Born to Interface Part 6

Just as this ongoing commentary might prove to be a clarion call for direct political support for Springsteen, Bruce’s weekly jaunts with his grandfather to literally scavenge from piles of junk: wires, filament tubes and the like, and watch him recycle these into five-dollar radios for sale retrospectively place him on the high table of (and with) pioneering environmental entrepreneurs producing upcycled goods. An additional talking and rallying-point for a political sojourn.

The black migrant population that had immigrated into New Jersey from the ‘South’ came to think of Springsteen’s grandfather as the “radio man”, and were his main “patrons”. Bruce was “simply the protegee grandson of the ‘radio man’”.

Touching upon race relations while recounting his role in his grandfather’s rags-to-riches venture (Elements of the Bildungsroman have been skilfully woven in, and are reinforced in the narrative via mention of Charles Dickens elsewhere in the book), Springsteen writes: “Race relations, never great in Freehold, will explode ten years later into riotings and shootings, but for now, there is just a steady, uncomfortable quiet”.

Bruce writes: “We had black friends, though only rarely did we enter each other’s homes. There was détente in the streets. The white and black adults were cordial but distant. The children played together. There was a lot of easy racism amongst the kids…but I never ran into kids who wouldn’t play with black kids until I bumped into the middle and upper-middle class.” Springsteen understands these nuances of how race relations play out across various strata of society through personal association at all levels. From the radio-buying blacks in their “’Mickey Mouse’ camps”, to rubbing shoulders with President Obama, Springsteen understands it all. And is able to communicate it to the masses.

He describes the racism of the fifty’s as being “presumed and casual”, to the extent that kids who were excluded from a group-event by a particular person were conditioned to take this in their stride, and to socialize with the same group that had, in a sense, condoned the social exclusion, at future events as if nothing was the matter. This was considered normal.

Of his black friends when he was young, Springsteen says he was “pals” with the Blackwell brothers, was taken up by the jazz-like demeanour of Richard Blackwell, and reminisces over how he thought of him as “the pope of cool”.

He describes two distinct kinds of school gangs, “two socially incompatible teen cliques”, in great detail through the overlapping prisms of fashion, style and social status. He identified more with the ones that “copped their whole look from the school’s black community.” He writes of how the kids return from some of the unifying music on the dance floor “to their UN-designated square of gym floor”.

Dance, for Springsteen, was something he’d been initiated into at home by his aunts and his mother, and it was also a carefully honed skill. He does not hesitate to reveal that he went to great extents to practice his moves before he hit the dance floor. He used to attend dance “soirees” at the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO), and at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). Some of Springsteen’s music is, unsurprisingly, influenced by the sound of Gospel music.

But Springsteen’s two defining connects with the black community are his friendship and musical association with Clarence Clemons, and the flak that he drew from sections of the police (“usually a great part of my audience”), when he “stepped directly into the divide of race” with his number, American Skin, that drew attention to an incident of police brutality on the streets, perpetrated against an African immigrant.

The book also treads a political path when he holds forth on his views on government expenditure in his observations on the aftermath of the LA riots of 1992.

The lyrics of a number of Springsteen’s songs are, of course, about race and exclusion. The number My Hometown captures “the racial tension of late-sixties small-town New Jersey”. In writing about the album, The Ghost of Tom Joad, he says he “traced the lineage of some of his earlier characters to the Mexican immigrant experience in the new West”.

The concerns of immigrants, of religious minorities, and those racially discriminated against have been an abiding concern for Springsteen.

He mentions how he once had a girlfriend who was “fabulously Jewish”, and how, unfortunately, he wasn’t able to conjure up much social bonhomie, in his youth, with another set of Jewish sisters whose family moved into his neighbourhood.

Springsteen talks of “day-dreaming over brown-skinned girls”, there are appreciative references to olive-skinned girls, and we are told that “…on the “Irish Riviera” of the Shore, the “Italians and the Irish meet and mate often…the fair-skinned and freckled can be found tossing down beers….”. Race was definitely on peoples’ minds, irrespective of how they treated the factor.

Bruce Springsteen points out that his song, “We Are Alive”, from the album Wrecking Ball, addresses “new voices of immigration, the civil rights movement and anyone who’d ever stuck their neck out for some righteous justice and was knocked down or killed for their effort.” The Boss urges people to “Listen and learn from the souls and spirits who’ve come before’.

Springsteen describes himself as a child of “Vietnam-era America, of the Kennedy, King and Malcolm X assassinations. The country no longer felt like the innocent place it was said to be in the Eisenhower fifties. Political murder, economic injustice and institutionalised racism were all powerfully and brutally present”. He views his work as being done in the service of humanity.

While his audience has largely been comprised of white people, he writes that when he sang Promised Land on an Obama campaign at Cleveland, his intended audience were: “young people, old people, black, white, brown, cutting across religious and class line”.

Through the book, Springsteen directly addresses the reader/s on a few occasions. The kind of interface with his audience that Springsteen attempts to craft, and revels in, make for fascinating reading and conjecture.

To be continued. You were reading Born to Interface Part 6