THE TRAMP, THE FAN, AND THE WORKING MAN: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, "THE ROAD", AND AMERICAN PUBLICS

A Thesis Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Faculty of Humanities

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© Copyright by Brent Bellamy 2009

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1*1 Canada ABSTRACT

The Tramp, the Fan, and the Working Man: Bruce Springsteen, "the Road", and American Publics

Brent Bellamy

This thesis focuses on reading the music and lyrics of Bruce Springsteen for their affective cathartic potential while keeping in mind that this potential can be publicly formative. Reading Springsteen through Michael Warner's framework of publics allows this project to parse publics theory and apply it beyond Springsteen to the literary tradition of "the road". This project summarizes a trend in American literature to utilize the road as a symbol of progression. However, this trend is inverted by analyzing homosocial relationships in road narratives to show that during the early 20th century masculine displays of affect are stifled and ridiculed. I argue, in my thesis, that Springsteen revitalizes masculine expressions of homosocial and homosexual affect through performance and songwriting.

Keywords: American fiction; the road; Bruce Springsteen; Michael Warner; Public

Sphere; affect; catharsis; homosocial.

11 Preface

At the outset of this project I would like to say what it will not do or be. It will not be a survey of Springsteen's career, offer an analysis of his image, or do the work of Springsteen glorification (he does this very much on his own). Much of the literature about Springsteen falls into fan-literature or quasi-academic studies. However, there are many studies that are worthy of praise and attention. I simply wish to distance myself, as an emerging thinker in this interdisciplinary pursuit, from a gushingly positive analysis of Springsteen's canon. In positioning myself I must confess that I began this project in love with Springsteen's music.

But, importantly, through my academic work, I hope that I have moved from the position of fan to that of critic. This statement raises two distracting questions: who is to say that one cannot be a fan and a critic, and why is it that we feel that to love and to be critical are mutually exclusive?1

This project strives to be more than fan-literature by arguing that not only is

Springsteen's work embedded within the American public sphere, but that it has positively contributed to a transformation and revitalization of specifically American publics and the public sphere.

Jefferson Cowie makes this argument succinctly in "The Intellectual as Fan", which is a review of Robert Coles' Bruce Springsteen's America: The People Listening, A Poet Singing, and Mark Marqusee's Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan's Art (both 2003): "Together, these two studies suggest that when it comes to pop, intellectuals ought to do what they do best: display their appreciation for their subjects by thinking critically about them, not simply celebrating them" (280).

ill Acknowledgements

I would like to humbly acknowledge the guiding hand and tutelage of my supervisor Michael Epp. What I recall most from the early days was his unending enthusiasm and his response to my question "Can I really write about Springsteen?"—"OF COURSE YOU CAN!". Without him this project would not be in the shape it is today. Thank you to Charmaine Eddy, who pushed this project hard in the right direction, and to Hugh Hodges, whose casual, yet firm, approach brought the best out in me. Thanks to Lewis MacLeod for the help during the writing stage, and for being the external reader during his sabbatical. Special thanks to my peers for their support and input, you know who you are, without you this project would be remarkably different. Many thanks to Barbara Bell, Eric Bell, and Ian Arthur my wonderful attentive readers. Finally thank you to the members of the Public Texts program, your tireless assistance and guidance is invaluable to your students and your peers. Keep up the fantastic work.

IV TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

Abstract ii Preface iii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents v List of Short-forms vi

Introduction 1

Part I: The Poetics of the Boss

1 Listening, Feeling, Dancing, Singing 15

Part II: Springsteen and "the Road"

2 Five Ways of Looking at "the Road" 74 3 Queering "the Road" 103

Conclusion 129

Bibliography 134

v List of Short Forms

Springsteen Albums:

The Early Phase:

Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J Greetings 1973 The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle Wild 1973 Born to Run Born to Run 1975 Darkness on the Edge of Town Darkness 1978

The Stadium Phase:

The River The River 1980

Nebraska Nebraska 1982 Born in the U.S.A. BITU 1984 Tunnel of Love Tunnel 1987

The Era of the Fake Band:

Human Touch Human Touch 1993 Lucky Town Lucky Town 1993 The Ghost of Tom Joad Ghost 1995

Renaissance:

The Rising The Rising 2002 Devils and Dust Devils 2005 We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions WSO 2006 Magic Magic 2007 Working on a Dream WOAD 2009

VI 1

Introduction

The youth lies awake in the dark. He can hear the ceiling fan doing lazy circles above

his head. His thoughts need to rest. He slips his feet over the edge of the bed as he reaches

for his turntable. The dim red glow of the power light illuminates his reach for the stylus.

The speakers crackle as the first notes reach into the boy's room, the perfect match of

strained harmonica and melodic piano. The tentative melody is soothing to his ears;

Springsteen sings: "The screen door slams Mary's, dress waves/ Like a vision she dances

across the porch as the radio plays" (1975).

Today, I sit on a Greyhound bus heading to Toronto. I am going see to see Bruce

Springsteen and the E Street Band. Right now I'm listening to their latest album Magic with

the insert in my hand so that I can read the lyrics. The album is really moving, and I'm

pleased that after the mediocre Devils and Dust Springsteen has released a raw rock and roll

record. I can barely contain my excitement to see him tonight.

What is the difference between these two listening acts? Am I different from the youth listening to Springsteen in 75? Even though these two experiences are distinct I am

compelled to view them as expressions of the same phenomenon.

This paper could ground itself in his biography, and read Springsteen's lyrics through the lens of his life. It could perform a cultural analysis of the impact of his music. It could

argue, along the lines of Horkheimer and Adorno, that Springsteen's music is a part of the

machinations of a "Culture Industry" bent on pacifying the American working class. Along these lines, it could situate Springsteen's music historically within the discourse of working

class America. It could situate Springsteen's work musically in the tradition of the

2 See Dialectic of Enlightenment "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception". 2 troubadour and American star performer3, or situate his lyrics within the American literary tradition4. These approaches are legitimate and canonized, but I chose to study the relationship of Springsteen's music to the American public sphere.

This project proposes that Springsteen's writing, music, and performance are part of a constantly re-emerging and changing American public sphere. Since 1973 Springsteen has written and released sixteen studio albums and countless live recordings and B-sides.5

Musically, he creates a pastiche of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, country, and folk. These factors make Springsteen's live shows legendary—typically filling an entire three hours with non-stop music. My central argument is that most of these texts (Springsteen's live shows and records) form listening communities. Whether his listeners put on a record late at night, attend a Springsteen concert, or watch his Super Bowl Halftime show, they join others in an activity that has the potential to be public.

On Publics

Jiirgen Habermas' crucial work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere provides a starting point for my own inquiry into Springsteen's place within the American public sphere. In it, Habermas details two transformations of the public sphere.

First, the emergence of rational critical debate over literature, art, music, and theater structures the public sphere of the bourgeoisie. This debate became possible because of the spread of private reading, a phenomenon that made it easier for an educated middle class to

J From Guthrie, Foster, and Seeger to Presley, and Berry. 4 From Twain, Melville and Whitman to Steinbeck, Kerouac, and Ginsberg. This leaves out Chimes of Freedom, Greatest Hits, Tracks, The Essential Bruce Springsteen and any live material. 3 form opinions about art, music, and literature. People were drawn together to engage in rational critical debate. Habermas applauds the commoditization of music because it was the

"first time an audience gathered to listen to music as such—a public of music lovers to which anyone who was propertied and educated was admitted" (39). The price of admission was, incidentally, drawn along class lines, a division that the second transformation would blur. It is specifically the second transformation that is of interest to this project.

The second shift in the bourgeois public sphere was away from rational critical debate—that Habermas championed in coffee houses, newspapers, and other intellectual gathering places (33)—toward the consumption of a palatable culture (166). Habermas witnessed the devaluing of leisure activities (once rational debate) occuring in connection with production and consumption, which turned once-politicized leisure time apolitical

(160)6. This shift was problematic for Habermas for two reasons: 1) The public sphere was no longer engaged in the enlightenment pursuits of rationality and reason, and 2) with the decline of public debate the visible existence of publics, and by extension the public sphere, diminished.

Although the apparent pacification of the public sphere via radio, and eventually television, can be read as an Orwellian or Adornian nightmare, the loss of public debate also saw a positive diminishment of class divisions. While this is by no means a prescriptive change, media and information, and therefore knowledge, were becoming accessible to the masses. The second concern for Habermas served to deepen the first; the disappearance of visible publics meant that the "loss" of public debate was final.

However, what Habermas found disturbing about the disappearance of a visible public,

Michael Warner finds intriguing. Warner's work on public formation and types of publics in

6 This can also been seen in Raymond Williams' chapter "Literature" from Literature and Marxism. 4

Publics and Counterpublics acts as the framework for this project as I flesh out Springsteen's

listening public. Warner argues that a public exists "by virtue of being addressed" (67;

theirs). By reading a text we engage in discourse with it and with others—countless and

unknowable—similarly absorbed. I argue that we listen to music in the same way, by

allowing ourselves, passively or actively, to be addressed. What Habermas found disturbing

about a public loss of visibility is, perhaps ironically, a cornerstone of Warner's publics theory.

