Bruce Springsteen was the first artist I saw in concert—in 1976, when I was 15. He had recently graced the covers of Time and Newsweek, and journalist Jon Landau, who would later become his manager, had dubbed him “the future of rock ‘n’ roll.” His early Dylan-esque reveries of streetwise characters on the margins, songs like “Sandy” and “Spirit in the Night,” felt lived-in and alive, and evoked charm and scruff. By the time he came out with 1975’s Born to Run, his music’s ever-bigger sound propelled working-class frustration and disillusionment into a high-octane overdrive of expansive dreams and open-road odysseys.

My frustrations were different: I was a lonely, awkward, self-absorbed, diffident suburban teenager, aching for a way out of myself. For me, Springsteen’s songs unlocked a liminal sweet spot between joy and fury that quickened my teenage rebellion fantasies and affirmed my angst-ridden realities.

The second time I saw Springsteen was at Madison Square Garden, in that transitory summer between high school graduation and freshman orientation. By then he was graduating too, from intimate concert spaces to cavernous ones, from Next Big Thing to bona fide rock star.

He brought a new vulnerability to his first-person confessions and laments. When he performed “Adam Raised a Cain”—a lightning-bolt-at-first-listen for me—you could picture him on his knees, pounding the floor, letting out a Brando-esque wail. He wasn’t just telling you about his fraught relationship with his father; this was primal-scream therapy. He was willing, in a room full of tens of thousands of strangers, to offer a sonic squall from the soul. This forced me to sit and listen. A catharsis of that visceral magnitude can power-drive you into silent submission. His concerts were epic transformations, doing what good art does.

As I grew—physically, emotionally, intellectually—I expanded my heart and mind to other music, other sounds, other affirmations. I hosted four different shows as a DJ at my college radio station: punk/new wave, jazz, classical, and the graveyard shift, the most freeform playground of all. I seldom, if ever, played Bruce. My musical palette broadened and deepened. His hadn’t. And while I would forever be in his debt for taking me to new places, I had moved on.

Like old friends from previous chapters in your narrative, some artists are of a certain time and place. The joyful fury and furious joy that fueled Bruce’s music lost its immediate relevance for me. But several decades later, Bruce returned—and I took notice.

In 2016, exactly 40 years after I stood in his audience at my very first concert, Springsteen published his memoir, Born to Run. The following year, as a sort of companion piece, he created and performed his one-man show, Springsteen on Broadway, which would later stream on Netflix. These works revealed to me an artist who had foraged through the attics, crawl spaces, and basements of his mind and reconstituted a life. They reminded me of the best aspects of a reunion—as a barometer of personal trajectory and an opportunity for rediscovery and recontextualization, where old friends reimagine friendships. Such became my reconnection with Bruce in my late-middle age—from a mutual place of wisdom and grace.

Media coverage around Born to Run homed in on Bruce’s description of his long battle with depression. Critics found it ironic that one who put everything he had into a four-hour offering of roof-raising exaltation would suffer from an illness that can lock you in a deep, dark world, where, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “It is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.” But as someone who lives with depression, I understood. Depression is a monster; sometimes that monster is Shrek and sometimes it’s Godzilla. You pray for the Shrek days, but you prepare for the Godzilla days, deploying every weapon in your arsenal to keep Godzilla off your trail. And if that means, for Bruce, a scorching guitar solo, a larynx-ripping roar, a band that amplifies your pain, and if it takes four hours, night after night, city after city, then you do it.

With Springsteen on Broadway, Bruce mined his music for a deeper exploration into his process and evolution as an artist, not so much performing the songs we’ve all known for so long but reimagining them to suit the sensibilities of a then-sexegenarian who has seen and felt and lived.

It’s just him, on guitar and piano, with occasional accompaniment from his wife, Patti Scialfa, in a 960-seat Broadway theater. This was a next frontier for Springsteen, where he could center his prowess as a storyteller, scribe, and poet, and reimagine his oeuvre as an evening-length narrative.

Full disclosure: I watched Springsteen on Broadway 3,000 miles from Broadway, in the comfort of my living room in Los Angeles, on Netflix. Just as reading a book is a solo act and a deeply personal interchange between author and reader, watching Springsteen on Broadway let me engage in Bruce’s psychological/emotional/artistic journey. No need for dancing in the dark. Just processing on my own.

