In 1992, I noticed Bruce Springsteen’s life and my own had begun to run somewhat parallel. Not like a psycho, stalker-fan, living in his mother’s basement, sometimes imagines his life running parallel with his favorite idol.
Bruce and I both had people in our family with emotional struggles, damaged people who had done damage. Still, like Bruce, I also came from people who inspired and told stories as a way creating a life all its own, called “family”.
I must have noticed long before, but in 1992, I realized Bruce was, yet again, doing songs about fathers and sons. In the early 80’s and before he had done songs about sons and fathers. Only now, a decade later, he was a father and so was I.
Bruce, nor I, had not fared that well as a son of trauma. In 1980’s” Independence Day” Bruce starts the song with a punch to the gut – love and alienation all twisted up:
“Well Papa go to bed now it’s getting late
Nothing we can say is gonna change anything now
I’ll be leaving in the morning from St. Mary’s Gate
We wouldn’t change this thing even if we could somehow
Cause the darkness of this house has got the best of us
There’s a darkness in this town that’s got us too
But they can’t touch me now
And you can’t touch me now
They ain’t gonna do to me
What I watched them do to you”
On Bruce’s next album, “Nebraska”, “My Father’s House” exposed the depth of some of the pain and unresolved feelings of the father son relationship.
“My father’s house shines hard and bright
It stands like a beacon calling me in the night
Calling and calling so cold and alone
Shining cross this dark highway where our sins lie unatoned”
I found Springsteen a little later than some of my cooler friends. In 1977, one of them from the co-op where I was living in Austin, asked me out of the clear blue, “Hey man, we’re driving down to San Antonio tonight to see “The Boss”. I got an extra ticket. You want to go?” I didn’t know much about Springsteen or that he even had a nickname but with those words Michael Kuhn changed my life for the better.
At the concert, the third song was “Racing in the Streets”.
“…She’s waiting tonight down in the parking lot
Outside the Seven-Eleven store.”
I was hooked. If a guy could write anthems about people living out heroic-tragic lives within a very small frame – working, racing, trying to hold on to love and dreams then I was going to be a fan. I heard the words to the story in that song clearer than I had ever heard any lyrics at any concert before and it shook me to the core. These were real American stories and lives with more painful imagery and poetry and less of the songwriter’s hook.
So when I heard Independence Day for the first time in 1980, I was four years, and four live concerts, steeped into this artist who had a hurtin’, dark side, “chasing something in the night.” I knew Bruce and his father, like my Dad and me, had an extremely rocky relationship. I took Independence Day as a warning about who we might become, as well as a testimony to our damaged dads, bless their souls.
By 2016, when I saw Springsteen’s revival of “The River Tour”, Bruce was introducing “Independence Day” with, “This is a song, another song, about fathers and sons. Fathers and sons, fathers and sons, I’ve written a lot about fathers and sons…”. We both have, but of course Bruce’s writing has made millions and mine just made my wife cry.
But on March 31,1992, I walked into a mall CD store in Somerset, Kentucky and purchased two CD’s Bruce had released that day. “Human Touch” and “Lucky Town” were the first big Bruce records without the E Street Band. The albums received lukewarm criticism but some songs have become classics among the faithful.
The 7th cut on Lucky Town, “Living Proof”, tells the story of the new father stripped bare, redeemed by love from a life as, “Just one frightened man and some old shadows for bars”.
“Well now on a summer night in a dusky room
Come a little piece of the Lord’s undying light
Crying like he swallowed the fiery moon
In his mother’s arms it was all the beauty I could take
Like the missing words to some prayer that I could never make
In a world so hard and dirty so fouled and confused
Searching for a little bit of God’s mercy
I found living proof”
The 14th cut on Human Touch, “Ponyboy” brought the father-son relationship full circle for me and became my bedtime anthem to rock and bounce my sons to sleep.
“Down into the valley deep
‘Neath the eaves we will sleep
Sky of dreams up above
My pony boy”
On a day when all news from my sons is positive and their lives are moving forward in big steps, I am filled with gratitude exceeding my expectations. I guess it really isn’t my life running parallel with Bruce. It is my life and Bruce’s life and all the lives of all the fathers running parallel.
Those who take on the job of “Fathering” as the most important responsibility of their lives, share a common bond and follow the same path. We may have done any number of things wrong in our lives but we are proven, as real human being men, by how we father, how we help create better men. There is a promise in the song Pony Boy.
“Pony boy Pony boy, Won’t you be my Pony boy?…Ride with me, ride with me, Won’t you take a ride with me, underneath the starry skies my Pony boy.”
These are the words of a man who promises his son a journey together, but also safety and security. On that adventure a father should not blink, or even if he does blink, never let them see the self-doubt in your eyes and leave no sins unatoned.
azenyardhen 