I didn’t discover Bruce Springsteen’s music so much as I inherited it. It’s been there for as long as I can remember, around my grandmother’s house, in my uncle’s car, the intermittent soundtrack of my life.
Many of you know the story already: my biological father has never been present in my life and my mother worked for an airline, so her mother looked after me for a lot of my childhood. Mum married my stepfather when I was about four, and when I speak of ‘my parents’, it’s those two I’m referring to. While I know now that the role of stepparent is a difficult one to occupy, I would venture that so too is the role of stepchild. But my stepdad and I have both softened over time and these days I’ll sing his praises to anyone who asks. He is kind, considerate, generous, dependable. The first time J met my parents, he remarked to me afterwards what a nice man he thought my stepdad, which made me look at my family with renewed affection.
All of this to say, my stepdad also worked for an airline (and still does, though my understanding of his job has not progressed beyond what I was told at four years old, namely ‘he mends the aeroplanes’) and so for childcare reasons, many of the ‘fun’ bits of parenting fell to my grandmother and my uncle.
Tom taught me to ride a bicycle without stabilisers. He helped with school drop-offs and pick-ups, and took me to friend’s houses and riding lessons. He taught me the pleasure of quick crosswords and the obstinate, temple-aching puzzle of cryptic ones. He passed on his love of Liverpool FC and took me to buy my first guitar. He taught me the importance of silliness: of daft voices and bad impressions and in-jokes that long outlive the memory of what caused them in the first place. We were once in the car on a warm day, waiting at traffic lights with the windows down. Tom sneezed. An unseen workman nearby shouted ‘bless you!’ Tom shouted back ‘thank you!’ Even now, more than 25 years later, we repeat this gruff exchange to each other when one of us sneezes.
My uncle is the biggest Bruce Springsteen fan I know and so I cannot remember a time when Springsteen’s music was not a part of my life. The Born In The USA album, on cassette, was the soundtrack to many of our car journeys when I was small. The clutch of notes that ring out bell-clear throughout the title track must have, by now, threaded their way into my DNA.
‘People think it’s a patriotic, “ra-ra-USA!” sort of song,’ explained my uncle to me when I couldn’t have been more than seven. ‘But if you listen to the words, it’s the opposite of that.’
I duly did listen to the words, understanding few of them, but enough to see his point. Then took great delight in parroting this fact to anyone who’d listen, feeling very clever indeed.
‘God, that says so much about you,’ said J when I recounted this to him recently. ‘You, aged seven, telling people why your opinions on music were correct.’
But as with many things that make up the wallpaper of our childhoods, Springsteen’s music wasn’t something I paid much active attention to. Sure, I listened obediently when Tom played his records, but it was less about the music itself and more just the vehicle for connecting with a father figure. A chosen language for sharing something that lies slightly beyond the capability of words. I hear J and his dad do a similar thing when they start discussing Liverpool’s latest performance within minutes of being reunited; it’s a bit about the football, yes, but it’s more about common ground between generations, an emotional inheritance passed from a father to his child. It’s more about love than anything else.
It was only at 17 that I finally came to Bruce of my own volition. The song that sparked the conversion rarely gets a mention from hardcore Springsteen fans; it doesn’t seem to be a live show staple. It sounds like a lot of the radio rock that cluttered the charts at the time of its release in 2007. If you take your guitar, place a capo on the second fret, and play the most satisfying chord progression there is – E minor, C, G, D – you can pretty much play ‘Radio Nowhere’ in its entirety.
Sometime in the summer of 2012, I was back at my parents’ and tasked with writing my MA dissertation after a fairly miserable nine months of studying a niche branch of linguistics. My uncle called on a Saturday morning. ‘I’ve got a spare ticket for Bruce in Hyde Park this afternoon, my friend can’t make it. Do you want to come?’ And that’s how I ended up seeing Springsteen live for the first time. Tom Morello came onstage for ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’ and that white-hot wailing guitar solo. Paul McCartney joined Springsteen for the last couple of songs of the night and the fact that the sound was cut due to a curfew made the news the following day.
During my later teenage years, I distanced myself from my uncle and my grandparents. Rejected their rural, small-village life, discovered boys and parties and MSN and minor underage drinking. Became scornful of the fact that my uncle never really left home, choosing instead to work on his parents’ farms, then once they retired, moved into bartending jobs, labouring jobs, all sorts, but never one thing for very long. I set my sights on university, in a city far away from the country lanes of Sussex.
All inevitable, yes, but I regret the rage with which I tried to push my family away. We have to reject our families a bit at that age; it’s a vital separation process. But I was a shitty teenager, and I’m sorry for it now.
But we find our way back to those we love, one way or another.
This year, I’ve had plenty of cause to consider what in my life is permanent and what is not. What I’ve inherited from my family and what I do and don’t want to hold on to. J proposed last Christmas (my stepdad was the first to hear the news; the stoic, self-contained Scotsman promptly burst into tears) and we’ve spent the last few months trying to buy a house and plan a wedding. Do not attempt to do these two things at the same time unless you really love sending expensive emails.
