Springsteen on Broadway: it's just the working, the working, the working life

LIKE AMERICA, like most things in life, there’s an easy, surface-level reading of Bruce Springsteen: stars-and-stripes thick-necked denim-clad bombastic muscle bro - looked kind of dorky before the 80s - who sings about blue-collar workers and cars and chasing girls on Friday nights. Dad-rock alert! But when you really listen to him, read about him, see him sweat before your eyes, that image explodes into multiple layers, as complex as the country he sings about.

Springsteen on Broadway is a fast-track to exploding those layers, the myth laid bare under industrial stage light. The performance makes sense of the feelings his music and live shows give you. On Broadway, Springsteen songs feel like museum exhibits, not in a dull dusty way, but in how he exposes each song on stage, vulnerable, stripped and examined from all angles. Songs as exhibits, until he rattles their bones out to the audience, and builds something new but not-new out of them. The Promised Land, a-capella. The gutsy blues of Born in the USA, how’d Reagan like the sound of that now, anger in plain sight.

I didn’t think I needed Broadway Bruce, thought I knew it all already: the names of his aunts, the shapes of his demons, the way his hometown smells in August rain and November snow. I’d watched him read from his autobiography in a San Francisco theatre in 2016, and wondered if I’d be in for a similar experience. The cynic in me thought the whole venture was easy money.

Well, there was nothing recycled about this experience. And money, yes, but easy? Fuck no. ‘I’ve never worked five days a week - until right now,’ Springsteen says during the show. ‘I don’t like it.’ His point is that as a lifelong musician, he’s completely unqualified to sing about working-class labour, the factory life that's defined both the generation of his time and the main thrust of his music. But his remark is also a nod to the show’s imperceptible toil. Five performances, five days a week, 236 shows in total (a run longer than any Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band tour): seventeen songs laced together with a tight script, over and over, week in week out. This is a kind of strenuous repetition that also belongs to the factory line, and it’s therefore reasonable to consider Springsteen on Broadway as his own warped version of factory work.

But Springsteen’s not mass-producing anything material. On stage, over and over again in factory style, he perpetuates his own mythology – that blue-collar easy read - even as he works to dismantle it.

Springsteen is for lovers: The She Street Band at the Clapham Grand

It’s Friday night at the Clapham Grand, the stage lights are low, the room teeming with beer bottles, Bruce shirts, and bandanas. But the Boss himself is nowhere to be seen. That’s because this high-spirited gathering of fans young and old aren’t here for Bruce Springsteen himself, but for the all-girl covers band breathing new fire into his songs.

The She Street Band formed in 2016, after bassist Jody Orsbon saw Springsteen live for the first time at London’s Wembley Stadium that summer. His performance with the E Street Band blew her away, but it was the infectious energy of the audience that really stayed with her. The She Street Band came into being, she tells the Clapham crowd, ‘to try and keep some of that magic alive’.

Covers bands often bring to mind bad Elvis wigs, uncool dads kindling their teenage band-member dreams, cartoonish adaptations of rock star outfits, and the likely desecration of your favourite songs. This is unfair. Covers bands can also be one of the best reciprocations of love for an artist or band.

But as the type of fan who can date a photo of Springsteen according to the length of his sideburns, I have my reservations as I wait in a crowd masked in anticipatory blue haze. When the seven members of the She Street Band take to the stage with grins to rival Springsteen’s, though, and settle into a confident, poignant rendition of Thunder Road, I am immediately at home.

The She Street Band are in no way amateurish. For most of the band this is one of many musical projects. They know how to inhabit a stage. What’s particularly striking is that they make no attempt to imitate Springsteen. There aren’t, thankfully, seven blue-jeaned, bandana-brandishing figures lined up on stage. The She Street Band is not a tribute to Springsteen the star (and certainly not to Springsteen the eighties sartorial disaster), but to his music. As well as their avoidance of rock star fancy dress, the She Street Band’s thoughtful arrangement of lead vocals allows Springsteen’s songs to travel through time and take on new identities. Playing on the different strengths of the band’s impressive vocal range, the songs are distributed between four lead singers, or they all sing together. No member of the She Street Band has been assigned the role of Bruce Springsteen. His spirit is dispersed equally throughout the band, strengthening their command of his music and making space for updated interpretations.

Some things stay the same, of course. Each sax solo is met with audience ecstasy. The Badlands counter melody, familiar to anyone who’s ever been within earshot of a Springsteen show, runs like a leitmotif through the night. Everybody explodes during Born To Run. There’s a delightful moment during Dancing in the Dark when a man winds up on stage dancing with Orsbon.

