Joel Dinerstein

THE SOUL ROOTS OF BRUCE SPRINGSTeen’S AMERICAN DREAM Joel Dinerstein Bruce Springsteen’s reputation stands as the voice of white working- class America, the heroic poet-everyman of the Rust Belt’s white ethnic working class and its intelligentsia. Most scholars place him in the social realist musical tradition of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan which hearkens back to the fetishization of male workers that informs the Whitmanesque.1 Yet for nearly a decade (1973–82), Springsteen was best known as a dynamic live performer, a rock-and-roll showman who ap- propriated many of James Brown’s performative gestures for marathon four-hour shows that were, in effect, his translation of Brown’s stage- craft, the energy and dramatic gestures of the self-proclaimed “hardest- working man in show business.” In 1974 Springsteen’s E Street band owed far more to the model of an integrated soul-funk band like War or Sly and the Family Stone than to, say, the Rolling Stones: it had two African American members—jazz pianist David Sancious along with saxophonist Clarence Clemons—and the half-Hispanic drummer Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez. (Lopez was at first replaced by an African-American jazz drummer, Ernest “Boom” Carter, before current long-time drummer Max Weinberg became an E Street member in mid-1975.) The title cut of Springsteen’s second album, “The E Street Shuffle” (1974), was a soul-funk tune he admittedly riffed off of a Curtis Mayfield–penned R&B hit for Major Lance called “Monkey Time” (1963), while in his Joel Dinerstein is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University. He re- ceived his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and is the author of a cultural history of big band swing, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African-American Culture Between the World Wars (2003). He is currently at work on a study of the origins of the concept of cool in Ameri- can culture. American Music Winter 2007 © 2008 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 442 Dinerstein spare time Springsteen wrote and produced soul-tinged songs for the other successful white Asbury Park R&B band, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes.2 Issues of race and African American culture have not been central to the scholarship on Bruce Springsteen, and one old joke has it that in concert (since 1975) there are more African Americans on stage than in the audience—that is, saxophonist Clemons is the only black presence in the room.3 When Springsteen has attempted to connect musically with Af- rican American audiences—on the club mixes of “Dancing in the Dark” (1984), for example, or “57 Channels (And Nothing On)” (1992)—he has failed. “Bruce [has] never had much of a black audience,” biographer Dave Marsh reflects, “[yet] he draws on a musical history developed primarily among African-Americans . [and he] sings more often than not in a voice derived from blues, R&B, soul and gospel.”4 In this article I will theorize Springsteen’s debt to “soul,” a term often simply associated with the lived experience of “being black,” as defined in the late sixties by sources as diverse as Aretha Franklin and anthropologist Ulf Hannerz.5 As I will show, if we frame Springsteen not through the content of his songs but through his philosophy of live performance—his investment in moving audiences toward existential affirmation and social justice—then he is a Euro-American avatar of the African American soul tradition. Springsteen’s debt to African American music in general (and soul in particular) remains underdeveloped within a substantial body of critical work. His debt remains an open secret: according to a New Jersey journal- ist who followed him around for a year, Springsteen “loves James Brown” and “has Smokey Robinson’s voice in his head when he writes songs.” On a recent concert performance for VH-1 Storytellers, Springsteen paid homage to the latter when, after performing “Waiting on a Sunny Day” (2002), he burst into a second take of the song, demonstrating how Rob- inson might sing it. Yet neither Brown nor Robinson rates an entry in The Ties That Bind: Bruce Springsteen A to E to Z (a Springsteen encyclopedia), and both receive only passing mentions in the literature. More impor- tant, there are extramusical aspects to this debt that allude to formative notions—for Springsteen—of self, community, and democracy.6 For example, at a July 7, 1981, concert in Stockholm, Springsteen intro- duced his composition “Independence Day” with a typically long, con- fessional anecdote. In introducing this ballad about a son leaving home due to his embattled relationship with his father, Springsteen identified African American music as, in effect, the trigger event that