Born to Interface Part 2

Born to Interface Part 2

Bruce Springsteen points out that his hit number of the mid-1980s, the protest song, Born in the USA, is one of his most misunderstood numbers, but that later acoustic renditions do serve to demonstrate that there are no inherent contradictions in the things that his music says.

Bruce was inspired to write Born in the USA ten years after the Vietnam war, after meeting two people: Ron Kovic and Bobby Muller.

Ron Kovic, the author of Born on the Fourth of July, was a Vietnam vet whom Springsteen met by sheer coincidence just a few days after he’d bought the memoir at a shop while driving through the Arizona desert. Ron went on to take him to the vet centre at Venice, California, to meet the So Cal vets.

Bobby Muller, who’d been shot in Vietnam, he met backstage in New Jersey. Muller had been in anti-war protests with John Kerry (the Secretary of State of the USA during Obama’s time), and had started the Vietnam Veterans of America, and a concert for the Vietnam Veterans of America was held in Los Angeles on 20^th August, 1981. Bruce opened the concert with CCR’s (Creedence Clearwater Revival’s) “Who’ll Stop the Rain”.

The CCR, I’m told, was in India in the 1960s, touring with the Moral Re-armament Movement (MRA), a sort of cultural group, and visited places such as Ooty, where the third order of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary (FMM) was founded, though the groups performed elsewhere, and the event was widely publicised at the time.

Springsteen first came across navy SEAL, Terry Magovern when he returned from his second great trip to California, having visited his parents who had moved to the Bay Area, and after having accompanied his father on a Mexican holiday. Terry was also the manager of the Captain’s Garter in Neptune, New Jersey, where Bruce joined Steve, Southside and their Sundance Blues Band soon after his return from San Francisco. Terry later became his assistant and close friend for twenty-three years. “Terry’s Song” was written for Magovern for the album Magic, after Terry’s passing away.

Bruce refers to himself as the Jersey draft dodger number one, and his memoir records the event of him (like quite a few others), successfully managing to dodge being sent off to fight the war. There is mention of “survivor’s guilt” at least twice in the book, in the context of the rest of his work and life, but no regret for the dodge.

Friends of Springsteen who went to war include Bart Haynes, who was a drummer for his early band, The Castiles. He was the first soldier from New Jersey to die in Vietnam (Mortar shelling in Quang Tri province).

Walter Cichon of The Motifs also received a head wound in Kontum province of South Vietnam, was left for dead, and was among the list of those missing in action.

When one compares the essences of the greatest democracies of the world, one of the parameters against which my country scores higher, is that we, in India, do not draft people to the armed forces. (The unrelated fact that our Constitution has Emergency provisions- wherein fundamental rights can be temporarily suspended by the government- is arguably the most debatable article of our otherwise exemplary document. This is a provision that has been called into use only once in history, and is seen as one of the darkest phases that the nation has gone through).

While talking of the dodge of the draft, Springsteen has his reasons, and noteworthy today, is the bit where his perception was: “…bodies were needed to stem the perceived Communist menace in South Asia”. Today, decades after the war, it is evident that eventually. It is not wars, but multi-pronged global approaches towards sustainable development and human rights that bridge gaps amongst people and nations.

Bruce describes his present wife (he continues to use this old-fashioned term, as do quite a few people), and band-member, Patti Scialfa, as ”…a one-woman, red-haired revolution”. The accomplished musician happens to be the daughter of a Coast Guard lieutenant commander. After Born in the USA, Springsteen says there was an intentional left-turn, which, along with his growing relationship with Patti, was disorienting for the band.

The Tunnel of Love album tour, after Born in the USA, merged into the Amnesty International Human Rights Now world tour, and though Springsteen had acquired his largest audience with Born in the USA, the greater significance of the 1988 tour could be though of as organically evolving and revealing itself in the present day.

It is no coincidence that on the 9^th of August, 2017 (the UN-declared International Day of Indigenous People), Springsteen’s Twitter account and Facebook page announced that he will make his Broadway debut this year. Through most of October and November, these acoustic shows to smaller audiences are timed to coincide with the annual general assembly of the United Nations at New York.

The grand orchestra that is the development sector has an instinct for leveraging ongoing events to bring about desired results by way of impromptu gatherings of an otherwise-difficult-to-bring-together bunch of nationalities or interest groups.

By Springsteen’s own admission, when large crowds attend Bruce Springsteen concerts, there are bound to be not just Democrats (who he campaigns for, and supports), but also Republicans, amongst the audience. Similarly, he draws audiences from countries that might be in conflict, such as countries with boundary disputes: India and Pakistan.

When Springsteen was recording the number, Worlds Apart, for his post-nine-eleven album, The Rising, a Pakistani Sufi music group happened to be in Los Angeles on exactly the day that he needed a particular kind of sound for the number. They thus recorded the number with Bruce.

The unifying power of music, and its ability to work beyond boundaries of nationality, and, indeed, of trans-nationality, equate it with the world of Nature and the Environment, of which it is an essential part.

Cross-planetary forces of destruction caused by the dirtying of rivers, or the melting of glaciers do not recognize borders of countries or states in their destruction. Music, in its reach and appeal, can, and often, does work beyond such demarcations as well.

It is therefore significant (and useful) that Bruce has not been handed out any very significant UN-centric honours or ambassadorships, as the Boss continues to play Magician in the theatre of the World.

To be continued. You were reading Born to Interface Part 2