A few weeks ago, my uncle called and floated the idea of trying to get tickets for one of Bruce Springsteen’s Wembley dates in July. I agonised over it, put off by extortionate ticket prices for stadium shows but conscious that Bruce and many of the E Street Band are now in their seventies, so how many more tours will there be? Tom and I had the same conversation last year, decided we couldn’t justify spending the money, then regretted it immensely. ‘I think we should go for it. I’ll cover the tickets,’ said Tom this time. ‘You book them and I’ll put the money in your account.’
I spent the next fortnight or so doing a whistle-stop tour through Springsteen’s extensive back catalogue, starting where it began for me with Born In The USA. And I hadn’t realised how much of that record has just been dormant in my memory for nearly 30 years, lying in wait for me to recognise it, and return.
Even at a young age, I’d clocked the basic mood of many of the songs on that album. The melancholy of ‘Bobby Jean’, the despair in ‘Downbound Train’, the contradictory cheery resignation of ‘I’m Goin’ Down’ – but of course they land differently when I listen to them now. I can’t articulate how much I like or love these songs; like all genetic inheritances, they are simply facts of my life, immovable architecture of an internal cityscape. My feelings don’t really come into it.
Encouraged by this musical homecoming of sorts, I ploughed on – into the restlessness of ‘Lucky Town’, the ache of ‘Darkness On The Edge of Town’, the hymn-like hope-amid-despair of ‘The Promised Land’. Some songs I’d known and loved all along: ‘The Rising’, ‘Lonesome Day’, ‘Growin’ Up’. And of course, that paean to desire, that feverish howl of lust, ‘Because The Night’. How I love that song. How I love finally understanding it.
On the other hand, there were songs of which I knew their titles because my uncle had repeatedly recommended them, but I’d never got around to hearing them. One such track is ‘Adam Raised A Cain’: like most of my favourite songs, its prevailing mood is fury. It’s all screeching guitars and minor chords. I love its sense of reckoning, the roar of it.
It took me multiple listens over several days to fully realise that it’s a song about fathers.
At the end of July, my uncle and I went to Wembley and sat way up in the stands, off to the side of the stage. The evening sun sliced through the gap under the stadium roof, flooding one side of my vision with gold and adding a whisper of divinity to the occasion. When Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Lego-sized before us, arrived onstage and threw out the riff of ‘Lonesome Day’, I failed to hold back a couple of tears.
It was of course an incredible gig; life-affirming in the way only live music can be. Tom and I stood side by side, hollering along to ‘Adam Raised A Cain’, ‘The Promised Land’, ‘Hungry Heart’, ‘Darlington County’, ‘The River’, all of it. Late in the show, on the home stretch of the big hits, the lights came up for ‘Born In The USA’ and bathed the whole crowd in silver. As those opening notes rang out bell-clear, something decades-old stirred in my blood.
The only thing I could think all the way home was ‘I hope that wasn’t the last tour. God, I hope we get to do this again.’
My relationship with my uncle is not as effortless as it once was, and so we make the effort it requires. We are both older; he moves slower than he used to, a lifetime of manual labour having worn out his back. When we got back to my flat in Brighton, he asked me for painkillers before he went to bed. ‘Have you got any reading material you can spare? I probably won’t sleep straight away.’ I left him with the latest edition of The New Statesman.
In the morning, after he’d gone, I noticed he’d done the quick crossword and made a start on the cryptic one.
This is such a beautiful piece of writing and I can relate to it so personally! I also inherited a love of Springsteen from the generation before me – specifically my mam. His music was always there in the background as a kid, but it wasn’t until my mid-late teens that I really discovered him for myself. And he is so good on relationships with parents, especially fathers. Adam Raised a Cain has always struck a chord with me. I idolised my dad as a teen, but now… not so much! Our relationship is now very strained, and part of that comes from his own relationship with his dad, who died aged 50 when my dad was about 14. He’s basically lived since then assuming anything after 50 is “a bonus” which is source of some really problematic behaviours. It makes me try to act very differently to him as regards my relationship with my son – I have no desire for him to “inherit the sins, inherit the flames”!
I also saw Bruce for the first time around 2012 and for the third time last summer in Hyde Park. Similarly, I simply can’t justify three figure sums for any gig, no matter how much I love them, but I got incredibly lucky and was gifted a pair of unwanted tickets (I did make a charitable donation out of gratitude). My sister and I went and I was in tears at numerous points. My favourite song of his shifts over the years (I think The River was what clicked with me when I “discovered” him properly). Last summer it was Prove it All Night and I was in raptures when he played that.
I’d really recommend Springsteen’s autobiography if you haven’t already read it. It is incredibly introspective, especially about his relationship with his own father and what made them both the way they are.
Your family sound wonderful!
Found this to be very affecting thank you Kirsten.