Warner's argument that publics unite strangers seems important. He writes that a public does this "through participation only" (75). In other words, our engagement in the

Habermasian debate, or in listening to a particular song is, according to Warner, "converted by the category of the public into a form of stranger relationality" (84). Relationality is contingent on our not knowing one another and our experience of the text, which through multiple discreet acts of reading7 is public forming. While this view certainly allows for understanding of or insight into the subject, it is not without inherent problems, an issue

Warner himself realizes.

The forming of publics, through text, is not always guaranteed and neither is the type of public that will be formed. Warner contemplates public formation in "Styles of

Intellectual Publics". One of his arguments is that one cannot write with one's audience in mind through the example of Winston Smith's attempt to write a diary in Orwell's 1984:

Winston's choice of genre, the diary, is perversely apt to illustrate the problem of audience. Perversely, because the addressee of the diary is that unique individual about whom most is known and whose sympathetic response can be taken for granted: oneself. How could anyone, even in the most ruthlessly totalitarian regime, lack an audience for a diary? But even in a diary, one never writes simply to oneself in the present. At the very least, one addresses one's retrospective reading at some point in the future. One therefore addresses oneself as a partial stranger, one who will have

7 Or, in the case of music, acts of listening. 5

forgotten or will have been caught up in a different phase of life and will have become, by consequence, different. And thus oneself comes to stand for posterity, and for a posterity, partly brought into being by this act of writing (125).

In this passage Warner articulates problems inherent in publics theory, namely, the problem of audience, and the dichotomy between acts of reading and acts of writing. Warner asks,

"How, by what rhetoric, [might one] bring a public into being when extant modes of address and intelligibility seem themselves to be a problem[?]" (130). At a time when forms and styles of writing obfuscate more than they illuminate, Warner's conjecture is poignant.

The core of Warner's argument here is leveled at Habermas, whose arguments are characterized in Warner's ironic description of the public sphere: "a vibrant scene of public- spirited discussion is the motor of democratic culture" (143). The ironic tone of this statement is noted and validated as Warner tersely begins the next paragraph, "One of the basic points of this book is that publics do not in fact work this way" (143). He continues,

"The public sphere never required a widespread culture of rational discussion. It required only the category of the public—an essentially imaginary function that allows the temporally indexed circulation among strangers to be captured as a social entity and addressed impersonally" (144). Warner's description of a public conjures images of an organic entity flexing and growing, extending and retracting. It both manifests physically, at least in terms of its membership, and intangibly—that is, it cannot be pointed to. But it is directly affected by the contributing readership—as a body. In this way it can be tangible and real.

The tendency of music and lyrics to grapple with emotional, and even traumatic, experience embraces Ann Cvetkovich's concern with cultural production in An Archive of

Feelings. She explores "cultural texts as repositories of feelings and emotions, which are encoded not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception" (7) and asks "how affective experience gives rise to public 6 culture" (17). She argues that the cultural work surrounding trauma "enables new practices and publics" (10). To Cvetkovich, affect serves as the foundation for the formation of public cultures. Cvetkovich does not distinguish between reading and listening publics. For her, cultural texts encapsulate many mediums; publics are formed through the affect response to texts and not to their form.

I am tempted to place reading and listening publics apart as theoretically different.

However, they are not as radically different as they seem. In fact, many theories of reading are more accurately described as theories of listening. The lynchpin of their similarity is our understanding of them as formed through attention to a text. Because records, concert performances, and MP3s alike constitute text there is no reason to strictly separate listening and reading in a theoretical approach to publics. Subsequently, despite any inherent differences between reading and listening, they both function similarly in the formation of publics.

For instance, in Mechanic Accents Michael Denning's reading of working-class culture articulates the formation of reading publics. For Denning, despite their surface purpose (escape), dime novels act as index of working class cultures (65), and he reads contemporary worker's attention to dime novels as a crucial signifier that reveals their

"thoughts, feelings, and doings" (4). He also notes that "the formulas and figures that recur in these dime novels are marked by the imprint of their working class audience" (5).

Denning coins a trope: a "mechanic accent", or a reflective presentation of a category or type of public citizen to him or herself.

We see a similar device at work with Springsteen's listening publics. Instead of 19th century working-class culture, Springsteen writes and performs with a late 20th century

"mechanic accent". "Born in the U.S.A." (1984) is lushly produced, and conjures images of 7 a busy factory line—ironically empty in the song's lyrical content. "Factory" (1978) captures the shuffle of tired worker's feet—heard in song's lyrics as well. Whether it is harsh staccato guitar, or soft melodic piano that punctuates the listener's ear, Springsteen writes from, and to his listening public with his own form of Denning's "accents".

The two distinct categories of publics that rise out of Springsteen's work are concert publics (visible, accessible, fluidly addressable, and temporally existent) and listening publics (invisible, moderately accessible, myopically addressable, and atemporal) . Concert publics are easy to see. One only has to look around when at a concert to see the public and the performer can lay eyes on his audience and communicate with them directly; this characterizes the fluidity of concert publics. Their only shortcoming is that they exist only for the duration of the show, so they can never be absolutely repeated. Listening publics, on the other hand, exist within different confines. They are not easily accessible and we cannot point to them, or look around to see who else is taking part in our experience. The speaker, in this case within the frame of the text, can only address the public through the preset nature of their address. The intriguing element to listening publics is that they are atemporal. By returning to an ancient text we can imagine its reading public. Similarly, by immersing ourselves in an historical musical culture or scene, we can participate in its formative potential. It is the existence of these two categories of the public in unison that builds dense networks of publics and individuals—the public sphere.

The relationship between these two categories of publics supersedes the rational critical debate of Habermas. In late-nineteenth and twentieth century America the public

While a concert public is technically also a form of listening public I will distinguish the two terms here: A listening public is formed through private listening, whereas a concert publics is formed at a concert, or live musical performance. 8 sphere became constituted through the interrelation of temporal9 and atemporal10 publics.

Temporal publics, as discussed above, exist in a specific time and place. Their audience is visible and comprehensible. Conversely, atemporal publics present a mystery within publics theory by being immensely difficult to define. This problem is most clearly observed in the idea of stranger relationality between individuals participating in a reading or listening public. In a crowd it is easy to imagine how these unknown individuals bond and interact, but conceiving this unification only through text is difficult, to say the least. It is unclear how and when atemporal publics exist. However, the idea of a readership (or a fan-base) persists and provides an example of a conceivable atemporal public. By accepting the idea that any readers of a particular text can be united—as the addressees of that text—across space and time we can begin to see how atemporal publics are possible and necessary.

"The Road"

Amanda Petrusich, writing in 2007, engages the road and its relevance to American music in 7/ Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American

Music. Petrusich writes passionately about music and its roots. For example, she writes:

The notion of the American road as an unregulated gateway to freedom has been codified and repeated so many times throughout modern American literature and history that road stories have practically become their own genre. The stereotypical narrator is a lonely male (the man on the road is the stuff of American legend; the woman on the road is the stuff of teenage fantasy), preoccupied with achieving catharsis, reinvention, desperately fulfilling an awkward, unnamed quest for authenticity (17).

For example, temperance meetings (see Glenn Hendler Public Sentiments), executions, blackface minstrelsy (see Eric Lott Love and Theft), and enactments of Shakespeare (see Lawrence Levine Highbrow Lowbrow) in late 19lh early 20th century, or any number of movies, concerts, plays or public gatherings in the 20th. For example, temperance novels (again see Glenn Hendler Public Sentiments), dime novels (see Michael Denning Mechanic Accents), and monthly magazines in the late 19* early 20th century, or records, DVDs, radio and television in the later 20th century. 9

This is a succinct and accurate summary of the road narrative. It highlights themes from

Kerouac, Steinbeck and Springsteen. Despite her starkly accurate depiction of the road, she does not engage Springsteen directly (I contend that one cannot help but engage Springsteen through his contemporaries, or subject matter). Petrusich raises a valid point: these are masculine narratives.11 Springsteen writes in a masculine tradition; studying these narratives means reading masculine authors and listening to masculine songwriters. The road is a gendered structure and thus a gendered metaphor.

In terms of literature, Springsteen belongs to the American tradition of the road. This tradition functions in and out of literary reality. Some of its members actually do travel the road. For instance, Woody Guthrie and Jack Kerouac both spent much of their lives traveling the road in the same way that they wrote about it. Springsteen, with regards to his profession, occupies the road as part of his job as "the Boss". Springsteen contributes to an already vibrant and complicated entity. Similarly, Whitman, Steinbeck, Kerouac and McCarthy construct and re-construct the figural landscape of America by writing, not riding, the road.

A metaphoric and structural element within these narratives, the road simultaneously drives the narrative and halts the character's progress along it. In this way Steinbeck, for example, can relate the personal development of his characters (Tom's choice to stay with and support the "fambly"), develop larger themes (the transition from "I to We"), and build narrative and dramatic tension (the mounting expectations of California are eventually

" The desire for travel, or to consume such narratives, surely exists in female writers. Petrusich stands as a leading example of these. There are others, for instance Joni Mitchell's longing for "a river so long...(to) skate away," Nelly Furtado's simile "I'm like a bird, I'll only fly away,/1 don't know where my soul is, 1 don't know where my home is," or even Nancy Sinatra "Are you ready boots? Start walking!". These songs use journey as a metaphor, but not as a narrative theme and perhaps not in the same heroic, rugged individualist vein as the "masculine" view of the Road. 12 Petrusich is correct in linking the Road with an American coming of age, and therefore a youthful maturing as well. But she leaves Springsteen out, even after writing explicitly about Elvis, Dylan, Guthrie and Seeger, not to mention Kerouac and Steinbeck. 10 dashed, but not until the characters have placed their lives on the line). By driving (no pun intended) and halting the narrative the road takes on a larger-than-life quality that hints at its capacity to offer salvation.

