'Sandy'

This Fourth, I'm thinking a lot about the farewell of Bruce Springsteen's song "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" from The Wild, The Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle.

Funny, the line "the aurora is rising behind us" -- I had always figured "Aurora" was the name of a ferris wheel or roller coaster or something. It just fit. I'm guessing now that he was using it in the generic sense, synonymous with "aura" but implying a solar source -- a bright, bright star radiating light. The star, of course, is the boardwalk itself and the fireworks of the Fourth of July.

Bruce is leaving in this song, and the boardwalk itself is leaving. This is the early 1970s. Asbury was already headed down the steep incline from its peak in the 1950s and '60s, to bottom out in the late 1990s with the boardwalk especially looking like a shuttered ghost town. Disillusioned and lamenting "our carnival life on the boardwalk," bored with "hanging in the dusty arcades, slamming those pleasure machines," he pleads with "Sandy" to love him tonight "for I may neee-ver see you again."

"Sandy" is the perfect name for his beloved: the beach, the resort, the magical unreality of the boardwalk's "Palace Amusements" and Madame Marie's mysticism.

Photo by Russ Meseroll

His next stop would be the grittier reality of Born to Run's "Meeting Across the River," themes of harsh, wounded souls, flayed, struggling and doomed, that he would develop more fully in "Darkness on the Edge of Town" and his later poetic masterpiece, "Nebraska."

The line of themes of childhood loss of innocence, desperate struggle, a growing maturity and sense of community that pace Springsteen's long discography are naturally reflected in the man himself. In his philanthropic gifts to Asbury Park, the emphasis has never been heavy on rebuilding the amusements, the carnival life. Instead, his focus was, and is, on schools, community projects, helping the underserved who struggled during the long years of the city's economic stagnation.

Along those lines it interesting to me that, here in Asbury Park -- and in New Jersey -- we take such pride in "Sandy" and "Born to Run". All those who know these (and that may be just about everybody in the world by now) recognize the sadness, the critical love, even condemnation, and longing after escape in both songs.

Judging by Springsteen's evolution as an artist and as a human being, it is easy to believe that nostalgia for Asbury Park's amusements is misplaced. It is easy for me to see a resonance with my belief that the town's emphasis on money over community has always been one of its greatest flaws.

But maybe we're not so wrong to be proud. We represent the community and the culture that produced him, after all and we can take some small credit for having nurtured him toward his great achievements, his massive success.

If in the final estimate, we as New Jerseyans are just "a town full of losers," then at least one of us got free and we can cheer him on his heroic journey. If he is the best we can do, that's ain't half bad.

--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
On Facebook
Follow me on Twitter: @CarltonOne

Springsteen Video

Here's the video of the recent Springsteen and E-Street Band performance in the Asbury Park Carousel Building. I mentioned in an earlier post that my grade-school-aged son more or less accidentally was among those in attendance, albeit outside in the cold. The video was made available online starting this morning, as a promotion for the newly released box set compilation, The Promise. If the video below doesn't display properly, click on the title displayed on the video and it will take you to the full screen view on www.vevo.com.



--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
On Facebook

Growing Up ... in Asbury Park

See my note of corrections at the end of this story.

I helped teach a class on Springsteen's lyrics as literature earlier this semester. A great experience, but I only mention it here as background for another story. I've known about Springsteen since I was in high school in Pittsburgh. Have studied his songs. Thought about his work.

My son came home from school today, idly talking about his day. Bunch of kids absent. No homework because they had extra time in class to do it. Blah-blah-blah. Oh yeah, and they watched Bruce Springsteen today.

"What was he singing?" I said, curious. What video would his teachers be showing a group of elementary kids?

"Christmas songs," he said. "Can I play a game on your phone?"

My daughter, sitting in the room, piped up.

"Yeh, I heard Springsteen was at the Carousel building today."

"Oh, really?" I said, curious. "I hadn't heard about that."

"But that's what I just said!" my son yelled, irritated that clearly we hadn't been listening.

Silence. My daughter and I looked at each other. Two plus two were beginning to add up.

"Um," I said. "You saw Bruce Springsteen--live--performing--at the Carousel building?"

"YES!"

Well, a little investigation and we find out Springsteen was filming a video on the boardwalk in Asbury Park, to be broadcast on the Web at some future date. A lottery was held for tickets to attract a small audience, advertised through Backstreets Magazine. Somehow, my son's school got tickets. The plan was to have the whole E-Street Band there ...

