Fever (20 page)

Springsteen gathered his pop forefathers around him deliberately: from Presley to Phil Spector, girl groups to Dylan, R&B covers to frat rock, his appetite for rock history was at least as big as his ambition. His marathon concerts, lasting upwards of four and half hours, demanded the physical stamina of Tina Turner (finally, a white guy to rival Tina) and earned him the nickname previously reserved for James Brown: “the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business.” He shuffled his song sets constantly, so that even if you were hearing familiar material, every night had a different emotional tone. And he loved pulling out surprises—unreleased material, oddball covers, new arrangements of songs everybody thought they knew. Through this ongoing process of re-creating his material night after night, he built an empire, and it was an empire of participation: at any given concert, audiences felt as though they were helping celebrate everything rock could be.

Drenched in sweat and sporting a grin that summed up and goaded the crowd's rapture even further, Springsteen stretched out his original material way past expectations, then piled on the encores, diagrams of rock history that visited the Motor City (the Mitch Ryder medley with “Devil with a Blue Dress On”/“Good Golly Miss Molly”), Buddy Holly (“Rave On” and “Oh Boy”), Bob Dylan (“I Want You,” “Chimes of Freedom”), the Rolling Stones (“Street Fighting Man”), Eddie Cochran (“Summertime Blues”), the Bobby Fuller Four (“I Fought the Law”), and, later on, his own stuff, reconfigured (acoustic renditions of “Adam Raised a Cain,” “Born in the U.S.A.,” “Murder Incorporated,” “Born to Run,” and “No Surrender”). Other references were hidden in plain sight: “She's the One” raided Bo Diddley's “Mona” beat for new meaning (and onstage often quoted directly from its source), the drums-only last verse to “Prove It All Night” reworked the rhythmic spine of the Ronettes' “Be My Baby”; “Downbound Train” and “Promised Land” borrowed titles from Chuck Berry; and numbers like “Give the Girl a Kiss,” “Rendezvous,” “Ricky Wants a Man of Her Own,” “Out on the Street,” and “Two Hearts” had bona fide girl-group magnetism.

Springsteen's covers were legion, generous, and the few he released boasted great taste: Jimmy Cliff's “Trapped,” Eddie Floyd's “Raise Your Hand,” Tom Waits's “Jersey Girl,” and, onstage during his 1984–85 world-tour leap to mega-platinum status, Presley himself (“Follow That Dream” and “Can't Help Falling in Love,” which he sang to his audience, his band, and the larger rock tradition all at once). When compared to Presley's, Springsteen's manhood makes sense as the redeemed celebrity—the kid who worshiped the King from afar, imagined himself a similar mainstream audience, and fashioned a far-sighted career that Presley himself might have admired.

In his early days, other models subsumed this Presley identification. Springsteen was one of thousands of young songwriters dubbed “the new Dylan,” which he didn't live down until
Born to Run.
But the nickname followed him, and his writing bears an enlightening contrast to Dylan's. Both are prolific, often to a fault; both are “pure” performers, at their best in front of an audience; and both conceive and interpret their material as organic, songs that evolve new meanings through time.

Springsteen is more of a romantic than Dylan, has a lot more fun with his girlfriends, and pitches woo in classic fashion. Yet unlike Dylan, Springsteen has no large-canvas portraits of women (no “Visions of Johanna” or “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” no “Sarah”) and counts few female characters among his stable of street hoods, corner Joes, loners, grifters, serial killers, and hard-luck dreamers. This may be why Springsteen is perceived as more sympathetic to women, whereas the men in Dylan's songs seem to be protecting themselves from powerful, all-consuming women.

Early on, it was easy to categorize Dylan as a folksinger, until he started making rock albums and taunted the Newport Folk Festival with his electric guitar in 1965. Seven years later, Springsteen's audition for Columbia's John Hammond, the man who discovered Dylan, was completely acoustic, and his first album was a compromise between Hammond's received notions about Springsteen's “acoustic” sensibility and the shows Springsteen was putting on in Asbury Park with a full band. On his 1973 debut,
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.,
he sounded like a street busker miscast as a blues shouter. Several songs from this record became emblematic (“Growin' Up,” “Spirits in the Night,” and “Blinded by the Light,” which became an unlikely hit for the Manfred Mann Earth Band), but only after he had worked on the arrangements. For all its reach, it was a thin-sounding debut.