It is important to realize that the salvation offered by the road while initially promising, is not usually fulfilled. Through episodic experience, characters on the road discover its false nature; the road truly leads nowhere. This is a theme often repeated within narratives of the road and is consistently being re-articulated and re-worked by writers of the road. Springsteen repeats this theme, most famously in the dysfunctional tension between

Born to Run, which represents the road as Holy Saviour—a grand vision of the road driving the narrative—and Darkness on the Edge of Town, which stands for the loss of previously unshakable faith in the road as the path of exodus, which epitomizes the road's capacity to halt the narrative.

The E Street Band

This paper approaches Springsteen's work as literature. It is important to me personally and in regard to this project, to consider his music and lyrics together. Springsteen has written so prolifically in so many genres that it is difficult (and this is a good thing) to pin him down. Springsteen's musical influences run from the rock and roll of Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley to the crooning of Roy Orbison and Hank Williams; in other words, he is a truly American musician. His emergence during the last third of the century that saw the birth of rock and roll allows him to neatly catalogue the movement.

The sound that truly characterizes Springsteen's music is created by the E Street

Band. Both dynamic and profound, the band is as much a part of Springsteen's signature sound as his 1953 Fender Esquire. The band members are all accomplished musicians and 11

exhibit an athleticism that seems a prerequisite for any musician playing in Springsteen's live

shows. The rhythm section is currently composed of the "mighty" Max Weinberg on drums,

and Garry Tallent on bass. Roy Bittan plays keyboard and piano, and the late Danny Federici played organ13. Miami Steve Van Zandt, Patti Scialfa, and Nils Lofgren play guitar. Soozie

Tyrell plays violin. Last, but certainly not least, is Clarence demons on saxophone. Together with the Boss they create the live "wall of sound" that is characteristic of Springsteen's writing. Simon Frith, usually a critic of Springsteen, makes positive comments about the E

Street Band: "The group is "tight", everyone is aiming for the same rhythmic end, but

"loose", each player makes their own decision as to how to get there" (138). This glowing report on the band turns into praise for Springsteen, "his voice strains to be heard, he has to

shout against the instruments that both support and compete with him. However many times he's rehearsed his lines they always sound as if they're being forged on the spot" (138).

Frith's praise rings true of Springsteen and the band, and perhaps explains their apparent

longevity.

That Springsteen has been producing music for so long is a testament to his artistic prowess. This longevity has also allowed him to bear witness to the changing ways we listen to music. Until the late 80s, Springsteen released all of his albums on vinyl records and tape cassette, but with digital music, CDs became the dominant form of the 90s, and iTunes became the main method of distribution of the 2000s. That his music has survived these changes highlights Springsteen's adaptability.

Chapter Summary

This thesis is divided into two parts. Part I focuses on Springsteen's poetics and

lj Federici passed away on April 17lh, 2008. 12 performance, and how these elements of his music are public-forming. Part II places

Springsteen within the American literary tradition of the road and then argues that

Springsteen has a direct transformative effect on the American public sphere.

Parti

In Chapter I "The Poetics of the Boss", I present a reading of Springsteen's music and lyrics that historically divides his canon into four distinct categories that I have named The

Early Period, The Stadium Phase, The Era of the Fake Band, and Renaissance. This methodological approach provides a structure to embed Springsteen's poetics and my argument.

Springsteen's poetics are by no means uniform or coherent throughout his canon. An assertion of coherency is difficult enough to make for a novelist or poet, let alone a musician. However, there are several elements of Springsteen's poetics that emerge and claim dominance over his canon. For instance, Springsteen writes narratives grounded in geography, uses dramatic monologue, creates thematic narratives, plays with the relationship between music and lyric, and frequently blurs fantasy and reality. Each distinct aspect of his writing will be fleshed out as I argue that Springsteen's poetics, coupled with the affective catharsis of their performance (live or recorded), are transformative and public-forming.

Part II

Chapter II shifts gears as it traces several road narratives. It starts with Whitman's

"Song of the Open Road", moves through Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Kerouac's On the Road, McCarthy's The Road, and finally ends with Springsteen's "Further On Up the

Road". This chapter identifies multiple imaginary existences of the road and publics of the road. For instance, Whitman and Kerouac's engagement with the road is mediated by a 13

desire to be free, whereas Steinbeck and McCarthy imagine the road as a dangerous

necessity to travel. Springsteen's road encompasses both approaches. By tracing these

disparate realities of the road, I narrativize the literary tradition as each work adds its own philosophical and structural position on the road. This approach leads to the collapse of the

figurative road. This crumbling subsurface leaves us with what appears to be a hearty

blacktop, but it is actually worn and fractured; the road continues to be of figural importance, but the accumulated contextual weight of the metaphor leaves it more clunky and awkward than ever.

Chapter III engages the discourse of homosocial desire14 exhibited by masculine

fraternities of the road in America. Whitman is part of an emerging discourse about homosexuality and heterosexuality in America. His poetry exhibits an uninhibited masculine affect. I argue that, after Whitman, during the middle of the twentieth century, growing homophobia and changing masculinity in America work to repress masculine displays of affect. This is clear in the homosocial relationship between Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty in On the Road. By the 1970s, Springsteen works to restore acceptable masculine displays of affect through the performance of homosocial and homoerotic behavior. It is Springsteen's complicated relationship to saxophonist Clarence demons that works the hardest to destabilize and corrode homophobic behaviors and discourse within the American public sphere. Because of the complex history of race relations in the U.S. it is no surprise that demons' blackness is problematically played on by Springsteen in concert and on album covers. I theorize the interplay of black and white masculinities within the context of the E

Street Band and homosocial desire.

14 See Eve Sedgwick's Between Men for discussion of homosocial desire in literature. 15 For "no surprise" see Eric Lott's Love and Theft, for album covers see Born to Run. 14

This paper could have traced a myriad of other threads within Springsteen and the tradition of the road. There are many lines within Springsteen's lyrics that lead in directions other than homosocial desire and male affect. For instance, the dominant discourse of the working class within Springsteen's canon leads to an analysis of his place in the mid-80s decline of Marxist discourse and rise of post-modern identarian politics16. Springsteen's apparently political nature in the early 21st century also plays into questions of the place of culture within American politics, and whether or not its place should be articulated to political economy. Springsteen's personal place as an advocate-for/voice-of the working class rests beside his (substantial) material worth. Where Guthrie had only a sort of counter- cultural capital Springsteen has cultural, economic, and I would argue, political capital. I engage this confusing disjuncture in a brief conclusion, pointing not only to a place that this project could extend itself, but also to a place publics theory might find useful and fascinating.

16 See Aijaz Ahmad "Postcolonial Theory and the 'Post-' Condition" (1997), Alain Badiou "Against 'Politcal Philosophy'" (2005), Terry Eagleton "Defending the Free World" (1990), Bryan Palmer "The Eclipse of Materialism: Marxism and the Writing of Social History in the 1980s" (1990), John Sanbonmatsu "Postmodernism and the Corruption of the Academic Intellengtsia" (2005), and Michael Warner "Styles of Intellectual Publics" (2002). 15

Part I: The Poetics of the Boss—Chapter I: Listening, Feeling, Dancing, Singing

Affective Catharsis and Transformative Poetics

In the Air Canada Centre, the rock and roll peoples' troubadour wailed on his guitar as

thousands of smiling faces bobbed in time to the music. For one moment, the faces turned

away from the stage to look at the people around them. Everyone was singing along and

everyone knew the words. It had been twenty years since Bruce Springsteen and the E Street

band had played in Toronto and their return was being celebrated as if it would be another twenty before the next visit. Springsteen played song after song and each was just as recognizable as the last. Fans yelled "We lovvvvve you Clarence!", and between songs you could hear the ever-famous "BRUUUUUUUUUCE!" We yelled not because we wanted

Springsteen and Clemons to hear but because we just needed to let it out. The feeling in the

air was that we mattered. We were just as important as Clemons, as Roy Bittan, as Gary

Talent, as the Boss himself. The feeling of fulfillment and belonging that we gained through membership in this concert public was because of the affective catharsis of rock and roll.

Hidden at the core of this experience is the music. Springsteen's musical career has allowed him to adopt different genres of music, styles of writing, and ways of performing.

The folk-rock of Greetings from Asbury Park N.J. is markedly different than the stadium- filling sound of Born in the U.S.A. as is the stark stripped-down sound of Nebraska.

Springsteen's writing similarly changes from the egomaniacal obsessive way he wrote Born to Run to the greater role the E Street Band plays on The River. Springsteen's canon is so large and diverse that there is no unifying aesthetic. One definable quality is the

1 Born to Run was composed on a piano. Springsteen talks about this in the documentary Wings for Wheels which was included with the 40th anniversary edition of Born to Run. The melodies on the album exhibit an unnameable similiar beauty; they are epic and storylike, which can be attributed to their composition. 16 transformative poetics of the Boss that enable affective catharsis and public formation.

