Racing in the Street: Springsteen and Us in Ten Songs
It’s a warm summer evening in Madrid. I am high in the stands of the Bernabeu Stadium. There are 75,000 people below me. I get up out of my seat. The air guitarist from Austria standing next to me is already assuming the pose, invisible plectrum in hand. An extended family of wealthy looking Spaniards with neat Beneton jumpers around their shoulders crane their necks.
Bruce Springsteen ambles onto the stage, “Hola Madriiiiid!” he shouts. “Hola Madriiid! One, two…” and Badlands crashes into life. As one, the mass of people standing below me leap into the air.
“Lights out tonight,
Trouble in the heartland….”
The sky is a deep blue and the evening sun fills the stadium. It is hard to see. People are finding their seats. Way down below, the giant screen shows guitarist Steve Van Zandt still adjusting his expensive headscarf.
“Workin’ in the fields,
’Til you get your back burned….”
A pause for breath then Springsteen, dripping with sweat like he has already reached the encore, pulls on the reins and steers the band careering into No Surrender, We Take Care of Our Own, and on and on it goes, winding the coil. Spirit in the Night, Jack of All Trades… She’s The One… Youngstown.
The summer night brings darkness overhead. The heat, the lights and the crowd all pull in close around me, compressing everything into a white-hot ball suspended in infinite darkness. Somewhere, out beyond the city, over the mountains and the vineyards and across the cold sea is the damp concrete of a hospital car park and my mother dying in a bed, like a small broken bird; her post chemo hair short, thin and wispy.
But I am in this moment. In this place. And there is no other. Bruce doesn’t let me down. Pushing on and on through Because the Night, Working on the Highway, The River, and then house lights up for Born to Run. I become disconnected; disoriented; unstable. It starts from my feet and rises up through my body — a hot broiling in my blood. Almost imperceptibly, I begin to rise into the air, my feet leaving the concrete and my arms spreading wide. I am weightless. There is a moment of total silence as the atomic structure of the universe holds its breath. Then a sudden exhalation sends everything spinning backwards. The night gets younger, the sun rises exactly where it had set. Planes fly backwards in the sky. An acceleration into colour and speed — back to the very beginning — with a loud CRACK! …
Song 1 — My Hometown
I am sitting on my parents’ bed in my pyjamas unwrapping a small box. It’s 1986 and something is about to snap into place. I have just turned thirteen — a full-grown man. I asked for a silver chain to wear round my neck like they wear in the year above me at school. I fumble with the clasp and put on my new necklace.
“You look like a girl,” my sister says.
A later inspection in the bathroom mirror proves her right. I go back to my room to play one of my three cassettes: Born in the USA. I bought it months ago but immediately put it away, Dancing in the Dark was good but the rest of it was shit. This time, however, as I press down on the stiff plastic play button, something is different.
“I was eight years old and running with a dime in my hand
Into the bus stop to pick up a paper for my old man
I’d sit on his lap in that big old Buick and steer as we drove through town.”
I see it. I feel it. I smell the worn leather on the steering wheel and hear the shouts at the High School, where there were “a lot of fights between the black and white.”
I have turned thirteen and these songs are now full of resonance and pathos and light and dark and, yes, adulthood. Suddenly, dressed like a little girl in pyjamas, I am in love with Bruce Springsteen.
…CRACK! …
… I am sitting high up on the steps of a fire escape looking down into the alley below; a neon sign pulses red then blue. In the distance a siren rises and falls. I am smoking a cigarette. There is no one around, just a stray cat patrolling a line of trash cans surrounded by broken glass. From an open window I hear a woman’s voice: “Hey Johnny, you out there?”….
…CRACK! …
Song 2 — Incident on 57th Street
Ever since I was fourteen I have had the key to a magic wardrobe. Whenever I hear those opening piano phrases of Incident on 57th Street and the guitar that gently shimmers into focus, I can open the door with a creak and push my way through the coats and the hangers, emerging into the steamy heat of a 1970s summer night in New York City.
After Born in the USA, I worked my way through the back catalogue, and by the time I discovered Incident on 57th Street, I had already read and reread The Outsiders by S E Hinton, and had entered the dreamlike world of the Coppola film, Rumble Fish. All the romance and danger of American city street life of the ’50s and ’60s was now in my blood. As I cruised the Mid-Sussex streets on my bicycle, I had found my place in life: I was Spanish Johnny; loveable rogue, chancer, hustler, loner.
