BY RICHARD PITHOUSE
There are not too many working-class heroes who are known as the "Boss". Bruce Springsteen's fans hang out everywhere from cyber-shrines and academic conferences to battered bars on the wrong side of town. And while a bikie might put it differently to a post-grad English student, it all comes down to the same thing: Springsteen's exquisitely sung stories of everyday life are infused with a clarity, compassion and vitality that brings wisdom, soul and a sense of justice into their lives.
Springsteen's 25 years as a recording artist have resulted in 11 studio albums, two live collections, a greatest hits package and numerous side projects — and an intense and remarkably durable mystique.
After years of composing on an old piano rotting away in the back of a beauty salon, battling to get gigs, Springsteen finally released his first album, the acoustic Greetings From Ashbury Park N.J., in 1973. Despite being evicted from his flat and having to bum space in a garage, he was able to bring out his second album, The Wild, the Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle, within a year of the first.
The seeds of his genius were gloriously clear in these albums and the strength of songs like "Blinded by the Light", "It's Hard to be a Saint in the City" and "Rosalita" took Springsteen and his band from the backstreet bars of New Jersey to a small but passionately enthusiastic international cognoscenti.
He wasn't the only person building on the legacy of musicians like Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie, but there was something special about his stories of growing up, battling to get decent work, drifting, searching, breaking loose and the search for some kind of redemption in the midst of the Vietnam War, race riots and economic depression. Those in the know were already calling him the new Dylan.
When Born to Run hits the streets in 1975, Springsteen's picture went straight to the covers of Time and Newsweek and he was, famously, hailed as the future of rock by leading journalist Jon Landau. The stories of faith, hope and struggle on the superb Darkness on the Edge of Town cemented his status as a musician and chronicler of working-class life. When a journalist asked him what is rock'n'roll, he answered: "It's me and my band going out there tonight and growing older with that audience".
Then came the sublime and widely celebrated The River which was followed by the dark Nebraska, which Springsteen recorded in his bedroom on a four-track tape machine. In 1984, Born in the USA was unleashed.
Eighteen million people rushed to get a copy and Springsteen's life changed forever. He tells anyone who'll listen that he always felt ambivalent about the album. He's not the only one. Although the themes were classic Springsteen, the album was a lot more radio friendly than his previous work and had the US flag on the cover.
Despite the infectious exuberance of the first single, "Dancing in the Dark", a lot of the old fans were disappointed. Q Magazine went so far as to say that it was "as calculated a product as anything by Stock, Aitken and Waterman". Fifteen years on, it's clear that this was an overreaction.
The title track was totally misinterpreted. The song is a penetrating critique of US society, but when the Republican Party, which stood for everything that Springsteen spent a life rejecting, used it in President Ronald Reagan's election campaign it was clear that something had gone very wrong.
"In order to understand the song's intent, you need to invest a certain amount of time and effort to absorb both the music and the words", Springsteen explained. "But that's not the way a lot of people use pop music. For most, music is primarily an emotional language; whatever you've written lyrically almost always comes in second to what the listener is feeling.
"Should form follow content? I had two experiences that illustrate how this works in the real world. The first guy I played the finished version of "Born in the USA" for was Bobby Muller, president of the Vietnam Veterans of America. He sat there listening to the first couple of verses and then a big smile crossed his face.
"But then, for years after the release of the album, at Halloween, I had little kids at my door with their trick or treat bags singing 'I was born in the USA'. They were not particularly well versed in the 'Had a brother at Khe San' lyric ... I guess the same fate awaited Woody Guthrie's 'This Land is Your Land' but that's never made me feel any better."
These days Springsteen performs only a stripped down blues version of the song to make sure that its meaning cannot be misconstrued.
The pressure to follow Born in the USA with more of the same was huge, but with reflective Tunnel of Love Springsteen followed his heart and went back to home recording. As he explained, "For 20 years, I'd written about the man on the road. On Tunnel of Love that changed, and my music turned to the hopes and fears of the man in the house."
By now the Boss had left his wife, his band and his working-class New Jersey community for a new life in a $14 million mansion in the Hollywood Hills. His fans, some of whom had even hoped that Springsteen would chant down Tinsel Town, were not impressed. They felt betrayed and although the two albums which he brought out in 1992, Human Touch and Lucky Town, still had the insight and wisdom of his earlier work, the grittiness was gone.
From New York to Tokyo, journalists, sometimes gleefully and sometimes sadly, told readers that the "Boss" was just another aging rocker getting burned by the grunge explosion.
Springsteen was aware of the ironies of his position. On Lucky Town, he sang: "It's a sad funny ending when you find yourself pretending/ A rich man in a poor man's shirt." On Human Touch, the old theme of trouble with the law was still there, but this time the song's character was in front of a judge for disturbing the peace of the Hollywood Hills by putting a bullet in his TV because he had 57 satellite channels on the remote and nothing worth watching.
The pedestrian 1993 Unplugged and the huge selling 1995 Greatest Hits made it seem like Springsteen was just going through the motions.
Then, in 1995, Springsteen stunned with the release of the stripped down acoustic The Ghost of Tom Joad, inspired by John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Each of its 12 deeply moving tracks were about people battling against the odds to make a life for themselves and their families.
To make sure that no one misunderstood the stories he was telling, Springsteen took the radical step of dispensing with both melody and chorus. Instead he laid his half-spoken, half-sung lyrics over evocative soundscapes. The result was an album which was impossible to misconstrue. It is a beautifully poetic collection of songs that laments social injustice and celebrates the resilience of the human spirit.
"In California, there was a sense of a new country being formed on the edge of the old. But the stories of race and exclusion continued to be played out. I tried to catch a small piece of this on the songs I wrote.
"I knew that The Ghost of Tom Joad would not attract my largest audience. But I was sure that the songs on it added up to a reaffirmation of the best of what I could do", Springsteen explained.
It was too good for most radio stations, but critics and serious fans loved it. Rage Against the Machine's cover version of the title track took Springsteen's potent lyrics to a new audience. Springsteen was again hailed as everything from the USA's conscience to the saviour of rock's integrity.
On June 13, Springsteen's return to social commentary hit the headlines when he performed "American Skin", a song that deplored the killing of immigrant Amadou Diallo by four police officers in New York's Madison Square Garden. The poignant anti-police brutality anthem, with its chorus of "41 shots" — referring to the number of shots the police fired at the innocent African who was standing on his own doorstep — and the line, "You can get killed just for living in your American skin", outraged New York's cops.
[Richard Pithouse teaches philosophy at the Workers' College and the University of Durban-Westville, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He writes on politics, media and music for South African radio stations, newspapers and magazines, as well as underground Durban publications like Durban Poison and Bunnychow.]