Springsteen's poetics have the power to change their reader and to construct publics from within this readership. By "change", I mean anything from a change in emotions to an intellectual, philosophical, or political development. But, importantly, this change does not occur because Springsteen says so. He is not the Boss of his listeners or their constitutive politics. He is the one who writes the music. Any attempts to pass political power to the man—as separate from his musical creation—have been met with a Shermanesque statement: "If nominated I will not run, if elected I will not serve". In this way Springsteen rejects the ideas that he holds power and intellectually acknowledges that he is not the music. Instead, Springsteen acts as a conduit channeling rock music and affective catharsis through his voice, his guitar and his band.

To define affective catharsis I need to separate the terms. Affect in this case refers to the feeling of feelings derived from engagement with an object. It is not the specific emotion experienced, but the occurrence of any emotion at all. Catharsis is defined by the OED as "a. purgation", but it is the second meaning I intend: "b. The purification of the emotions by vicarious experience, esp. through the drama." This definition comes from Aristotle's Poetics

"Book 6" where he defines tragedy and adapts the medical term to metaphor:

A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable accessories, each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.

The entire purpose of tragedy is to affect the audience, to make them feel "pity and fear," and to cleanse them of those emotions. Aristotle extends his idea of tragedy beyond the

"Spectacle" of the stage by positing a Warnerian element of public formation: "The tragic effect is quite possible without a public performance and actors; and besides, the getting-up 17

of the Spectacle is more a matter for the costumier than the poet" (Book 6). This statement

coincides with Warner's requirement of "mere-attention," pointing towards both temporal

and atemporal publics, and forces catharsis out of its niche in drama. Catharsis, then, is a

succinct way to think through public formation, especially when an affective response is

involved. So, affective catharsis is the experience of feeling cleansed or the purification of

the vessel that houses our faculties. It makes sense that Springsteen's concerts are referred to

as "equal parts rock concert, spiritual revival, and nationalist rally" (Boehm and Cowie,

353). The affective catharsis of Springsteen's music and performance is the central

component in the formation of Springsteen-related publics.

Michael Warner aptly describes publics in "Publics and Counterpublics". So far I

have been writing about a Springsteen concert, which constitutes a certain public. Warner

writes that "such a public has a sense of totality, bounded by the event or by the shared physical space. A performer knows where her public is, how big it is, where its boundaries

are, and what the time of its common existence is" (66). The concert public is, in a sense,

limited—it is temporal. Granted, it is possible to know your public, to see and hear it in front

of you, but this is temporally and spatially limiting. Frith contributes to our understanding of temporal publics: "listening to such epics is a public activity (rather than a private fantasy), which is why Springsteen concerts still feel like collective occasions" (138). Frith identifies the affective power of Springsteen's performance in concert as public forming.

Warner argues that many publics form, even exist, only through discreetly engaging a text. So, a listening public—it is atemporal—, while more slippery and less definable, could

exist indefinitely. Warner argues that a public exists "by virtue of being addressed" (67).

When we listen to a record we engage it with our attention. We hum along, interrogate the

lyrics, drum our hands on the steering wheel, look through the liner notes, etc. We listen to 18

the music thereby allowing ourselves, passively or actively, to be addressed. By doing this

we participate along with countless, unknowable others. Warner writes that a public "unites

strangers through participation only" (75). Even when we listen to the saddest most personal

songs, this activity can be "converted by the category of the public into a form of stranger

relationality" (84). Even when we engage a text separately we can form publics. In a concert

public it is the attention to the text (performance) that unites the listeners, and not that they

are gathered together in a room. The same is true of a listening public; its membership is

united by their shared attention to the music. What Warner means by "stranger relationality"

is that, despite being temporally and spatially separate, these individuals are connected

through listening-public membership.

Warner has a problem with the unity of a public being ideological (117). It is worth

quoting him in full:

[The public] depends on the stylization of the reading act as transparent and replicable; it depends on an arbitrary social closure (through language, idiolect, genre, medium, and address) to contain its potentially infinite extension; it depends on institutionalized forms of power to realize the agency attributed to the public; and it depends on a hierarchy of faculties that allows some activities to count as public or general and others to be merely personal, private, or particular. Some publics, for these reasons, are more likely than others to stand in for the public, to frame their address as the universal discussion of the people (117).

Here Warner identifies an inherent problem with the size and type of Springsteen's listening public. In Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition Jim Cullen tells the anecdote of how in the 1980s Ronald Reagan famously asked for Springsteen's

endorsement and then after Springsteen refused invoked his name anyway (1-5). This act

acknowledges the blur of space between a public, Springsteen's listeners, and the public, the

American public. Similarly, and somewhat humorously, many people have uttered the phrase

Recently Springsteen has endorsed Democrats John Kerry 2004 and Barack Obama 2008. 19

"Springsteen for President". A vault in status, and category is problematic for a listening public. The confusion of Springsteen's listeners for the members of a democratic state is problematic. His perceived authenticity and politics dangerously represent the American people in such a way that Springsteen's publics—concert, listening, fans, etc—begin to, or perhaps always have, identify equally with Springsteen and the American public.

Within critical and popular discourse on Springsteen many choose to engage

Springsteen's authenticity, commercialization, masculinity, whiteness, faith, or patriotism19.

However, it is by understanding Springsteen's artistic merit and work, and the historical and political surroundings that the music was born from and into, that the importance of

Springsteen's poetics to public formation, as transformative and affective, is best situated.

Tenets of Springsteen's Music

Although his writing is not conclusively organized or guided by a concrete set of principles, Springsteen's writing does have particular qualities.

The writing of narratives from a specific geography: Writing within a specific

geography, an approach employed by Springsteen throughout his career, can best be

seen on his early albums {Greetings, The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle,

Born to Run, and Darkness on the Edge of Town). Significantly, the road emerges from

19 Elizabeth Bird '"Is that me Baby: Image, Authenticity, and the Career of Bruce Springsteen", Lauren Boehm and Jeffersin Cowie "Dead Man's Town: "Born in the U.S.A.", Social History, and Working Class Identity", Gavin Cologne-Brooks "The Ghost of Tom Joad: Steinbeck's Legacy in the Songs of Bruce Springsteen", Simon Frith "The Real Thing—Bruce Springsteen", Fred Goodman, Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, and Springsteen, and the Head-On Collision of Rock and Commerce, Kate McCarthy, "Deliver Me from Nowhere: Bruce Springsteen and the Myth of the American Promised Land", Alan Rauch "Bruce Springsteen and the Dramatic Monologue", Martha Smith "Sexual Mobilities in Bruce Springsteen: Performance as Commentary", and David Shumway "Authenticity: Modernity, Stardom, and Rock & Roll" ALSO see Racing in the Street:The Bruce Springsteen Reader. 20 the specific geography of Springsteen's Jersey Shore surroundings and becomes a major theme in his work.

The structural use of dramatic monologue: In what I dub the second phase of his career, Springsteen begins to develop dramatic monologue in his writing. His songs develop strong charactered voices that tell working class stories. This structural development facilitates a realistic depiction of characters on the road, in bars, at work, and at play.

The creation of thematically concentric and interrelated narratives: These stories develop characters and situations that build upon Springsteen's eternal fascination with interrelating stories that play out with concentric themes. For instance, in Darkness he writes about loss and in The River about working class people facing hard choices, albeit in starkly different ways.

The interdependent, and frequently ironic, relation of music and lyric: The nature of his writing is often complicated by the interplay between music and lyric. For example, the music in "Highway Patrolman" is sparse; its three chord I-IV-V progression feels calm and slow when compared to the exuberant frolic in C of "The E Street Shuffle".

In each case the music is meant to recreate the subject of Springsteen's writing. Wild depicts a vibrant scene while Nebraska captures badlands and lost souls. Springsteen does not always match the lyric to the music. He regularly resists his lyric with a musical key or melodic tone. This can be seen in many of the songs on Darkness and, to give a more recent example, on "Your Own Worst Enemy" from Magic. 21

The romantic and horrifying blurring of fantasy and reality: This is a broad category

and can be attributed to Springsteen's aesthetic. Take the closing lyrics of "Thunder

Road": "There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away/ They haunt this

dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets". Here horrific

fantasy, indeed a poetic interpretation of reality, is blurred with the line: "in the lonely

cool before dawn you hear their engines roaring on/ But when you get to the porch

they're gone on the wind, so Mary climb in". The speaker's depiction of reality, as

Mary turns down the other suitors, is mixed with his own romantic fantasy, "Mary

climb in/ It's a town full of losers and I'm pullin' out of here to win," all written with

poetic imagery. The "lonely cool before dawn" (1975) is a perfect example of this

style.

Historically Dividing Springsteen's Canon

Springsteen's writing can be historically divided into four categories. 'The Early

Period', 1973-78, the height and decline of'The Stadium Phase' from 1980-87, 'The Era of the Fake Band' 1990-98, and Springsteen's 'Renaissance' 1998-2008. Springsteen's early work, especially that on Greetings and Wild, is his rawest, most self-involved material. Born to Run and Darkness move beyond this self-involvement and feature tight themes and interrelated songs. These albums were released over a five year period amid constant touring. I will briefly discuss geography in Greetings and Wild, then read Born to Run in its vinyl form and for its adoption of the road as an extension of geography, and finally, read

The first two albums were released in 1973, January and September, respectfully. Born to Run followed in August 1975, and Darkness was released June 1978. 22

Darkness as a poetically transitive album for Springsteen. I tend to place the double album

The River, October 1980, on its own, although it is a product of the previous stage and the fuel for the next.21

The second category covers four albums: The River, Nebraska, BITU,22 and Tunnel of

Love. On these albums Springsteen developed his use of the dramatic monologue. Nebraska saw a withdrawal from themes of freedom and destiny, although it still featured the road as an image and symbol. BITU dealt with a range of issues, from the United States' response to

Vietnam veterans in "Born in the U.S.A.", to Springsteen's own feelings about Steve Van

Zandt leaving the band in "Bobby Jean", to one of the few Springsteen songs that address race, "My Hometown". After a long and arduous tour, Springsteen released Tunnel, and while it featured several key members of the E Street Band, it marked a departure for him.

