Rock and Hard Places (21 page)

Afterwards, in a nearby sports bar, I get talking to John and Joel, who might have been dispatched as a neat personification of what this corridor of America I’m following Springsteen along once was, and what it now is: John, wearing a Minnesota Vikings top, drives a cement truck; his good friend Joel, in a golf shirt embroidered with a corporate logo, does something in IT, and John joshes him about the apparently impressive amounts of money he makes. I guess that John in particular was unbothered that Springsteen didn’t labour his political themes overly.

“Yeah, I was pretty pleased about that,” he says. “I paid a hundred bucks for a ticket, I want to see a rock’n’roll show, not the news.”

“Redneck,” says Joel.

“Liberal,” retorts John.

Here’s a thing, I ask John. If you do drive a truck—or, indeed, have any sort of proper job—how does it sound when a guy who is, if not necessarily through any fault of his own, uproariously rich, sings about you?

“Bruce wasn’t always a millionaire,” notes John. “And hell, he still puts everything into it. I mean, he’s working up there.”

 

CLEVELAND’S GORGEOUSLY MASTHEADED city newspaper,
The Plain Dealer
, calls it “Super Sunday.” “For a single, shimmering day,” declares the front page, “we are the centre of the (pop) cultural universe.” Not only is Springsteen in town, but the Martha Graham Dance Company are doing a matinee at the Ohio Theatre, Australian child-amusers The Wiggles are playing the University and the local NFL team, the Browns, are at home to the Seattle Seahawks. The article goes on to suggest a schedule by which it might be possible to attend all four. “You,” the front page continues, “a lover of high art, simplistic 90-second singalongs, working-man anthems and beer-soaked blood sport, want to experience each and every one . . . you’ll need serpentine reflexes and a reliable car to pull it off, but it can be done.”

Cleveland has had to grow a sense of humour: it’s a town people joke about. The Cuyahoga river, which flows through the town, was once so polluted that on June 22, 1969, it caught fire. R.E.M. would amplify the shame with a song named after the congealed waterway, on which they regarded Cleveland and suggested, “Let’s put our heads together/ And start a new country up.” Ian Hunter wrote the anthem “Cleveland Rocks,” and he may have been joking, but it earned him a hefty exhibit in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, a depressing mausoleum situated on Cleveland’s Lake Erie shore (induction ceremonies are held in New York, because nobody wants to come here). And, since
This Is Spinal Tap
, Cleveland’s name is reflexively invoked whenever a rock band, or anyone associated with one, gets lost backstage, anywhere in the world.

For a while, shivering outside the Quicken Loans Arena, usually home to the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team, I wonder if Springsteen has fallen prey to precisely this mishap. The advertised opening time is 6:30. An hour past that, and everyone’s still outside, subsiding towards hypothermia—but, as luck would have it, able to avail themselves of the warmth that can only be generated by unexpected communal ecstasy.
Plasma screens around the outside of the venue show the closing stages of the match taking place across town at Browns stadium. When I’d left at halftime, the Browns looked cooked—21-9 down, and if it had been a fight, the referee would have stopped it. The home team have clawed their way back, though, and the venue doors open just as an extra-time field goal seals a 33-30 Cleveland victory. When “Radio Nowhere” cranks into gear, the mass lowing of “Brooooooooce” is competing with chanted homages to the Browns.

Patti Scialfa returns tonight, with two effects. One on the sound—the doubling of the female backing vocal accentuates the simple classicist choruses for which Springsteen has always had such an extraordinary facility. The other on the spirit—there’s a more relaxed feel about the E Street Band tonight, more smiling; Steve Van Zandt’s perpetually jutting bottom lip has retracted a couple of inches. “It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City” is exhumed from Springsteen’s 1973 debut album, and decorated with duelling solos by Springsteen and Van Zandt with the exuberance of kids silly-stringing the principal’s car on the last day of term. It slams into “She’s The One”; Springsteen catches a daisy thrown from the crowd and wears it in a hip pocket. Momentum dips slightly with the curious inclusion of husband-and-wife duet of “Town Called Heartbreak,” from Patti Scialfa’s last solo album, “Play It As It Lays”—a record there was little wrong with, but which is ill-served by the cinematic bombast of the E Street Band, who are trained to build the epic visions of their leader. Which is not to declare them incapable of subtlely. “Devil’s Arcade,” steadily establishing itself as a classic, is a study in restrained fury, dying away to a martial drum roll, the stage dark but for flickering neon beneath Max Weinberg’s riser, an effective evocation of a spotlit airstrip, and the beat to which men carry caskets draped with flags.