This manifestation of vulnerability, of personal excavation, inspired a new appreciation, a different connection—to an artist in service of and in full allegiance to his art, who is still searching, still seeking, but through different means, and who is willing to interrogate the mysteries and wonders of his long odyssey, and all that he created and shared along the way.

We all have chapters in our ongoing narratives that we would rather leave closed and unexamined. Perhaps we’d even want to excise them altogether. But Bruce, in this late-period exhumation, was more than willing to go there. While my teenage fandom was cause for escape, exultation, and empowerment, my late-middle-aged appreciation has inspired me to reexamine my own back pages for deeper truths about where I’ve been, and where I’m going.

The rock icon who once had me in his thrall is today a greater inspiration as a human, endowed with foibles and grace, darkness and light, demons and angels, in equal measure.

The post What Bruce Springsteen Taught Me Then—And Teaches Me Now appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The only music I remember listening to (not counting church songs, oh god) before my family arrived in Los Angeles when I was 10, was Julio Iglesias, ABBA, and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. This was all from my time in Paraguay. Don’t ask me about music from Korea. I have zero recollection of my life in my hometown of Seoul. I was 5 when we left.

When my family came to L.A. in 1980, our first home was in Koreatown, a six-unit apartment just off Olympic and Wilton Place. Our next-door neighbor had a daughter my age whom I was madly in love with from fifth grade all through junior high. But that’s a whole different story I would like to not get into right now, OK? Anyway … her big brother had an AC/DC record, Highway to Hell, that blew my mind. (The only reason AC/DC is not on this playlist is because I rarely think of a single track, just memories of sitting at Margaret’s place listening to Highway to Hell and then Back in Black.) Soon after, I was exposed to R&B and hip-hop through the Black kids who were the first (and only, for a while) people to accept me.

When I sat down to make this playlist, memories like these came to me surprisingly fast. And soon after, the feelings. Ohhhh, the feelings.

It makes sense once you think of it, but it’s so easy to forget that there is a soundtrack to your life. Just like in the movies, specific songs are played in varying volumes to accompany the moments you’re living through, to accent them.

I just didn’t know until I wrote this that the audience was me.

“Doo Wa Ditty” by ZAPP

No matter where I am or what I’m doing, no song instantly takes me back to Los Angeles better than this song by ZAPP. It might be the first song I fell in love with, but I’m not sure. Because 1982, two years after my family arrived in L.A., had some songs for me. It is the first time a song made me want to dance.

“You Dropped a Bomb on Me” by the GAP Band

Another ’82 classic. This song always makes me think of my older brother because it might be the last pop song that he and I ever bonded over. He loved this song, which looking back now, seems almost like fiction (he’s a classical music aficionado). I miss this time when he and I would sit in front of the stereo in our apartment on Gramercy Drive in Koreatown, our minds blowing each and every time the song came on.

“Nasty Girl” by Vanity 6

Um … sex. Pure sex. To me at this time (1982 is like “Another one!”), it was a wake-up song, except for parts of me that I didn’t even know existed. Vanity’s voice, way beyond even her physical beauty, made me feel like I was entering a different world, one that I’d never experienced before. You could call it the American Dream, the U.S., life in the West, the Global North, Hollywood, puberty, sexual awakening, possibility … Yes, I think possibility.

“Bizarre Love Triangle” by New Order

High school. ’80s. Parties. Drogas. This is a song that is the center of my playlist called “80s 5AM COKE MUSIC” because in the soundtrack of you walking out of a West L.A. apartment at 5 a.m., those Pyrus calleryana spewing jizz into the atmosphere, your body about to murder you for all the Bartles & Jaymes you used to wash down the drugs, your heart broken by, well, you don’t even remember exactly what or who did that to you.

“Feel Good Hit of the Summer” by Queens of the Stone Age

Driving around with my childhood friend George in his black IROC convertible until we hit Torrance for no reason. We weren’t even talking. But we understood our lives were about to take drastic turns and we wouldn’t see each other much anymore—a friendship that began with a fight by the handball courts at Wilton Place Elementary in Koreatown, continued through his crack years, his shooting incident, his Boston exile and subsequent Boston prison term, his return to L.A. and his opening of a successful sushi restaurant in Palmdale.

