the rix mix

Melissa always wanted to be Bruce & she finally got her chance. Note the Asbury Park backdrop.

In Jersey, we look at Springsteen at the Kennedy Center Honors & wonder, "How the heck did that happen?" I mean the Statesman / Official Voice of a Generation / mass choir at Lincoln Memorial thing. He's filthy rich but he still lives here & rents Convention Hall in Asbury Park for rehearsals, & you can stand outside listening & admiring the classic Corvette he drives over from Rumson. Once, I found Springsteen standing outside Convention Hall with only three fans there & still kick myself for leaving my camera with friends while I took a stroll. I won't to call him "The Boss" because I'm a little older than him, don't work for him, was also in a band when he was starting out,  didn't need Jon Landau to hip me to Jersey poet William Carlos Williams, & anyway  I'm The Boss in my own obscure Jersey-based cultural universe.

40 years ago Springsteen had generated local buzz among bar & frat house party bands fronting a very loud group called "Steel Mill." They hadn't named themselves "Chemical Factory." I went to hear them. They had impressive equipment. I figured no band from Jersey could make it while making a big deal of being from Jersey. Somehow you had to get to L.A. & be whatever the industry people out there wanted you be.

The next time I saw Springsteen was at the Philly Spectrum during "The River" tour. The show was probably sold out thanks to scalpers, but there were plenty of empty seats in the lousy view sections. Although Springsteen was a very big act, he'd personally had only one moderate hit single, "Hungry Heart," that was not really representative of him. At the time, looking ahead, I would've predicted a subsequent career comparable to Tom Petty, with a more fanatical core fan base with more females & journalists in it.

What happened, obviously, was "Born In the U.S.A." & MTV. Designed to be a major album & image makeover, still, its outrageous success must have  blindsided Springsteen. In a matter of months he went from a guy knowing he'd always earn a good living from music to being set for life. Took him awhile to sort out what to do with the changed circumstances. What he finally did, wisely, was basically nothing, except marry a smart, upper middle class Jersey girl & bank the windfall. He's hardly recorded a song since that one couldn't imagine him writing  even if "Born In the U.S.A. " hadn't spun off 7 hit singles. The forms & influences he had adopted & mastered are trustworthy, & he trusted himself to grow within them. Kennedy Center Honors are given mainly to great representatives & extenders of traditional forms & influences.

It's wrong-headed to complain about Springsteen's liberal political views & say they cause some  kind of dichotomy in his music. By what stretch of the imagination does the scrappy, ambitious young poet who'd have worn his heart on his sleeve if his tee shirt wasn't sleeveless, & who wrote "Rosalita" & "4th of July, Asbury Park" turn into a union-hating, immigrant-bashing Republican? That is, without all but repudiating his early work by mocking it in live performances. Springsteen still, as Jon Stewart noted last night, "empties the tank" for those songs. Famous poets have been known to turn their coats, but not many.

Labels: Asbury Park, jersey shore, music, New Jersey, TV