So clearly, this is a website that has Bruce Springsteen on its mind pretty often. It’s also a website maintained by lifelong Southerners. And I wonder if that’s a little weird.
I wonder because, until I got to graduate school (still in the South, mind you), I was the only obsessive Springsteen aficionado that I knew. As far as I could tell, I had practically discovered the guy. No one else I knew knew anything about his songs other than stuff from the Born in the USA era, and certainly no one had seen him in concert or owned a bootleg. When I began making regular trips to the Camelot Music in Northpark Mall to pick up those little grey cassettes packed full of Bruce-y goodness, each trek was made in complete ignorance, each new album a total mystery to be pored over, unlocked, deciphered. I had no map inherited or intuited from friends or family to help negotiate his body of work, and when I bought Nebraska and The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle on the same day, I just about never found a road out of the vast gap between those two records.
Once I became the globe-trotting, streetwise man of the world I am now, I had met a whole bunch people from the northeast for whom Springsteen fandom was simply a way of life, another way of being in the world—if not for themselves, then for a big chunk of people they knew. And for that matter, there seemed to exist in the snowy north such a thing as a casual Springsteen fan: someone who had a bunch of his albums, knew all about him, thought he was great, but wasn’t convinced that maybe, just a little, he was Jesus. For them, my solitary pilgrimages to Jackson, through the garish glare of County Line Road—can a wasteland teem?—to claw yet another mysterious scrap of shore-rat-cum-Steinbeck wisdom free of its cellophane was an utterly alien experience. I don’t doubt they thought me a little stupid.
So my question here is, why didn’t Bruce catch on in the South? Why, on the 1999-2000 Reunion tour, which packed ‘em in at nearly every stop, was New Orleans one of the few shows not to sell out, and Little Rock only sold to about two-thirds capacity? (And why, despite this fact, is Little Rock getting a big-screen premiere of the 1975 Hammersmith concert, and Jackson and Baton Rouge are not? Huh?) And just try to find a bootleg of his 1978 show at the Jackson Auditorium on the otherwise thoroughly documented Darkness tour. And then send it to me. I’d love to hear it.
I suppose there are some obvious answers to consider. The world of Springsteen’s catalog is a world of factories, smokestacks, splintering boardwalks on gray beaches, Manhattan as wonderland. None of these elements are traditionally associated with the South, and one could argue that Southerners might have trouble getting immersed in his imaginative world. But look, people: I didn’t go to school for over a decade just to accept the easy and reasonable answer to things. Plus, I don’t think that answer works. Just because those elements aren’t “traditionally associated” with the South doesn’t mean they aren’t there. I spent many a summer week at the Broadwater in Biloxi, a beachside resort (or is that last restort?) that knows—or knew, pre-Katrina and pre-casino—how to turn its dilapidation and seediness into wistful charm as well as any Jersey Coast village. People didn’t go to the Broadwater because it was nice; they went because it used to be nice. The chipped lion-head spouts in the pool, the cracked tennis court, the scraggly and yellow grass were all evidence of its former glory, and it was that evidence that its patrons paid for. And I certainly saw more smokestacks growing up than I ever saw plantations (to pick a Southern cliche), and when you consider how central coal mining has been to the South, well, the idea of that Bruce didn’t go over because listeners didn’t identify with his bleak post-industrial landscapes just doesn’t fly.
So, what then? Maybe part of it isn’t so much what’s being depicted as it is the angle Bruce looks at it from. Class is right there at the center of his work, and the South has never been much good at talking about class, letting issues of race obscure other social issues. Not that you can really separate class and race, anyway, and maybe that’s part of it, too: Bruce’s protagonists—broken-down laborers, outcast Vietnam vets—embody a version of whiteness that does not signify privilege, as it always must in the South.
