Springsteen describes Bruce at
the age of thirty-four as a serial monogamist, and attributes this to the
culture of shame and guilt that was imbibed in him by the Catholic church.
While discussing the role of
religion in his life, he recounts a few unpleasant incidents of how he (and
other children) were treated by the authorities at the grammar school that he
attended. Springsteen says that while these violent admonishments ‘estranged’
him forever from the church, the institution was so all-pervasive, that there
was no real escape, and that he “came to ruefully and bemusedly understand that
once you’re a Catholic, you’re always a Catholic”. He also goes on to admit
that “deep inside”, he’s “still on the team”, and says that his mother and her
sisters lived and preached the credo of work, faith and family.
In relating events connected to
negotiations he tried to make with Mike Appel, his manager, for a new round of
contracts, he uses concepts and phrases from the language of Buddhism such as “the
middle way” (reminiscent of the Middle Path propounded by The Buddha), and moderation, but in the nick of time, for the culminating
sentence of the same paragraph and chapter, he reverts back to Christian
imagery, and describes his band and his extended team as his apostles. The manner of the use of language mirrors the reality of his religious grounding that he seems to have come to terms with.
Springsteen’s album, Magic, was
his “…state-of-nation dissent over the Iraq War and the Bush years.” In the
course of the Magic tour, in the context of counselling a band member, Danny
Federici, who had contracted melanoma (and had earlier been “overstating his
expenses and skimming off the top”), Bruce says that “As a leader, even of a
rock ‘n’ roll band, there is always a little of the ‘padrone’ in your job
description, but it’s a fine line.”
This healing touch, Springsteen has brought
with his music, to shape, respond to, and pave the way in synch with a
growing collection of world events.
The concert that he did for the
Vietnam vets in LA was on the 20th of August, 1981. 20th
of Aug. happens to be the birthday of one of the past leaders of the Indian
National Congress party, the late Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, and is
being celebrated in India today as one writes.
Thirty-six years after the LA
concert, and nineteen years after the New Delhi concert, Springsteen continues
to perform on significant occasions such as for the inauguration ceremony of President
Obama, and at the half-time of the American Super Bowl.
When he went back to East Berlin
for his second concert, after which the German wall fell, Springsteen seems to
have been quite surprised to notice that the tickets said that they were being
presented by the Young Communist League, and that they were playing a “concert
for the Sandinistas” (question-mark, exclamation mark!)
Back home in the USA, those who hailed
from the Russian steppes in his state of New Jersey were people who included
descendants of Genghis Khan, and belonged to the Mongolian race. “Persecuted”
by Stalin, and rescued by Tolstoy’s daughter from the Soviets, they lived south
of Bruce’s town of Freehold, on Freewood Acres, as a “planned community”. He
describes them as being “rabidly anti-Communist”, and we are told that they
“were sprung from Stalin’s cages”. Springsteen says many of the children from
Freewood Acres were his school-mates.
In the context of describing some
of his father’s behaviour as “paranoid delusion”, Springsteen mentions how his
father thought that a teenage Russian friend of Bruce’s was a spy.
Springsteen recalls a year when
he did “a holiday show for the locals at a Russian social club called Rova
Farms on the outskirts of town”.
One finds that Richard Blackwell
played the congas that evening for Bruce at Rova Farms. The same Richard Blackwell
that Springsteen had fortuitously run into far away from home, a familiar face
from New Jersey, on his first trip to San Francisco. (More on San Francisco,
and Springsteen’s tryst with nature and the environment in the next part of
this series).
Springsteen was thus, even in his
statedly insular early life, familiar with a thing or two that was Russian, as
opposed to what the rest of the world might expect of an everyday American’s
exposure to Russian people or culture of any kind during the days of the cold
war.
We find, in Chapter Forty, The
River, that in true Springsteenian form, he draws attention to the Three Mile
Island nuclear accident (and environmental disaster) that took place in the USA,
through the life of an everyday character. He describes his song, “Roulette”, as
the “portrait of a family man caught in the shadow of the Three Mile Island
nuclear accident”.
Thus, a number about an American nuclear
disaster (an environmental issue), was his debut, in his words, “into the
public political arena”. Bruce Springsteen performed Roulette at Madison Square
Garden for Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE).
Somehow, via the title, Roulette,
and the Power of Suggestion of the artist, the reader’s mind moves to the
Chernobyl disaster, and, indeed, to thoughts on the negative aspects of the role of civil nuclear
energy in the emerging energy mix of our planet.
By the time Springsteen got news
of his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998, his repertoire in
the public political arena had expanded to include the Human Rights Now tour that
had served not only to extend solidarity, but to also legally empower people
who stood in need of strength or liberation, or just music, across the globe.
To be continued…this was Part 4
of Born to Interface
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