03 Feb, 2009 Springsteen ? Oh my God !
Did you see Bruce Springsteen’s set during the American Super Bowl? Talk about a master class in making it all look so easy. Fact is, there are no superlatives left to describe Springsteen on top of his game so I will skip that chore and avoid the pitfalls involved in telling you about what you already know.
In fact I myself, have more than admired ‘Bruce’ since my mate first came breathlessly running into our house, commanding me to stop whatever I was doing and listen immediately to an album that he had just bought. Remember the days when people were that enthusiastic about music?
In any case this time my pal’s enthusiasm was entirely warranted, ‘The Wild, The Innocent, And The E Street Shuffle’ was the album he had in his hands and we went on to play it all that night and indeed endlessly over the days and nights to come. This of course being prior to the soon to come explosive landmark “Born To Run, meant that the album was like a small treasure that we had just to ourselves. For few others where yet to know this impressively vibrant music, in the process of making it’s self known all the way from blue collar New Jersey, to a housing estate in the south side of Glasgow.
It was still after all some months before the singer then became a name on the lips of just about everybody who knew anything about popular music. They say that if you only ever read one book you should make it Steinbeck’s Grapes Of Wrath. I say that if you had to listen to only one rock record you could no worse than the Jimmy Iovine produced ‘Born to Run, the one that captivates me to this day,
That was about 25 years ago and Springsteen since then has more than deservedly enjoyed an unbelievably successful career that has in turn barely witnessed him put a foot wrong. That’s what happens I guess when you don’t know how to make a bad record or play a less than sensational show!
But perhaps the greatest of all of his many talents, and there are so many, has been his remarkable ability to make it all seem so effortless. (A point so well discussed in yesterday’s Guardian newspaper.)
It is truly as though through it all, Bruce Springsteen has always wanted us to believe that he is some Plain Ole’ Ordinary Joe, and that someone without even the asking had hung a guitar around his neck, leaving him with little option but to get a few mates together and bang out a bunch of tunes. Easy Peasy!
Of course within a world full of complications and all manner of dizzying trends, Springsteen’s reliable down home attitude was celebrated worldwide, despite being almost entirely all American by nature. The undoubted reasons for that are that he works with underlying themes that correspond with the emotions that we all experience as well as regularly featuring those universal authenticities that we also all have a rapport with.
On a personal level for me however, there is something else that this artist carries and it runs eternal within every note written by him. It is called hope, true hope at that, and who does not need bucket loads of that. For as Seth Godin put’s it “People need more hope always. We run out. We need it replenished immediately. Hope is almost always in short supply. The magical thing about selling hope is that it makes everything else work better, every day get better, every project works better, every relationship feels better. If you can actually deliver on the hope you sell, there will be a line out the door.” Springsteen delivers on hope, and at the risk of crashing the stage that I set for Bruce, Simple Minds also deliver on that one.
But those qualities as good as they are, are never nearly enough in a bonafide rock and roll star, unless that is, they are also married to full blooded melodies played with the kind of abandon that itself is mustered up as though it was the last American night on earth. Is there really anyone I ask, who does that nearly as well as Bruce Springsteen still manages? You just know that the answer to that is no!
But is it also all really as it seems? Or is this a case as already mentioned, where the real genius way and above the actual talent – lies instead in how he goes about making it all look so easy. Because it can’t be just as so, so let’s then think about it a little more.
Firstly we all know for example that to attain a real goal, calls for some full on determination. In addition we are told that we need to be resolute least in having the stomach to endure the hardships that any major task worth doing calls for. A commitment to keep going forward is yet another requisite in reaching for things that are able to produce true feeling of happiness and perhaps the sense of freedom that goes with it. The one final certainty in all of this is that none of the aforementioned ever comes easy. It all has a price and that price usually takes form in some kind of personal sacrifice, one that more often than not demands to be paid in full.
And the pay off, when and if taken on? Unfortunately that is not guaranteed to materialise in any exact amount, or for that matter arrive on schedule, if at all. The only definite is in the knowing that it is under the greatest adversity that there exists the potential for doing good for oneself and others. And again tell me if I am wrong, but if there was ever a time when the world might be calling out to people to consider that notion it is surely now.
Springsteen not only writes about all of this kind stuff so brilliantly, but more importantly his attitude reeks of having regularly gone through those very same experiences, as it does with anyone who gives generously of their lives to deliver what they think is worthwhile.
For me it is the ‘showing up no matter what, and wearing your heart fully on your sleeve’ attitude that resounds so thoroughly within the scenes to which he sets much of his music. That repeated calling alone is worthy of all the fanfare that has arisen through his phenomena. What else is there to be done after all during the small time we are allotted on this slow revolving orb? And is it not possible to have amazing adventures equally while seeing the vital things in life through?
To those question he knows that the answer can only be yes, and it is this that accounts for the air of authenticity and credibility that he and all others committed to giving of themselves in full are coated in. You don’t need to be a Superstar he is telling you, and he being one of the biggest ever should know all about that. Neither do you need to be in an anyway an intellectual. Thank God for that I say. You do however need to know the lines that are drawn within the map of your very own heart, and the borderlines between what is good for the soul and what on the other hand will see it torn to shreds. Does that make him a preacher man then? Not at all, it makes him a storyteller and a seeker of truths. Now that is something altogether different.
I have no idea how many records Springsteen will have sold directly after his transcending appearance on Sunday. I hope he sold a ton. I however bought a couple immediately after I saw it, the same ones in fact that I already bought years ago and had given away, to some pretty girls no doubt. Then I listened to the fairly recent” Radio Nowhere”. Loving it, I must have played it twenty times non-stop. It made me feel like an even younger man than I am, and even better still it made me enthralled once again with the mysteries of rock and roll, it’s dynamic patterns, and why for me it still works better than just about anything else I know.
But best of all, it made me want to make even more music and never stop doing so no matter what occurs in my life from here on in, because in the end, evidently I was born to do this also.
Above all however, I saw the dignity that lies behind a hard working man on stage at the Super Bowl, the kind of hard worker who’s genius is in making it all looks so easy, the same type in fact who I looked up to when I was growing up and I love them to this day for it. I am of course talking about the type of people that wouldn’t know how to begin giving up on anything, even if you put a gun to their head.
Bless them all whoever and wherever they are in this world. Bless Bruce Springsteen too!
Jim Kerr