I chewed on the end of a matchstick, the smell of summer rain drying on the pavement as I stepped out into the night. My imaginary girlfriend sitting up in bed as she sighed:
“Those romantic young boys, all they ever want to do is fight,
Those romantic young boys, they’re callin’ through the window:
Hey, Spanish Johnny, you want to make a little easy money tonight?”
Song 3 — Backstreets
In the shadowlands between childhood and adulthood, some things go deep. They become a part of us that we never really lose. The cinemascopic opening to Backstreets turned my world up to full colour — anything was possible. Life was enormous. I could feel the neural pathways in my spongy adolescent brain crystalizing around the shape of this song. Springsteen at his most romantic, cinematic and unobtainable.
Backstreets was the sound of my teenage dreams, so hard to beat. The taste of Thunderbird, Smirnoff and menthol cigarettes. Village Hall discos and slam-door carriages to Brighton. Life was epic but it couldn’t last. The compromises and disappointments that the adult world brings were waiting just out of view. In Backstreets the future is hinted at — like the first scent of winter on the breeze.
“Remember all the movies, Terry, we’d go see,
Trying to learn to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be,
Well after all this time to find we’re just like all the rest,
Stranded in the park and forced to confess,
To hiding on the backstreets”
But we weren’t like all the rest were we? I refused — in my head — to ever be like all the rest. No matter what came my way.
Song 4 — Used Cars
Change happens. My parents had started to struggle with money when I was about twelve. By the following year they were forced to sell the large house I had grown up in and we moved. Debt changed my parents. It corroded them.
In Used Cars a family takes a second hand car for a test drive: “mister the day the lottery I win, I ain’t ever gonna ride in no used car again”. The guitar is sparse, the voice hushed and the harmonica blows gently like the wind through treetops. Perfect details bring the song to life: his little sister is “in the front seat with an ice cream cone”; his Ma “fingers her wedding band” and the salesman is telling them all about “the break he’d give us if he could, but he just can’t”. But the image that came back to me over and over again, is at the songs close. Springsteen’s voice drops away as he sings:
“Me, I walk home on the same dirty streets where I was born
Up the block I can hear my little sister in the front seat blowin’ that horn
The sounds echoin’ all down Michigan Avenue.”
The sound of that car horn drifting up the street, like the distant sound of a phantom freight train across an imagined prairie, was the sound of silent Sunday afternoons on the empty street outside our house.
Song 5 — Thunder Road (Live 1975)
My new school was at the bottom of my road and I could get home by four o’clock — tea, toast and time to work through the three and a half hours of ‘Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Live 1975–85’. The sound of American clubs, theatres, arenas and summer night stadiums reached me through the oversized headphones of my parents’ clunky Pioneer hifi.
I would float high over Giants Stadium, the sounds of I’m On Fire drifting up to me, barely audible over the wind rushing in my ears. Then, is that me? Spanish Johnny, standing aloof at the back of the Roxy Theatre on a steamy Los Angeles night in July 1978, condensation running down the walls as Springsteen addresses his parents in the audience:
“One of you guys wanted a lawyer and the other one wanted an author. Well tonight, yous are both just gonna have to settle for rock ’n’ roll.”
The guy next to me spills his beer as the band slams back in to finish the song.
Further back, it’s 1975 and I’m right in front of the stage. Bruce stands alone in the spotlight when Roy Bittan’s piano sparkles into life — a heart stopping version of ‘Thunder Road’; an invitation to bite into the forbidden fruit:
“Show a little faith there’s magic in the night.”
A Springsteen vocal so close, so intimate that I know that wherever he is going, I am going too.
Song 6 — Racing in the Street
The roads grow dark and I began to immerse myself deeper in the darker undertow of Springsteen’s work. Darkness on the Edge of Town gripped me and I would drive around empty Sussex streets in my parents red Escort, listening to Something in the Night and Candy’s Room at extreme volumes; searching for the dirt road out of town, the State Trooper on my tail. Sometimes I made it to the county line. Sometimes I didn’t. In an early live version of Something in the Night, Springsteen sang:
“I picked this chick up hitch hiking
She hung her head out of the window and she screamed
She said that she was looking for some place to go
To die or be redeemed.”
Another fan once said to me that this is the litmus test — you are either turned on to Springsteen by these histrionics or turned right off. I’ll take it all day long — the high stakes melodrama of youth. From the Shangri-Las to Sonic Youth, this is what underpins it all.