“Walking Away” by Craig David

I couldn’t stop singing this song in the summer of 2001, and it continued into summer of 2002 as I was getting ready to leave L.A. for N.Y. It was for grad school but I didn’t think I was coming back. There was, as Mr. David says, too much trouble in my life in L.A. and all I wanted to do was run away and disappear. The canceled engagement. The post-canceled-engagement-self-destructive Eurotrash Era. The Why I Wouldn’t Date You List that I was given over dinner at Nobu when I asked a woman I was in love with why she wouldn’t date me. But …

“Ship Song” by Nick Cave

… I came back to L.A. in 2004, with Judeth, who I met at NYU. And we got married in DTLA, on the rooftop of the Oviatt Building on Olive Street. It was a Sunday night because it was cheaper to rent on Sundays. And street parking was free. This song was our first dance. Therefore, this song is ours. Nobody else can have it.

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Given that history, it’s hard to argue with Gregg Allman, who once asserted that the phrase “Southern Rock” was redundant. He would have known. Along with brother Duane and the rest of the Allman Brothers Band, the Nashville-born and Florida-raised performer conjured up the peculiarly regional beast two decades after Turner and his band visited Memphis. Formed in Jacksonville, Florida and based in Macon, Georgia, birthplace of Little Richard and Otis Redding, the Allman Brothers Band crosswired blues and country sources with longform guitar improvisations that waxed ecstatic and sublime, sharing the quests of jazz visionaries like John Coltrane and Bay Area jug-band-gone-psychonauts the Grateful Dead. (Duane Allman wasn’t called “Sky Dog” for nothing.)

Gregg Allman’s death in May, at age 69, which followed by a few months the suicide of founding drummer Butch Trucks, marked the definitive end of a band that had officially called it quits in 2014. Its career had been troubled from early on, shadowed by the separate motorcycle-accident deaths of Duane and bassist Berry Oakley just a year apart in 1971 and ’72. Yet the Allman Brothers Band enjoyed a stunning resurgence in its latter years and went out on top with a climactic string of shows in 2014 at New York’s Beacon Theatre.

At once the alpha and the omega of what people thought of as “Southern Rock,” the Allmans seeded generations of bands from their essential DNA. They also shared status as Jacksonville’s greatest rock band with some scruffy fellow travelers: Lynyrd Skynyrd. The group was named in reference to a disliked high school gym teacher, and quickly established itself as something much more than a soulful boogie outfit, led by frontman Ronnie Van Zant.

Lynyrd Skynyrd passed into legend when a 1977 plane crash claimed the lives of the singer and two other musicians, among others. The band’s most pointed song on Southern identity, not to mention its most quoted, was “Sweet Home Alabama,” which amid verses that long for the state’s blue skies and celebrate its musical heritage, punched back at folk-singer diatribes—such as Neil Young’s sardonic “Southern Man”—and patronizing Northern hypocrites. “Well, I hope Neil Young will remember,” Van Zant sang, “A southern man don’t need him around anyhow.”

Gregg Allman, who passed away earlier this year, and his brother Duane were namesakes of the band that seeded generations Southern rockers from their essential DNA. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In another verse that took a swipe at what we’d now call coastal elites, the song criticized those passing judgment on the South when they had problems of their own. But Van Zant also acknowledges the troubling popularity of Alabama governor George Wallace, a white supremacist who swore during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, “segregation today … segregation tomorrow … segregation forever.”

Although the song’s greasy guitar licks and strutting rhythm can make it sound ready for a bumper sticker, its perspective is nuanced. It doesn’t endorse Wallace, but it also doesn’t brook unsolicited blue-state judgement:

In Birmingham they love the Gov’nor, boo-boo-boo
Now we all did what we could do
Now Watergate does not bother me
Does your conscience bother you, tell the truth

Like the Allman camp, Van Zant supported former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential race. He also sang songs that endorsed gun control (“Saturday Night Special”) and reached across the Deep South’s racial divide (“The Ballad of Curtis Loew’). The performer happened to be a huge Neil Young fan, and vice-versa—it’s said that the Canadian penned the smoldering ballad “Powderfinger” for the band—although Skynyrd nonetheless unfurled the Confederate flag as a concert prop.

