Public faces, private lives. Public lies, and the truths we only tell in the night, when only one person is listening.
It’s true for all of us.
IT’S ABOUT a four-hour drive from the Peace Arch border crossing to Portland, Oregon, on a good day. Add in the drive time from the ferry terminal, and the wait at the border, and you’re looking at five plus.
It was late afternoon, August. High summer, and the heat felt like a wall coming.
It was less than two weeks into the 2002 tour for The Rising, and Greg and I were doing back-to-back shows, Portland and Tacoma. Springsteen Inc. was trying something new with this tour: a general admission floor, with a fenced-off area in front of the stage for the first three hundred or so fans in line.
We were determined to be in the pit, and that meant taking an extra day off work to get there in time.
The early part of the drive passed with the usual banalities: work, writing, reports from earlier shows on the tour, expectations from the setlist, plans for our day in the lineup.
We stopped for dinner, and when we came out, it was getting dark. Back in the car, we put on Roses and Broken Hearts, a bootleg from the Tunnel of Love tour.
It was going to be that kind of night. A Circle night.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell how these things begin.8
Was it going out for pie at the Lakeview Diner in Harrison when I was home from university for weekends?
Or was it those afternoons on the beach, with our broken hearts and our woman-hating music?
Was it those dawn mornings, picking strawberries in neighboring rows?
Was it before even that, back in home ec, talking about jerking off and heavy metal?
Where did the Circle of Men begin?
Ultimately, I suppose it doesn’t matter. What matters is that it still exists, this magic Circle.
It exists over pie or breakfast at three am in roadside diners, throats raw following a show.
It exists in dive bars in strange cities, chain smoking and drinking crappy beer before passing out in a cheap hotel room.
And it exists on the highway in the middle of the night, lights from oncoming cars flashing through the windshield, Springsteen coming out of the stereo, voices hushed and no eye contact being made.
The Circle of Men is a term Greg thought of, and it comes with its own rules. Chief among them is that nothing leaves the Circle: what is talked about there stays there.9
(I’m adhering to that, by the way. Greg has read these pages, and anything you see here has been released willingly from the Circle. No confidences will have been violated, no lines crossed.)10
I’ve discovered over the years that I don’t really do casual acquaintances. I don’t have so-so friends. I recognize that this is an issue—I need more guy friends I can just hang out with, shoot the shit with over a couple of beers.11
That’s not the way it works for me, though. I gravitate toward intense friendships. Greg and Peter and me? Nothing is off the table. No truth too hard, no secret too deep.
When you’ve sat beside a friend as his heart is breaking, as he cries, listening to “Point Blank,” there’s nothing casual about that. When you’ve split a pair of earphones so you can both listen to a bootleg of Springsteen singing “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” because you are both doing just that—in a sort of teenage doomed frenzy—there’s nothing casual about that.
And when you spend four hours in a car at night, hurtling down a highway at seventy miles an hour, telling secrets? There’s nothing casual about that.
It started off casually enough, though: we talked about the show we were listening to, and I gave Greg the expected hard time about not coming to Tacoma with Peter and me. He replied with the usual comment about the unused ticket from the 1992 tour.
When we got to “All That Heaven Will Allow,” though, the conversation turned more personal.
On the Tunnel of Love tour, Springsteen ditched many of his standard numbers (no “Badlands,” no “Thunder Road,” no “The Promised Land”), and largely dispensed with the rambling, seemingly spontaneous song introductions that had characterized previous tours.
He did have a park bench, though.
“All That Heaven Will Allow” is a nakedly romantic song,12 an ode to love and to the power of a good relationship to brighten even the worst day. On the tour, it was introduced every night by a bit of theatre. Springsteen and Clemons would take a seat on a park bench on stage and talk about, well, girls.
When the introduction came on that night in the car with Greg, our conversation turned, naturally enough, to our own “park bench” days: those summers at the beach.
“So what are your five biggest regrets?” he asked me at one point.
I thought for a moment. “I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done,” I said, staring out at the lights and the darkness. “The things I didn’t do . . .”
“Jenn,” he said, correctly, with the certainty reserved for old friends.
“What about you?”
He had a list.
When he was done, it was my turn to ask a question. “What are the best things you’ve done?”
He talked about going to grad school, moving out of Vancouver into the hinterland to get teaching experience. He talked about his daughters.
The night continued like that, swapping questions back and forth.
What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?
If you could do one thing over?
What was your worst moment?
We talked about everything. Nothing was off the table. We talked about the frustrations of the day to day, about what it was like being a father, what had surprised us and what hadn’t. We talked about our sex lives, how things were different now that there were babies in the house, how things were after pregnancy and childbirth. We were completely candid, completely open.
Except . . . I wasn’t.
It’s strange. Greg knows more about me than just about anyone in the world, but I froze. He knows every dirty thing I’ve done, every shame, every failing, and he has never, not once, judged or scorned.
But I couldn’t tell him how I was feeling.
