There
are in our existence spots of time,
That
with distinct pre-eminence retain
A
renovating virtue, whence--depressed
By false
opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught
of heavier or more deadly weight,
In
trivial occupations, and the round
Of
ordinary intercourse--our minds
Are
nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue,
by which pleasure is enhanced,
That
penetrates, enables us to mount,
When
high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.
William
Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book XII
I wear two hearing aids, I have glaucoma and gout, and I
write occasional book reviews for The
Spectator. I’m 58 years old. Should
I be a prisoner of rock and roll?
I first saw Bruce Springsteen in 1975, at Hammersmith Odeon,
when he was hailed, to his annoyance, as ‘the future of rock and roll’. I was 17
years old. His stuff was written for me.
“Baby, we were born to run”.
Forty years later, I find his stuff is still written for me,
even though getting up is hard enough, let alone actually running.
Those who don’t get ‘The Boss’ (he got the moniker at a very
early age not by way of music but because he was a demon Monopoly player) tend
to stereotype a typical Springsteen fan as a once-youngish white male on the
cusp of collars between blue and white, with perhaps an overdeveloped love of
hubcaps or twin stroke engines (whatever they are), and certainly a deeply outmoded
approach to women. It is true that – pace
Sarfraz Manzoor - most Springsteen fans are white. Otherwise they are more diverse a group of
people than you will find at any other gig.
Age does not seem to be a factor; class does not seem to be
a factor; sex does not seem to be a factor; dress is not a factor; nationality
is not a factor. The only unifying
factor is the Boss himself.
This is going to sound mawkish, but one of Springsteen’s
abilities is to ennoble the mawkish, so: Springsteen’s fans love him. It is not
the love of the teeny bopper, not the love of the obsessive, it is the love of
a figure, a sound, that has remained not simply constant, but constantly good
through all our lives. Springsteen is a
consoling force, an example of moral virtue in an age of relativism. One may agree or disagree with his politics,
but it is impossible to deny his decency.
For some this is expressed by his liberal deeds, for others
his lyrics affirm it, but for most it is the experience of a Springsteen concert
that seals the deal. There are no fancy
light shows, no following spots, no explosions, no dancing girls. There is a band, and there is the material
the band plays, and that is it. What the
audience is given is unfiltered. The
songs, which on the whole are fairly musically unsophisticated, are, like
hymns, easy to sing, and so the concert invariably becomes a shared event. We’re like a choir. Enjoyable, undoubtedly, as this is, it is not
merely enjoyable; it is, as hymn singing is, an act of praise. Springtseen’s lyrics are often informed by
Biblical imagery, by notions of faith and sinfulness, and he employs the
rabble-rousing rhetoric of the Baptist preacher to spur his band and people
on. He is a witness, we are
witnesses.
All this might sound phoney, but the ironies are understood
by band and audience alike, and in a godless world, at the very least an
agnostic one, Springsteen offers rock and roll as a redemptive draught. We all
know it is momentary. In Springsteenian terms that moment usually lasts upwards
of four hours.
At the recent Wembley concert I found myself weeping. This has happened before. I struggle to explain it to myself. The loss
of childhood is involved, and a sense of one’s mortality; there is a
consciousness of the loss of innocence; and the presence of excellence is
moving in itself. The songwriter has said that his best work is sparked by the
friction between pessimism and optimism. This is perfectly exemplified in the
early and ever popular ‘Thunder Road’, recorded as a rocker in which he and his
girlfriend are ‘pulling out… to win’, but performed almost always solo on an
acoustic guitar or piano, with accompanying melancholy harmonica. Springsteen too has a lost youth.
There is also this acute awareness of being not merely
distracted or entertained or informed, as, say, by Eddie Izzard or Elvis
Costello or Ian McEwan, but rather as living in a Wordsworthian ‘spot of
time’. Bruce Springsteen indeed has a
‘renovating virtue’.
In a way this is of course laughable, because apparently
pretentious, but if spots of time do exist then why shouldn’t the Boss be a
cause of them? Perhaps it is just me. I do have others, of course – spots of time,
that is - and there is no guarantee that next time round he’ll have another
such effect. The truth is that my sobs
(ok, it is sometimes more than a mere weep) are for the huge ineffable sadness
of things, and the paradox is that being at a Springsteen concert also makes me
very very happy.
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