Bruce Springsteen has sung about the poor, the hopeless, the lost souls on the road; if he doesn’t emancipate us, he’ll rock our world, writes Richard Pithouse
When Bruce Springsteen steps on to the stage in Cape Town and Johannesburg next year, it’ll be his first performance in South Africa; it won’t be his first connection to the country.
In 1985, he and an impressive collection of musicians ranging from Miles Davis to Bob Dylan and the exiled South African band the Malopoets were part of the project organised by Steven van Zandt, the original guitarist in his E Street Band, to boycott Sun City. And in 1988, Springsteen and artists such as Tracy Chapman and Youssou N’Dour, played in Harare as part of an Amnesty International tour in support of human rights.
The path from the cultural strictures of apartheid South Africa to musical redemption in Harare had been opened in 1980 when a few hundred South Africans made it to Bob Marley’s performance at the celebration of Zimbabwean independence. That concert descended into chaos when people trying to get in to the stadium were teargassed. Then some of Marley’s staff had to leave town in a hurry after being accused of making Marley bigger than Mugabe. The bootleg recording, which begins with Marley shouting “Zimbabwe” while a party apparatchik counters with “Zanu”, makes for bittersweet listening.
In 1988, more than 15 000 visas were processed at Beitbridge before the show. Springsteen was still riding the international success of his Born in the USA album released in June 1984. That night, in Harare, he introduced his version of War, first performed by the Temptations but made famous by Edwin Star, by speaking about conscription. He spoke of the experience of his generation who were conscripted into the Vietnam War.
In the bootleg recording he can be heard saying: “I guess there’s a lot of young guys out there who are conscription age for the South African army. I guess there can’t be much worse than living in a society that’s at war with itself under a government at war with its own people and being required to support that government.
“And I just wanna say to all young South Africans I do not envy your position. My prayers are with the young men here that you can use your hearts and voices in the struggle for the dignity and freedom of all the African people, because whether it’s the systematic apartheid of South Africa or the economic apartheid of my own country, where we segregate our underclass in ghettos of all the major cities, there can’t be no peace without justice and where there is apartheid, systematic or economic, there is no justice and where there is no justice, there is only war.”
Springsteen was not born into an easy life. His family was poor and his father depressive and violent. But seeing Elvis Presley on TV at the age of seven, and his mother’s delight at the spectacle, bought an explosion of life, colour and possibility into a grey childhood.
A few years on, TV brought another decisive moment in Springsteen’s artistic awakening. This time it was John Ford’s cinematic interpretation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Seeing this film began an enduring connection to the history of popular American radicalism.
Springsteen’s political vision has become clearer, but even at the beginning it was rooted in empathy for humanity and an ability to take the drama of ordinary lives seriously.
His early work speaks of the simple desire to escape working-class life and a future in the factories where “Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes / And you just better believe, boy, somebody’s gonna get hurt tonight”. This is most famously captured in Born to Run, the title track of his 1975 breakthrough album: “We gotta get out while we’re young / cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run”.
Just three years later in The Promise, a song originally recorded for his much darker but equally brilliant 1978 album, Darkness on the Edge of Town, but only released in 2010, a character who wins some money in a drag race sings: “Inside I felt like I was carrying / The broken spirits of all the other ones who lost”. Springsteen has felt the same way.
This sense of obligation to those who weren’t able to get out is at the heart of his artistic vision. He has not let the hard-won optimism of his early work stand. In a song written for the bars on the Jersey Shore, The Seaside Bar Song, and first recorded in 1973 for his second album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, he sang, in a standard trope: “The highway is alive tonight”. On his sublime 1995 album, he added: “But nobody’s kiddin’ nobody about where it goes / I’m sittin’ down here in the campfire light / Searchin’ for the ghost of Tom Joad.”
Here the highway is not alive with young men who want to take a fast car away from the factory; it’s alive with people sleeping under bridges as they wander the country in search of what work they can find.
In last year’s Wrecking Ball, Springsteen’s response to the capture of American society by money and power, he moves from lament to resistance.
Our society is moving towards an increasingly crass conflation of consumerism and liberation and an increasingly brutal separation between rich and poor. Our highways are alive with burning tyres. Springsteen’s extraordinary body of work will bring us a lot more than just a three-hour jol.
* Pithouse teaches politics at Rhodes University. This article first appeared on the SA Civil Society Information Service website.
** The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Newspapers
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band perform at the Rock in Rio Music Festival in Rio de Janeiro in September. Springsteen has successfully married rock and politics, so hes bound to appeal wherever theres hardship. Picture: Reuters
Source: Pretoria News Weekend