By later that same year, on
The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle,
Springsteen had gained authority in the studio, and projected far more confidence as a personality. Suddenly, he was the Jersey scruff as rock's aesthetic Trojan horse, and that blues influence rang out as one of his most promising assets. Side 1 had trademark aw-shucks Jersey humor and shaggy-dog understatement (the boardwalk accordion in “Sandy,” the tuba in “Wild Billy's Circus Story”), but side 2 displayed a songwriter-conceptualist worthy of his unlikely pretensions: “Rosalita” became a prophetic closing number, an ambitious climax that worked like a center of whoop-it-up gravity to all his other songs in concert, and “New York City Serenade,”
Shuffle
's finale, had a resignation that belied his then twenty-four years. Between the cut-loose freedom of the former and the twilight soul of the latter, Springsteen's ambition had both sweep and drive, the kind that gave credibility to his growing live reputation. This was not the new Dylan, but a new
kind
of Dylan, one with different formal pretensions who delighted in his audience.

And like Dylan, Springsteen figured himself a song stylist, at ease mentioning Roy Orbison in the opening stanza of “Thunder Road,” copping song titles from Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons (“Walk Like a Man”), Martha and the Vandellas (“Racing in the Street,” after “Dancing in the Street”), the Shangri-Las (“Out in the Street” echoes “Out in the Streets”), even Cole Porter (“Dancing in the Dark”). Only Springsteen was good enough at inveigling guitar licks (“Cadillac Ranch,” “Ramrod,” “You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch),” “Darlington County,” and “Glory Days”) to finish off Chuck Berry's “Johnny B. Goode” saga with “Bye Bye Johnny.” But not many reviewers noticed how male-oriented Springsteen's themes were, even though by 1984's breakout
Born in the U.S.A.,
when he wrote female-name songs (“Sandy,” “Rosalita,” “Candy's Room,” “Bobby Jean,” and “Kitty's Back”), they were less about women and more about the men who worshiped them. By comparison, Bob Dylan wrote songs about women that actually detailed feminine qualities, like “She Belongs to Me,” “Love Minus Zero (No Limit),” or “Just Like a Woman,” which rubbed putdown up against reverence.

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Even with this strong Dylan identification, the Presley overtones in Springsteen's sound were unmistakable. Springsteen and Presley shared humble beginnings, enormous ambition, and a belief rooted in common sense that there was more to life than what their fathers held out for them. To Elvis, Vernon Presley came second to his mother, Gladys, and the father-son conflict seemed sublimated, over-shadowed by his intense desire to please his mother's expectations. Of course, Gladys died when Presley was twenty-three, on sabbatical from his singing career, serving in the army. This misguided sense of duty during peacetime was a key reason fans like John Lennon lost faith in Presley's rebelliousness. Listening to Springsteen's “The Promise” or “Independence Day,” it's intriguing to imagine what a subject Vernon, Gladys's bumbling husband, would have made for Elvis.

In Presley's persona, the father figure was large by omission. If Elvis was rock's original teenager on the loose, hungry for experience, wildly expressive in ways his father never dreamt of, Springsteen wrote about father-son tension with convulsive energy. His coming-of-age songs conveyed unusual specificity and ardor, from how love can deliver a believer from small-town worldviews to big-time freedoms (“Thunder Road”), then on to middle-age limitations and compromise (“Glory Days”), to making peace with life's limits (“My Hometown”).

Where Presley's explosive early persona was steeped in the throes of adolescence, Springsteen's characters went more explicitly from boy to man. Presley the truck driver mowed down John Wayne's stoic cowboy with sexual panache; Springsteen was the rock 'n' roll low-rider who turned his humble Jersey-coast bar-band lifestyle into a mindset, a way of growing up, of finding “the key to the universe in the engine of an old parked car.” One critic hooted that Springsteen had done the impossible by “making New Jersey fashionable.” Springsteen himself went from outsized, radical talent with a gift for winning the mainstream to tireless performer, Rock 'n' Roll Mensch, and champion of thankless causes: the outraged son who became a proud father, the 4-F exemption who championed Vietnam vets, the working-class scruff who got famous enough to write $10,000 checks to local food banks as his show swung through town.