Van Zant’s defiant, prideful stance was readily adopted—without the political complexities—by a new wave of country acts that took over Nashville in the 1980s. At the same time, Southern college bands, liberated by punk and post-punk, championed a choppier, anti-virtuosic, and art-infected aesthetic that spread like kudzu in places like Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Athens, Georgia, led by groups like the dBs and R.E.M—and even, heck, the palliative, tailgate-party pop of Hootie and the Blowfish.

R.E.M.’s liberal activism is well-known, but its songs were usually too slippery for political interpretation, its regional perspective more abstract and allusive, evidenced by album covers that pictured old railway trestles or the Biblical hallucinations of folk-art savant Rev. Howard Finster, or a nod to history in titles like “Fables of the Reconstruction,” the band’s third studio album, released in 1985.

Contemporary country music, heralded by strapping suburban cowboys like Garth Brooks and Travis Tritt, more than compensated for the abdication of six-string pyrotechnics and Dixie-fried attitude, pumping up the volume as they stormed the arena circuit, where so-called “Bro Country” continues to rule today.

Those separate strains weren’t as polarized as they seemed, though. When I lived in Atlanta, from the late 1980s through the ’90s, something new was incubating in the music bars around Little Five Points and in the low-rent shotgun shacks of Cabbagetown (a raw-edged neighborhood cast into decline by the closing of the mammoth Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill in 1977). A loosely connected music scene emerged that had generous elbow room for honky-tonkers, punk-rockers, drag performers, and avant-garde noisemakers.

My friend and fellow Atlanta journalist Bob Townsend coined a name for it: The Redneck Underground. The label stuck best to brash performance artist Deacon Lunchbox, a burly poet who somehow crossed Charles Bukowski’s scabrous candor with New South progressive politics as he verbally assaulted icons of the old order—all while sporting a bra, brandishing a chainsaw and, for self-accompaniment, whacking a hammer on a torpedo shell.

In his song “Lewis Grizzard I’m Calling You Out,” Deacon (AKA Timothy Tyson Ruttenber), took on Grizzard, the popular Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist and author of such unreconstructed Southern humor collections as Elvis Is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself. “You’re a knee-jerk, myopic, supercilious, half-baked, neo-closet-white-supremist [sic], mixed-drink-swilling, country club Reaganite, petit-bourgeois, woman-bashing, beach-music-listening, pork-barrel, good ol’ boy, homophobic [expletive].”

That Deacon hollered such epithets in any number of venues only a few minutes’ drive from The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, is a detail that underscores the significance of a message delivered as over-the-top humor.

Deacon died tragically young, at age 41, in a 1992 car accident. But his subversive, cantankerous spirit abided. His way of being a working class white man in the contemporary South embraced a history and sense of place while also acknowledging its social ills and racist past (and present). As an artist, he was scarcely alone in this. It was an important evolutionary moment in the music, one that would take up the legacy of bands like the Allmans and Skynyrd as a mythic wellspring.

Elvis Presley, son of Tupelo, Mississippi, “whose hip-shaking synthesis of blues, gospel, hillbilly, and country music changed American popular culture forever.” Photo courtesy of Ian Burt/Flickr.

The Drive-By Truckers were right there with Deacon. Part of an Athens scene that included jam bands (Widespread Panic) and idiosyncratic songwriters (Vic Chesnutt), the group would have been distinctive for the juxtaposition in its name alone—but it also had three guitarists and as many songwriters.

The band was co-founded by Alabama college pals Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood, whose father David Hood is the bassist in the fabled Muscle Shoals studio band The Swampers—celebrated by name by none other than Ronnie Van Zant in “Sweet Home Alabama.” Hood and his bandmates brought it all back home in their 2001 album “Southern Rock Opera,” whose 20 songs explored the legend of Lynyrd Skynyrd, while also tangling with the contradictions of Southern history.

Amid swaggering guitars, his voice hoarse and impassioned, Hood identifies a fundamental principle on “The Southern Thing.”