Here I’d like to qualify that claim by pointing to a bundle of South-set country music songs that tread the same ground, tell similar stories, but I confess that I’m drawing a blank. I keep coming up with Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It,” which is a fun song, but which can barely take itself seriously. It’s the sort of chuck-it-all fantasy that helps you pass the hours away until the five o’clock whistle blows, but you’ll be back tomorrow. One could make the same claim about “9 to 5,” I guess, but you can dance to it, at least. So what are we left with? The survivalist cartoon of “A Country Boy Can Survive,” the soundtrack for minivan-driving suburbanites who fantasize about apocalypse while sitting in rush-hour gridlock? And I know there’s any number of songs by Johnny Cash or Merle Haggard that deal with disenfranchised white laborers, but neither of those legends were really having their heydays during the era that Springsteen’s career was taking off, the late 1970s and early 1980s. Indeed, the only unquestionable bright lights of Johnny Cash’s 1980s work are his covers of Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman” and “Johnny 99.”
In fact—and this is probably an overgeneralization, but indulge me—the country music scene during the Springsteen rise to superstardom was already tending towards its now full-blown obsession with the trite and the platitudinous, with ReaganBushite affirmations of the unproblematic goodness of small towns and simple folk. Say you live in a “town full of losers,” a town that “rips the bones from your back,” and someone’s feeling might get hurt: this is the heart of America, dammit, the wellspring of all that is good and decent, and pointing any lingering problems we may be dealing with or acknowledging that some people here lead desperate, barren lives—well, that’s tantamount to treason, iddin it? That boy wouldn’t have to keep wanting things that can only be found in the darkness on the edge of town if he’d just join the men’s group at church. There’s a fish fry this weekend, and they’re all reading Jesus Christ, CEO for the book club next week. What do you mean, he’s Catholic? Well, I never.
Listen to country radio now, and for every song that raises the tiniest objection about modern small-town life, there are three more that affirm its essential and sustaining nature. Rebellion is always seen as something that young folks do before they grow up and realize how sacred the status quo really is. It’s always in the past, a funny story to tell with a wry grin over a round of golf. “The secret of life is little league baseball,” sings Faith Hill, and legions of new diabetics lunge for their insulin. But can they make it before Gary Allan sings “when tough little boys grow up to be dads / they turn into babies again”? If not, they may die. Bruce had some CMT success with the video for “Lonseome Day,” and Kenny Chesney covered “One Step Up,” but those are both somebody-done-me-wrong songs that fit easily into a politics-free genre.
But it’s probably a mistake to over-associate contemporary country with Southern music. I knew at least as many, and probably more, people who were into classic rock when I was in high school and college—Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd. I suppose you could make a case for Zeppelin being “Southern” based on their appropriation of the blues, but I don’t really think you should. And I don’t have an answer for why Springsteen never caught on as another staple of classic rock in the South, unless it’s just that, since there’s already so much Skynyrd on the airwaves, classic rock stations have already used up their FCC allotment of bombast, a problem that DJs north of the Mason-Dixon don’t have to grapple with.
I wonder, too, if Bruce enacts a more complicated performance of masculinity than is traditionally acceptable in Southern culture. In the pre-hardbody years, street-rat Springsteen’s sexuality was a bit more ambiguous, a bit more flexible. All those songs about “golden-heeled fairies” and all. Leaving aside the fact that his guitarist dresses like a flamboyantly gay pirate vampire (and God bless him for it—who doesn’t love Little Steven?) there’s also the fact that one of the central moments of the Springsteen Concert Experience used to be Bruce and Clarence kissing full on the mouth (which I couldn’t find a picture of). And maybe that brings us back to class and race.
Anyway, I’m all out of answers. I’d be glad to hear yours. In a weird way, though, I am glad to have gotten to discover Springsteen’s music in a culture where he was not already weighted down with decades of accumulated meaning, in a place where his music felt more like a secret that only I knew than like a cornerstone of regional identity. It meant that on those occasions where I did find another Boss-phile, I had probably found someone I’d enjoy spending time with. And you know, I’ve never met an obsessive Springsteen fan from the South who I didn’t like, and many became fast and good friends, though I’ve lost touch with a lot of them now. In fact, now that I think of it, the highest concentration of Brucefans that I met was in Hattiesburg, MS—a Southern burg tailor-made for songs about getting out if ever there was one.
