8. Usually by me.
9. It’s hard to tell whether it’s just the rose-colored lenses of retrospect, or whether it really is the universe messing with your head, but have you ever noticed that the last time you make love with someone tends to be the best, the most fulfilling? I usually come down on the “universe messing with you” side of the argument: “Are you sure about this path? Are you really, really sure?” Mono no aware.
10. Green Point has a lot of memories for me. Family picnics. The day I almost drowned trying to impress that girl I mentioned previously. Nightswimming with a girl I was in love with, but would never tell.
11. Peter, who has become a physicist, would likely argue that there’s never anything more than angles and physics.
Thundercrack
Album:Tracks
Released: November 10, 1998
Recorded: June 28, 1973
THIS WILL COME as no surprise to anyone who knows me: I’m not the world’s most organized person. Quite the opposite, in fact. Some would argue that I’m a hoarder, though I haven’t quite reached the stage where I might be featured on an exploitative television show.
This makes me, in many ways, a bad Tramp. I’ve got decades’ worth of magazine articles, but do you think I can find them? My Springsteen books are scattered through a multitude of rooms in two separate buildings (three if you include the books still at my mom’s place in Agassiz). My bootleg CDRs are mostly in unmarked sleeves in a box, labeled with a title and disc number if I’m lucky; no song listing, no dates, no other identifying information.
I tend to lose things. This was brought home to me—acutely— while writing this book. It wasn’t just that it was a struggle to pull all the materials together. No, I even had trouble seeing things right in front of me.
Take “Thundercrack,” for example.
One of the main reasons I was so thrilled when the Tracks box set came out in 1998 was that it contained—finally!—an official release of “Thundercrack.” Sure, it was a studio recording, but beggars can’t be choosers, right? I’d fallen in love with the song from bootlegs of legendary early seventies live shows, and I’d spent the last decade plus hoping that Springsteen Inc. might someday, in their infinite wisdom, release one of those live versions. I knew it was a vain hope; I knew there was no chance.
I knew that right up until I was writing the “Born to Run” chapter for this book.
I was watching the documentary included with the Born to Run: 30th Anniversary box set; I needed to confirm some information about the recording sessions, and the film is a gold mine.
And there, in the DVD menu?
“Thundercrack.”
Not just a live version of the song, mind you. A live video, from 1973.1
Vintage.
It had been right there, under my nose, for five years, and I hadn’t realized it.2
I can’t express what a treasure this video is, a fossil record of what, at the time, was one of the Springsteen songs. It was everything I had envisioned, and more.3 It’s a balls-to-the-wall performance, filled with humor and intensity, superbly played and delivered with passion.4
Just another night in the bar for Springsteen and company.
Even after the release of the first two albums, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band were journeymen musicians going from town to town, night after night, paying their dues. They played theatres and larger venues in cities where their following was developing (those cities—Philadelphia, New York, Boston— remain Springsteen hot spots to this day), but mostly their gigs were isolated, one-night barroom stands, winning their audience over one sweaty set at a time. You can follow the development of the band through what Springsteen once referred to5 as “the magic of bootlegging.”6
Two of the finest pre–Born to Run bootlegs were recorded at the Main Point, a bar in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, two years apart.
The second show, on February 5, 1975, performed as a benefit for the club, finds the band on the cusp of their Born to Run–era powers. The almost three-hour set includes “Born to Run” itself and an early version of “Thunder Road” (with different lyrics, and under the title “Wings for Wheels”), along with definitive versions of “New York City Serenade” and, yes, “Incident on 57th Street.”7 The show also includes a carefully chosen set of covers, including “Mountain of Love,” Chuck Berry’s “Back in the U.S.A.” as the show’s finale, and a version of Bob Dylan’s “I Want You” that has me weeping at the mere memory of it.
If you’re collecting Springsteen,8 this show should be one of the cornerstones of your collection: it’s damn near perfect.9
The earlier show, though, is actually more interesting, and just as strong. Recorded April 24, 1973, this show finds the band in their two-shows-a-night period. Their seven-song, hour-plus set was fairly standard in those days, and it includes an early version of “New York City Serenade” (entitled “New York City Song”), and a couple of tracks off the first album (“Spirit in the Night” and “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street,” along with two of Springsteen’s great, lost songs, “Santa Ana” and “Tokyo” (aka “And the Band Played”).10 When we first got that bootleg, Greg and I spent hours, days, poring over the words, building the story up in our mind.
The set finished, as sets did in those days, with “Thundercrack.”
“Thundercrack” was the showstopper. It’s flat-out rock and roll, soul-infused, with sing-along spots, call and response, and plenty of room for soloing and schtick. In the earlier Main Point show, it’s thirteen minutes of rock-and-roll baptism; like “Rosalita” would be in years to come, it’s pure, undistilled joy.
And it’s all about a girl who likes to dance.
LEAVING HOME at seventeen to go to university on Vancouver Island was the best thing I could have done. I knew that by the middle of my first year. No baby steps for me; no living at home while I did a year or two at Fraser Valley College. No schools on the mainland, where I could easily go home for weekends. I wanted the hour and a half on the ferry, that stretch of open water between me and my past.
