Walk like a Man

by Robert J. Wiersema

  14. Understand, this wasn’t a rational process. Had I given it even a moment’s thought, I would have faded into the wallpaper and saved myself five or six years of torment.

  15. Thankfully, I grew out of that. No, really. All right, shut up.

  16. And clearly I’ve forgiven her: she’s one of three teachers thanked in the acknowledgements in my novel Before I Wake.

  17. I admit I brought some of this torment on myself. It is not, for example, a good idea to point out that the penis of the fourteen-year-old bully about to kick the crap out of you in the change room shower is curiously small and hairless for someone of his size and age. Let’s call that a lesson I learned the hard way.

  18. I don’t need to explain that the nickname came from Ozzy Osbourne, former lead singer of Black Sabbath, then infamous for the rumor that he bit the head off a live dove, do I?

  19. To this day, the sound of teenage girls laughing on a bus will cause an adrenaline spike and a fight-or-flight reaction. Hence the music during my commute.

  20. I told you you’d meet Peter. Wasn’t that a good entrance?

  21. It just occurred to me: he might actually have suffered from some of that persecution because of me. I suppose I owe him an apology. And a drink.

  22. Metaphorically speaking. Really.

  Badlands

  Album:Darkness on the Edge of Town

  Released: June 2, 1978

  Recorded: October 12, 1977–March 19, 1978

  SPRINGSTEEN FANS ARE a weird lot.1 It’s not just the devotion, the inexorable pull that draws us away from home, that has us happily spending twelve hours in a general admission line and referring to each other by nicknames drawn from one Springsteen song or another.2 No, those things are relatively normal, as far as devoted fans go.3

  What strikes me as odd about Springsteen fans is our masochism. It’s the way we grow, largely by process of overexposure—which we ourselves are responsible for—to revile the songs we love most. Familiarity, for us, breeds contempt. I’m not talking about songs from Born in the U.S.A.; no self-respecting Tramp4 is likely to claim any of those as his favorite, save for possibly the title track.

  No, I’m talking about songs that genuinely move our souls, that are key, in many ways, to our fandom, and that we eventually come to loathe.

  Take “Badlands” as an example.

  The opening track on Darkness on the Edge of Town, “Badlands” was most people’s first glimpse of the new Bruce Springsteen. He was still recovering from his bitter legal battle with his former manager, Mike Appel, which had kept him from releasing new music for three years, and Darkness revealed a songwriter tortured and ground down.

  Darkness is a mature record, by design. Gone are the anthems of escape, like “Thunder Road” and “Born to Run.” Rather than jumping in a car and running, the characters in Darkness are trapped, consigned to late-night road races and early mornings waking to the factory’s whistle. Exploring loss of faith, loss of love, succor in sex, and weekend thrill-taking, the album is a masterpiece of ennui verging on despair. Sure, there’s defiance there, but it’s a bitter and impotent railing against reality.

  Springsteen wasn’t even thirty years old when Darkness was released, and it sounded as if the world had already broken him.

  This was, in fact, a deliberate choice on Springsteen’s part. In the book Songs, he writes, “After Born to Run I wanted to write about life in the close confines of the small towns I grew up in . . . I intentionally steered away from any hint of escapism and set my characters down in the middle of a community under siege.”5

  As a result of that deliberateness (some would say ruthlessness), the songs on Darkness—each of them a masterpiece—have some of the best staying power in Springsteen’s canon. A typical Springsteen concert, even more than thirty years later, will feature four or five tracks from the album. The title track, “The Promised Land,” “Candy’s Room,” “Prove It All Night,” and “Racing in the Street” are all in regular rotation even now.6

  It’s a curious alchemy, what these songs do to a sold-out arena of fans. Take the title track. “Darkness on the Edge of Town” is utterly despairing, a chronicle of a man who’s lost his money and his wife and no longer cares. He lives for weekend nights when he can race in the darkness and lay what little he has on the line. In concert, though, the song becomes a communal moment, a shared cry of frustration. Let’s face it: there are a lot of lives that feel like dead ends, and many people live for the moments that take them out of that life-as-mere-survival mindset. A Springsteen concert, say. “Darkness” is a raised voice of understanding, twenty thousand strong, every night. That shared experience transmutes despair to a true measure of defiance.

