From the Mar 30 – Apr 5, 2000 issue

Music

Don't Shut Out the Light

Bruce Springsteen Is a Cowboy Singer in Steelworker Drag

by Grant Cogswell

IN THE GAME OF ROMANCE and attraction, we all have a "type" linking us again and again throughout our lives to the person, usually in adolescence, through whom we first experienced the magical bliss and torture of eros. So it is with aesthetics. My first love, as an aesthete, was the music of Bruce Springsteen.

Darkness on the Edge of Town was the first record of Springsteen's decade-long, brilliant middle period. It was on this album that he first sang about what would become, in his work, a touchstone metaphor for tortured consciousness: a narrator, driving a car, at night, toward nothing. Just driving. The escape advertised on Born to Run was shown as a drift into nothingness, sprawl without meaning. The figure of the lone driver is that of a man returning from experiences that punch through the psyche to the mystical, wind-scarred territory where simple and ordinary details of living are a source of nameless horror.

Musically, Springsteen was reining in his free-jazz and soul influences and returning to something older and legitimately his own: the country dirge, the death ballad. His accent and worldview are not Northeast-urban but the Southern-flavored outlook and sound of American drifters -- the accent of the military, of non-Hispanic Southern California. The title track of his 1980 double-album, The River, sketched out one hopeless working-class life as bluntly as an equation would. The final side of the album, except for one "rock" song, is a pure journey into the solo-driver mode. His next album, Nebraska, is a record for the ages, bearing no trace of rock-radio, crowd-pleasing, facile loverboy poses. Completely stripped down to one acoustic guitar and one voice, this was the only recording Springsteen ever made that does not hold one cringe-inducing moment of embarrassment, the only one where he does not give a fuck what the paying listener thinks. In 1982, this ugly, brutal honesty sold about as many records as Black Flag.

In 1984, Bruce Springsteen was at his career's peak, famous enough in the year of Prince and Madonna to break the cultural isolation of my suburban world. That year, Springsteen tried to reclaim icons that were finally stronger than he was. Born in the U.S.A. came out of the full-band sessions of 1982, which Springsteen turned away from to explore his darker directions alone. Many of its songs have the force he was working with earlier, and are fascinating because they have an upbeat noise laid over a dark undercurrent. Because of his ham-handed use of heavily weighted poses and icons, many take that record as an opportunity to ridicule Springsteen's lack of sophistication, which at its worst is severe. Ronald Reagan's speechwriters heard the chorus of the title song and tried to co-opt the flag-and-drag of Springsteen's latest incarnation in order to hold on to Reagan Democrats, which wasn't hard. I probably still respect this album simply because it was the first to speak to me from the cultural desert that was the year of 1984.

Springsteen's personal history has always floated close to the surface of his work, and as his life changed, it was inevitable his records would too. The three he made in the 1990s were too thin to even be mentioned alongside earlier work, the last citing Newsweek as a source for its songs. But there is a B-side from the Born in the U.S.A. singles, one that I had on a mix tape that I lost maybe 10 years ago. It is called "Shut out the Light," and it may be the last pure vein of Springsteen's finest mode:

"On his porch they stretched a banner/That said 'Johnny Welcome Home'/Bobby pulled his Ford out of the garage/And they polished up the chrome/His mama said, 'Johnny, oh Johnny, I'm so glad to have you back with me/The foreman said he could get you your job/Back down at the factory'/Oh, mama, mama, mama come quick/I've got the shakes and I'm gonna be sick/Throw your arms around me in the cold dark night/Hey now mama, don't shut out the light."

This is the Springsteen of "Racing in the Street," of "The Price You Pay." This is the Bruce Springsteen that is still compelling, that looks at the stark and lonely truths of existence. The one who values community because he has seen what happens to people without it. If Springsteen can wear the mask of the frightened night-driver just once on stage this week, it will be worth the 12 years I have waited, with less and less anticipation, to see him play again.

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