Feb. 23, 2010

That guy in the distance there is me when I was a mere 15 years-old, in my parents’ dining room, listening to albums. At that point in my life, I did this constantly, practically every day of every week. I may have been sitting in a three bedroom house in small-town Alabama, but when I had those giant Koss headphones on my head, my mind was in a far different place. When I had the music blasting, pretty much anything was possible.

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It was 29 years ago today, on Feb. 23, 1981, that my friends, Llane and Delene, and I skipped school and traveled four hours to Atlanta to see our first-ever Bruce Springsteen concert (we met up with my brother, Jim, who was then a freshman at Auburn, and our buddy, Glenn, when we got there.) Springsteen was promoting his new album, “The River,” at the time, and those of you who aren’t old enough to remember should know that he was hardly a household name in 1981, especially south of the Mason-Dixon.

Where I grew up, Hank Williams, Jr. and Lynyrd Skynyrd carried far more weight than some skinny guitar player from New Jersey who danced around on top of the piano and liked to play Ronettes covers. But my friends and I connected with Springsteen’s tales of everyday heartbreak and heroism in a big way. We listened closely, and we believed. We were romantics, and we knew exactly when Clarence would be stepping in with that saxophone break.

At my high school there were no more than five or six of us who even knew who Springsteen was. In fact, “Hungry Heart,” the lead single from “The River,” was the first of his tunes that I ever heard on the radio in Alabama, aside from a couple random blasts of “Born to Run” that popped up when some deejay in Birmingham accidentally wandered beyond the Foreigner-Boston-Styx-Journey commercial bludgeon. Springsteen, though, was our guy - I ordered a poster of him in his bearded beatnik phase out of the back pages of “Rolling Stone,” and proudly hung it on the wall of my bedroom - and we were determined to see one of his reportedly monumental live performances before we died. And who knew when that could be?

So school was officially out, as far as we were concerned. We headed to Atlanta.

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The concert was nothing short of a revelation, worth every bit of the time, energy, and school teacher subterfuge we devoted to seeing it. This was, as my buddy Mike used to say, “Rockabilly Bruce,” pre-muscles, with Link Wray sideburns and a tendency to break into wide, goofy grins, as if he couldn’t believe his good fortune in being able to play his music in front of 12,000 of his best friends. He was still just some wildly talented rock & roll fan whose dream was coming true, rather than a legend receiving Grand Old Man honors at the Kennedy Center. At the time, such a thing wasn’t even imaginable.

What struck me most about Springsteen’s live show was his truly staggering ability to deliver tales of brutal loss and soaring redemption, full of burning guitar solos and semi-classical piano interludes, then suddenly shift gears into a big, stupid rocker that referenced more arcane Americana than you can fit into a Chuck Berry tune. He obviously recognized his position in the rock & roll lineage, and just as clearly aimed to blaze a new trail that forged a bond between Berry and John Steinbeck.

Even at such a young age - I had turned 18 less than a week before the show - it was an exhilarating thing to witness. This monumental performance that lasted over three hours and moved through a vast landscape of emotions, that made me laugh out loud and cry like a baby in front of strangers, was the work of a person who simply would not be denied.

Springsteen used words like “faith” and “hope” and “belief” in his songs, and he got chuckled at by a lot of people because they felt such words had grown obsolete by the onset of the go-go 80s. But he used the words for that very reason. As long as he believed, he seemed be saying, even in a world that wants to deny the very existence of possibilities, the concepts that drove his music were still significant and worthy of consideration. And he was looking for other gypsies to join the caravan. The message he imparted to me that evening in Atlanta was that I had the option of picking up the gauntlet, and so did everyone else who was listening to him.

I want to say I was ripe for the picking at the time, but that’s not really true. My ripening process began with the concert itself. The seed of my personal inability to sit in an office and say, “Great idea, Bob!” for 40 years, then curl up in a ball and die, was surely planted on that night. By the time I left the auditorium, dizzy from the adrenaline rush of a Springsteen show, I started searching for my own voice. And I wanted it to be inclusive.

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Do I always follow through in this pursuit? Do I stick to my core beliefs and try to embrace the best in other people? No, unfortunately, not always. And neither does Springsteen; there have been times when he’s stumbled badly, and very publicly. He said in an interview years ago that it’s wise to “trust the art, not the artist,” and I’ve grown to understand this as I’ve gotten older.

It’s instructive to recognize that John Lennon dripped enough sarcasm from his acid tongue to obliterate several thousand references to peace and love, and, as I’ve written before, multi-millionaires with 40-room mansions have a far harder time imagining no possessions than you and I do. But when I sense I’ve started to drift free of my better self, I can often listen to a handful of favorite Springsteen songs and grab onto an exceptionally solid anchor. Even after three decades of listening, I can still feel the weight and be moved by it.

If you were to ask me how all this affected me over the years, I’d probably say I can’t really put it into words. But actually, I’ve put it into words repeatedly. The passion I try to transpose onto the page every time I sit down to write, regardless of the subject matter, is a direct remnant of what I got from Springsteen back in 1980, and in scores of installments since then. His music, especially from his peak period, which coincided with my deciding what path I would take through life – what, exactly, I would cling to and what I would throw away - is the source of my belief system, every bit as much as what my parents taught me.

Even when I’m aiming for laughs, I’m not making knock-knock jokes; I at least try to entertain in a manner that reflects who I am and what I think about the world I inhabit— it’s my aim to announce my presence when I write, to announce my humanity. Everyone, I learned from Springsteen, is owed that recognition, and I strive to be open enough to receive it from others. And when I detect that public figures - whether they’re politicians, athletes, newscasters or movie producers - are going out of their way to deny the vibration that binds us all together, or are appealing to the meaner aspects of life in this badly tainted dream of a country, I’m here to point it out.

Sometimes I’m a little too loud, and sometimes I’m relatively grace-deficient. But somebody has to do it, and I don’t think I could really live with myself if I didn’t take a stand on occasion, if I didn’t call bullshit when bullshit needs to be called. I didn't, however, come up with this approach all by myself.

I know this might sound ridiculous to someone who views music as an aural space-filler fit for dinner preparation, or if you think the ultimate form of musical expression is to win the honor of being plasticized by committee when you’re crowned on “American Idol.” But I believe what I believe and I know what I know, and I wouldn’t be the person I am today, for better or worse, if not for Bruce Springsteen. It’s as simple as that.

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And now, because they play the most joyous encores in rock & roll history, here’s Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band barreling through “The Detroit Medley,” live at the Capital Center in Landover, MD, on November 24, 1980. John Lennon would be gone in two weeks, but this…this is life. And remember, Springsteen tossed it off at the end of a three hour-plus show!

I’m endlessly grateful that I skipped school that morning, 29 years ago. I learned more from stacks of three-minute records than I ever learned there anyway.

Paul Tatara