  The same is true of “Badlands.” In concert, especially since the 1999–2000 reunion tour, it’s become a regular setpiece. The house lights are turned up partway, and the song transforms into a sing-along, often with several minutes of milked audience response. And it works. Of course it works. On the Live in Barcelona DVD you can see the intensity of the crowd reaction, the surging, roiling sea of hands, hear the voices raised in song almost overpowering the band. It’s remarkable, and moving.

  And Tramps, generally speaking? We hate it.

  It’s not the disappointment we share in a 2003 version of “Prove It All Night” that will never hold a candle to the epic versions of the 1978 tour, no matter how strong it is. Nor is it the disdain we have for later versions of “Thunder Road,” tainted by what some fans call “the twang.”

  No, this is a case of hating what you love, plain and simple. Because every one of those people who bitches on message boards about what a warhorse “Badlands” has become, how bloated and overblown, how much it panders to the audience, I guarantee you: every one of those people, when the song rolls around in concert, will have their hands in the air and tears in their eyes. They’ll strain their vocal cords, and experience, for a moment, transcendence.

  And then they’ll log on again and complain about how it slowed down the show, and ask things like “Why isn’t he playing ‘Be True’ or ‘None But the Brave’ in that slot?”

  It’s the curse of being a Tramp.

  I know it well.

  IF YOU WERE a kid growing up in the country (and make no mistake, Agassiz was and is country, through and through7), a summer job generally meant misery. Outdoor misery, regardless of the weather. “Workin’ in the fields, till you get your back burned,” as Springsteen sings in “Badlands.”

  Options for summer work tended to come down to word of mouth: so-and-so knew somebody who was looking for a few young guys to spend a couple of days bringing the hay in. So-and-so was looking for someone to dig something out or cut something down or pick something or plant something or bury something. Work-wise, you were largely limited to a choice between brutal and humiliating. I had the bad fortune, for a few years, of working summer jobs that bridged the gap.

  I’d be hard-pressed to say which is worse, picking strawberries or picking corn. If you’re picking strawberries, you’re either hunched over, killing your back, or kneeling in the dew-soaked mud. Picking corn, you get to stand up, but your shoulders are rubbed bloody with the burlap sack you’re picking into, and you spend hours crashing between rows of plants wet with dew, so you end up soaked to the skin, sweating and chilled before the August sun is even up. Picking corn, you rip your hands apart on the razor edges of the leaves. Picking strawberries, you get covered in strawberry juice, which only sounds fun; it takes you an hour in the shower at night to get the sugary mud off. Picking corn, you get yelled at for selecting unripe cobs; with strawberries, it’s the “goddamn monkey faces” your boss picks out of your basket and throws over his shoulder, shorting your weight. They’re both dawn-hour studies in endurance.

  If I had to choose, I suppose I’d say picking strawberries is a little less onerous than picking corn, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s never a bad thing to sneak a glowing, ripe strawberry right off the vine. You
can’t say that about an ear of corn, no matter how sweet. Second, picking corn was a solo endeavor; picking strawberries, I got to work with Greg.

  Unlike Peter, whom I can recall meeting, Greg Lawley was from town, and I’d known him all my life. He was hard to miss: even as a kid he was almost terrifyingly tall, and to this day he stands, literally, a foot higher than I do. With height like that, Greg was a natural for basketball, and from an early age he was inseparable from his ball. Many summer nights we’d spend hours on the outdoor court at the high school. We never played horse or anything like that—he’d position and take a shot, I’d grab the ball and send it back his way. Badly. Repeatedly.