The focus turned to relationships -love found and lost- and would not return to the political and historical until 1995.

Through the 1990s Springsteen released three original full-length albums: Human

Touch '92, Lucky Town '92, and The Ghost of Tom Joad '95. Human Touch and Lucky Town were released on the same day. "Springsteen described the making of Human Touch as 'an exercise' to get himself'back into writing and recording'" (Sawyers, 123). Some refer to it as his worst album (121). His most successful work of the decade is arguably Ghost because it re-engages personal and meta- narrative, historical and political dimensions and rises above

(or perhaps more correctly, sinks below) the poorly orchestrated, synthesizer bound, major

June Skinner Sawyers, in Tougher than the Rest: 100 Best Bruce Springsteen Songs, credits The River as the album where Springsteen began writing about "real people and real relationships" (51). It is also, according to Springsteen, the first album where the band drove the writing. Listen to "The Ties that Bind" and you get a looser garage-band feel contrary to the thematically and musically tight writing that we hear on Born to Run and Darkness. 22 After the BITU tour the E Street band disbands and Springsteen begins to perform with the "fake" band. 23 key, and pop driven sound of the simultaneous albums.

Springsteen's most recent set of Albums, The Rising, Devils and Dust, and Magic, draw on structural and thematic elements from throughout his musical career. The Rising is a collection of songs that Springsteen was saving for the E Street Band and is a response to

September 11th, 2001. Devils returns to earlier works Nebraska and Ghost in order to tell stories about lost souls. In an interview for VH1 Storytellers series (2005) Springsteen said he had wanted to write about characters that were on the line between doing right and wrong and that Devils was a way for him to explore the voices of those people. Magic is a return for

Springsteen, as writer, and E Street Band, as performers, to the hope and disillusionment seen in their music from the late seventies. While The Rising and Devils witness a revival of that hope, Magic displays Springsteen's complete loss of faith.

The Early Period

Place, Space, and Belonging

Springsteen's early albums point to a specific geography. This narrative begins on the

Jersey shore in Greetings and Wild, expands beyond its borders in Born to Run, through the metaphor of the road, and finally is problematized in Darkness. The characters from the first two albums are based on contemporaries of Springsteen, or are born of folklore. This usage plays into myth and allows Springsteen to story-tell about Jersey folklore.

In Greetings and Wild geography is used as a backdrop for storytelling. The journey in

"Spirit in the Night" to "Greasy Lake" is a perfect example:

23 They also introduce a new record producer: Brendan O'Brian. He is known for working with Pearl Jam, The Stone Temple Pilots, and Rage Against the Machine. 24

Crazy Janey and her mission man were back in the alley tradin' hands 'long came Wild Billy with his friend G-man all duded up for Saturday night Well Billy slammed on his coaster brakes and said anybody wanna go on up to Greasy Lake It's about a mile down on the dark side of route eighty-eight I got a bottle of rose so let's try it (1973)

Springsteen introduces a whole cast of characters and the backdrop for their performance.

The journey begins in "the alley" and quickly introduces us to its characters. "Greasy Lake", the destination, is characterized by its location, "a mile down on the dark side of route eighty-eight", and its purpose: partying. The metaphoric description of Billy's ride as a

"coaster" speaks to the nature of their journey. Springsteen refers to the brake system of a bicycle to play with the liminal nature of early adulthood; these individuals are just to old to ride around on bicycles, but they are not quite ready to own cars. "Greasy Lake" acts as a portal through which Billy and friends can be propelled towards adulthood.

Geography allows the listener to relate to the characters and narratives by building affective relationships. The geography, originally specific, becomes more general in this passage:

Now the night was bright and the stars threw light on Billy and Davy dancin' in the moonlight They were down near the water in a stone mud fight Killer Joe gone passed out on the lawn Well now Hazy Davy got really hurt, he ran into the lake in just his socks and a shirt Me and Crazy Janey was makin' love in the dirt singin' our birthday songs (1973)

The stars, moonlight, the lawn and the beach are recognizable to the listener from their own experience. Springsteen's melodramatic tone draws the already engaged listener into the fabric of the story. He romances the listener with reckless abandon through extremes in the song: sobriety and drug-induced-craze, specificity and generality, and the false dichotomy between danger and fun. These extremes enhance the listener's experience of the music—the frolicking saxophone and rolling drums—and forms a relationship between the narrative and 25

the listener's experience of listening to it.

The movement from specific to general geography is characterized in Springsteen's

poetics by the emergence of the road in "Rosalita". The speaker's desire in "Rosalita" is

pronounced in his suggestion that they run away together—away from her parents and

responsibility:

Spread out now Rosie, doctor come cut loose her mama's reins You know playin' blindman's bluff is a little baby's game You pick up Little Dynamite, I'm gonna pick up Little Gun And together we're gonna go out tonight and make that highway run (1973)

The speaker moves from infantalizing Rosie to criminalizing her. On Born to Run

Springsteen uses less specific language to describe breaking out than the "Dynamite" and

"Gun" necessary here. The speaker grants the road some agency, although, it will be he and

Rosie that "make that highway run". Ultimately, Springsteen's speaker acknowledges the inability to break free at this time: "My tires were slashed and I almost crashed but the Lord had mercy/ My machine she's a dud, I'm stuck in the mud somewhere in the swamps of

Jersey" (1973). The speaker's vehicle offers salvation—from responsibility, parents, and a land without possibility. Without it he and his girl will be marooned in the Jersey geography.

In "Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island", Ariel Swartly argues humorously that in "The E Street Shuffle" Springsteen "doesn't figure you know the neighborhood—he points out spots of interest—but assumes you're on his side" (79). Swartly identifies this casual approach in his early albums as Springsteen's artificial insularity. The "street slang, nicknames, and local references" are a way for Springsteen to "flaunt authenticity" and trade on an "exclusivity that's an open invitation: learn the steps, join the crowd: they're doing it in

Philly" (79). Swartly's discussion circles Springsteen's public. She provides a good example of "Stranger Relationality". Springsteen makes his public feel at once specific, important, 26

and singular and larger-than-life, unknowable, and transcendent. This type of false binary

between inclusion and exclusion makes Springsteen's early work act as a launching platform

for Born to Run, and spring the Boss free of the Jersey mire.

Born to Run tests the limits of the geography detailed in the first two albums. Jersey turnpikes and shorelines are still the backdrop, but instead of Springsteen and his familiar crew we meet archetypal figures that drive the narrative: Wendy, Sammy, the Magic Rat,

Mary, etc. As a result the geography is used to an end. In "Born to Run" the kids are

figuratively "Sprung from cages out on highway 9" (1975), or in "Jungleland":

The midnight gang's assembled and picked a rendezvous for the night They'll meet 'neath that giant Exxon sign that brings this fair city light Man there's an opera out on the Turnpike There's a ballet being fought out in the alley (1975)

Locations are paired with verbs and show their utility. The "Turnpike" in particular has its value reassigned dramatically. Instead of being used as a tool of mobility, in this case facilitating a blue collar daily ritual (the drive to work), it is used to stage musical stand-offs and resolve smoldering teenage conflicts. Changing values are also characterized by the dichotomous linking of images. Tying "ballet" with "fought" creates a sense of urgency and tension that carries forth the earlier image of "midnight gangs". The internal rhyme between

"ballet" and "alley" is not lost by the end of the line and it reminds us the speaker is poetically dramatizing place.

In "Springsteen's Rock Poetry at its Best", John Rockwell describes Springsteen's third album: "The range is as wide as either of the earlier albums, from poignancy to street- strutting cockiness to punk poetry to quasi-Broadway to surging rock anthems" (48).

Springsteen, true to Rockwell, will inform us later that, "the poets down here/ Don't write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be" (1975). The geography of this night 27 becomes less important than the night and the characters in it. These places are hard pressed, but they are not destroyed. Even though these characters are "sprung" they have not flown the coop, at least not yet.

Where Born to Run tests the geographic boundaries, Darkness explodes them. In

"Badlands" it makes the transition from a backdrop for the characters to a way of figuratively expressing their emotion. Springsteen snarls:

Lights out tonight trouble in the heartland Got a head-on collision smashin' in my guts, man (1978).

These short lines punctuate the narrator's growing realization of "trouble" as evidenced by his own visceral response. This narrator is demarcated from songs like "Born to Run" by his voice. He claims, "if there's one thing I know for sure...I don't give a damn" (1978). The difference between the hopeful youth of '75 and the calloused fighter of '78 is that he is fully aware of his own situation:

Let the broken hearts stand As the price you've gotta pay We'll keep pushin' till it's understood and these badlands start treating us good (1978)

The cost is acknowledged, a theme to be repeated at the end of the album. The line, "I'll be there on time and I'll pay the cost," (1978) from "Darkness on the Edge of Town" hauntingly echoes the narrator's claims in "Badlands". By the album's close the toughness and bravado is replaced by a quiet acceptance of a darker reality.

