Fever (22 page)

“Adam Raised a Cain” portrays the guilt-ridden son as victim and hero, and his guitar pounds away in the track's center like a jack-hammer of dread. “Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain/Now he walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame…” The flame-throwing guitar solo that Springsteen sets loose in the middle of it all, leaping up and down his fret board, repeating his licks in vitriolic octaves, blueprints a father-son squabble. In concert, the demons Springsteen exorcised in this number were inexplicably complicated, touching on the certainty of his respect for a father who would fight tooth and nail with his son, combined with a fear of turning into a father who disappointed him in some essential way.

*   *   *

As Springsteen's writing developed and his audience grew, his portraits of men became less typified by class and locale, and more rattled by universal complexities: love's disappointments, middle age's compromises, and the uneasy victory of realizing your dreams only to find more interior challenges.

In 1980, if it took enormous ambition to release a double album, it took superhuman ambition to do so as your fifth release, as Springsteen did. But it was clear from his previous tour, where he debuted songs like “Independence Day” and “The Promise,” that Springsteen may have been as prolific as Dylan (although a good deal more consistent). And the court battle with Appel had eaten up a lot of recording time; there was a backlog of songs in the can, and Springsteen was ready to make good on his early promise.

The River
cloaks
Darkness
themes in the heroic spirit of
Born to Run.
A larger picture emerges, as though his stories all link up in a chain of self-understanding. “I'm a Rocker,” “Cadillac Ranch,” “The Ties That Bind,” “Two Hearts Are Better Than One,” and “You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)” all fork over exhilaration with a forgiving tone that makes the
Darkness
songs seem less all-consuming, less final. The yammer juxtaposes the death-sentence pregnancy of “The River” (“The judge put it all to rest…”), but finally all the cars and partying become fraught with mortality. “Cadillac Ranch” fuses these two: it's a chicken race with death built on a thundering Chuck Berry riff. Even self-respecting people sometimes find themselves driving a “Stolen Car,” and the twilight finale, “Wreck on the Highway,” presents a body coughed up from a merciless joyride.

True to form, the politics on
Nebraska
(1982) are all built around characters and their situations, their short fuses confronting pitiless judges, to the point where almost any intimate act is fraught with political consequence. The men in these songs walk through mayhem as though it's just a condition of having an X chromosome; they don't ask for any explanations, and they don't expect any. Being born a man is curse enough; explanation would only coarsen the effect. In the title song, the first-person narrator sets off on a killing spree with his girlfriend, his beloved shotgun at the ready. But after he's explained himself (“Sir I guess there's just a meanness in this world…”), he insists on having his girl on his lap for his electrocution, as if she could make even death sweeter. In “My Father's House,” a man dreams that he searches through a forest of fog to find the source of his pain, which turns out to be his father's house. When he finally gets to the porch, a “woman I didn't recognize” tells him: “I'm sorry, son, but no one by that that name lives here anymore.” Onstage, Springsteen explained its troublesome precept: it's as if he thought by returning to the house, the source of his anxiety, he could correct something terrible that had once happened inside.

A decent highway cop's bond with his black sheep of a brother in “Highway Patrolman” becomes a rubric, something beyond understanding. “I got a brother named Frankie, and Frankie ain't no good,” Joe tells us, as he reminisces about dancing with his wife and his brother; “I catch him when he's drifting/Like any brother would/Man turns his back on his family, and he just ain't no good.” The final act of mercy—the patrolman watching his brother, a killer, flee to Canada—has poetry in it: Joe turns his back on his brother to let him cross the border. If good men flee toward death in these cars, crooked men flee towards freedom. Springsteen lets these characters have their own loose ends, without imposing any artificial morals on them. Structurally, he's working within a very small frame, but the echoes of American style are enormous: many of these songs sound like they could have been written at any time during the past fifty or sixty years; these
Nebraska
characters sound one part Guthrie, one part Hank Williams, and one part curse—the booby prize to the American game show they're all contestants on.