I couldn’t tell him how scared I was about being a father, how uncertain. Cori seemed to do everything so naturally, and the other new fathers we knew seemed to take to it so effortlessly. I stumbled at every turn. It wasn’t just the practicalities, I had no idea how to be. How could I get out of my own head enough to really connect with the little boy who was looking to me? Could I really put myself aside in favor of someone else?
And it wasn’t just fatherhood. I spent most of my days completely overwhelmed. There was always too much work, and never enough money. Never enough time, and always too much to do. I’d turned miserable and I was pretty much sad all the time.
But how could I say that to Greg? Just the thought of it made me feel so weak, so inferior. I felt like such a failure so much of the time—saying it out loud would only add to it.
So the questions continued.
A lot of the answers we knew each other well enough to anticipate; some of our questions were asked specifically to elicit those responses. And there were some surprises.
I hadn’t realized, for example, how much Greg had suffered over his height, the amount of torment he had taken at school about being the big man. He had always seemed so impervious. It was something we had never talked about, and the realization crushed me.
There was something different about Greg that night, some chip in the veneer.
“Are you happy?” I asked, when it was my turn. I kept my eyes focused on the road ahead. Deliberately.
He answered slowly. He talked about his daughters again, and his job, and his prospects. He talked about coaching senior girls basketball, about giving something back. He talked about Agassiz, and the new house, and his plans for the yard.
He didn’t really answer the question.
Greg started dating Lisa shortly after I started dating
Cori. They got married about a year after we did.
I didn’t need him to answer the question in the car that night; I had known the answer for years.13
I glanced over at him quickly. He was hunched down a bit, peering through the windshield, his hands tight around the wheel.
“So, Cori,” he said. “If you met her today, would you marry her again?”
I thought of the sadness I was feeling, all the doubt, the deep certainty of my failure as a father and a man.
“Yes,” I said.
I knew better than to ask the question in return.
“I think that’s our exit,” I said, pointing at the sign overhanging the highway. “Coming up on the right.”
So when you look at me
you better look hard and look twice
Is that me baby
or just a brilliant disguise?
1. Actually, a series of guitars. This is one thing I don’t get about Springsteen. I’ve watched Richard Thompson—arguably one of the finest guitar players on the planet— perform a two-hour solo acoustic show using one guitar for the whole thing. So why is it necessary for Springsteen to change guitars for every song? I know about different tunings, different tones, all of that, but it seems excessive. And irksome. On a tangential guitar note: there’s a moment in most shows with the band when, standing at the front of the stage, he’ll take his guitar off and throw it back towards the drum kit—without turning or looking. It’s caught, every time, by his guitar tech. The move is spectacular, and always gets a cheer, but you have to wonder: how shitty would it feel to not make that catch some night?
2. He cops to the strangeness of the idea of discussing his creative process by describing it as “an iffy proposition.” He continues by saying, “Talking about music is like talking about sex. Can you describe it? Are you supposed to?”
3. The appearance on Storytellers was ostensibly to promote the 2005 Devils & Dust album.
4. This raises a question, of course: how much of this candidness about his two faces was, in fact, candor, and how much of it was artifice and construct? The same can be asked, of course, about any sort of disclosive art, from confessional poetry to self-portraits to memoirs written in the guise of liner notes.
5. William Wordsworth, for the record.
6. Which, let’s face it, is probably far larger and nicer than any home most of us are ever likely to visit.
7. There’s a great moment in Peter Weir’s film Dead Poets Society when Robin Williams, playing a renegade English teacher, asks a class of private school boys why men write poetry. He dismisses the usual pieties, before answering his own question: “To woo women.” One can’t deny the insight.
8. One of my favorite lines, from anywhere, comes early in the musical The Fantasticks: “You wonder how these things begin,” the narrator, El Gallo, says of the two young lovers. To me, that’s as magical as “Once upon a time,” and more evocative.
9. It occurs to me that the Circle of Men is the sensitive-guy version of Fight Club, a non-hippie version of that mid-nineties Iron John crap.
10. Peter doesn’t figure into this chapter, but he’s also part of the Circle. For the two of us, it’s usually parsing our lives over cigars in downtown Toronto, usually after a night of drinking, usually before I have to catch a plane.
11. This is where a tolerance for sports would come in handy: hanging out to watch the game is the perfect casual-guy-friend thing to do. Sadly? I still don’t give a fuck about hockey, and apparently my derision comes through. There is, however, a men’s book club that I’ve visited on occasion. I have a standing invitation to join; as soon as this book is done, I think I might do that.
12. With all of the darkness of Tunnel of Love, it’s easy to overlook that there are some beautiful, romantic songs on the album as well. “All that Heaven Will Allow” and “Tougher Than the Rest” are two of the finest loves songs Springsteen has ever written.
13. Greg got married for the second time in November 2010. He married Wendy, a lovely woman who he’s worked with for years, and the affection and passion between them is pervasive and strong. She loves his daughters, and they love her. I was in Toronto on book tour, so I couldn’t be there, but Peter and I had a couple of drinks in their honor over the course of the evening.