both enabled him to reject his father’s blue-collar conservatism while also jumpstart- ing his quest for a distinctive interpretation of freedom. “Back in the ’60s people were asking a lot of questions about the forces that shape their lives,” he reflected, Soul Roots of Springsteen 443 [but] the only place I ever heard [about] it was at night listening to the radio. It seemed like in those songs by The Drifters and Smokey Robinson, there was a promise, and it was just the promise of a right to a decent life . That you didn’t have to live and die like my old man did, working in a factory until he couldn’t hear what you were saying anymore.7 Despite his more overt debts to Elvis and Dylan, Springsteen here claims to have heard the “promise of a right to a decent life” in the grain of Afri- can American voices during the soul era. In terms of racial discourse and music history, false generic distinctions continue to obscure the complex tapestry of the postwar musical world with regard to gospel, jazz, swing, rhythm and blues, rock-and-roll, and soul. Springsteen grew up in Freehold, New Jersey, a factory town that seemed to portend a joyless future of hard, repetitive work; in a family without cultural interests, rock-and-roll was the art form that brought in messages of hope, spirit, rebellion, freedom, sex, and pleasure. “Rock and roll came to my house where there seemed to be no way out. It just seemed like a dead-end street, nothing I liked to do, nothing I wanted to do, except roll over and go to sleep.” In the mid-sixties, Springsteen had no aspirations to either fame or artistry when rock-and-roll “snuck in . and opened up a whole world of possibilities.” By the early 1970s, he began immersing himself in the “craft and power” of rock-and-roll—or “rock and soul,” as Marsh terms it—as much through the formative songs of Chuck Berry, Roy Orbison, and Phil Spector, as through those of Dylan, Robinson, The Who, and the Beach Boys. Springsteen studied pop song- craft as young novelists study the techniques of Faulkner or Toni Mor- rison, and his early compositions “slipped easily into grooves based on soul rhythm patterns.” He did not differentiate in terms of race or culture (musically) between the Animals or the Rolling Stones on the one hand, or “soul hits by Sam Cooke, Martha and Vandellas and the rest of Motown” on the other, and he absorbed with seemingly equal force the songs of “Sam and Dave, Eddie Floyd and other Stax artists, [as well as] Mitch Ryder’s and the Rascals’ white twists on rhythm and blues.”8 For Springsteen, “rock-and-roll” is an inclusive term. It has become a restrictive phrase in discourse, synonymous with either late-fifties music or a genre distinguished by white performers, a heavy backbeat, guitar solos, and blues song structures. Yet in the 1960s and 1970s, there was little separation for listeners, and nearly all young audiences were equally open to soul, R&B, and Motown—genres that presume black performers, gospel-trained singers, a more fluid, flexible rhythmic groove, and open expressions of sexual desire. In the early 1970s, Springsteen lived in the decaying resort town of Asbury Park, where he recalled “blues, R&B, and soul were still heavily influential and heard often along the Jersey Shore.”9 444 Dinerstein Despite the decisively whiter musical turn Springsteen’s recordings took beginning with Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), his theatrical performative style—his physical intensity, high-energy showmanship, self- reflexive monologues, and use of call-and-response—remains indebted to African American exemplars. More to the point here, Springsteen’s theories of performer-audience interaction owe more to African American gospel-based models and traditions of affirmation than to rock’s calling cards of Dionysian revelry, adolescent rebellion, transgression, and Hora- tio Alger narratives. Springsteen is a social artist: the artist as self-conscious representa- tive of a specific community. This ideal is germane to African American models of musical icons but antithetical to prevalent Western models— the romantic, the avant-gardist, the social rebel.10 In contrast to such archetypes of the creative individual, social artists always have their audiences in mind, in the sense of considering how to sustain and provoke them—that is, how to speak with and for them, how to create presence and resonance. And in contrast to commercial artists, the social artist does not consider him- or herself an embodied commodity reproduc- ing what consumers want, but a self-conscious artist providing what a given audience might need. “You can’t conform to . always giving the audience what it wants,” Springsteen said in the late seventies, or you’re killing yourself and you’re killing the audience.

Load more