Geography in "Darkness on the Edge of Town" is a place and space that we do not want to inhabit, but we follow the song there anyway, living vicariously through the speaker's loss. Springsteen obfuscates the true subject of the song—the reason for the speaker's fall from grace and his compulsive haunting of urban borders—and the depth of 28 the speaker's moral depravity with generalities and cliches:

Tonight I'll be on that hill 'cause I can't stop I'll be on that hill with everything I got Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost I'll be there on time and I'll pay the cost For wanting things that can only be found In the darkness on the edge of town (1978)

The rhyme scheme (aaaabb) enforces the repetition of cliches: "I can't stop...everything I got...dreams are found and lost...I'll pay the cost". These vague images fit within the rubric of place as generality: "...the darkness on the edge of town". The addition of "darkness" plunges the geographic vagueness of the "edge of town" into complete obscurity. Alone, the lyrics are singular and sound like a cliche; however, we do not resist because of the employment of a non-specific geography with major-key-upbeat-music. This is a problem with the cathartic nature of music: it forces an emotional release and allows cliche to sound larger and better than it is.

Approaching geography generally, as a poetic decision, is most successful, not here, but in "The River". It The River can be a literal place the narrator goes in the story, but it is simultaneously a device of that story; much like Twain's use of the river in The Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn. As Springsteen writes he develops his own devices, like the road and the river that appear repeatedly. Each time they do they take on more meaning. By the time he writes "Further on up the Road" (2002), or "Matamoros Banks" (written for Ghost 1995, released on Devils 2005) for instance, the road and the river work in entirely new and importantly different ways. The road and the river begin as representations of freedom and mobility, much like the frontier. By Darkness they seem not to lead anywhere. Finally, by

Springsteen's 'Renaissance', they take on a dark pre-apocalyptic quality. Crossing the river is a standard death metaphor. In Greek Mythology, the River Styx, a common trope of Rock 29

and Roll, formed the boundary between Earth and the Underworld . The road and the river

become harbingers of doom. Throughout his work, Springsteen uses geography to situate his

stories. His placement of characters within specific (or purposely nonspecific) locations

allows the listener to from an idea of whom the characters are: their feelings, tribulations,

hopes and dreams. They may be having fun, may be feeling sad, may be alive, may be dead

or are about to be.

The Vinyl Experience

The winding river and seemingly endless road are physically replicated by the groove

of a record—the car by the stylus. The groove leads somewhere; it leads us on a musical journey mediated by our agency, active listening, affective catharsis, and by engaging our

feelings. Today the way we approach listening to music is different from when Born to Run

was released on vinyl. When it is experienced as a record the physical engagement with the

medium—selecting the record, placing it on the table, engaging the stylus, and even flipping

it— is altered along with the reading. Listening publics that form through Born to Run take a

step beyond Warner's "mere attention" by physically engaging the medium of the text. On

record the track order is set to tell a story, and unlike digital mediums the listener cannot

easily alter this order—aside from physically picking up and moving the stylus. Even the

listener's engagement contributes to the public experience of listening to Born to Run.

The listener takes part in the journey of Born to Run. The record distinguishes itself

and steps beyond the combined scope of Greetings and Wild. Rockwell accounts for

Springsteen's lyrics and the reason why they were so attractive to so many listeners. "They

epitomize urban folk poetry at its best—overflowing with pungent detail and evocative

metaphors, but never tied to their sources in a way that is binding" (48). Thus is Born to Run 30 elevated from its geography and enabled to logically carry forward its theme of erupting freedom. Rockwell highlights Springsteen's ability to move from the general to the specific, which separates Born to Run as something new, different, and exciting. Instead of taking part in the carnivalesque antics, as in the first two albums, Born to Run imagines the desire to break free from this scene.

The LP is divided up into two sets24 that present a narrative about breaking free. By reading the record from side to side we can follow the listener, and the public they join, in the affective experience of Born to Run. "Thunder Road" is an introduction. Its first lines are like a screen play:

The screen door slams Mary's dress waves Like a vision she dances across the porch As the radio plays (1975)

The images, whimsical tone, and bright tempo draw the listener into the music. The imagery of Mary romances the listener, building an affective relationship. The song ends with an instrumental bridge that slowly fades; providing space between musically different tracks - romantic epic to the horn-filled autobiographical "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out". It details how saxophonist Clarence Clemons joined the band with a rhythm and blues feel. The third track is fast paced; the drum intro to "Night" snaps the listener to attention.

In "Night", Springsteen sings about the release from a day of toil. Despite the subtext

Born to Run setlist: Side A: 1. "Thunder Road" 2. "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" 3. "Night" 4. "Backstreets"

Side B: 5. "Born to Run" 6. "She's the One" 7. "Meeting Across the River" 8. "Jungleland" 31

of "Night" it encourages toe tapping and hand drumming. The only concerns here are "the

boss man" and an alarm clock. Springsteen subtly anticipates his musical future in the

following lines: "The rat trap's filled with soul crusaders, /the circuit's lined and jammed

with chrome invaders" (1975). In a song depicting the trap of a day job, Springsteen

acknowledges that the real vice is the night time activity; this is the reason to toil at a thankless job. The chorus echoes this thought with a dramatic chord change from B minor to

B major—these chords are only separated by a semi-tone, D in the minor chord versus D# in the major chord. While the difference is subtle, the change between the bright sounding

major to the more moody minor enacts a vicious cycle, musical and narrative, that is at the heart of Born to Run. This song is placed to let the listener have fun before "Backstreets" ends the set.

"Backstreets" tells the story of lovers from different worlds. They are eventually torn apart when they are discovered. Springsteen's wracked voice takes on the collective grief of the speaker, and the audience:

...at night sometimes it seemed You could hear the whole damn city crying, blame it on the lies that killed us Blame it on the truth that ran us down, you can blame it all on me Terry It don't matter to me now, when the breakdown hit at midnight There was nothing left to say, but I hated him and I hated you when you went away (1975)

This piece is particularly beautiful because of the language Springsteen uses. There is a violence to his words: "truth ran us down" and "breakdown hit at midnight". Even the idea of "hiding on the backstreets" is covert and begs the question: hiding from what? They are hiding from the illicit nature of their love.

Questions lie at the heart of "Backstreets". Springsteen chose an ambiguous name -is

Terry a man or a woman? 32

Remember all the movies, Terry, we'd go see Trying to learn how to walk like heroes we thought we had to be And after all this time to find we're just like all the rest Stranded in the park and forced to confess (1975)

Here, the truth is obfuscated by the darkness of the masculine imagery and the mournful tone. The speaker's melancholy and loss inscribes itself aurally on the listener. On its own it is a crushingly sad piece, but it ties the sides of the album together. The temporality of pain and loss is maintained when the record is flipped, but then as the warm hum of the stylus over vinyl signals the start of side 2, "Born to Run" blasts over the speakers and offers cathartic release from "Backstreets".

"Born to Run" pulls the listener back at a break neck pace. Springsteen takes this track over the top. In the verses the instruments are layered. Acoustic guitar, 12 string guitar, electric guitar, bass guitar, alto sax, tenor sax, baritone sax, organ, piano, glockenspiel, synthesizer, fender Rhodes electric piano, and drums play on, around, and with one performing lushly dense rhythms and harmonies. In terms of form, this song has an introduction, many verses, pre-chorus, chorus, a sax solo, bridge, a guitar solo, drum breakdowns, a chromatic scale breakdown, a mid song count-in , and an extended chorus outro and a beautifully synchronized final chord that quickly fades. The overwhelming fullness of the song cathartically strips away the affect of sorrow from "Backstreets" leaving the listener clean, refreshed, and ready to pump fist. For listening publics, it is this shared cathartic experience binds them across space and time.

Not to mention there is electric guitar played clean, distorted, with wah-wah pedal, and with tremolo, that add to the wall of sound. Live versions of "Born to Run" feature Springsteen's fans stroking his guitar during the raucous abrasive breakdown before the count-in. This fan-boss engagement should be read as a affective touch stone between reader (screaming fan) and text (Springsteen's guitar). There is a phallic nature to this display that plays into the masculine power of the Boss. This point of the song features no defined beat, instead musical cacophony reigns, fans reach out to stroke the guitar of the mighty rock god, and then he takes charge by counting back in to the structure of the known: "1-2-3-4!". 33

The transition from "Born to Run" to "She's the One" is seamless, as the rewrite of Bo

Diddley's "Mona" pops off the record. Diddley's version vamps on one chord for most of the

song; by adding the bridge Springsteen dramatically rewrites it:

Oh-o and just one kiss She'd fill them long summer nights With her tenderness that secret pact you made Back when her love could save you from the bitterness

Oh she's the one, oh she's the one (1975)

This bridge melodically and rhythmically adds tension as the narrator imagines one kiss with the woman of his dreams. After two upbeat danceable numbers, "Meeting Across the River" sorrowfully expresses the opposite side of the same coin: a chance for freedom, to impress the narrator's girl and hope for the future. For the narrator of "Meeting" the need to break free is much greater than childish fantasy. This is Springsteen's Eminem moment: failure will have a catastrophic effect. This is a sparse and sorrowful song, but it is not melodramatic or self-absorbed in the way of "Thunder Road" and "Backstreets".