On Labor Day 1988, though, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was the worst idea I had ever had.
My mother borrowed her boyfriend’s car, a sporty little number, to get me to Victoria. I moved to university with less stuff than it took to fill the trunk of the z28: a few books, my tapes, and my clothes. Included in the latter were fourteen identical pairs of robin’s-egg blue underwear.
Two weeks earlier, after one last bout of back-to-school shopping for me, my mother had come home from Chilliwack very proud. She had bought me fourteen pairs of identical white socks, and the fourteen pairs of underwear. “There’s enough for two weeks, and this way you never have to worry about socks not matching.”
I was transfixed by the blue underwear. “Blue?”
“This way you won’t mix them up with anyone else’s laundry.”
It was sound in principle, but I knew that it was a recipe for disaster. (Which would hit, less than a month later, when I returned to my building’s laundry room to fetch my load out of the dryer and found the heartbreakingly beautiful Ukrainian exchange student who lived on the fourth floor in the final stages of folding my clothes. Right there, as if a spotlight was shining on them, a teetering stack of carefully folded powder blue underwear. Thirteen pairs. I was wearing the other. I was never able to look her in the eye again.)
My mother woke me up at four that Labor Day morning—I’d been asleep for about an hour. I slept in the car on the way to the ferry.
A few hours later, she dropped me off at my room, Helmcken 211.
I don’t know what I was expecting from a university residence, but the Lansdowne complex wasn’t it. The six buildings of the complex were identical, squat grey structures roughly the shape of cinder blocks. And about as welcoming. Everything was concrete, brutalist. The quad between the buildings was off-kilter, as if the six cinder blocks had been kicked out of true and left where they landed. Later in the fall,
when the rains of October and November hit, I’d discover that the buildings seemed to bleed, with streaks of wet black against the grey like open wounds.11
It was only when my mother was gone that I realized what “alone” really meant.
The thing with growing up in a place like Agassiz, living there for your whole life, is that you know everyone. I had a hard enough time making friends, but I didn’t have to worry about actually meeting people for the first time.
And then there I was, hours from home, completely alone, and with absolutely no idea what to do. Once again, I was the little kid in the big school with the big kids, and me with nothing to offer.
I had a roommate, but he came with his own set of friends; I had left mine behind. There was one guy I knew slightly already, Dave, and we hung out some. He’d eventually trade spots with my roommate, but for the first few weeks I felt utterly, inconsolably alone.
I wasn’t prepared for it. I had envisioned meeting people immediately, striking friendships that would last a lifetime, falling into a period of shameless promiscuity. Instead, I spent most of my time in class, reading old record reviews from Rolling Stone off the microfiche in the library basement, or sitting on the window ledge of my room, watching people coming and going.
It was the fall of Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction. Every Friday night people would put their speakers on their windowsills and “Welcome to the Jungle” would echo through the concrete quad. Cases of beer and forties of booze were set up in party rooms or carried from scene to scene.
I was paralyzed. I had always known that I was an outsider, an onlooker, a misfit, but I hadn’t realized just how shy I was. When I went to parties, I would end up standing back near the wall, unable to bring myself to talk to anyone. It was easier to just not go.
So I threw myself into swimming and movies.
UVic, then and now, had a fantastic film society, with a different movie—often a double feature—screening at the Cinecenta in the student union building every night. I went to everything in those early days: documentaries, foreign films, blockbusters on the weekends, and midnight showings of cult favorites. I was there five nights a week, ensconced in my preferred seat dead center in the second row. I’d fill the time before the movie, or in the break between halves of a double feature, scrawling in one of a series of black notebooks that I always carried with me.
The other two evenings of each week I took my lifeguard training. I had been working at the pool in Agassiz for a couple of summers, but it was time to recertify, so I signed up for a class that ran Tuesdays and Thursdays at the campus pool. The demands of the program forced me to swim every night. I’d go to a movie with my bag containing swimsuit, towel, and goggles in hand and head to the pool as soon as the lights came up. Within a couple of weeks I was swimming ten kilometers a night.
Which is how I found myself, on the third Saturday in September, exhausted and spent and flying from endorphins, staggering back to my room.
Second Helmcken. Second door on the right.
I didn’t want to be alone that night. The third weekend in September was the annual Agassiz Fall Fair, the high-water mark of the year for my little town. It was the archetypal country fair, with a midway, and rides, and a craft competition, and the judging of everything from apples to livestock. The barns were always packed, everyone milling past cows and sheep and roosters and rabbits. Most years, four of my mother’s siblings turned up for the fair, and occasionally the full set of seven Eddys would congregate around the table at my grandmother’s for dinner.
All of a sudden I was one of those Island relatives, cut off by the strait. All of a sudden all that distance that I had fought so hard for seemed like a really bad idea. I was lonesome, and a long way from home.
I tossed my swim stuff into my room and did something I had never done: I went to the lounge between the second and third floors.