Oh yeah! One last Bruce-and-the-South connection: Walker Percy was a fan, and Bruce was a fan of Percy’s. Here’s a link to the letter Percy sent Springsteen, the letter Springsteen sent Percy’s widow, and the Joad-era interview with Percy’s nephew and Bruce; it’s under “Essentials,” and it’s called “Rock and Read,” from DoubleTake magazine.
Okay. Just a few days until this. Must remain calm.
I’m right with you on the question of why Bruce isn’t bigger in the South—especially growing up in the burned-out shell of Birmingham in the 70’s in 80’s, after the steel industry collapse. I didn’t think anything of driving through neighborhood after neighborhood of gently decaying homes, and entire shuttered blocks of downtown.
The soundtrack, though, was always metal and distorted blues. Is there a chance that Bruce was, in a way, too “soft” for the region? Not just in tone, but also in subject matter? For while Bruce can rock as hard as anyone (not Zeppelin, though; he doesn’t crunch), they didn’t sing about breaking apart inside. While Bruce sang about a mansion on a hill, and his father’s house, Robert Plant sung about Mordor. Was it so terrible that we didn’t want to have to see the present reflected through music? Is that why we turned to sugar and pop?
Hey, and check our new “Springsteenia” category!
Yeah, that makes sense to me—not enough escapism in the Bruce canon. Plenty of escape, mind you, but maybe for some people there’s too much info about what he’s escaping from.
See, when I saw that “Jesus Christ, CEO” link, I assumed it was snark. But it’s not, and now I’m depressed.
I grew up in Annapolis, Maryland, which is only about 90 miles south of the Mason-Dixon, but Annapolis has a very peculiar character. I don’t think of it as the Northeast, exactly, but it’s certainly nothing like the South. All of which is probably an unnecessary lead-in for this: I grew up in a Bruce-free zone too.
He would very occasionally show up on the Baltimore and D.C. classic rock stations, and his tour stops at the Capital Center always seemed to sell out, but I don’t recall being exposed to anything other than the hits. And, really, after hearing “Glory Days” for the 60th or 70th time, I wasn’t terribly interested in digging into his catalog. Don’t hate me for saying this, but in my mind, he got lumped together with John Mellencamp—both of them singing songs to blue-collar folk to whom I felt absolutely no identification. (But then again I was too busy trying to count the meter of Yes’s “Close to the Edge” to worry about singer/songwriters.)
Could the source of the North/South divide be something so simple as Bruce’s close association with New Jersey? “He writes songs for and about them,” I can imagine a southerner thinking, “not about us.”
That Born to Run CD/DVD set looks great. Do you think it would be a good starting point for overcoming my deeply-ingrained “Glory Days”-era biases?
the teeming wasteland of county-line road – heh, that’s a good one, prof!
i can’t speculate on Bruce personally, but growing up in the outskirts of Jackson, i’ve noted two basic themes in pop culture from outside the south: homogeny and delay.
it seemed that only the music that sounded like all other music got play. and we only got new things after they made it big in the northeast or west, so again we got only the mass-market appeal if only 2 or 3 years later
now, i admit that i nursed at the teet of Z106 and broke free less than you did, prof. btw, last time i was in town, they were playing Deep Purple, so go figure.
you didn’t mention how you got hooked on Bruce?
Yeah, Stevo, that inferiority-complex model works, I think, that need for validation from elsewhere.
As for how I got into Bruce, well, I’ve written once before about the sorry state of radio in the greater Bold New listening area during my teen years, a sorriness exacerbated by the fact that our cable provider didn’t offer MTV. So, I tended to just wander it to the record store from time to time and buy something based on dim memories of liking it before, or something I ran across in a magazine, et cetera. I remember buying Born to Run at a time when I still basically only knew BitUSA-era Bruce and thinking, “Well, that’s not what he’s supposed to sound like. Where are the synthesizers? Why is this last song so long?” But something about it got its hooks into me, and after a very short amount of time, I was converted.
