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ARTS

Springsteen: images
of the working life

By DOUG CRAIG

House lights dim. A drum wallop rocks
the arena. Fifty-five thousand people leap
to their feet, dancing in the dark. The words
they hear are these:

“Born down in a dead man’s town.

First kick I took was when I hit the ground.
End up like a dog that’s been beat too much.
Spend half your life just covering up.

Born in the USA.”

The music of Bruce Springsteen, deli-
vered powerfully and brilliantly, evokes the
strength, the resiliency, the tenacity, the very
heart and soul of the American working
class. The characters populating his songs
are working men and women and their
children. The lyrics tell of struggle, of mak-
ing it, somehow, to the next day.

For the people in Springsteen’s songs life
is not a bed of roses. There are traces, some-
times gobs, of desperation in these lives. The
reason has to do with something called “the
American Dream” — a dream of freedom,
of equality, of possibility, of dignity and
self-respect — and its betrayal. Greil Mar-
cus, in Mystery Train, his magnificent book
about rock and roll music and America, put
it this way:

“The promise of American life...is
expressed so completely — by billboards,
by our movies, by Chuck Berry’s refusal to
put the slightest irony into ‘Back into the
USA’ by the way we try to live our
lives — that we hardly know how to talk
about the resentment and fear that lie
beneath that promise. To be an American is
to feel the promise as a birthright, and to
feel alone and haunted when that promise
fails.”

From his first album Springsteen has
eloquently described that haunted loneli-
ness. Above all, he is an observer of life in
the U.S. His songs tell of people with
“dreams that are torn” who “hate for just
being born,” those who used to wait for
their Romeos but who now “wait on that

welfare check and all the pretty things you
can’t ever have.”

In 1982, Springsteen temporarily hung
up his rock and roll shoes and recorded the
album Nebraska, using only guitar and
voice. The songs reek of violence — the
violence that people do to other people but
also the violence done in this society to our
spirit and soul, to the hopes and dreams we
have for ourselves, and for our children.

Nebraska’s landscape is stark, its people
have once dreamed of better times. But now
they strive for “brand new used cars,” they
are “looking of jobs that are hard to find,”
and “have debts no honest man could pay.”
The songs speak of auto plant closing and
of farm prices dropping “till it looked like
we was getting robbed.”

Springsteen tells his stories with empathy
and tenderness, and respect for the strength
it takes to carry on. In the end he is amazed
at what he sees. For concluding the stories
of people simply trying to hang on is asong
containing this chorus:

“Struck me kinda funny,.

Yeah funny sir to me,
Still at the end of every hard earned day
People find some reason to believe.”

By 1984, in “Born in the USA” we have
found out that we all are, well, born in the
USA. There is no escape.

“You end up like a dog
that’s been beat too much
Till you spend half your life
just covering up.”

A right wing president, in his recent elec-
tion campaign, lauded what he called
Springsteen’s “message of hope.” A right
wing columnist wrote that “Born in the
USA” was a “grand, cheerful affirmation.”

Tell me, flag wavers, where are you find-
ing these words of hope or these cheerful
affirmations about being born in America?
You guys ain’t listening.

Springsteen has voiced one affirmation

Ballad of the Peace-Pushers

Each drop of water

is a part of the wave
the voice of one person
can change the world
Each one you know
has something to show
each drop of water

is part of the wave

Did you ever wonder

how slavery was stopped — |
F Viet Nam ended? :

Who gave women the vote?

10 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, SEPTEMBER 4, 1985

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN IN CONCERT. ..a figure apart in the world of rock and dl

and it is this: in spite of the constant message
you can look at your dream “but you better
not touch;” in spite of the boss man giving
you hell;” day after day, “you work nine to
five and somehow you survive, to the
night.” People summon the strength to keep
on keeping on.

But’s it not easy and, in action as well as
song, Springsteen is increasingly turning his
attention to those members of the working
class who are hanging on by their finger-
nails. During his current tour, Springsteen
has donated $10,000 to a food bank for
unemployed steelworkers in Pennsylvania;
he has given $10,000 to a clinic that provides
health care to. striking copper miners in
Arizona; during concerts he plugs commun-
ity action groups and organizes pass-the-hat
fund raisers to raise money for unemployed
workers; and he has met with members of a
steelworkers local in Los Angeles. In
Toronto he donated a refrigerated truck to
a food bank and gave $20,000 to the British
miners while in London.

No rock and roll or pop music performer,
let alone one of Springsteen’s popularity,
has ever done anything remotely like this. In
the lyrics of his songs, and now in his actions
relating to working class struggles, Spring-
steen is showing he recognizes that there are
sides and he is declaring which of those sides
he is on.

Part of Springsteen’s success story is that
he wanted — and had to fight for —
control over the music he makes. Whenever
workers oragnize into a union they are wag-
ing that same fight for control. By organiz-
ing, workers change their relationship to the
boss and alter their view of themselves, as
workers and as people. Unions affirm the
fact that workers can and do want to con-
trol their working lives.

Springsteen now has before him one
final, critical bridge. Up until now his char-
acters have found their small bits of free-
dom outside the work place. Truth,
“finding out what we’ve got,” is defined in
moments of time, not lifetimes. It’s only out
in the street where we “walk the way we
wanna walk, talk the way we wanna talk.”

His political acts of this past year have
been directed at coping with existing
oppressive and debilitating conditions. The
emphasis must now shift — from reacting
to acting — to fighting back and demand-
ing control over our lives.

From the beginning Springsteen has
advised us to not wait “for a savior to rise
from these streets. . .well now I’m no hero,
that’s understood.” But now he is being
labelled a “troubador of the working class.”

iat a ee “5 Sate Site cae

By lending his voice to those who are s@

ing to make that dream of freedom | ;
dignity a reality, he can truly become
troubador.

His is music for all those who hav
notion deep inside that it ain’t no sin to!
glad you’re alive; it’s music that guards 0!
dreams and visions, and maybe our oné Y
chance to make it real. :

And it just may be a revolution youd
dance to.

— abridged from Talkin’ Us

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