"Meeting'"s sparse arrangement and truthful tone affectively prepare the listener for the grand finale—"Jungleland".

Springsteen introduces the concept of silence early in "Jungleland". "From the churches to the jails tonight all is silence in the world/ As we take our stand down in

Jungleland" (1975). Silence dichotomizes experience. Springsteen, the producer of noise, depicts the listeners—churches and jails—as consumers of noise. This relationship extends to the living rooms and cars of Springsteen's listening public. In an all-eyes-on-me moment,

"Jungleland" presumes its singular importance. This type of relationship—teacher-talking- student-listening—is not desired by song, or performer. The audience can sing-along, clap their hands, and nod their heads, but only their "mere attention" (Warner, 87) is required to 27 See film 8 Mile. 34 form a public. Whether in concert, or on record, Springsteen's performance draws the listener into his public.

Alongside a reading of "Jungleland" as a display of listeners engaging and creating the text as it unfolds, the song can also be read as an allegory for the record industry:

The midnight gang's assembled and picked a rendezvous for the night They'll meet 'neath that giant Exxon sign that brings this fair city light Man there's an opera out on the Turnpike There's a ballet being fought out in the alley Until the local cops, Cherry Tops, rips this holy night The street's alive as secret debts are paid Contacts made, they vanished unseen Kids flash guitars just like switch-blades hustling for the record machine The hungry and the hunted explode into rock 'n' roll bands That face off against each other out in the street down in Jungleland

In the parking lot the visionaries dress in the latest rage Inside the backstreet girls are dancing to the records that the D.J. plays Lonely-hearted lovers struggle in dark corners Desperate as the night moves on, just a look and a whisper, and they're gone (1975)

An allegorical reading of the record industry in "Jungeland" is contained a the single line, in the middle of the song: "Kids flash guitars just like switch-blades hustling for the record machine". This line recalls the noise/silence dichotomy. The kids, like Springsteen, are hustling for attention. If we read this line out from the centre of this passage the "ballet" and the "opera" become theaters for this conflict. Springsteen acknowledges that each side of the binary "hungry and the hunted" are able to engage in this medium. The verse after these conflicts relates the impact of music on its public.

Crowds come out in droves to listen, to dance, and to make love proving that the dichotomy between noise and silence (production/consumption) is false. The scene created through music is temporal. "Just a look and a whisper, and they're gone" (1975). The rapid disruption of the crowds assumes an inhuman sensitivity, especially after such visceral depiction of the gathering. Springsteen's mournful closer finally explodes the noise/silence 35 binary: "Outside the street's on fire in a real death waltz/ Between flesh and what's fantasy/

And the poets down here don't write nothing at all/ they just stand back and let it all be"

(1975). The producers become consumers as the imaginary romanticized vision of

"Jungleland" consumes itself.

Despite the gravity of the situation described in the narrative and conveyed by the music Springsteen's playfulness comes through in lines such as, "they reach for their moment/ And try to make an honest stand but they wind up wounded, not even dead/ Tonight in Jungleland" (1975). This song closes the album the same way it starts, with grand, sweeping strokes of epic music. The strict plod of the bass guitar and the tentative piano when mixed with Springsteen's wails mirror the piano and harmonica intro of "Thunder

Road". Just like the record, the album is circular.

Vinyl experience relays what a listening public shares. Although, as in theories of reading, each concretization of the album will yield a slightly different experience of the it;

Born to Run maintains a core aesthetic, and feel. Even if the listening is markedly different time-to-time the record offers the potential for repeat and shared experience. Through an individuals attention to to the record, whether on a car stereo, record player, or iPod, they become part of its public.

Lost Dreams, Busting Guts and Hollow Romanticism

As its name implies Darkness casts a shadow over the epic quality of "Jungleland" and rejects Born to Run; it aptly names the theme of the album and its rejection of specific geography and the road. From "Badlands" to the title track this album delivers songs about lost hope, failed dreams and empty lives. The saddest song on the album is "Factory", while 36

"Adam Raised a Cain"28 perfectly captures the futility of hope and dreams as it assumes that we are damned from birth. The theme of the road is still prevalent in this album, but

Springsteen rewrites the metaphor creating a symbol of loss and futility out of one of hope.

The theme of loss is duplicated in the relationship between music and lyrics. "Darkness on the Edge of Town" is a good example of how Springsteen creates tension in his songs by writing dark lyrics in a major key. June Skinner Sawyers calls this dynamic: "a simmering fusion of angst and despair" (p. 49, 2006). It is played in a major key (G), but features the key's relative minor chord (E minor). Springsteen uses this flash of tone for half bars only to punctuate lyrics. For instance, "Well if she wants to see me,/ [E minor] [G] you can tell her

I'm easily found," or "Someday they just cut it loose,/ [E minor] [G] cut it loose or let it drag

'em down./ [E minor]" (1978). When Springsteen punctuates a gap in singing with the minor chord he musically enunciates the lyric. This becomes evident through the predominance of the major key. The tension at the album's close is unsettling and separates it from other albums like "Jungleland" which offer closure, even if it is ambivalent.

Like "Darkness...", "Something in the Night" subverts everything that Born to Run fights for. It maintains the musical introduction of previous songs, but even this is just a quick and dirty version of any intro from Born to Run. Springsteen moaning, the sparse lead guitar, and then the slow build of the drum roll subvert the urgency of the introduction. This is a song about emptiness. A man drives around aimlessly and instead of finding comfort finds misery: "Turn the radio up loud,/ so I don't have to think" (1978). The car is no longer a vehicle of freedom or romanticism. "I take her to the floor,/ looking for a moment when the world seems right, (1978). Thus, the function of the road is dramatically reconfigured and now it serves as banal escapism.

28 Springsteen wrote this song after seeing East of Eden (Sawyers 41, 2006). 37

Springsteen's writing has changed along with his new attitude towards the road. These lines are literal. There are no metaphors and no lyrically crowded lines. The imagery that is used, "And I tear into the guts,/ of something in the night," (1978) brutally cuts away the old idealistic dream of freedom and echoes "Badlands": "Got a head-on collision,/ smashin' in my guts, man" (1975). As we become familiar with the speaker's feeling of loss and lack of belonging we become aware that the others in the narrative are similarly affected:

You can ride this road 'till dawn, without another human being in sight, Just kids wasted on something in the night (1978)

This verse recalls "Thunder Road", "And in the lonely cool before dawn/ You hear their engines roaring on/ But when you get to the porch they're gone" (1975). Even the absent presence of the drag racers is more gratifying than the "wasted [kids]" (1978). The transformation that occurs is one that leaves them inhuman so that the narrator does not recognize them. As listeners we ask, is he similarly changed?

The bridge music in "Something..." carries the listener away from the known as it performs violent tendencies. The music mirrors the violence by physically attacking the listener. As Springsteen sings,

Nothing is forgotten or forgiven, when it's your last time around, I got stuff running 'round my head That I just can't live down (1978) the words are punctuated by heavy drum beats; the tom-tom strokes land like punches and the guttural grunt that he lets out .. ."when it's your last time around.... HUHN!!" hints at a pain there are no words capable of expressing. This violent outburst may seem self inflicted, but the speaker is beaten down. By sustaining only the vocals, synthesizer, and bass drum for the final passage Springsteen isolates the speaker and his feeling of loneliness and 38

emptiness:

When we found the things we loved, They were crushed and dying in the dirt. We tried to pick up the pieces, And get away without getting hurt (1978)

The speaker cannot escape this self-replicating mess as "Something in the Night" works

back over itself. In the end, this feeling of emptiness is turned on the narrator.

"Something in the Night" rejects similar scenes from Born to Run thereby completely

subverting the 1975 album's hope and romanticism replacing it with violence and

destruction:

But they caught us at the state line, And burned our cars in one last fight, And left us running burned and blind, Chasing something in the night (1978)

Even the music during the outro drowns out Springsteen's wailing vocals. The listener, like

the speaker, is left devoid of emotion. Springsteen has abandoned the poetics of Born to Run.

A listener's engagement with a text that leaves them with questions, such as

"Something in the Night", fuels public discourse and public formation. This change in

Springsteen's writing, from close geographic narratives to songs about loss and hardship, highlights the important new ways this music is public forming. The violence and

destruction from Darkness leads away from the fun and freedom of his first three albums.

These songs are just as affective, yet they have a capacity to make us feel grief, pain, and remorse before we feel the feelings of fun and liberation associated with Born to Run. The

willingness of Springsteen's publics to move with him as his writing developed exposes the

affective potential of his writing, and not its subject or form, as the main attraction of his music. The absolute refusal to live in Darkness replaces the romantic escapism of Born to

Run. A harsh, beat down truth rises out of this violence: The characters on Darkness do not 39 need to suffer from ideals, because they suffer enough as it is.

Mounting Tension Between Music and Lyric

As Springsteen rejects a romantic and hopeful poetic style he begins to employ new techniques. For instance, on Darkness Springsteen creates tension between lyric and music.

