Bruce Springsteen turned fifty on September 23; he ought to be as irrelevant as the Rolling Stones. Both, of course, still sell out whatever shows they choose to play—the Rolling Stones, for that matter, are a much bigger draw than Springsteen. Both can count on respectful if not intimidated write-ups, almost all of which contain, first, a few jokes about rockin' in the old folks home, and, second, the writer's surprised conclusion that, yes, they really are as great as they ever were. But no one pretends that a new Rolling Stones tour will have anything new about it beyond props.
Springsteen can still fail. The Rolling Stones can't; they're fixed, their book written, their prophecies behind them, even if some of them, like "Gimmie Shelter," remain so powerful and unstable they can still terrorize your dreams of the future. Springsteen can still want more than he can have. When he looks out on the world, there is a way in which it mocks him today as surely as it did before he ever had a hit.
It's hard to see the looming possibility of failure now, but it is the reason Springsteen still has a career, not merely a marketing strategy. Last summer, after a European tour with a reunited E Street Band, Springsteen put on a fifteen-show homecoming stand at New Jersey's Meadowlands; very little was set. From night to night songs varied not by a few but by a third or more. Backstage at one of the shows, second guitarist Nils Lofgren had to beg off from a conversation "to go practice"; the person he was talking to was dumbfounded. "Practice?" he asked. "You're in the middle of a tour—you do these songs every night!" But Lofgren had added his own steel-guitar part to "Youngstown," a tune from Springsteen's 1995 The Ghost of Tom Joad—or he was trying to. "I don't think," Lofgren said of the notoriously difficult table of pedals and strings, "that I've achieved intimacy with the instrument."
Springsteen himself is still attempting to achieve intimacy with his most resistant songs. "Youngstown" is one of them, and almost Springsteen's dare to himself and his listeners: just the latest of his Oh-theFactory-Is-Closing-Down songs, a shtick, the kind of ideological tic Springsteen can spin into a tune in his sleep. This is where failure comes in: Sorry, Bruce, you really can't squeeze any more blood from this stone.
It's almost scary how fast Springsteen wins the game. The melody on which he hangs his corny factory song is so deep, so suggestive, it instantly hints at stories that have never been told—that cannot be exhausted, even if the place he's singing about has been used up.
A single factory becomes a cauldron where the truths and lies of a whole nation were boiled, all across its history. The modal shifts of the oldest white American music—the dips from fatalism to a glimpse of a different world and back to a certainty that nothing will ever change—carry the song forward; the old-time fiddle that bends the melody like a tree branch reminds you that the person singing this song is two hundred years old, and simply means to tell you what he's seen. You can remember that the Appalachian melody is no accident, that as the nineteenth century yielded to the twentieth the factories in Ohio were filled by dispossessed mountain people from West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, who brought their music with them—you can remember that, but you have no need to know it to understand everything in the song.
The song carries a sense of people deprived of what they know best, carrying their culture like clothes on their backs; when the clothes are discarded, people who need them even more put them on. Think of it this way: For a little girl, an unraveling blue sweater someone else didn't want can become a talisman, a piece of magic. She will know there is a story behind it, even if she can never know what the story is; thus she will make up her own story, her own fable. That sense of a receding narrative is what powers "Youngstown"; its engine runs on the energy generated by the past as it disappears. The song opens up; by its words, it is all about war, a more graceful version of Bob Dylan's "With God on Our Side."
That's what they made in Youngstown: armaments, from cannonballs to bombs. But by its music, the song is all about time. The dead trudge through the verses; then they march right out of the song. The sense of finality is so strong you can wonder if the town itself is still on the map. The song closes down with its melody: there is a romance here, a series of possibilities and desires that once could not be gainsaid, but this romance is something you will never really know. You know others once knew it. Springsteen's concerts are full of anthemic celebrations, moments of complete absurdity and adolescent ridiculousness, self-mockery and preaching, camaraderie and lonesomeness. A performance like "Youngstown" can bring great cheers and satisfaction, or it can make a hole in the whole show, a hole so dark it can make you wonder why you're wasting your time at a concert when you could be home reading a book, or driving down a highway without a destination, or jumping off a bridge.
When Springsteen mixes "Youngstown" with the likes of "Darkness on the Edge of Town" and "Hungry Heart," he knows that not all of his songs are equally true. He can perform them so that one makes you doubt the worth of another. Stretched out across three hours, his show is a dramatization of many failures: failures of nerve, of imagination, of trust in himself or his audience. These failures are palpable only because they are highlighted by the many moments in which they are transcended, but they always recur, as likely they will for years to come. In a decade, the songs you cherish most today may be discredited by the person singing them.
Originally published in Interview Magazine, November 1999
I saw the reunion tour three times. They definitely had an A list setlist for first nights and single dates and I caught three A shows. That's why the residency was generally better for song selection. Bruce initially disliked signs requesting songs (especially "Rosalita") but eventually embraced them including taking a minute to run down the chord changes to Darkness outtake "One Way Street" before delivering its lone live outing in Germany in 2013.
Excellent piece, Greil, typically. Especially your side trip into southern Appalachia.