We Are Alive
Bruce Springsteen at sixty-two.
Nearly half a century ago, when Elvis Presley was filming
“Harum Scarum” and “Help!” was on the charts, a moody, father-haunted, yet
uncannily charismatic Shore rat named Bruce Springsteen was building a small
reputation around central Jersey as a guitar player in a band called the
Castiles. The band was named for the lead singer’s favorite brand of soap. Its
members were from Freehold, an industrial town half an hour inland from the
boardwalk carnies and the sea. The Castiles performed at sweet sixteens and
Elks-club dances, at drive-in movie theatres and ShopRite ribbon cuttings, at a
mobile-home park in Farmingdale, at the Matawan-Keyport Rollerdrome. Once, they
played for the patients at a psychiatric hospital, in Marlboro. A gentleman
dressed in a suit came to the stage and, in an introductory speech that ran
some twenty minutes, declared the Castiles “greater than the Beatles.” At which
point a doctor intervened and escorted him back to his room.
One spring afternoon in 1966, the Castiles, with dreams of
making it big and making it quick, drove to a studio at the Brick Mall Shopping
Center and recorded two original songs, “Baby I” and “That’s What You Get.” Mainly,
though, they played an array of covers, from Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” to
the G-Clefs’ “I Understand.” They did Sonny and Cher, Sam and Dave, Don &
Juan, the Who, the Kinks, the Stones, the Animals.
Many musicians in their grizzled late maturity have an
uncertain grasp on their earliest days on the bandstand. (Not a few have an
uncertain grasp on last week.) But Springsteen, who is sixty-two and among the
most durable musicians since B. B. King and Om Kalthoum, seems to remember
every gaudy night, from the moment, in 1957, when he and his mother watched
Elvis on “The Ed Sullivan Show”—“I looked at her and I said, ‘I wanna be just .
. . like . . . that’ ”—to his most recent exploits as a multimillionaire
populist rock star crowd-surfing the adoring masses. These days, he is the
subject of historical exhibitions; at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum, in
Cleveland, and at the National Constitution Center, in Philadelphia, his lyric
sheets, old cars, and faded performing duds have been displayed like the
snippets of the Shroud. But, unlike the Rolling Stones, say, who have not
written a great song since the disco era and come together only to pad their
fortunes as their own cover band, Springsteen refuses to be a mercenary curator
of his past. He continues to evolve as an artist, filling one spiral notebook
after another with ideas, quotations, questions, clippings, and, ultimately,
new songs. His latest album, “Wrecking Ball,” is a melodic indictment of the
recessionary moment, of income disparity, emasculated workers, and what he
calls “the distance between the American reality and the American dream.” The
work is remote from his early operettas of humid summer interludes and abandon
out on the Turnpike. In his desire to extend a counter-tradition of political
progressivism, Springsteen quotes from Irish rebel songs, Dust Bowl ballads,
Civil War tunes, and chain-gang chants.
Early this year, Springsteen was leading rehearsals for a
world tour at Fort Monmouth, an Army base that was shut down last year; it had
been an outpost since the First World War of military communications and
intelligence, and once employed Julius Rosenberg and thousands of militarized
carrier pigeons. The twelve-hundred-acre property is now a ghost town inhabited
only by steel dummies meant to scare off the ubiquitous Canada geese that
squirt a carpet of green across middle Jersey. Driving to the far end of the
base, I reached an unlovely theatre that Springsteen and Jon Landau, his
longtime manager, had rented for the rehearsals. Springsteen had performed for
officers’ children at the Fort Monmouth “teen club” (dancing, no liquor) with
the Castiles, forty-seven years earlier.
The atmosphere inside was purposeful but easygoing.
Musicians stood onstage noodling on their instruments with the languid air of
outfielders warming up in the sun. Max Weinberg, the band’s volcanic drummer,
wore the sort of generous jeans favored by dads at weekend barbecues. Steve Van
Zandt, Springsteen’s childhood friend and guitarist-wingman, keeps up a brutal
schedule as an actor and a d.j., and he seemed weary, his eyes drooping under a
piratical purple head scarf. The bass player Garry Tallent, the organist
Charlie Giordano, and the pianist Roy Bittan horsed around on a roller-rink
tune while they waited. The guitarist Nils Lofgren was on the phone, trying to
figure out flights to get back to his home, in Scottsdale, for the weekend.
Springsteen arrived and greeted everyone with a quick hello
and his distinctive cackle. He is five-nine and walks with a rolling rodeo
gait. When he takes in something new—a visitor, a thought, a passing car in the
distance—his eyes narrow, as if in hard light, and his lower jaw protrudes a
bit. His hairline is receding, and, if one had to guess, he has, over the years,
in the face of high-def scrutiny and the fight against time, enjoined the
expensive attentions of cosmetic and dental practitioners. He remains
dispiritingly handsome, preposterously fit. (“He has practically the same waist
size as when I met him, when we were fifteen,” says Steve Van Zandt, who does
not.) Some of this has to do with his abstemious inclinations; Van Zandt says
Springsteen is “the only guy I know—I think the only guy I know at all—who
never did drugs.” He’s followed more or less the same exercise regimen for
thirty years: he runs on a treadmill and, with a trainer, works out with
weights. It has paid off. His muscle tone approximates a fresh tennis ball. And
yet, with the tour a month away, he laughed at the idea that he was ready. “I’m
not remotely close,” he said, slumping into a chair twenty rows back from the
stage....