Racing in the Street captures those feelings and pushes them to the cusp of the adult world. The sadness of Roy Bittan’s piano is unbearable — “the summer’s here and the time is right, for racing in the street,” — but those things can crumble into sand. Compromises are made and if you don’t cling on, you lose yourself along the way.
“Some guys they just give up living
And they start dying little by little, piece by piece
Some guys come home from work and wash up
And go racing in the street.”
Like older bruised versions of the kids in Born to Run and Thunder Road — all they can do is escape and keep searching for their place of redemption.
“Tonight my baby and me we’re gonna ride to the sea,
And wash these sins off our hands.”
Song 7 — Stolen Car
My father avoided reality in every way. He lived in a fantasy world of tall stories and false bravura; covering up his fear and incomprehension of the world. Unable to work for anyone else, he set up a one-man marketing business above a shop, fuelling this with my mother’s money and a heavy addiction to cheap whisky. This couldn’t last. The collapse of his business broke him and his bravura never returned, apart from the kind of chutzpah it takes to ignore every bill, letter, telephone call and county court summons the world can throw at you.
Eventually, we lost another home and moved into a small rented house by a railway line. We stacked all our belongings into the garage and watched them slowly rot.
My mother did what she should have done from the very beginning and took control. He rolled over and never took responsibility for another decision in his life. Eventually he needed her approval to change his socks or make a cup of tea.
I owe her a great deal; as Springsteen wrote to his mother in ‘The Wish’:
“If Pa’s eyes were a window,
Into a world so deadly and true,
You couldn’t stop me from looking,
But you kept me from crawling through.”
But it was Stolen Car that pointed to something adult; something lurking in the shadows. Stolen Car exemplifies Springsteen’s outlook, particularly at his artistic zenith of 1977–1982 — a fear of isolation and how easily people can get pulled under by life. From the man broken by grinding work in Factory (1978) to the young couple forced to grow up too fast in The River (1980) to Johnny 99 (1982), a man pushed into violence and prison by debt.
This is the point of departure between Springsteen and his peers. Other artists, from Bowie to the Clash, celebrate being outsiders — they stick two fingers up to conformity and the mainstream world, yet Springsteen’s characters are different. Despite all the braggadocio and escapism of his early songs, his characters are not outsiders by choice. They want to belong, to lead a life of quiet dignity, but the world conspires against them. It is this essential conservatism that makes his music so universal.
Stolen Car is about a man in a loveless marriage. He is lost. He drives a stolen car hoping to get caught, but he fails; a cry for recognition, but he remains invisible. My father never wanted much more than to escape his ghosts, a task to which he applied alcohol and gargantuan levels of denial.
“And I’m driving a stolen car
On a pitch black night
And I’m telling myself, I’m gonna be alright
But I ride by night and I travel in fear
That in this darkness I might disappear”
Song 8 — Long Time Comin’
In 2006, married and happy, life’s spoon was coated with sugar. The psychopath, who was about to move in downstairs and make our lives so claustrophobic and so put upon that we felt like two beetles slowly having each leg pulled off by a fat smiling child, had not yet arrived. Had not yet used his chart compilations as offensive weapons. As death rays that could penetrate the floor boards as revenge for us being upstairs. Being together. Being happy. He had not yet killed the neighbour’s cat and thrown the carcass in our garden. This was before all of that.
The next step was a baby. We wanted a gang of our own, but things do not work out as planned. Have a baby. Let’s have a baby. Let’s repaint the house and have baby. “The time it takes to make a baby,” sang Billy Bragg, “can be the time it takes to make a cup of tea”. Quite so. But not for us.
By way of distraction we took a final fling to America. With no more plan than to fly into Phoenix, loop about a bit then fly back out of Denver two weeks later. Underestimating distances, the effects of altitude and extreme desert temperatures made for gruelling road trip. But for Springsteen fans, driving long lonely hours through Arizona, the length of the Utah desert, into Wyoming, Nebraska and Colorado was epic.
On the second day, we woke up in our tent at four in the morning to watch the sun rise pink over the Grand Canyon before setting off on the next 300 miles. For the first hour we hugged the edge of the Canyon, stopping in silent lay-bys to try and photograph the enormity, the colours of the rock and the large desert birds wheeling above the Colorado river. As the day wore on the sun became ferocious. We entered Navajo reservation land, where everyone wore mirrored sunglasses, hats and scowls. The Navajo fire truck, the Navajo police department; faces so baked in a lifetime of dry desert heat that you could strike a match on them. We drove 200 miles further through unchanging scenery. The sparse population seemed to live in isolated trailers, leaving old cars to ossify by the road, or in the open desert.