"You saw Clarence Clemons?!" I asked my son. Blank stare. "Was there a big, black guy, playing saxophone?"

"Yes," he said. I had to explain to him how expensive tickets to a Springsteen show are. How the E-Street Band doesn't play together much any more ....

Mind you, one gaping hole in my Springsteen knowledge is I have never seen him live. Never. Ever. I've seen him in person, but not performing. It goes without saying, I've never seen the E-Street Band.

To my son, all this is just funny. Not even funny, just a cool distraction from the school day. An interesting, unplanned field trip. Otherwise, no big deal. Some old guy playing Christmas songs. Let's get on with the video games.

--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
On Facebook

NOTE: Spoke with the teacher this morning and it turns out we got some big details wrong. First, my son's class didn't actually get inside the Carousel building. They were among the 150 people standing in the cold outside. Second, he didn't actually see the band, as anything more than shadowy figures behind the glass and plastic sheeting. He thinks Clemons was there but he wasn't sure. Third, the band wasn't playing "Christmas songs." They were playing classic Bruce tunes, mostly from the newly released box set, The Promise. His teacher had said specifically that the class could tell people they "heard" Bruce Springsteen play live. It was so cold standing there that they stayed for only a few songs, so when Springsteen came out to shake hands with a few people, they had already left.

--C.
8:10 a.m. 12/8/10

P.P.S.
Apparently, Bruce did play some Christmas songs after all. And Clarence Clemons was there. My son's report turns out to be more accurate than I was giving him credit for.

--C.
8:28 p.m. 12/12/10

Springsteen Class

I was MIA in this blog for most of October as a result of a convergence of personal and professional demands. Most lovely among these was substituting as instructor for two weeks in a freshman seminar at The College of New Jersey. I already am teaching one freshman seminar class (on the topic of "Music and the Natural World"). Here though, I was asked to fill in for two sections of the course, "The Lyrics of Bruce Springsteen as Literature." I live in Asbury Park and have followed Springsteen's progress since "Born to Run" hit the charts while I was in high school, so this assignment was a natural fit.

Freshman seminars are designed to introduce students to the work involved in real scholarship at more advanced levels. Ideally, they would pick something that interests them and be guided through detailed study, modeling the experience of upper-level undergraduate or graduate school courses. The reality falls somewhat short of that: The students are forced to choose from a list of predetermined courses and asked to balance their course selections across from categories designed to cover the whole of the liberal arts. Then they have to shoehorn those choices into a daily schedule. As a result, every class will have some kids left wondering why they are there. But still, the goal of the program is to engage the freshman in individualized research--very different from my first years in college.

Considering Springsteen's lyrics as literature isn't a stretch. We've seen presidents, politicians, authors and commentators quoting from his songs. Albums recorded in the 1970s and '80s still have currency, finding new audiences and influencing young musicians. Subjecting those lyrics to a semester-long course of study might seem over the top--until you actually start the research. Then it becomes clear there's a lot to say. So much has been written about Springsteen's music--thousands of books and articles--but much more could be.

In the classes I taught, for instance, we spent a good bit of time on the political ramifications of the song "Born in the U.S.A." (1984) and how the deliberately patriotic album cover and the upbeat, anthem-like music seemed to contradict the lyrics' portrait of a beat-down vet. That contrast alone is worth a ream of paper at least (especially since Springsteen recorded an earlier, much more subdued version of the song). We noted the way the words succinctly capture complex social issues surrounding the Vietnam war, ("I had a brother at Khe Sahn, fighting off the Viet Cong/They're still there; he's all gone"). The narrator is not Springsteen himself, but one of the many working class joes that populate his songs. That character is celebrating his rough birthright with all the joyous fervor of a good barroom brawl. He challenges us to accept that this is his America, too.

Is it OK to celebrate failure? Is it patriotism to write about things as they are? Great questions for freshmen to try to answer.

Every album since the 1975 "Born to Run" is full of similar, if less obvious, conflicts--challenges to societal norms, provocative blends of good and evil within a single character, jabs at political issues, difficult personal relationships worked out through characters and rhymes. You don't have to be a die-hard fan to mine the rewards of these stories.

But for me the best part of teaching these classes was not Bruce. It was, as always, simply being able to talk to the freshmen, to participate in the flow of ideas and insights that are shaping who they will become. Open faced and newly vulnerable to the robo-assembly line challenges slamming them every second, they give me a reason to believe in a future less horrorshow; a hope that somehow together, taking a careful look at meanings--almost regardless of where we find them--we can help put humanity to rights.

--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
On Facebook