But the She Street Band doesn’t rely solely on these moments of guaranteed satisfaction inherited from Springsteen’s masterful song writing. Their rendition of Darkness on the Edge of Town, more tender yet just as vigorous as the original, reminds me that a well-crafted song can offer up new meanings and take on new stories, if it falls into the right hands.

And it goes without saying that Springsteen’s songs take on a whole new resonance when they’re sung by women. Fresh and energetic, this is Springsteen not just for newer generations, but for all the girls absent from his shows before the 1980 chart success of Hungry Heart.

The Grand is full of faded Springsteen tour t-shirts on this February Friday night. Two veteran fans in the front row demonstrate particularly contagious enthusiasm: white-haired, they are the best dancers in the house. I think of all the decades of Springsteen tours they must have followed. I’m moved not just by their dedication and loyalty to his music, but by their open-heartedness towards a new era’s treatment of songs that have belonged to them for so long. That’s what’s remarkable about Springsteen’s work: its spirit endures through generations, never losing its power to forge communities.

I’ve always dreamed of being in the E Street Band, but now I think I want to be in the She Street Band. And with Twitter support from Amy Lofgren, wife of E Street Band guitarist Nils, and Olivia Tallent, daughter of bassist Garry, two sell-out London shows under their belt, and the loyalty of a legion of Springsteen fans, surely it’s only a matter of time before Springsteen himself offers an approving grin.

When I listen to Bruce Springsteen’s songs, I never imagine myself as the female characters. I’m never Mary or Wendy or Janey. I’m always the protagonist, always wanting to know if love is wild and real, wanting the heart, the soul, control, right now. The She Street Band provide the joyful space for me to be that person. And they keep the magic alive.

A promised land

One of the reasons I love Bruce Springsteen's song The Promised Land so wholeheartedly is because from the first moment I listen to it - from that opening harmonica - I feel like I already know it intimately. Not in a superficial, easy-listening sense. The song speaks to a deeper kind of familiarity, but it does so in a way that's both immediate and lasting. I think Springsteen is one of only a few songwriters who can hold depth and immediacy so tightly together in a single song.

Many moons ago, my friend Isabelle watches a Youtube video I link to on Twitter. It's Springsteen performing an acoustic Thunder Road on a sunny-rainy evening in London's Hyde Park, 2012. Later, Isabelle tells me her initial response is something along the lines of, 'oh, he's surprisingly hot'. Yes, yes indeed. But there's something else in the performance that leads Isabelle to listen through his back catalogue one afternoon. The Promised Land comes on, and it's the song that truly turns her ear to Springsteen; so much so that eventually she'll become the kind of fan who can date a photograph of him just from the length of his sideburns.

The Promised Land reels her in to the shores of Springsteen, if you will. There's just something about that song, the way it instantly tears open your defences to beat alongside a thing so deep and raw within you. I got the radio on and I'm just killing' time ... Driving all night chasing some mirage ... Blow away the dreams that break your heart ... I believe in a promised land. 

I guess maybe one reason this song works so well is because, despite its title, the lyrics refer to 'a' promised land, not 'the'. Springsteen's not talking about a specific Land of Milk and Honey, Shangri-La, Arcadia, nirvana. Like many of his songs, the idea of a utopian 'someplace better' remains just that, an idea. Specific definition and detail aren't important; it's the motivation behind the longing that remains true, a central thread unifying all Americans - all humans - regardless of background or religion. The song is stubbornly secular, even though its themes are the same ones religion loves to grapple with: work, faith, commitment, redemption, the hope of something better, doing your best to 'live the right way' despite your constant desire to head 'straight into the storm'. They're questions relatable and accessible to everybody.

The Promised Land is one of the first songs that hooks me in, too. I'm about nineteen years old, and I'm in between things: school and university, adolescence and adulthood, dependence and independence. I'm also struggling to construct the next hour of my life, let alone the next few years, and every day I walk the streets of my small hometown to my quiet retail jobs, thinking that there must be something more than this. Thinking: I get up every morning and go to work each day / But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold / Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode / Explode and tear this town apart / Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart / Find somebody itching for something to start.

Eventually I find the courage to start something, and five or six years later, I'm much further down a better road. But every time I hear The Promised Land, every time Springsteen whips a harmonica from his back pocket and the crowd roars along to the opening chords, I get that same half-frustrated, half-ecstatic, but overall life-affirming feeling, the sense that I can and will find a better place. Because that's perhaps the most significant thing about The Promised Land: no matter where you are in life, it'll always speak to your yearning to head into the storm in search of something greater.