*   *   *

Born in the U.S.A.
(1981), which was assembled from many sessions involving
Nebraska
's material with band arrangements, takes men out into a grand epic of duty and revenge, high spirits and defeat; this is manhood as a hard-fought battle of expectations, both inside and outside, that leads only to bitter irony. The opening number (which quickly became the opening song of the tour's shows) catches a Vietnam vet riding a claustrophobic gerbil wheel, running fast in place to keep up with all the pride and duty he felt compelled to act out, and all the inexplicable loss that followed. As Jonathan Shay writes in
Achilles in Vietnam,
most vets bonded deeply with somebody in the field, only to lose him and return with survivor guilt. It's a peculiar guilt, not easily confided, and it has a strangely masculine quality about it: it's the bond of people who live in the mind-numbing anticipation of death, have quite literally saved one another's lives more than a few times, and feel the loss of their colleague (protector, stand-in, brother) with an unspeakable intensity.

Of course, Ronald Reagan cynically quoted from “Born in the U.S.A.” during the 1984 campaign, and its jingoistic chorus (for those unwilling to check a lyric sheet) rang out patriotic for many newer fans. With the band lashing at its irreducible hook, and Weinberg taking the impromptu solo of a lifetime, the song's long, fevered coda must have been a puzzle for those not willing to listen harder. Up until this point, Springsteen had been long on characters and situations but short on irony. With this one song, Springsteen turned in an irony so glaring it doesn't just insinuate, it heaves. To hear this refrain literally is to have hearing trouble. So the meanings that boomeranged off this blistering track led to misinterpretation on a wider scale than anything else Springsteen ever wrote. After its humiliating government bailout, Chrysler offered Springsteen $12 million to use the hook for car ads, which Springsteen steadfastly refused; they simply got a sound-alike to sing “Born in America.”

“Shut Out the Light,” a B-side, is even more graphic about posttraumatic stress syndrome, and the existential loneliness of the soldier turned civilian. The fraternal “Bobby Jean” and “No Surrender” were farewells to Springsteen's longtime partner, guitarist Miami Steve Van Zandt (who left to go solo). Where the title song repudiated how the military “makes a man out of you,” with a first-person narrative about “going to kill the yellow man” and returning home a beaten-down vet on the bottom rung of society's totem pole, the album went out with “My Hometown,” a song about a family leaving a boarded-up town for jobs that foreshadowed the family themes of
Tunnel of Love.
In these numbers, manhood was at the mercy of all the social forces you could think of: home, government, employment, even the road trip to “Darlington County” that ended with “Wayne handcuffed to the bumper of a state trooper's Ford.” It took daring and valiance to play out these scenarios onstage, to express manhood as a soldier might grope for meaning under constant fire. During one memorable “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” set piece, Springsteen slid across the stage into saxist Clarence Clemons's arms to deliver a lengthy on-the-lips kiss. The sheer joy it expressed overcame both the mano-a-mano and white-on-black taboos. That it all pushed Springsteen's sales multiplatinum, and delivered him to the next tier of celebrity, only seemed to make his manhood that much more courageous.

*   *   *

Springsteen was never associated with a single girlfriend for very long, and by the time he finished his eighteen-month world tour in 1985, he was thirty-five. In the weeks before the European leg, he met and married actress Julianne Phillips. He had perfected the theme of relationships that bite the dust despite sincere affection (“Racing in the Street”), but marriage had mostly provided a handle for peppy rockers (“Two Hearts”) or weepy ballads (“I Wanna Marry You”). Then, quite suddenly, he found himself married, still touring, and posed with perhaps his greatest professional challenge: how to follow up
Born in the U.S.A.,
which had sold over ten million units. Since ambition is one of his great themes, and one of the key pillars of Springsteen's identification as a man, this challenge was as big as it could get.