And Darren, yeah, I think the BTR DVD/CD set is a good place to start. It’s $23.98 at Target this week! Be warned that BTR is still a bombast-heavy, over-heated record—Nick Hornby once claimed that Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman made a whole career out of trying to recreate “Thunder Road,” and if I didn’t know Hornby was such a Bruce-phile, I might be tempted to pop him one. But it’s a good good big loud over-romantic wallofsoundy record, and by all accounts, the DVD of the Hammersmith Odeon concert—which, man, I wish I could watch in your swank home theater—is just spellbinding. If BTR isn’t to your tastes, then I’d recommend Nebraska, which is about as far from “Glory Days” as you can get. “Atlantic City” is, seriously, my favorite song of all time.
Also, Darren raises a good point about only hearing the “hits.” Springsteen never had much rotation in “classic rock” formats because he never really had anything even approximating a chart-topper until BitUSA (I think “Born to Run” peaked at #30, or something like that?), so he wasn’t likely to get much play on Z106 or on rawk stations with similarly chart-driven playlists. Songs like “Glory Days” are probably over-represented, with the occasionaly “BTR” or “The River” or “Rosalita,” and rarely a “Prove it All Night” or “Backstreets” or “The Promised Land” or what have you.
Not to downplay other points, but do you think our collective age has possibly kept us from seeing the southern appreciation of Bruce? Think about it. if you’re 32 today, his most important albums range from the year of your birth through about your 4th grade year. whatever movement or feel that people had for bruce at the moment, i think would quite easily be lost on us that might have been a bit young to notice at the time.
On the other hand, many springsteen songs that i DO like a lot, and which often hit home for me: Highway Patrolman, Atlantic City, even Born to Run, seem to be clearly set in other states. When i hear born to run i think of riding off into the unknown in a cold unpleasant NJ climate to which i’m oblivious.
country music–today–is a white suburbanite’s hip hop in that its rarely interested in moving beyond ‘how great everything is being a baller/countryboy.
Atlantic City is also one of my favorite songs. I often find myself listening to the line… “Down on the boardwalk they’re gettin’ ready for a fight” to make myself understand that sometimes you really do have to hurt people, that i should understand this.
I considered the age thing, Mooch, and I think that’s certainly part of it, but then again, lots of other bands whose heyday came well before our birth or during our infancy enjoy loyal, vocal followings and regular airplay in parts South to a much greater extent than Springsteen, at least in my experience.
I like Darren’s idea, that he writes about them, not about us. For those of us who get beat over the head by the phrase “sense of place” I think we learn to admire a sense of any place, whether it’s our place or someone else’s. Otherwise, I think most folks just respond to seeing their neck of the woods represented in pop culture (I think Noel Polk calls it “validation”).
I got Born in the USA when I was a kid, and that was my introduction to Springsteen. I still think it’s a great album. Later, when I got a turntable and started buying dollar records, I stumbled onto Born to Run, The Wild the Innocent, and others. Mostly I fall into the category of the “casual Springsteen fan: someone who had a bunch of his albums, knew all about him, thought he was great, but wasn’t convinced that maybe, just a little, he was Jesus.” I never thought much of it; I knew other casual fans when I was in college in (where else?) Hattiesburg.
Thanks for the heads up on the Walker Percy letters and the DVD/CD. Reckon the 2 disc Wilco live album will be on sale at Target, too?
yeah, that Walker Percy connection was a pleasant surprise!
I had intended an earlier response to this issue of To Bruce or Not to Bruce in Dixie, but many of my points have already been made.
For Darren, I’ll especially second (fourth?) the notion of Nebraska as a good place to start, a kind of unplugged record a good decade before MTV “created the concept” and a neat inverting of “Broooce” as Dylan (a kind of Springsteen goes acoustic without the concomitant crowd rejoinders of “traitor”). But I also think you might investigate Darkness on the Edge of Town (an underrated work in the Boss canon methinks) and a kind of nice “electric” pair with Nebraska.
