Bruce Springsteen: American Man

Sunday News
Published: Aug. 17, 2008
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent


He began his career as a skinny outcast who fought with his father, dropped out of community college and was facing a hopeless life. But since finding a sense of community and a sense of purpose in rock 'n' roll, Bruce Springsteen has come to represent the ideals of the modern American man.

Twenty years ago, Bruce Springsteen recorded one of his most important, most undervalued songs. "Walk Like A Man," from his album "Tunnel of Love," seldom makes an appearance in concert, but it's stuck in the rotation of Springsteen's life.In the song, the singer is standing at the altar about to be married. His father grips his hand, cries on his shoulder and turns away.

All the singer can remember is walking behind his father on the beach as a child, trying to match his manly stride, "tracing your footprints in the sand, trying to walk like a man."

While Springsteen, who will perform Tuesday in Hershey, still argues with himself about the role his father played in his life — as recently as 2006 he called his dad an absentee father, even though he was physically available, if emotionally distant — the song signaled that he had made some kind of peace with his father and realized he still had lessons to learn from him.

Today, Springsteen seems to have a more mature understanding of life and his place in it. Praise has been heaped upon him like no other artist since Bob Dylan, and he has evolved into more than just an iconic rock star, peerless bandleader and celebrator of cherished American dreams.

In short, he is a fit model of American manhood.Springsteen hasn't been gunning for the title of "model man." He would probably scoff at the idea. But in his life and music, he meditates on a set of admirable values and principles: loyalty, fidelity, integrity, love of community, patriotism rooted in solidarity, the glad responsibility of citizenship, reward in one's work, respect for others and satisfaction in love.

By Springsteen's unspoken standards, a man worthy of calling himself as much is a loving husband and devoted father, a faithful friend, a spiritual seeker and an engaged, compassionate citizen. He is able to celebrate the victories of life, but knows the cost if those victories are hollow or cheaply won.

To that end, Springsteen has conducted his personal life in close harmony with his musical ideals. He has kept business and personal struggles out of the limelight. Go ahead, Google him. You'll be hard pressed to find anything more than a lawsuit against a crooked manager in 1976 and a disagreement over a horse two years ago.

There have been no public temper tantrums, attacks on paparazzi, mad stalkers, drug arrests, illegitimate children or DUIs. He is either very lucky or very grounded. The argument for the latter seems most convincing.

Growing up, Bruce Springsteen knew the frustration of poverty. The Freehold, N.J., house where he spent most of his youth had a gaping hole in one wall that was never properly repaired. He told friends a plane crashed there during the war. His father drove a school bus.

Years later, he would sing with childlike wonder about looking up at a mansion on the hill, and in another song swore that once he grew up and became wealthy he would never drive a used car. Bruce now lives in that mansion on the hill, a few of them in fact, and while he can afford any car he wants, he prefers classics from the 1950s and 60s.

Springsteen settled his family only a few miles from Freehold. He still makes occasional forays into town,
visiting the old neighborhood, having a beer with the guy who lives in his boyhood home. He's even played benefits for the Catholic school that nearly kicked him out.

In rock 'n' roll, Springsteen found hope in the bleakness of his surroundings. The voices he heard on the radio came from mostly working-class kids, black and white. They spoke to him, gave him comfort and a taste of an exciting, alluring world. More to the point, they introduced a set of ideals on which to build a life.

An outcast at school, Springsteen found friendship and understanding among other musicians who shared his passion for rock music, and they became his de facto family. When he finally got signed to Columbia Records in 1972, he called in all the best Jersey Shore musicians he had worked with over the years — all ace players, but first and foremost, friends he could depend on and trust, personally and musically.

Many of the members of his E Street Band have been playing with him for decades. In 1991, Springsteen married singer Patti Scialfa, who joined the band in 1984. In April, organist Danny Federici, who hooked up with Springsteen in 1968, died of melanoma. Every night since, he's been given a touching tribute on tour.

It's no wonder that themes of friendship, loyalty and fidelity have found their way into the core of Springsteen's catalog. His social themes took a little longer to develop.Only in the last decade has Springsteen developed a strong political voice. Throughout the first epoch of his career, he aligned himself with no movements, sang no protest songs and burned no draft cards. (He failed his draft physical.)

In 1979, he performed at the No Nukes concerts against the proliferation of nuclear weapons and power plants, but was the only artist not to contribute a statement to the concert program. He turned a 1981 concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum into a benefit for the fledgling Vietnam Veterans of America, saving the group from an early demise. There he performed Credence Clearwater Revival's "Who'll Stop the Rain," recognizing the song as an unofficial anthem of Vietnam vets.

He added his gruff refrain to the all-star "We Are the World" single in 1984 to aid famine victims in Africa, but didn't play Live Aid the following summer. He signed onto Amnesty International's Human Rights Now tour in 1988, and played Bob Dylan's "Chimes of Freedom" to a hopeful audience in East Berlin a year before the wall came down.

He imbued a man dying of AIDS with empathy and empowerment on his Oscar-award winning "Streets of Philadelphia"; pointed to the still-deep racial divide in America on "American Skin (41 Shots)," about the pointless shooting death of Amadou Diallo at the hands of New York City police; and channeled Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck on "The Ghost of Tom Joad."

But in choosing his stages, songs and statements, Springsteen steadfastly remained uncommitted to any political platform, party or candidate, despite having plenty of opportunities to declare himself.

When Ronald Reagan name-dropped Springsteen during a 1984 campaign stop in New Jersey, a state ravaged by the policies of Reaganomics, Springsteen said nothing. Twelve years later, Bob Dole tried the same trick. This time, Bruce wrote a letter to his local paper simply saying he didn't support Dole.

By the 2004 presidential elections, however, something had changed. Maybe it was due to the fact that he had three children, or that the activists of the 1960s weren't around much anymore, but Springsteen felt compelled to spearhead a barnstorming tour of swing states, dubbed the Vote For Change Tour, to benefit a liberal political action committee.

At the conclusion of that tour, he went so far as to endorse and go on the stump for Democratic nominee John Kerry, performing and speaking at several rallies late in the campaign. In endorsing the senator, Springsteen for the first time put the ideals of his songs into a political context. He had clearly been heading in that direction for some time.

"For the last 25 years, I have always stayed one step away from partisan politics. Instead, I have been partisan about a set of ideals: economic justice, civil rights, a humane foreign policy, freedom and a decent life for all of our citizens," he wrote to the New York Times.

Onstage in Washington, D.C., in October 2004, he was even more direct. "You deceive the country into war, you should lose your job! It ain't rocket science!"

Some of Springsteen's fans were less than happy. Bruce had always gotten a lot done working not with well-funded, high-profile politicos, but with food banks, union relief funds, homeless shelters and veterans groups. The risk, Springsteen said, was worth it because remaining silent would have called into question the sincerity of the ideals expressed in his music.

In his book "The Gospel According to Bruce Springsteen: Rock and Redemption, From Asbury Park to Magic," writer Jeffrey Symynkywicz, a Unitarian minister from Massachusetts, summarizes the ideals of more than 30 years of Springsteen's music into what he termed the Ten Commandments of Springsteen.

Reflecting a balance of hope and bitter reality, the list of observations includes "There is always something more," "Our stories symbolize something deeper" and, perhaps the most important one, "Life without connections is empty and dangerous."

On his newest disc, "Magic," Springsteen, now 58, contemplates his mortality and wonders if, as a nation, we've strayed. Twenty years after "Walk Like a Man," Springsteen continues to chew on his belief that a man worthy of admiration is a work in progress. He should know.