We drove through monument valley, the eerie columns of red rock like a vast complex of alien anthills. Eventually we dropped out of the baked rocky landscape into a valley. We had left the desert behind us and were entering the farmland on the edges of Blanding, Utah. The air cooled in the evening and fields opened up and flattened out into rich, green, fertile plots. Horses with shining coats ran along neat white fences. I was dizzy with exhaustion and over-stimulation. My partner was sleeping gently in the passenger seat. After a rugged day listening to Johnny Cash and Darkness on the Edge of Town, the soft, country-tinged Long Time Comin’ soothed my head:
“Out where the creek turns shallow and sandy
And the moon comes skimmin’ away the stars
The wind in the mesquite comes rushin’ over the hilltops
Straight into my arms.”
It is a song about finding happiness. About fatherhood. About family. About second chances.
“Well there’s just a spark of campfire burning
Two kids in a sleeping bag beside
I reach ‘neath your shirt, lay my hands across your belly
And feel another one kickin’ inside
I ain’t gonna fuck it up this time
It’s been a long time comin’, my dear.”
I watched my partner dozing in the seat beside me and felt the warmth of the sublime and unshakeable desire to be a parent.
Over years of monthly disappointments, we fell in and out of love with the idea of parenthood. Vacillating between hope and the need to construct a life without children. Long Time Comin’ was like a switch. I could flick it anytime and recapture the warmth I felt that evening in Utah, and resurrect that all-encompassing desire for fatherhood. Our daughter was born two years later.
Song 9 — Land of Hope and Dreams
Springsteen’s political anger is directed at those who stand in the way of these simple desires. The desire to live a life with dignity. The desire to belong. His politics are personal — from the Reagan era family forced to sleep rough in their car (Seeds, 1985) to the man pushed back onto his wits by the banking crisis (Jack of All Trades, 2012) and the whole community destroyed by industrial decline (Youngstown, 1995):
“700 tons of metal a day,
Now, sir, you tell me the world’s changed,
Once I made you rich enough,
Rich enough to forget my name.”
But his promise to us is intoxicating — there is always light in the darkness. From the romantic, youthful cry: “it’s a town full of losers and I’m pulling out of here to win” in 1975 to “I believe in the promised land” (1978) to “I’ll kiss the sorrow from your eyes, there across the border” (1995). He holds firm to the knowledge that love, friendship and community can save us. This reaches its apogee in 1999’s secular gospel anthem, Land of Hope and Dreams:
“Leave behind your sorrows
Let this day be your last
Tomorrow there’ll be sunshine and all this darkness passed.
Big wheels roll through fields where sunlight streams,
Meet me in a land of hope and dreams.”
Song 10 — Thunder Road (Live 2012)
….CRACK!..
Back in Madrid, the seats all around me are empty. I can hear the sound of roadies packing cables into flight cases, and plastic bottles and hot dog wrappers being swept into piles. It is one in the morning and Springsteen, at the age of 62, has just played the longest show of his career. I knew he wouldn’t let me down.
The night is hot and outside the stadium there is noise and confusion as people find each other in the crowd and head home among the shouts of t-shirt sellers and the smoke of Spanish sausages grilling on impromptu fires. I have nowhere to go until my flight at 6:00am. A flight back to disinfectant and polished floors and a clipboard of notes hung at the end of my mother’s bed. So I walk the wide leafy Spanish streets all night, slowing time down with all my might. Stretching out the rest of her life. Delaying my return to her bedside.
“He must recognise you by now,” she said.
“There’s quite a lot of people there, Mum.”
A fortnight later, the night she died, I slept on the floor at the end of her bed.
Three days after the funeral I was back at a Springsteen concert, this time under the leaden skies of London. Exhausted, but needing to return to the way I felt in the warmth of Madrid. This time I was with two friends and a large bottle of rum that we had sneaked in past bored security guards. Still in daylight, Bruce took to the stage in the early evening,
“We’re going to do something special for you tonight. This was the first thing we played when my feet first touched British soil in 1975. This is a love letter to you tonight.”
He counted in the piano, blew those famous notes on the harmonica and sang the same heart stopping version of Thunder Road that had drawn me in 26 years earlier as I sat, after school, with oversized headphones eating toast and marmite with butter so thick you could see your teeth marks.
“A screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves…”
An invitation to climb aboard and escape forever had become the harbour lights of home.