Early on, Springsteen's father-son quarrel was an all-consuming theme; his identification and conflict with his father was like a riptide that challenged even his considerable force of personality. In many ways, Presley became emblematic of what Springsteen's characters' struggled with in his songs: as a musical father figure, Presley represented everything and nothing Springsteen wanted to be. Like his songs' characters, Springsteen was passionate about his hero worship, and his illusions fell hard when his hard-fought success delivered him untold wealth. He was as determined to live up to the promise of Presley's fame as he was to avoid the Fat Elvis booby trap.

By the time Springsteen released
Born to Run
in 1975, Presley was a fading icon, a hollow Las Vegas version of himself, stripped of his own power and celebrated for what he once was, not what he had become. So every time Springsteen sang a Presley tribute, the under song was “I refuse to turn out like Elvis.” Even his “Viva Las Vegas,” on a Presley tribute called
The Last Temptation of Elvis
from 1990, has a wariness about it—as though he just can't put himself comfortably in his hero's shoes.

On one hand, Springsteen's fondness for Elvis was linked to his o'ervaulting ambition, the courage and stamina it took to tour your pants off, push your band to its limits, and win over an audience that was skeptical of critical hype one venue at a time, without a string of Top 40 hits to keep your label happy. And since Springsteen viewed rock 'n' roll as nothing less than a path to salvation, perhaps he, like Presley, could find a way out of himself and the world he had grown up in if he believed enough in the music's promises. For Springsteen, and a lot of his listeners, rock became a way to conquer the world at least figuratively—if you heeded your father's mistakes.

Throughout the first part of his career, Springsteen wrestled publicly with his father's ghost, writing songs about the arguments, the broken promises, the passionate detachment; he composed and acted out the first rock catalog of “separation anxiety” songs in “The Promise,” “Adam Raised a Cain,” “The River,” “My Father's House,” and “Independence Day,” among many others. Two of these numbers are emblematic: “Born to Run” was his early anthem of cutting loose; “Walk Like a Man” became his own answer song, addressed to his father as he walked down the aisle (“I remember how rough your hand felt on mine/On my wedding day…”).

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The other figures in Springsteen's pantheon of heroes help explain why his critics groped for superlatives. “Born to Run” was a high-torque production, a wide-eyed tribute to Phil Spector's baroque soundscapes; it's still a classic-sounding record about the renewal of classic ideas. “It sounded like a '57 Chevy running on melted-down Crystals records,” wrote Greil Marcus. And his epic live shows gave off a girl-group joy even though he never specialized in girl-group material. His affection for girl-group sounds dramatized that genre's appeal beyond female listeners—men were not only writing and producing a lot of those records, they were buying them, and buying into girl-group fantasies about what kind of men they could be. Phil Spector's girl-group records had toughness, a female directness about sexuality that men found instantly appealing, and it's not hard to imagine Springsteen producing a great Ronnie Spector track himself. He brought her onstage to sing “Be My Baby” during the 1978
Darkness
tour; the E Street Band backed her up on Billy Joel's “Say Goodbye to Hollywood” in 1978 on a compilation called
Cleveland Rocks,
and you could hear them thinking “Be My Baby” along with Joel. Springsteen's most famous female song encore was “When You Walk in the Room,” Jackie DeShannon's 1964 track.

By the time Springsteen's epic shows began to dominate rock's live experience in the mid-seventies, the rock stage had become a place where men acted out everything about maleness, from Jagger on down, almost because there was no other medium where such contradictions could be convincingly portrayed. Rock's most heroic men (Springsteen, John Lennon, Neil Young, Pete Townshend, Van Morrison, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop) did something far more embracing than strut a peacock's walk with phallic guitars. The fact that Springsteen and Townshend fronted two of the best live acts in rock history tells you how male camaraderie found its voice onstage, and perhaps how the Beatles' retirement from performing seemed to undo their early esprit de corps. Intriguingly, amidst Springsteen's vast array of covers, he's done Morrison's “Brown-Eyed Girl” and Young's “Down by the River,” but has yet to do a Townshend number.