The Rising
Album:The Rising
Released: July 30, 2002
Recorded: January–March 2002
THE LEGEND1 goes like this:
The attacks on the World Trade Center, September 11, 2001, were very close to Bruce Springsteen, both geographically and emotionally. Monmouth County, where Springsteen and Scialfa live with their family on a farm near Colts Neck, is close enough to New York City to be home to many people employed in the financial industry in lower Manhattan. The Al Qaeda attacks were devastating to the community, many areas of which had clear views across to Manhattan, to the columns of smoke where the towers had once stood. Of the 341 firefighters who died that day, 158 were from Monmouth County.
Following the attacks, Springsteen did what he apparently does when troubled: he drove around. And as he was driving, the story goes, a car pulled up next to him at a light, and a window was unrolled. “Bruce,” someone is said to have called, “We need you now.”
Within weeks, Springsteen had the band back in the studio, and early the next summer his first album of new material in seven years, The Rising, hit record-store shelves on a wave of hype the likes of which Springsteen’s career hadn’t seen since the glory days of Born in the U.S.A.
It’s a great story, but was the prototypical man of the people actually summoned by the people to resume his work, to heal them with his words?
We’ll never know.
But we do know, since it’s been reported and verified, that in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Springsteen spent a lot of time reading the obituaries of those who had died, especially those in the rescue services. In those first painful weeks after the attacks, an odd thing would sometimes happen. A grieving widow would be at home, and the phone would ring, and a familiar voice would say, “This is Bruce Springsteen,” offering words of comfort for their loss. A number of the reported calls lasted more than an hour. Springsteen also provided new versions of several of his songs, recorded for individual heroes, to be played at their funerals.
He did what he could to help soothe the pain of his community in those horrifying first weeks.2
And in the months after that, he wrote furiously. He brought the band back together for their first studio album in eighteen years,3 and over a period of less than a month they recorded at least fifteen new songs.
The Rising was unlike anything he and the band had ever done. Part of that was by design. Springsteen had broken up the band after the Tunnel of Love tour because, among other reasons, he wanted to pursue different sounds. The band’s triumphant reunion tour of 1999–2000, while it was many, many impressive things, in other ways served to codify the band’s strengths as excesses. To remedy this, Springsteen now changed his approach. For the first time in decades, the band worked with an outside producer, Brendan O’Brien, who had previously worked with Pearl Jam and Rage Against the Machine. They recorded on the fly, at O’Brien’s Atlanta studio, rather than taking up residency at one of their traditional haunts. Springsteen brought in violinist Soozie Tyrell to freshen the sound. He experimented with different musical styles, including the Sufi inflections of “Worlds Apart,” which featured qaawali musician Asif Ali Khan and his group.
More striking than the sonic differences were some of the approaches Springsteen took to the songs. Although a number of the pieces pre-date September 11, 2001, the songs written after the attacks reflect not only an immersion in the events, but also a deeply personal understanding of their effect on the people around him.
It is impossible to hear songs like “You’re Missing” (which details a day of loss, from a morning normal in every way save the absence of a partner, to the children in the evening asking if their pa
rent will be coming home) or the rollicking “Mary’s Place” (which details a house party so suffused in loss that one assumes it’s a wake) and not think of the survivors with whom Springsteen spent so much time. He’s once again chronicling his community, but this time with a personal connection; these aren’t the existential figures that populated Darkness on the Edge of Town. Yet he also pushes beyond that personal experience. You might expect “Into the Fire,” an uplifting near-hymn about being inspired by heroism, from Springsteen, but few people were prepared for either “Paradise,” which sympathetically follows a young suicide bomber, or “Empty Sky,” which deals with both the desire for vengeance and the futility of acting upon that desire.
And then there was “The Rising” itself.
In many ways, the album’s title track is the most typical “Springsteen song” on the record.4 It’s got a rousing sing-along chorus, it’s got great show-opening power, it’s bigger than life.
It’s also transcendent. As should be the case for an album’s title song, it’s here that many of the record’s themes and concerns coalesce. “The Rising” is the song most explicitly about 9/11, following a rescue worker to the scene of a disaster and up a smoke-filled staircase, but it never succumbs to the details. Instead of tragedy, it’s a song of ascension, a glorious moment of . . . well, rising. With its bells, its cross, and its “wheels of fire,” with its Mary and its dream of life, it is the most explicitly spiritual song Springsteen has ever written, in the guise of one of his most topical.
On the ensuing tour, opening with “The Rising,” a song about the vitality of a “dream of life,” and closing every night with “Land of Hope and Dreams,” a gospel-tinged train song about inclusiveness and a golden promised land into which all will be welcomed, Springsteen seemed to be deliberately creating, every night, a celebration of life, not only its bright spots but also its darkness, and its questions.
Walk like a Man Page 14
