 T SEEMS illogical for the boss bard of bluecollar to be
celebrated with a coffee table book.
There's no doubt that it's a handsome testimonial to Springsteen's stature as a songwriter. And perhaps, now they can see them in print, those nerds who persist in believing that Born in the USA
is a patriotic anthem will
pay attention to words like the opening verse:
Born down in a dead man's town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that's been beat too much
Till you spend half
your life just covering up
and its
hopeless final verse:
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I'm ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run, ain't got
nowhere to go
This is a sad
conclusion for the boy who was born to run.
Springsteen
comments:
The sound of Born in the USA was martial, modal, and
straight ahead. The lyrics dealt with the problems Vietnam gets
faced when they came back home after fighting in "the only war
that America had ever lost". In order to understand the song's
intent, you needed to invest a certain amount of time and effort to
absorb both the music and the words. But that's not the way a lot of
people use pop music . . .
A songwriter
writes to be understood. Is the way you choose to present your music
its politics? Is the sound and form your song takes its
content?
These are very
relevant questions, and while the corpus of Springsteen's work is
its own answer, if we apply them to the large, glossy format of this
book, then its content works against the actual words on a page in a
way that subverts them, reacts against them, provides comfortable
responses to the discomforting effect of the lyrics, buttresses the
very forces they seek to deny. Similarly (it has to be said), the
"martial, modal, and straight ahead" triumphalism of the
song's presentation not only injects a note of hope into
hopelessness, but justifies its Rambo-like adoption by that
underclass which confirms its oppressors' power at the very moment
it is expressing its own alienation from the rule of big government
and East Coast high finance.
Over the years (he says) I've had an opportunity to reinterpret Born in the USA many times in concert. Particularly on the Tom Joad tour, I had a version that could not be misconstrued. But those interpretations always stood in relief to the original and gained some of their new power from the audience's previous experience with the original version. On the album, Born in the USA
was in its most
powerful presentation. If I tried to undercut or change the music, I
believe I would have had a record that might have been more easily
understood, but not as good.
These thoughtful self-assessments are as remote from their subject as they are from his incredible impact as a rock'n'roll performer. He had the legendarily impassive London audiences when he hit UK on his 1975 world tour standing on their seats at the Hammersmith Odeon and screaming in a way that James Brown had been unable to catch. The boy who was born to run turned out to be born to stun, as well. Well might Jon Landau dub him "the future of rock'n'roll", and The Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music
"the last true rock star". For the process of
incorporation, in which the subversive effect of truly innovative
art is countered by its adoption into the culture of the
establishment – a process that clicked into gear with
tremendous efficiency the following year, with punk rock and the Sex
Pistols – had all but emasculated rock before John Hammond
signed Springsteen to Columbia.
In addition to the lyrics, and brilliant photographs on almost every non-lyric page, the book contains reproductions of a number of lyrics (unfortunately, not Born in the USA) which provide interesting hints of their gestation, the way "And if we lose this one" was originally "if we freeze this one" on Meeting Across the River, and the rough scribblings-out that obscure the opening words of The E. Street Shuffle, with the eventually chosen "Sparks fly" with added exclamation points, as if to celebrate a successful struggle to get exactly the right words. The notebook version of Prove It All Night demonstrates the way that some words from what became
the second verse were the first that came to mind. (The notebook
versions of this song spread over nine pages.)
A surprising omission in this book is any music. Yes, it's too
big (11½in x 9
½in x 1½in thick) and too heavy (nearly 2kg) to sit
comfortably on any music stand, and the binding doesn't lie flat
enough for comfortable playing along, and there are a number of
tune-and-tab editions (see listing) for anyone who wants to
play'n'singalong.
Springsteen's
hero, Woody Guthrie, used to mimeograph little pamphlets of his
songs and drawings and hand-paint them before handing them out. His
purpose, when neither he nor the Almanacs could get any
entrée into the world of mass market recordings, was to get
the songs known. Springsteen doesn't have that problem. Exactly what
need this book fulfils is difficult to say.
In the end,
though many have already bought this book in its US edition, and
many more in Europe will no doubt want the Virgin version, it has to
be admitted that it's something of an irrelevance. The songs stand
up on the basis of performance, either live or on record, and the
sort of tranquil recollections beloved of Wordsworth are just not
appropriate to an art which is aural rather than literary. The fact
that they mostly work on the printed page is an unexpected
bonus.
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