Afterwards, I visit a bar rejoicing in the name of The Boneyard Beer Farm, its speakers pumping “Thunder Road,” its chairs and sofas filled by patrons largely dressed in Cleveland brown, celebrating a memorable day. I find myself sitting next to Tim, a 40-something Springsteen fan of two decades’ standing who has driven down from Detroit, where he works as a fundraiser for a Catholic high school. Tim identifies himself as “a conservative Republican” and has Springsteen figured for “a conservative Democrat,” which is an astute call. Even Springsteen’s most overtly folky album, 1995’s
The Ghost Of Tom Joad
,
offered no whiff of Guthrie/Seeger-ish revolution, beyond stumping for a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, and the dearest wish of even his most emblematically reckless figures (the narrators of “Thunder Road,” “Born To Run”) is, at the setting of the sun, to make an honest and happy woman of, respectively, Wendy and Mary.

“What his songs are about,” says Tim, “isn’t this politically correct welfare America we have now. They’re about: do something. Go to work. Get it done. Take pride in what you have.”

Tim is punctiliously polite, one of those Americans with the hopelessly endearing habit of inserting your name into every conversational foray.

“Now, Andrew,” he grins. “I know what you’re going to ask next.”

So I do.

“I may be a Republican,” he says, “but I can tell when I’m being lied to. And we feel like we’ve been lied to. And that’s what I like about Bruce, and that’s what I like about the new album. He’s a straight guy. He stands up, and he tells the truth as he sees it.”

 

THREE SHOWS IN and I’m getting a sense of what Landau means when he talks about how Springsteen has edited these concerts. Nothing is tailored to the location, other than the odd bellow of the town’s name—in Cleveland, Springsteen didn’t take the free shot of the Browns’ comeback, didn’t drop “Youngstown” into the set just because it mentions Ohio. Tonight in Auburn Hills, Michigan, he says nothing of the travails besetting Chrysler, whose headquarters is here, and who have, just seventy-two hours previously, announced plans to lay off 12,000 workers, having already canned 13,000 in February (when the lights are up, though, he’d be able to see one economic indicator—the empty rear upper deck of the only non-sellout of the tour). The introduction to
Magic
, about how it’s really about tricks, is the same, as is the brief list of Bush’s malfeasances at the beginning of “Living In The Future,” as is the audacious toss of one of his hard-ridden Telecasters to a nervous roadie at the end of “She’s The One.” In the old-fashioned sense of the phrase, he’s putting on a show.

With due respect to Springsteen’s home state, this is the most apposite place imaginable to see him do it. Auburn Hills is a suburban extremity of Detroit, the town whose industry once built the cars that
drove the roads that crisscross Springsteen’s creative landscape. Auburn Hills isn’t auburn, and has no hills, but it is ostentatiously proud of its receding heritage. Tonight’s venue, the Palace of Auburn Hills, is usually home to the Detroit Pistons, the basketball team whose home jersey is trimmed by, yes, a blue collar (team motto: “Goin’ to work”). At the risk of tempting fate, Auburn Hills could serve as the setting should some agent of Beelzebub ever consider staging
Born To Run: the Bruce Springsteen Musical
.

Tonight, “Jackson Cage” makes its tour premiere, “I’ll Work For Your Love” its first live outing. The segue from “Living In The Future” (from
Magic
) to “Promised Land” (of 1978’s
Darkness On The Edge Of Town
) is, again, a jarring crash of experience against innocence. “Tunnel Of Love,” the title track of the 1987 album which Springsteen recorded largely without the E Street Band, is reclaimed with a dazzling Lofgren solo coda. “Gypsy Biker,” though its name might have been suggested by a computerised Springsteen song title generator, is a powerful reproach, eclipsed for righteous anger among the
Magic
material only by “Last To Die,” whose key question remains John Kerry’s only enduring political contribution, the one the young Vietnam veteran put to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and which should be above the desk of every head of government with armed forces at their disposal: “How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake?”