  I don’t remember how Greg and I became friends, exactly, but it was sometime in grade eight or nine. At our high school, the clichéd line between jocks and nerds didn’t really exist.8 Greg was a basketball player, but there was never any issue with the two of us hanging out, and before long other team members—Kevin, Victor, and John—were part of my social circle, which also included Peter, Jeff, Brendan. And a few girls: Nicole and Jennifer, Deanna, Roseanne and Karen. And there was Shawna. But more on her later. We would hang out outside the gym in the morning before school, or in the library, or, later, in the stairwell.

  Greg and I bonded over two things. The first was, oddly enough, cooking. The second was music.

  In a school as small as ours, electives were hard to come by. I ended up in home ec largely by process of elimination; Greg followed me there for a few years. We made a terrible partnership as far as the class work went (I remember some ghastly dishes, and a general air of disaster surrounding us9), but we had some great conversations while we cooked. We talked mostly10 about music.

  At that time, coming out of my heavy metal t-shirt phase, we talked a lot about bands like Quiet Riot and Twisted Sister.11 And we talked about Springsteen.

  Around then, it was all Born in the U.S.A. The album had charged into the public consciousness to the point where there was no avoiding it, but we were proud to be riding the front edge of that wave. Listen to it on the radio? Perish the thought! We had our own cassettes.

  And then I had to have surgery.

  One of the lingering effects of my clubfoot was that I had uneven bone growth in my legs. To wit, my left leg was shorter than my right. In the first consultation about the issue with my doctor in Vancouver, I was informed that we needed to wait until I had hit bone maturity (i.e., had finished growing), and then we’d take care of the problem.12 He sent me for X-rays and booked a follow-up for a month later.

  I left his office on Granville and Sixteenth with my mom, heading downtown. She had plans in Vancouver that night, and I was taking the bus back to Agassiz. En route to the bus station we stopped at A&B Sound. I bought a few tapes, including The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle.

  It was the second Springsteen album I owned, and I bought it because it had “Rosalita” on it, but the rest of the tape blew my mind. The wild cacophony that kicked off “The E Street Shuffle” was like a hurdy-gurdy unhinged, so far removed from the slick blue-collar rock of Born in the U.S.A. it was like a different band altogether.

  Greg and I spent hours playing pool on the table in my living room13 and cranking the tape as loud as it would go. We pieced together the lyrics and sang along. We studied it with the dedication of Talmudic scholars.14

  A month later, after my follow-up with my doctor, I once again ended up in downtown Vancouver, prowling the record stores. I bought a bunch more tapes at A&B Sound, but the real discovery was a record store well into the shady section of Granville Street. When I walked in, I thought I had gone to heaven: facing the door, there was a rack loaded with bootlegs.15

  I knew all about bootlegs. Greg and I had been trading books about Springsteen back and forth for months, and it was impossible to avoid awareness of the fact that Springsteen was—and remains—one of the most bootlegged artists of all time. Much of his popularity, and the legends about his live shows, stem from recordings of radio broadcasts (the August 15, 1975, show at the Bottom Line in New York and the December 15, 1978, show at Winterland in San Francisco, to name the two most significant) that passed from hand to hand and were sold at disreputable record shops, outside concerts, and at flea markets. Before the internet, a lot of being a Springsteen fan involved exchanging tapes by mail, spreading the wealth, building a community.

  That day? To actually come across bootlegs, though? It was like being welcomed into the kingdom.

  The titles were unfamiliar, but the sleeves hinted at the arcane riches within.

  The bootlegs were outrageously expensive, of course, but they beckoned me like a drug. When he saw me looking, picking up the albums one by one like they were fragile, the guy behind the counter let me know that, if I was interested, he might be able to do something for me. Just like any good dealer would. He gestured at a wall of cassettes behind him, all encased in white paper sleeves, with hand-typed titles. He had tapes of all the vinyl bootlegs in the store, and more.

  Over the next few months, Greg and I built a wicked bootleg tape collection. We started with the Alpine Valley show from 1984 and part of the Agora, Cleveland, show from 1978. The latter was the one that destroyed us, that turned us from fans into Tramps: the energy level was off the charts, and suddenly everything that we had heard and read, all those legends and rumors, was inarguably true.