So
Tunnel of Love
(1987) raised a few eyebrows: this man didn't sound happily married. The men on
Tunnel of Love
are confused in a more self-consciously poetic way than before. Romantic partners don't provide fulfillment, much less promise redemption, the way they seem to on
The River
and even
Nebraska.
By
Tunnel of Love,
with its dashed-hopes title song built around a potentially commonplace image (Jersey-shore carnivals), the turmoil of intimacy is drawn in ever more intricate emotional spirals. While its themes are romantic,
Tunnel of Love
is a shadow record of male anxiety—both the vulnerabilities of entanglement and the certainty of loneliness.

Tunnel of Love
makes postfeminist manhood seem like a heroic pursuit, where happiness, self-confidence, and a sense of ease inside one's own skin become triumphant. The narratives exploit evasion, omission, and cautionary tale. The married protagonist of “One Step Up” goes barhopping to distract himself from his wife. A song like “Tougher Than the Rest” sets boastful, even macho lyrics set to hesitant, rueful music. The song is a marvel of imaginative release, and it turns the male code on its head: how the impulse to “stay strong” and “in command” can backfire, while expressing vulnerability leads to its own subtle strengths; how what women seem attracted to contrasts with what they respond to; and how these messages come hurtling out at men to trip them up just as they find the courage to make their move:

Some girls they want a handsome Dan

Or some good-lookin' Joe on their arm

Some girls like a sweet-talkin' Romeo

Maybe your other boyfriends

Couldn't pass the test

Well if you're rough and ready for love

Honey I'm tougher than the rest …

That last couplet inverts the typical male come-on to signify a resolve that has nothing to do with physical strength. If anything, the broad, undulating beat and ominous synthesizers hint at an internal resolve; the word “tough” here transcends machismo to become emotional muscle flexed through humility.

In “All That Heaven Will Allow,” a guy heads down to a local bar to meet his flame, forgets his wallet “back home in [his] working pants,” and has to sweet-talk the bouncer as an ironic prelude to his rendezvous (the sly subtext: do bouncers hear more sweet talk than the ladies?). The song blurs a common romantic notion: that no matter how small a man might feel, romantic love elevates his stature beyond what any male code could. At the same time, it disposes of the beautiful-loser myth:

Now some may wanna die young man

Young and gloriously

Get it straight now mister

Hey buddy that ain't me

Cause I got something on my mind

That sets me straight and walkin' proud

And I want all the time

All that heaven will allow …

There are moments here when Springsteen expresses such a casual ease with manhood, such a gentle self-deprecation, that it's hard to imagine him as the singer who wrote “Adam Raised a Cain” or “Independence Day,” songs that pitched the boy-acting-like-a-man goals way out of reach. When Bill Horton loses his virginity in “Cautious Man,” it's less a rite of passage than just another huge illusion suddenly deflated, the punch line to a joke he spent a lifetime fretting about (“He sat back and laughed at what had happened to him…”). This is the character with two tattoos on his hands, one that says “Love,” the other “Fear”—an image taken from the Robert Mitchum film
The Night of the Hunter
(1955) (where the tattoos say “Love” and “Hate”), echoed in the Clash song “Death or Glory.” But the resemblance ends there. After settling down, taking a wife and building a home, he wakes one night from a terrible dream, calling his wife's name: “She lay breathing beside him in a peaceful sleep, a thousand miles away.” He goes down to the highway, miffed at how alone he can feel with his wife lying next to him, but “he doesn't see anything but road…”

If grandiosity has an opposite, it's the sound of this track, which inverts John Wayne's code: a typical man comes of age to make peace with his nightmares by seeing the road for what it is—paved gravel. So many myths, so many American archetypes surround “the road” that being “a man of the road” doesn't require an explanation. Horton is a salesman or a rig driver or a construction man, always on the move. But that final image of him looking down a road and seeing pavement is all too cunning: suddenly, the road stands for anything but being still within oneself.