Get Yourself A Song To Sing And Sing It ‘Till You’re Done
In which I pretend to write about Bruce Springsteen but actually write all about myself. It’s one of those.
Being a child of the eighties, a certain era of Bruce Springsteen’s music was hard-wired into me from an early age. It was down in the same part of me that can still sing the theme tune to Mysterious Cities Of Gold. Pop culture was a strange thing back then. It was after home video (but before everyone in my hometown had one) and just after MTV. But it was before the internet, before mobile phones. Culture still happened by a strange form of urban legend on the school playground. This was at a time when children at my junior school had heard of Freddy Krueger but didn’t know it was from a film, and before WWF was fake.
In the school I attended/suffered through at the time, there were two large pieces of graffiti on the wall above the storeroom entrance by which I would play (I still assume it was a store-room, because it clearly wasn’t the boiler room in which Krueger lived.) One said GUNS N ROSES, the other said FUCK SPRINGSTEEN. I’ve never found out where the anger came from, or why someone would feel the need to display it above a door of dubious nature in a working-class junior school in the West Midlands. Still, I guess we would give them marks for getting their message across, because I still remember it over two decades later.
A few years later I recognised him as “that Born In The USA guy” when I first saw the music video to Streets Of Philadelphia. By that point I could hum a few of his hit songs at you, then roll my eyes as I mentioned that song; because popular consensus was that it was all about how great America was and, amongst the great many lazy lies and easy jokes that had seeped into British culture, laughing at America was key.
But I was set up to like Bruce in ways I didn’t know at the time. When many young children are being taught The Wheels On The Bus as a nice sing along ditty, my Mum was teaching me the words to Joe Hill. That said, the first single I ever bought was the vinyl 45 of Batdance by Prince, I can probably still sing Bat Out Of Hell word for word, and I own more than one DEACON BLUE album, so please don’t think I’m up here looking to be cool.
Where am I going with this? To 1995, that’s where.
1995, and there’s a television advert for Springsteen’s GREATEST HITS album. It was one of those ads that had a static picture of the album cover, whilst clips from the most famous tracks played. I knew many of them and, crucially, they sounded a world removed from what was in the charts at the time. It also looked pretty cool, the leather jacket, the (not a ) Telecaster slung across his back, I never stood a chance. I’ve always remembered it as Christmas, but Wikipedia suggests maybe it was my birthday; either way I asked my family for the album (I still wasn’t committed to the idea enough to go and buy that Born In The USA guy’s album myself.) And, family being family, they also got it slightly wrong; what I found when I opened the present was a copy of….yes….Born In The USA. Hits wise, there was very little difference, really. (And, again, to sabotage any idea of me being the cool kid, the album I played more than any other that year was most likely the soundtrack CD to BATMAN FOREVER.)
I skipped around with it, because it was a CD and I was still in love with the idea of skipping around at the press of a button, I ignored the title track for a few months, and I started to seep the songs into the mix-tapes I was making for people. Then I started listening to the words, and that was that.
It wasn’t too long before I owned a leather jacket, a (squire) Telecaster, and was scribbling lyrics myself. Downbound Train was the first sing I learned to play, even if it was in the lazy half-arsed power chords that I would never grow out of using. There were other influences of course, lets’ just agree to ignore them for now. Springsteen was to be my road to Dylan, old-school rock and roll, and country music. BORN TO RUN was my ticket to another world and NEBRASKA was my invite back to the kind of socially-conscious acoustic music that people had raised me on.
Friends couldn’t look past his image problem, or the fact that his music sounded “so American.” And it also seemed strange to people that I could like songs that referenced things so alien to us; we didn’t tear up the highways at night, there were no turnpikes, we had canals rather than rivers, and we certainly didn’t venture to them on Saturday nights. But I never saw the songs as foreign; across from that junior school I mentioned were abandoned factories that had built tanks during the second world war. The metal ghosts of coalmine equipment still scattered the landscape, and most of the local towns were still teetering on the edge following the closure of FH LLoyds (to be replaced by IKEA, yay!) The songs spoke to me in a far more direct and passionate way than any of the smug-faced class tourism of Blur or the macho posturing of Oasis. “Cool Britannia” was fun marketing, but It bore no relation to where I was. Whereas songs about hometowns, about racial tensions, economic depression, unemployment, and one-too-many women named Mary- these all seemed real.