Mooch in fine monkey fashion has hit on a major point—age. I’ve got close to a decade on his Mythical Southerner and believe me Bruce did get airplay on FM radio in the South in the 1970s. One can quibble about the Southerness of my hometown (It’s in Florida but replete with Live Oaks and Spanish Moss, had an active KA house with the requisite events of a racial nature, is surrounded by working and former plantations, and is within 20 mintues of the GA border), and it also is a college town which raises some stakes about the nature of its radio and its relation to less “liberal” Southern cities; however, I even remember hearing stuff from the first two albums on Gulf 104, long before djs with names like Sandy Beach became omnipresent. Remember also that Born to Run was a national phenomenon and pre-release was featured the same week on the cover of Time and Newsweek, a rarity and even rarer for a “cultural” personality. But between 1972-3 and the BitUSA (1984-5) wave, the nature of FM radio changed. Remember it was originally a new, less commercial form. A kind of post-Summer of Love free form experiment. The movie FM attempts to show this but fails. Even in its second commercial incarnation (AOR-Album Oriented Rock—itself a kneejerk response to AM radio’s mid-70s discodom—think Cleveland and a certain baseball riot), there was a tendency to playlist things that weren’t chart hits—thus a lifetime of “Stairway to Heaven”. Only when FM Hit/Chart Radio Playlists became de rigeur and with the corporatization of radio into the Infiintys and Clear Channels of the world and the rise of the AutoDJ -now being supplanted by AUtoStations – did the nature of what Springsteen was being played generally but specifically in the South change.
Thinking about today to get some sense of historical perspective, we are as far from Born in the USA—two decades and a smidge—as that album (for those of with first issue vinyl copies) was from the very first heyday of the British Invasion (amazing how time flies innit?). And the distance from us to Born to Run—30 years—when pushed back similarly puts us at the tailend of WWII and before any concious notion of rock and roll!
The above tries to answer the what you heard at a certain age issue but not the question of popularity that Prof. Fury returns to. Although I think some of the answer lies in a supposed North-South divide and concomitant regionalism (however well it was deconstructed by Gorjus with respect to Bham and 80s industrial urban decay), I also think you might to ask a lot of hard questions about certain assumptions that lie behind this debate. First without a list of ” lots of other bands whose heyday came well before our birth or during our infancy [who] enjoy loyal, vocal followings and regular airplay in parts South,” I can’t discuss that issue with any intelligence. But I can ask a few questions. How many of those bands can be defined in any way as Southern (here I’m guessing Skynyrd or heaven forbid .38 Special might have been on such a list)? How many of said bands exist as going concerns? Whether of a touring or recording variety or both. Think hard about what type of format the radio stations on which you heard a certain band and its non-hits was played. Do you hear that track throughout the South on different kinds of stations or only on similarty formatted ones?
Second and finally (and I admit to being not much of a statistician), but this whole topic began partially with a discussion of concert attendance, there’s a host of questions to be answered before you can assume the Boss not selling out must mean he’s less popular in the South. For example, you need to compare a bunch of similar nationwide tours across musical genres to see if there’s any trend of lower ticket sales in NOLA and Little Rock generally. You might also look at tours of artists of similar stature and age (Say Areosmith for starters as one that still records as well as just milks concert tours; I’ll avoid any discussion of Hell Freezing over and Henley/Frey/Walsh here) and how they did locally. You also might consider when the tours occured in the calendar year. Did they, for example, overlap with some other type of events specific to or more popular in the Southern locale which might have bled off disposable income (say college football season as a prime example)?
A fascinating thread. And since this blog has so many Bruce-o-philes (I just couldn’t see doing the -head thing), does anyone know how to get a hold of the CD version of the famous Piece de Resistance bootleg? I’ve come across web mentions of a CD “release” of this but never with any details of how to obtain or even where to download. As much as I love my old mysteriously unlabeled black box set of 3 lps, a nice 2 disc set or even an iTunes file would be better.
Bulb lives! Bulb lives!
And Bulb, I have a copy of Passaic Night—a diff bootleg of the same show as Piece de Resistance, w/ different bonus material—that I’d be happy to send along your way, if you’re interested. You may be a Piece purist, though.
Uncut magazine has a Bruce cover/cd/section this month. and, dead on bulb.
Frontiersman,
I’d love to get Passaic Night, which appears to be simply a longer version of that concert/radio broadcast (perhaps the whole thing). Email me off blog (I couldn’t find your address iny my files) and we can discuss details.