  When Jack, the hulking Dutchman16 who was renting my grandmother’s west field to grow strawberries, let her know he was looking for someone to pick and sell the berries, I was a natural choice. I selected Greg as my wingman and partner in crime.

  The strawberry season lasted just a few weeks every year, late June into early July. Greg and I would meet up at dawn and ride our bikes down the highway to my grandmother’s field. We’d pick in side-by-side rows, talking music and girls, and talking Bruce.

  When the picking was done, we’d man our roadside stand, stretched out in lawn chairs, listening to tapes, reading from Bruce bios or music magazines, nipping up to my grandmother’s house for food and drink. It was a relationship forged in work and frustration and music.

  And we felt part of a community that expanded far beyond us. One photocopied fanzine, almost a year out of date, featured, among other things, lyrics to songs that had been played late in the Born in the U.S.A. tour but hadn’t been recorded, songs like “Seeds” and “This Hard Land.” Songs of the earth, the misery of work, and the healing balm of companionship. It was all right there, our summer, the backbreaking labor and drudgery, shared by people around the world, having been transformed by a now-less-scrawny singer from New Jersey.

  Workin’ in the fields

  till you get your back burned

  Workin’ ’neath the wheel

  till you get your facts learned

  Baby I got my facts

  learned real good right now

  1. As she reads that sentence, I’m sure Cori is nodding and muttering something about “an understatement.”

  2. I made that last one up. I’ve never met any Springsteen fan who has a nickname based on a song. Ask my friend G-man; he’ll back up his old pal Wild Billy.

  3. And we’ve got nothing on Trekkies. Man, those people are nuts.

  4. Oh, right. We have a label: Tramps. It’s not as catchy as Deadheads or Phishheads (or Trekkies), but hey, it’s from one of the great lines in “Born to Run,” and it’s hard to argue with that.

  5. In November, 2010, Springsteen released The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story, a three CD/three DVD set that explores the genesis of the album, and, most strikingly, how deliberately Springsteen had created paths not taken. In the break between Born to Run and Darkness, Springsteen wrote more than seventy songs; ten were selected for the album. With the outtakes on Tracks and the two CDs worth in the box set, more than forty of those songs have been made available, and it’s easy to see the method to his madness: even great songs like “Because the Night” and “The Promise” were dropped b
ecause they didn’t fit his vision of the record. Given the results, it’s hard to quibble.

  6. One of the best parts about the Darkness box set? In late 2009 Springsteen and a stripped-down version of The E Street Band—essentially the same band who recorded the album, with Charlie Giordano subbing on organ for the late Danny Federici—set up on stage at the Paramount Theatre in Asbury Park and ran through the album, from “Badlands” to the title track, performing to an empty theatre. It’s stunning just how deeply these songs are still felt, how much passion Springsteen brings to tracks like “Badlands.” He could be forgiven, having performed them hundreds of times, if he was bored with them. Yet there’s no boredom here, just the sheer, undiluted power of the music.

  7. You know what the dividing line is between “country town” and “town,” let alone “city”? A movie theatre.

  8. The big social division seemed to be between bullies and the people they picked on; everyone else was pretty harmonious.

  9. I stuck with home ec for the duration of my high school days; in fact, I was the top student five years running. I’ve got certificates and everything.

  10. “Mostly” is an important word here. It means I don’t have to acknowledge the fact that Greg and I knew an uncomfortable amount about each other’s masturbation habits and girlie magazine consumption at a tender age.

  11. I know, I know, not really heavy metal: we were fourteen! We were the demographic.

  12. By “take care of the problem,” it turns out my doctor meant “cut an inch of bone out of your right thigh to make it the same length as the left.” As someone who was never going to be tall, the loss of that inch wounds me deeply, to this day.

  13. The secondhand pool table was a Christmas gift for Dave, Jon, and me, to encourage us to make friends and have them over.