The encore contains a moment of spontaneity. Springsteen mentions a kid in the front row, sitting on his dad’s shoulders. “He can’t be more than six,” laughs Springsteen, “and he’s been rocking hard all night.” The infant has also been holding up a banner, reading “Ramrod please” (this request for the somewhat salacious cut from 1980’s
The River
may have been ghostwritten by his father). “Okay,” says Springsteen. “Unplayed in five years. Let’s go.” It ends with Springsteen and the kid making devil’s horn salutes at each other, and a drum roll like a landing helicopter, until the lights come up and Weinberg ignites “Born To Run.” It’s one of those indisputable absolutes, like the Taj Mahal, or
Henry V
or something—a work that it is honestly difficult to imagine any half-sentient being quibbling with, and a product of definitively American audacity, of a young man who, thirty-odd years ago, decided that he was going to make the greatest rock’n’roll record of all time.

AT A BAR across the street, more people for whom Springsteen has served as a soundtrack to a life gather to swap stories. I fall in with Dan, a silver-haired advertising copywriter from Huntingdon Woods, who has seen Springsteen more than fifty times, including six on this tour, and one Dublin show with the Seeger Sessions band. Tonight, he reckons, was in “the upper third” of his all-time list.

“I just love his passion,” says Dan. “He means what he’s saying.”

And we order some beers and talk about what that might be, and Dan raises the optimism that so many others I’ve met have also mentioned, and I say to him, as I’ve said to them, that that new album of his, though it’s one of his very best, sounds almost crushingly pessimistic.

“These,” says Dan, “are not optimistic times.”

And Dan mentions “Long Walk Home,” which has, at all three shows, taken on something of the quality of a singalong at a revival meeting. There’s work to be done, it acknowledges, stuff to fix and a reason for doing it that only an American—and, in today’s climate, possibly only Springsteen—would proffer with a straight face.

“That flag flying over the courthouse,” roared nearly 60,000 people of more than 60,000 different opinions over three nights, “means certain things are set in stone/Who we are, what we’ll do, and what we won’t.”

Corny as hell, of course. But the truth often is.

 

 

 

I
T SAYS MUCH about the vertiginous nature of the music industry’s decline that as recently as 1995 I saw fit to bemoan the fact that major labels didn’t charter private jets on wholly gratuitous junkets to North Africa very often. Nowadays, the operatives of those same labels tend to run a nervous finger around a sweaty collar when you turn up at a playback and ask for carbonated water. The mid-90s were, in retrospect, something of a last hurrah for the idea of a record company as a profligate subsidiser of demented entertainments for music business insiders. This was especially the case in Britain, where a commercial boom and a general giddy triumphalism were being fostered by the rise of a phalanx of new artists distinguished by their unmistakable and—unusually—unabashed Englishness. As is always the case during eras of plenty, everyone assumed that the good times would last forever. Which is to say that nobody imagined that the imminent unleashing of a new form of communication would have the interesting effect of subverting, subsuming or destroying all the others.

None of which has anything to do with Def Leppard—but then, what does? While the idea that anything can ever be so bad it’s somehow good is the infuriating folly of the irrecoverable aesthetic retard, there are things in this life so overwhelmingly and guilelessly preposterous that they are weirdly endearing despite themselves: Def Leppard, like France, are among those
things. Minutely though I have ransacked my memory, I have no recollection whatsoever as regards my assignment to this trip. It may have been that I was simply alone among
Melody Maker
’s roster of writers in never having committed to print any overt hostility towards the subject. It may have been that I was shanghaied by a cruel editor performing the common trick of dangling the destination in front of the journalist before revealing the band. It may have been a dare.

Whatever the reason, it was, as is always the case when the Fourth Estate descend en masse upon some location or event, excellent fun. An actor once told me, plausibly, that the worst thing about her job was the company of other actors. One of the very best things about my job is the company of other journalists. Given that the profession is—or should be—the last refuge of the otherwise unemployable, it attracts a disproportionate quantity of eccentrics, oddballs, flaneurs and freaks, people motivated in equal parts by a questing curiosity and a horror of having to work for a living. I believe I speak for all veterans of this particular escapade in expressing profound gratitude to the people and local authorities of the municipality of Tangiers that none of us were arrested, deported or chased to the city limits at pitchfork-point.