Alcatraz | '$24 in glass beads and red cloth'

It is not an unpleasant place to be, out there on Alcatraz with only the flowers and the wind and a bell buoy moaning and the tide surging through the Golden Gate, but to like a place like that you have to want a moat.

I come across Didion’s short essay on Alcatraz by chance, three days after my trip there. When Didion visits, though, the island is a ghostly ruin, caught in limbo between its days as a functioning penitentiary and its present status as a tourist magnet. Despite the fact she’s virtually alone on the island, not part of a crowd, she mentions details that stick for me too: the tear gas canisters in the dining hall, the buckled paint, the darkness of solitary confinement, the soap in the showers, and the views out across the bay. Looking out from the island across the water, actually, is particularly striking for both of us. In the penitentiary's early years, Alcatraz was nicknamed 'the silent island' because convicts weren't allowed to talk to one another. It earns this name in other ways, though. The bell buoy moans through the misty air, embodying the unexpected, if desolate, tranquility of the place. 

But my experience of this scene differs from Didion's in two ways. 
First, my attempts to capture it on my phone are constantly disturbed by the noise of other visitors who keep straying into the quiet. Two women debate endlessly about who packed the water bottles. A man’s patronising chatter to his infant daughter echoes across the island. Didion is lucky to savour Alcatraz when it’s completely uninhabited. 
Second, the very fact I am trying to film this scene on my phone, instead of just being present in it: I bet Didion wouldn’t.

Didion says, 'I tried to imagine the prison as it had been […] tried dutifully to summon up some distaste, some night terror of the doors locking and the boat pulling away. But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather...’ 

Devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions. During my visit, standing outside the penitentiary’s tiny morgue, I see a couple probably in their early sixties, except they're dressed like twenty-somethings in matching brand-new sportswear. She has fake nails, sunglasses, and a make-up caked, Botoxed face. Their gum chewing marks a regular beat to their drawl. He has the look of an ageing jock: still the triangular frame, narrow hips, slim waist, the conventionally good-looking all-American face, but everything is slightly droopy somehow. And his hair’s suspiciously un-grey. He regularly squeezes her ass. I imagine their home, low and wide in some homogenous suburb, with leather sofas, huge televisions, and a tacky bathroom. I bet he has a garage full of cars and plays golf at the weekends. She likes home fitness videos and has a handbag-sized dog to put in her ugly designer handbags.

I’m being awful. They’re probably philosophy professors.

But the point is, Alcatraz is no longer an empty place. It's one of San Francisco's biggest tourist pulls, hundreds ferried to the rock and back every day. I am standing in the suffocating black of a solitary confinement cell thinking about how this is my first (and, y'know, hopefully last) time in a prison, and about what it truly must be like for inmates. It is convenient to think of all prisoners as terrible, misshapen humans who need to be kept away from society, prisons a neat solution. And yes, there are the heinous criminals who deserve every horror they get. But what about the prisoners who are unable to escape the world of crime because of their upbringing, their class, their socio-economic circumstances? To physically step inside a prison is to open your mind to all of these kinds of thoughts, and whatever your opinions may be, I think that's an important thing to do. Though some tourists are downright irritating, everybody should have the chance to experience at least some of what Didion felt when she visited the deserted penitentiary. You see Alcatraz differently to what you were expecting, and you're forced to reconsider your feelings about prisons themselves too.

In an American Poetry lecture, my professor, who also teaches at San Quentin State Prison, mentions America's prison-industrial complex with regard to this poem by female black poet Morgan Parker. I think of the milky-skied Sunday afternoon I spent at Berkeley's Grassroots House (which deserves a blog post all of its own) writing letters and mailing books to literature-starved prisoners across the nation as part of the Prisoner's Literature Project. They're a volunteer group that sends free books directly to prisoners who request them, because as their website puts it: 'in American prisons, access to books is treated as a privilege, not a right'. NPR featured the PLP as part of their longform radio series Humankind, and it's worth listening to. Many prisoners request dictionaries, to improve their reading and writing skills, and thus their employability upon release. Because nobody wants to employ a felon, right. Other prisoners pursue diverse interests; one guy I write to is into surfing, Spanish, sociology, and creative writing. Another is looking for 'anything on old Aztec art'. Most letters I open come from Californian prisons, so I'm not surprised to learn, from The Atlantic, that the state 'holds more inmates in its jails and prisons than do France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore and the Netherlands combined'. It's a nationwide issue, though. Schlosser writes:

All across the country new cellblocks rise. And every one of them, every brand-new prison, becomes another lasting monument, concrete and ringed with deadly razor wire, to the fear and greed and political cowardice that now pervade American society.

