's spirited and comprehensive encyclopedia of Bossiana -- is both nuanced and incisive, as is his description of the songwriting ethic that guarantees that bond. Since ''Darkness on the Edge of Town,'' Springsteen, according to Guterman, has told ''accurate, unflinching stories of the people who weren't as lucky as he was. As he looked out at the vast stadium crowds, he must have known those were the people filling the stadiums. They still needed to see a reflection of themselves onstage; Springsteen still needed to deliver that.''
Of course, this has proven to be a complicated undertaking. For one thing, the scope of Springsteen's reference -- the kind of characters who show up in many of the songs on ''The Ghost of Tom Joad'' and his new album, ''Devils & Dust'' -- has broadened far beyond his core audience. And that audience itself may have narrowed as rock has left behind the last traces of youthful rebellion to become the soundtrack of wistful middle age. Still, no one who has stood in a stadium during the second verse of ''Promised Land'' or the opening of ''Hungry Heart'' can deny that the sense of identification between the singer, his subjects and his fans is powerful and deep. At those moments, Springsteen stops singing and listens as a hundred thousand people sing back his first-person lyrics.
This ritual transaction underlies Robert Coles's BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN'S AMERICA: The People Listening, a Poet Singing (Random House, paper, $13.95). (It's one of the only entries in the Boss bibliography, by the way, that does not take its title from a Springsteen lyric.) The subtitle may overreach. This people is as likely to be listening to Toby Keith or 50 Cent as to the bard Coles places in the line of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. Even so, Coles's book, in spite of a certain wish-fulfilling, populist sentimentality, turns listening into an ingeniously literal-minded exercise in anecdotal sociology. Using the documentary method he has been refining since the early 1960's, Coles sits down with a cross section of Americans, not all of them especially interested in Bruce Springsteen, and listens to them talking about what they hear in particular songs. His style of transcription can be grating -- it is sometimes hard to believe that ordinary Americans talk in the ostentatiously folksy vernacular Coles puts between quotation marks -- but ''Bruce Springsteen's America'' nonetheless attempts something rare and valuable in the study of popular culture. It tries to record the complicated reactions people have to the music they hear, and the contradictory, free-associative ways we connect that music to our own lives. The book's best section presents a law enforcement officer contending with tracks like ''Johnny 99'' and ''Highway Patrolman'' that cut against his ideas about work, morality and crime. His response to ''American Skin (41 Shots),'' Springsteen's song about the shooting of Amadou Diallo by New York City police officers in 1999, is a précis of the contradictions that the song tries to explore, but that even Springsteen's generous, capacious personality has had a hard time containing.
He does, nonetheless, contain multitudes, and at this stage in his career there is no shortage of writers eager to place him in the broadest context of American cultural history. BORN IN THE U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (Wesleyan University, paper, $22.95), Jim Cullen's 1997 study, newly updated to include Springsteen's response to 9/11, marshals impressive scholarship to assimilate the Boss into the main currents of American thought -- or at least into the canon of the American studies curriculum. (Cullen, currently on the faculty of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, has a Ph.D. in American studies from Brown.) Some of his readings are more persuasive than others. Much as I love the idea of Springsteen as torchbearer of a small-r republican tradition stretching back through Roosevelt and Lincoln into the Enlightenment, Cullen's argument has the effect of installing him in a stable full of academic hobbyhorses rather than in a vital constellation of ideas. The chapter on Springsteen's place within a tradition of American Roman Catholic writers and artists is more interesting, since it provides a cultural context for the dialectic of sin and grace, alienation and despair that has given structure to Springsteen's music since ''Born to Run.''
A more unusual kind of contextualization informs 4TH OF JULY, ASBURY PARK: A History of the Promised Land (Bloomsbury, $24.95), Daniel Wolff's wonderfully evocative history of the New Jersey resort town where Springsteen, after graduating from Freehold High School and briefly attending Ocean County Community College, served his rock 'n' roll apprenticeship. Among other things, Wolff's book footnotes some of the place names and geographical features in Springsteen's lyrics. (The narrator of ''Something in the Night,'' who's ''riding down Kingsley, figuring I'll get a drink'' is cruising one of the city's main thoroughfares, a block inland from the water, named for a 19th-century Methodist minister.) The chapters dealing with Springsteen himself also show how Asbury Park's music scene -- divided by race, class and taste -- influenced the intricate sound of his early records.
But really, Springsteen is less the subject of ''4th of July, Asbury Park'' than a kind of hovering spirit in the night, and perhaps also a marketing conceit. Wolff characterizes the book, which stretches back to the town's founding after the Civil War by an enterprising Methodist named James Bradley, as a ''rock 'n' roll history,'' a grand, sad story of racism and real estate, political hardball and seaside pleasure-seeking. It hardly explains Springsteen -- none of these books really do -- but it does remind us, in fascinating detail, where he comes from.
A. O. Scott is a film critic at The Times.
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