You think I’m dumb, maybe not too bright
You wonder how I sleep at night
Proud of the glory, stare down the shame
Duality of the southern thing.

Eight albums later, the Truckers continue to roll, avatars of a recombinant, critically aware kind of Southern Rock whose leading artists include the former Trucker Jason Isbell and Lee Bains III & the Glory Fires, as well as gritty, bluesy, powerhouse African-American artists like guitarist-vocalist Brittany Howard of the Alabama Shakes and guitarist Benjamin Booker.

Bains and his group, based in Atlanta and Birmingham, foreground their concerns in their 2014 sophomore release, a punning, landmark album called “Dereconstructed.” Its music combines the protest-anthem fury of The Clash with an unflinching narrative focus, as Bains struggles to reclaim Southern identity on his own terms, facing down old ghosts still holding fast to daylight. “Down here, we still hoist that old flag, watch it twist and flap in the wind,” he sings; “the way it did over the smacking lips and cracking whips of white men selling black men.” The song “Flags,” as does much of Bains’s music, reckons with the nightmare of Southern history in ways at once intimate and sweeping. He’s bound by blood to a place, but he doesn’t have to sit pretty:

Senior year, you could go deaf from all the talk of terrorists and Muslim fundamentalists
And I thought it strange in a town where so-called believers blew up women’s clinics we had the gall to act so offended.

When Bains played at the Word of South festival in my hometown of Tallahassee, Florida, last year, he used the occasion to partner with the writer and Southern culture scholar John T. Edge. Together, they presented a blazing historical work called “Lester and Donald,” with Edge reading and Bains singing-speaking-shouting about Lester Maddox, Georgia governor from 1967 to 1971, and pickaxe-wielding segregationist, and parallels with the rhetoric and agenda of then-GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump. The performance was at once spellbinding and so crackling with garage-rock energy you could mosh to it.

Far from becoming a cliché, or a pop culture footnote, Southern Rock has right now found its surest voice—and it isn’t about to shut up.

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The songs—sometimes called “standards”—came out of Broadway shows, Hollywood musicals, and small warren-like offices in a few Times Square office buildings, known collectively as Tin Pan Alley. It’s commonly agreed that they represent the pinnacle of American popular music, but it’s a little more difficult to pinpoint their common characteristics. The composer Jule Styne, who came on the scene in the 1940s, once said great popular songs had to be “melodically simple and harmonically attractive.”

These songs meet those requirements, and extend even further. They’re sophisticated (in more than one sense of the word). They’re constructed with superior craftsmanship and, in some cases, remarkable innovation and artistry. The jazz pianist Bill Charlap described a great pop song this way: “It has an innate sense of structure. There are rests, points of emphasis, and overall balance and taste. It’s so pliable, and very American.” The best songs of the era have lyrics that rise to the occasion and are wedded to the melody.

In the late 1940s and early ’50s, there was a widespread sense that the once powerful flow of great songs had slowed to a trickle. The great jazz bands that brought the songs to the masses were breaking up, and stepping into the breach were singers—Perry Como, Doris Day, Eddie Fisher, Teresa Brewer, and others—who mostly offered simple ditties and sentimental ballads. Hollywood had pretty much stopped making musicals. Some great tunes were still coming out of Broadway, but there were fewer shows, and they tended to concentrate more on theme and character than on stand-alone songs. And Tin Pan Alley (or so it seemed to older songwriters) was turning out inane novelty numbers and hillbilly hokum.

These trends seemed to reach a head in 1953. The smash hit of the year—number one on the charts for eight consecutive weeks—was a simplistic and infantile jingle whose refrain was, “How much is that doggie in the window?” The song was written by a Tin Pan Alley veteran named Bob Merrill who specialized in novelty songs, many of them vaguely regional or “ethnic.” There was one called “If I Knew You Were Comin’ (I’d’ve Baked a Cake),” another called “Feet Up (Pat Him on the Po-Po),” and another, “Oooh, Bang, Jiggily Jang.” The following year, his geographically puzzling “Mambo Italiano” would become a hit for Rosemary Clooney.