There were three people in the small room: two girls who were just leaving, dressed for a party, and a girl sitting astride the padded bench closest to the TV, which was playing the Miss America Pageant.
I took a place on the couch—about as far as I could get from the girl on the bench and still be in the same room—and tried to watch the show.
The girl on the bench was beautiful. Long dark hair, in curls, falling to the top of her back. Brown eyes. Glasses. A gorgeous smile. Shapely.
But what drew my eye was that she never stopped moving. It wasn’t hyperactivity, just a sense of barely contained momentum. She was like quicksilver, the way it never seems to rest, the way it shimmers, the way it shines.
Then she asked if I had been swimming. Her voice in the otherwise empty room startled me. After the previous few weeks, I was getting used to invisibility.
I suspect I stammered. I suspect that in the long history of opening lines, mine was well toward the bottom of the ranking.
And then she asked if she could brush my hair.
What would you have done?
I raced down to my room and returned in seconds with my hairbrush, sure that she would be gone by the time I got back.
But she wasn’t.
She shimmied back on the bench, leaving me room in front of her.
We talked as she brushed my long hair. She was gentle. Never pulled. We mocked the pageant, and I told her about the fall fair, and asked about her classes, and she told me about where she grew up, and when she handed me back the hairbrush, she said, “I’m Cori.”
We spent hours that night parceling out tiny bits of ourselves, devouring what we were offered. When she told me that she had been a dancer, that she had done jazz and ballet until her knees went, everything made sense. A line had been going through my head since I first saw her, that sinuous, endless movement.
“She’s got the heart of a ballerina.”12.
Cori and I became friends after that. One of the guys on my floor had a ridiculous crush on her, and she was spending a lot of time in his room down the hall, so I started gravitating that way as well. We’d hang out, talking about Monty Python, throwing darts, each of us trying to show the other up. Cori was dating a guy I had an English class with. And I befriended her next-door neighbor, two floors up.
Being friends with Cori, pursuing her in my clumsy, inexperienced way, forced me out of myself. I had to socialize, if I wanted to be around her. Which came with its own cost.
There weren’t many nights I was sober between that October and the following February.13.
One of the nights I was, I met up with Cori in the lounge after my swim. It was mid-October, and I brought my hairbrush.
We spent most of the night sitting there, watching MuchMusic. This was back when the station still showed videos, including a new U2 song (“Desire”), and a live video for Springsteen’s “Tougher Than the Rest” that had been shot a couple of days before the show Peter and I went to in Tacoma.
We stayed up till three or four, talking and laughing, pressed close on the couch, waiting for those songs. And after we had seen both, neither of us wanted to leave.
That was when I knew there was something. I wasn’t sure what, but something.
Cori’s suitor, my floor brother, was still in hot pursuit, and as Halloween approached, he ramped things up drastically: he asked her to a movie. A Friday midnight horror movie at Cinecenta, something from the Nightmare on Elm Street oeuvre, if memory serves.
In response, I asked Cori’s neighbor to the movie. She surprisingly upped the ante, suggesting—no, stating outright—that after the movie I could spend the night with her.
The four of us went off, a happy little incestuous ménage. We watched the movie, and we walked back to our building. Cori disappeared into the room at the end of the hall, and my date went upstairs first. I want to say that she used the phrase “slip into something more comfortable,” but that can’t possibly be true.
I went to brush my teeth. And when I came back from the bathroom, vibrating with thoughts of the night ahead (at last, all the co
llegiate sex I had been expecting was going to happen!), Cori was waiting in my room.
I never did make it upstairs.14.
We lay on my bed, talking. That was it. At about four, we crawled under the covers, and held each other as we went to sleep.
That’s the night we consider our anniversary.
The next night was the Halloween dance, which coincided15 with a floor crawl hosted by our sister floor, fourth Ravenhill. If you haven’t experienced a floor crawl, picture twelve residence rooms, all with their doors open. Picture each room with a different drink for its guests, ranging from the banal (Lucky Lager, official beer of Vancouver Island) to the ridiculous.
The latter, that night, was a yukaflux. That spelling might be wrong, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s the principle that counts: sliced fruit by the pound soaked in a cooler full of overproof liquor, a near-toxic stew of vodka, rum, gin, whatever these underage girls could get their hands on. Topped off, just before the guests arrived, with champagne and fruit juice.
The drink was effective enough. It was the fruit that killed me.
Cori and I had decided, over breakfast that morning, that we would go to the dance that night. It wasn’t a date, it was a foregone conclusion, really, considering.
By the time we got to the dance, though, I could barely walk. I certainly couldn’t see. I remember talking to Cori the next day, telling her what a fantastic time I had had, how I couldn’t believe that they had played Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl” so often.
“They didn’t play it at all,” she said.
“But . . . I must have danced to it, like, fifty times.”
“That,” she deadpanned, “explains a lot.”
It was one of those nights where memory is shaky at best.
I do remember one moment, though: leaning in to her on the dance floor, fearlessly, and kissing her for the first time.
I remember it like it was yesterday.16.
And I remember, with the same clarity, another moment from another drunken night, about a month later.
Walk like a Man Page 11
