As a great poet sort of once said, midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost. Speak will I of the other things I saw there, because there I also found myself for an evening in New York City, a city I love, and at a cost two times more than a working man's daily pay, I made good on the price of one ticket to see someone I have loved since I was just nine years old—Bruce Springsteen.
The set-up was outrageous—outrageous that the tickets cost so much, that the crowd was all white, that it was so damn hard to get a ticket. Outrageous, too, that I was close enough to see the wrinkles on Bruce's face and the way he limps and grimaces with a stiff back that's even stiffer than mine; outrageous that his voice is still in incredible form, that he and Patty are still together like that, and that he still gives a damn—he really does— sharing warmth and rage and humor and empathy with the ease of a conversation after a few beers with your very best friend in a voice so personal, so direct, that it's very difficult in moments not to image that he is not your very best friend.
After all of it—all of the ways that Springsteen has eased the burdens of the journey of our life (and urged battle cries, pangs of conscience, sighs of relief and shrieks of pleasure, too)—the story of Bruce's songs is the story of friendship -- the kind you can live and die for. This is "Badlands" and "Born to Run;" this is "Bobby Jean" and "Lost in the Flood;" this is "Born in the USA" and "The Rising." His songs are about the people we have always known and loved because they're about the people that he has always known and loved. His people are wrapped up in nicknames and composites in most of his songs, of course. But it was always live with the E Street Band—Little Steven and Patti and Danny and above all, as Springsteen himself tells it in "Springsteen on Broadway," Clarence Clemons—that the beacon of friendship always shone the ultimate value of his vision.
Clemons and Springsteen both playfully obscured the origins and strategies of their partnership from the beginning, but arguably the high point of his Broadway show is the silence in the middle of "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out," Springsteen sitting alone at the piano, "when the Big Man joined the band" and the music stops. People weep and shout for that moment every night. They weep and shout in recognition of their knowing Clarence's solos note for note in a way that few soloists in the history of rock and roll have merited; they weep for Bruce's sorrow and the hole in a band that's always been more like a neighborhood they were born in than a group of musicians; for getting older; for the friends they have also lost; for the slight incline getting steeper in the pathway of the journey of life once the straightforward path has been lost.
In live shows of the full E Street Band in recent years another moment of friendship was indelible: Patti, Bruce and Little Steven center stage at the mic, standing together—the one who entered Springsteen's life when he was most lost in a broken marriage and then built a family with him and played Virgil in the Boss' winding path through depression arm-in-arm with the guitarist who left the E Street Band—the one who Springsteen likely wrote "Bobby Jean" for—who ultimately circled back. If you believe it can be broken, the Hasidic teacher Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav taught, so must you believe it can be fixed. People can heal and friendships can survive. They always give more than they take, and then they keep growing.
Bruce Springsteen is now a kind of American royalty. He is also one of America's great citizen poets because the country and even the world are not big enough to contain the friendships that his music has cultivated. Just the thought of Springsteen and the Big Man toughing it out together is enough to shine some light in times of division and pettiness. We live in a time of small men—men without music and friendship—who in a sophisticated, hateful, and callous way are meticulously yet recklessly sketching out the blueprints for many circles of hell. They won't succeed, but it's likely to get worse before it gets better.
And when will it get better? The answer is simple: more friendship. Because friendship is about empathy and loyalty and generosity and timelessness and fun. None of these words apply to the standards leading the life of the republic these days, but Bruce is still kicking ass and taking names five nights a week, so there’s hope.
Maybe the tickets are wildly overpriced (if you can even get them) but that's not the point. The point is that it's time concentrate very hard on the values embedded in the music of Springsteen and artists like him. It's time to listen for friendship, connection, compassion, and bravery. And then it's time to take what we hear from these artists and do like Bruce said we should do way back in 1978 in a legendary show at the old Cleveland Agora, which, like New York and Jerusalem, is my hometown.
“You think this is a free ride?,” he says.
You wanna play, you've got to pay! Now I wanna see you get up! And out there I want you to walk over to your radio! Turn the mother--- up as loud as she'll go, open up the windows, wake up your neighbors, 'cause if there's something you need, if there's something you want—You gotta raise your hand!
So make some friends, raise your hand, turn it up real loud, and then raise some hell of your own.
Dedicated to David Bry on his birthday, for his memory is a blessing, and there's always a seat right next to me wherever I go to listen to music—especially Bruce.