Note that at this point, Elvis Presley had not yet stepped into the Sun Records recording studio in Memphis, and the term “rock and roll” would have drawn a blank look from most Americans. So it wasn’t rock that was doing a number on the Great American Songbook. But what was it? The transition was so obvious, so troubling, and so mystifying to old-line songwriters that in 1953, 34 of them sued the radio networks and the major record companies for $150 million. They alleged a conspiracy to keep their classic songs from being heard.

There was no conspiracy; after wending its way through the courts for 18 years, the suit was dismissed. What was in fact occurring was a sea change in taste, and an opening-up of American pop music. As great as the Great American Songbook was, its preeminence during the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s meant that a whole range of other sounds wasn’t getting wide exposure. In particular, records by African- Americans and by white musicians who created what would later be classified as “country music”—then it was called “hillbilly”—barely ever aired on national radio, and thus didn’t sell in substantial numbers. Of course, Great American Songbook composers like George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, and Cole Porter were greatly influenced by African-American jazz. In the late ’40s, a variety of factors, including the Great Migration of African Americans to Northern and Midwestern cities, and the increased power and prominence of local radio stations and the “deejays” who spun records on them, started to open things up.

It was a time of intriguing hybrids. Consider some of the other number-one records of the era:

• “Good Night Irene,” written by the black singer Lead Belly, and performed by the folk group The Weavers (known for their leftist politics).
• The country song “Slippin’ Around,” a duet by pop singer Margaret Whiting and singing cowboy Jimmy Wakely.
• “Cold, Cold Heart,” composed by Alabama honky-tonker Hank Williams and performed by Tony Bennett, an Italian-American tenor from Queens, New York.
• “Nature Boy,” former jazz pianist Nat “King” Cole’s rendition of a ballad by a New York City-born mystic who called himself eden ahbez.
• “The Tennessee Waltz,” performed by Oklahoman Patti Page and written by a Milwaukee-born polka musician who was born Julius Frank Kuczynski and reinvented himself as country songwriter and bandleader Pee Wee King.

Not to belabor the point, but these tunes were a very different animal than the Great American Songbook, both in their homespun, unsophisticated subject matter and their simple music. “Good Night Irene” has three chords, and “Tennessee Waltz” has four. The tune some people consider to be the greatest in the Songbook, “All the Things You Are” (music by Kern, lyrics by Hammerstein), modulates key four times. In one section (I quote from the website Jazz Standards), “The melody lands on G sharp, the third of the underlying chord of E. Then, by moving one note of the chord—B to C—it becomes a pivotal C [augmented], allowing for an easy return to F minor.”

But that doesn’t mean “Tennessee Waltz” isn’t a great American song. The emotion, immediacy, and, yes, simplicity of this material helped lay the groundwork for rock and roll, which arrived with a bang (literally) in 1956. At first, the older songwriters saw records by Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and all the rest as just another variation of the junk that had blanketed the airwaves for nearly a decade. But in time, rock became—and continues to be—the dominant form of American popular music.

Rock turned out to encompass a lot more than just electric guitars, shouted lyrics, and a pounding beat. In particular, it provided a context for a new kind of great American popular song—initiated, ironically, by a quartet from across the Atlantic.

Still, while the Beatles may have led the way, they were accompanied and followed by superb American writers who hailed from New York and Los Angeles, and also everywhere else in between. These included the likes of Carole King, Willie Nelson, Burt Bacharach, Brian Wilson, Smokey Robinson, Randy Newman, Paul Simon, and Joni Mitchell.

More often than not (in a departure from the earlier era), these songwriters got up on stage and performed the tunes themselves. The songs came out of folk and blues instead of jazz, and weren’t quite as complex as “All the Things You Are” or some of the other tunes in the Great American Songbook.

But the best of this new wave of American songwriting can hold its own with the earlier era’s best. One test of a standard is its ability to yield varied and satisfying cover versions, and plenty of the newer songs qualify. To take just one example, Willie Nelson’s “Crazy” was originally a hit for Patsy Cline in 1962. Since then, it has been recorded by dozens of artists, including Linda Ronstadt, Dottie West, Leann Rimes, Norah Jones, Dianna Krall, and Neil Young. In short, the last page may have been turned on the Great American Songbooks, but great American songs keep coming.

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