One can find meaning Springsteen’s music in, basically, one of two ways: the critical way, which produces a sense of outrage at the source of the suffering in his songs; or the conservative way, which takes comfort in the way his music dignifies the listener’s suffering. What first put the Springsteen hooks in me, and what has kept me listening for twenty years, was a response to the former, and what I would call genuine, message in Springsteen’s music. Unfortunately, the latter, and what I would call misguided, response will always be an easier sell. And this is why Bruce is much more popular in the North—the same reason hard-luck country songs are popular in the South—not because they open peoples’ eyes to the source of their needless misery, but because they lend an air of heroism to their suffering.
This is where the specificity of his settings makes him fill up stadiums in the North and not in the South, because you never fill up stadiums with people who have awoken to the evils of capitalism after hearing “Born in the U.S.A.”, but with people who can “identify” with a narrator who was “born down in a dead man’s town.” So while the critical appeal of Springsteen will transcend geography, the popular, conservative appeal, hinging on similarity and specificity, will remain much more contingent on shared geography and social experience.
This all makes me think of the first time I was in front of a classroom. My subject: Bruce Springsteen. Miss Surratt’s seventh-grade English class, and our first speech assignment. I often tell people that I became an old-time musician the day I first heard the Sex Pistols, but this memory makes me think that maybe it was actually the first time I heard Bruce Springsteen. It makes me realize, furthermore, that I first became a commie college English teacher at the same time. It’s that contrarian spirit, that “constitutional inability to say ‘yes’” that Dos Passos ascribed to Veblen, that I must have felt at some level way back in the seventh grade, that drew me to Springsteen and has caused me to make a life out of making, studying, and teaching art that takes a critical stance in the face of modernity’s excesses. Alas, this spirit is not what has sealed Bruce’s commercial success.
Well-said! I do hope, however, that his endurance—as contrasted with success—has something to do with the spirit that you speak of. Although I am loathe to do this, perhaps Dylan is an apt comparision in this aspect.
Damn. Helluva comment, Reg. And I think that helps explain why so many Springsteen fans are uncomfortable with Born in the USA (the album); there’s a suspicion that there, more than anywhere else in his career, he’s a little bit complicit in perpetuating the “conservative misreading” you identify—a song like “Glory Days” makes it a lot easier to misread a song like “Born in the USA.”
Hm, well as perhaps the only woman to comment on this Bruce thing (regulator?), and as a woman who grew up in a town on the dangling peninsula of the nation, a town with no factory or industry to speak of, I have to say that what Bruce was about for me was adolescent sexuality and angst, but especially about his pants and contents thereof.
I’d say you guys were overintellectualizing here, but politics are the gateway to the pants.
Ummm… McSweeney’s (no relation) has a take on Springsteen song titles.
Bruce Springsteen Songs, If the Title More Accurately Reflected the Subject Matter.
Hey, what’s up with these concert rules?
Anyone know?
Yeah, gorj had a run-in with those rules when he went to the show in Glendale. Bruce is pretty insistent on the whole you-sit-down-be-quiet thing on the solo tours. As he used to say on the Tom Joad tour, if someone sitting next to you is talking, politely ask them to shut the fuck up. “Don’t make me come down there and smack you around,” said Bruce. “It’ll mess with my man-of-the-people image.”
It’d be nice to live in a world where people would listen to the quiet music quietly and cheer between songs, but we don’t live in that world, sadly, so, pissy as his insistence on keeping people shushed can make him seen, it’s prob’ly necessary. Esp. when we keep in mind that Bruce fans—an entitled-feeling lot, especially in the northeast—once booed off the artist who opened for him AT A BENEFIT SHOW.
lordy:
Born to Run—but for Public Office?
On the 30th anniversary of the release of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, Sens. Jon Corzine and Frank Lautenberg, both New Jersey Democrats, proposed a resolution congratulating The Boss on his contribution to American culture. It’s the sort of thing that normally sails through Congress. But the resolution was shot down by Senate Republicans, presumably for the support Springsteen lent John Kerry last year. Now, as Corzine mulls over possible replacements for his Senate seat (he was elected governor of New Jersey earlier this month), there is a push among his constituents for him to name—who else?—The Boss. Anthony Coley, Corzine’s press secretary, says it’s not a bad idea—”especially,” he adds, “if you’re a Springsteen fan.”