On Alcatraz, we walk through the old prison library, the floors squeaking, the bookshelves long empty. Back when the prison was in operation, the library offered to its better-behaved inmates fifteen thousand books, seventy five magazine subscriptions, and monthly movies. In recent years many prison libraries have been closed and converted into cells to accommodate overcrowding. But how will prisoners ever escape the cycle of crime and incarceration if they're not even granted the basic right to read?

Inmates didn't just read, though, on Alcatraz. Crocheting was an unexpectedly popular pastime. And in the evenings there was music hour: guitars, saxophone, harmonica, keyboard, all played as the sun sank, casting pink and orange through the barred windows. Al Capone practised his banjo in the shower room. 

It's a good spot for birds, too: California gulls, cormorants, orange-footed guillemots, falcons, oystercatchers, black-crowned night herons, snowy egrets. I know very little about birds but those names sound cool, and the range would've suited another of Alcatraz's celebrity inmates, Robert 'Birdman' Stroud. Before Alcatraz, during his time at Leavenworth penitentiary, Stroud became a well-regarded ornithologist, tending to injured sparrows and rearing canaries, even writing two giant treatises on their diseases. His cells (he had two to house all his birds, despite prison overcrowding) became literal cages, laboratories devoted to the breeding and research of canaries. A full-time secretary was even required to oversee the correspondence of his canary-selling business. 

He was a difficult, violent prisoner though, and upon discovery that he was using laboratory equipment to distill alcohol, Stroud was shifted off to Alcatraz. He had ten minutes to say farewell to his birds, for on Alcatraz he wouldn't be allowed to rear them. But Stroud found other occupations on the island. He wrote an autobiography, and the manuscript 'Looking Outward: A History of the U.S. Prison System from Colonial Times to the Formation of the Bureau of Prisons'. He was granted access to the library and studied law there. (Law books are also widely requested from the PLP, and it's not too hard to understand why.) He played chess, and met actor Burt Lancaster who portrayed him in 1962's Birdman of Alcatraz. The film is, of course, almost totally fiction.

I can't write about Alcatraz without mentioning the Indian Occupation, especially considering recent events regarding the Dakota Access Pipeline. In November 1969, one hundred Native American activists settled on the derelict island, citing an 1868 treaty which granted unoccupied land to Native Americans. The protestors demanded the deeds to the land in order to build a university there, offering to buy Alcatraz for '$24 in glass beads and red cloth', which is apparently how much Dutch settlers paid for Manhattan in 1626. Though ultimately unsuccessful, the Occupation was hugely important in raising awareness of the rights and reparations of Native Americans. The last of the protestors left in 1971, but their graffiti remains, with a little touch-up and a little paint, on the water tower: 'Peace and Freedom. Welcome. Home of the Free Indian Land.' 

When I see those letters for myself, square and red in the misty rain, I'm reminded of one of my favourite performances of Springsteen's Thunder Road (from the legendary 1978 Passaic Night - you can watch the entire thing on Youtube, and it's pretty much my favourite thing ever) and his preamble to the song:

There was this Robert Mitchum movie. It was about these moonshine runners down south [...] I never saw the movie, I only saw the poster in the lobby in the theater. I took the title and I wrote this song. I didn't think there was ever a place that was like what I wrote this song about [...] We were out in the desert, over the summertime, driving to Nevada, and we came upon this house on the side of the road that this Indian had built. Had a big picture of Geronimo out front, said 'Landlord' over the top. Had this big sign, said, 'This is a land of peace, love, justice, and no mercy'. And it pointed down this little dirt road that said 'Thunder Road'.

Didion came to Alcatraz two years before the Indian Occupation, and I wonder how different her visit would've felt, had she ferried over in 1969 instead. I don't know if it's because it's a small island, or because it's so steeped in myth and drama, but Alcatraz seems able to don any identity: barren rock, cell-door-slammin' penitentiary, ghostly ruin, 'land of peace and freedom', tourist heap. And yet despite their wild variations, all these personas participate in the deep questions about what it means to be free and not free, liberated and caged, about what it means to be an American, and by extension, what it means to be human.

A final note: in 2005, Jake the dog participated in the Alcatraz Invitational, a swimming race between the island and San Francisco. He came 72nd.