When I tried college, a strange move after being such a poor school student, I found that the most important issue was whether you liked NIRVANA or GREEN DAY (you were not allowed to like both, which I kinda did,) and whether you hated THE OFFSPRING for ‘selling out,’ (I was a teenager, I was allowed to be wrong on that burning issue.) It was also important what kind of person you were, and at Dudley college in the late 90′s this was played out along very simple lines; were you a Grebo, a Goth, a Rocker or a Trendy. I didn’t really want to dress like any of those groups, but I could talk music with each of them, and that was all well and good as long as I left Springtseen out of it.
Later on as I tried being in bands, and being in and around the music scene in Birmingham and the Black Country of the late 90′s and early 00′s, I found that all of the cliques were united on this one thing. I would get a nodding-if-vaguely-unaware appreciation when I mentioned that one of my main influences were The Replacements but just a sneer if I mentioned the other was an American named Bruce. You quickly learn to either hide your unpopular influences, or quit having the conversation. I went for the latter. And everyone in that scene was better at music than me anyway, because already I was obsessing too much about the words.
I was a bit of a dick about him getting “popular” again in the middle of the last decade. What I should have been doing at the time, was blogging about how great it was that he was getting new recognition and that so many talented musicians were citing him as an influence. What I did was try and turn my ‘not being cool’ into a passive-aggressive crusade for the ultimate cool. But hey, live and learn. Moving across country and getting more involved online finally put me in touch with people who were more open to talking about his music.
He’s one of the great restless spirits of modern music. I’ve always loved the fearlessness with which he would change gears, the way that each album would be a departure from the last. It’s no accident that the two albums I have least time for -Human Touch and Working On A Dream- have been when he’s released albums that were mining safe ground.
As I got into the bootlegs, and then the official TRACKS release, I learned lessons in writing. I found that these tight and controlled lyrics that I loved would often have been honed over a number of years and across different songs, moving pieces around until he found the right form. so much of writing is about getting past the idea that genius simply happens and into getting down and dirty, and moving those pieces around. It also showed a willingness to leave good shit on the shelf. Don’t just put out everything that you’ve written, and don’t just throw things together into a collection for the sake of a release; wait on it, work on it, make sure you can stand by the work that’s released.
I also came to love the honesty of his songwriting. There’s nothing quite like going through a marriage break-up and a divorce to make you realise what an honest album TUNNEL OF LOVE is. Or how impressed I was on the reunion tour when he not only played American Skin in MSG, but wasn’t afraid to tell the crowd to shut up so that he could do it. Because, again, so much of writing lies in learning lessons of honesty and integrity. Story first. Emotion first. Honesty first. And THE GHOST OF TOM JOAD came with a research and reading list. Shit, it wasn’t a free ride, there was homework. It was social fiction set to music.
I spent a long time trying to be my influences. Even now, if i’m watching a gig I can spot if someone else has stolen a move from Springsteen, or Strummer, or any of the guys I tried stealing things from. I thought that liking Springsteen and Westerberg meant I had to get up in front of people and try to be them. I thought that liking films meant I had to make them. That learning to read with comics meant that I needed to produce them. I failed at each and every attempt to be those people. There comes a time when the best way to serve your influences is to put them to one side. What I found was that I liked writing. Rather than the spontaneity of performance that other people can use so well, I liked to obsess. I wanted to sit with a blank page and move the words around until they were my words, then move them around some more until they were the right words.
I still have my much travelled and much modified esquire guitar, that bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain other guitar, but it sits next to my desk and almost never gets played. Find your thing and follow it. Find your voice and fight for it. “Get yourself a song to sing, and sing it ’till you’re done.”
Everybody has got one. Find yours.
And while you’re at it, listen to Bruce’s new album, “Wrecking Ball.”