This tension adds depth to his music and gives him an avenue for creative output. In

"Factory" and "Candy's Room" the lyrics and music work together to create affective catharsis in Darkness' public. The dreariness of "Factory" and the sexual desperation of

"Candy's Room" translate the lyrics, through music, to the listener; the experience of the song is enhanced by their interplay. These songs contain "accents" of their publics, as seen in

Denning's Mechanic Accents. The excitement of the speaker in "Candy's Room" (punctuated by fast paced drumming, and blistering guitar) is shared with the listening public as a type of accent. "Factory" is closer to Denning's conception. It is a song about the working-class that utilizes musical onomatopoeia to represent the daily trek to and from work.

The organ and piano introduction to "Factory" place it as gospel music. This song is about Springsteen's father; although Springsteen calls him "my daddy", he is referred to as

"the man" in the first verse. "Factory" produces a harsh paradox faced by the working class:

"Factory takes his hearing,/ Factory gives him life" (1978). Springsteen's nonchalant chorus,

"the workin', just the workin', just the workin' life," (1978) shuffles in time to the drum beat; you can hear the men marching through this day of work. In live performances this rhythm is drawn to the foreground and slowed significantly29.

In "Candy's Room" the music and lyric unite. The drums pump like the blood of the speaker in adolescent excitement. The sustained staccatto sixteenths on the high hat shift to

29 Especially at Winterland. 40 the snare drum as Springsteen sings, "we kiss," and then moves into a powerful one-two beat. This drum work mounts the tension alternating between beat and sixteenths. Other instruments represent the speaker's mounting excitement. The piano runs up and down octaves of the scale as the narrator sings, "The blood rushes in my veins fire rushes towards the sky" (1978). The passion mounts as Springsteen whispers, barely audible over the pounding drums: "Cause in the darkness there'll be hidden worlds that shine, When I hold

Candy close she makes these hidden worlds mine." (1978) The guitar cuts in, piercingly delivering shudders of aural ecstasy as the speaker and "Candy" reach the climax of the song. Springsteen's last verse lyrically subverts the entire song as fantasy. The two voices that speak, "That what what she she wants wants is is me," double the speaker as he talks himself into following his lust. The speaker whispers "tonight" and turns this passionate depiction of love into fantasy. The unity of the music and the lyric makes the listener, and the speaker, believe that it has.

This is what Darkness repeatedly does: it gives us something we know and recognize and then turns it upside down. We hear "Streets of Fire" and recognize the interval from

"Backstreets" but the lyrics turn us in a new direction:

When the night's quiet and you don't care anymore, And your eyes are tired and there's someone at your door And you realize you wanna let go And the weak lies and the cold walls you embrace Eat at your insides and leave you face to face with Streets of fire (1978)30

Despite being over sung, this song captures the withdrawal of the speaker. Here "weak lies" and "cold walls" are blown away by "streets of fire". This dichotomy displays the speaker's

30 Line six is incorrect in Songs and on brucespringsteen.net. It should scan: "Eat at your insides, but babe I ain't a liar/1 walk streets of fire" (1978). 41

inner turmoil. Once again his "guts" are suffering,31 but the traditional way out, the road, is

on fire.

"Darkness on the Edge of Town" concludes the album almost like "Jungleland" in terms of theme, but its form is completely resistant to the geography of early albums and the epic closure offered on Born to Run. This song sounds stripped down and bare compared to the grand cinematic "Jungleland". The lyrics are not bogged down with figural language, instead the image of darkness is used repeatedly, and Springsteen returns to geography. As he returns to the places from the previous albums we find that they have a sinister edge to them:

They're still racing out at the Trestles But that blood it never burned in her veins Now I hear she's got a house up in Fairview And a style she's trying to maintain Well if she wants to see me You can tell her that I'm easily found Tell her there's a spot out 'neath Abram's Bridge (1978)

The speaker's girl was never into racing, and "Fairview" sounds like a nice place, so the listener wonders why she would want to go to a spot '"neath Abram's Bridge". The speaker has to come to terms with this question as well. The speaker has faced an unbearable loss.

Unlike "Jungleland" the stakes are high: "Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost/

I'll be there on time and I'll pay the cost" (1978). Traveling through the "Darkness on the

Edge of Town" has a profound life altering effect for speaker and listener. The price for freedom is no longer simply breaking free or down, or busting out of the city, or meeting the

"big man", and it never can be again; this is a simple understanding of the costs, which once overcome, are gone forever, replaced with a quiet bitter acceptance of reality.

The public of Darkness faces these problems repeatedly alongside the voices from

31 See "Badlands" and "Something in the Night". 42 the album. The change from Born to Run to Darkness is exemplified in Springsteen's listening public as well as in his poetic approach. This can be seen in specific examples; for instance, Springsteen's cathartic extended approach to "Backstreets" on the Darkness tour made a powerful song personal and engaging by injecting his own narration into the bridge of the song. This is compelling in the concert setting and increases the tension in an already emotionally abusive song. In this way Darkness casts a shadow on everything that came before it, and marks what will come.

The Stadium Phase

A Narrative Turn

The River moves away from the rest of Springsteen's canon because of the way it was written and recorded. In Songs, Springsteen explains that early versions of the album did not sound good enough. According to him the songs "lacked the kind of unity and conceptual intensity" he liked his music to have. Springsteen and the E Street Band returned to the studio for a year, and they wrote as many songs as were cut from the album. The problem was the less meticulous, more instinctive way that Springsteen approached the songwriting.

Recording The River Springsteen "let the band play live and let the music happen". The album has more concert ready upbeat songs than previous albums, which gives The River its vivacious and dark identity. Springsteen says, "[We]'d try for the best of both worlds: more pop songs in a lesser conceptual framework"; because of this the record explodes in the most positive way(99-100).

The River involves the E Street Band more than on any other album. Recollection of artistic intent usually does little to illuminate the album, beyond simply listening to it, but 43

Springsteen's motive is noteworthy:

This was the album where the E Street Band really came into its own in the studio. We struck the right balance between a garage band and the professionalism required to make good records. Plus, I had a clear idea of what I wanted to hear. I wanted the snare drum to explode and I wanted less separation between the instruments. Also, after the seriousness of Darkness, I wanted to give myself a lot more flexibility with the emotional range of the songs I chose. Our shows had always been filled with fun and I didn't want to see that left out this time around (97-98).

Here Springsteen speaks to the balance between studio records and performance. The poetics

of the Boss are as much about writing and playing as they are about a finished product. The

songs as they exist on record are recognizably altered in concert. As an album, The River

attempts to marry the spontaneity of a live show and the professionalism of a record. It

successfully draws more fun onto the record than we have heard since Wild, but it has less

conceptual and thematic purpose than previous albums.

Springsteen's desire to make a fun record is completed by his use of dramatic monologue, as Alan Rauch argues in the article "Bruce Springsteen and the Dramatic

Monologue", the transition to this old narrative technique occurs between the early albums

and Nebraska with specific evidence on The River that it represents "an effort to get away

from abstract lyrics that resist easy interpretation (and in the process alienate the listener) towards lyrics that seem straightforward and familiar" (30). By writing more accessible, fun music Springsteen widens his listening audience, forming a broader, pop-rock based public

of record listeners and concert patrons. This public formation is facilitated by Springsteen's use of dramatic monologue.

The dramatic monologue, as a literary form, is one where we encounter the speaker

addressing a silent listener. For instance, in "Born to Run" Springsteen addresses Wendy: "I wanna die with you Wendy on the streets tonight/ In an everlasting kiss" and "But till then tramps like us/ baby we were born to run" (1975; mine). So Wendy, his baby, is the 44

addressee. Or, the speaker in "Hungry Heart" addresses a male listener: "Got a wife and kids

in Baltimore, Jack" (1980). Jack is a male colloquialism, like bud or guy, but its consonant makes it harshly specific. Rauch explains that dramatic monologue forms a triangle

"composed of the speaker in the poem, the individual to whom he is speaking and the reader, who is observing, at something of a distance, the relationship that exists within the context of the poem" (31). What is most interesting about Springsteen is that, as Rauch articulates, "his use of the monologue transforms the audience into active rather than passive listeners who are required to make a judgment that depends on a fairly complex appreciation of the narrative" (33). This enables the audience to interact with the song, and, in doing so, to become a part of it. Therefore, the dramatic monologue is public forming, which is especially meaningful in a concert setting.

In the late 70s and early 80s Springsteen began to play stadiums. The power of his live show dwarfs the already potent cathartic and transformational nature of his recorded music.

Through performance he builds audience rapport by storytelling in-and-out of its lyrical format. Rauch argues that during these stories the speaker may reveal deeply personal truths

(30). Springsteen's lyrics are in-character-confessionals, but in between songs Springsteen opens his own heart to the audience32. Dramatic monologue suits Springsteen's poetics in terms of aesthetics, affecting catharsis, and facilitating public formation. We can see this on side 1 and side 2 of The River with the opening track, "The Ties that Bind" and the end of side 2 "The River".

"The Ties that Bind" features a speaker and his girl. Springsteen's narrator speaks to

32 On the Live 1975-85 record collection Springsteen plays a version of "The River" which includes a preamble about his father. His story is about when he, Bruce, was drafted to fight in Vietnam. Springsteen and his father did not get along, but the touching thing is that when Springsteen was rejected by the army, after staying out all night, he returned to find his father waiting up. His father's response was minimal, "that's good son that's good". When Springsteen reaches this part of the story he starts to play the opening notes of "The River" to great applause. 45 his addressee directly as "you", "you been hurt and you're all cried out you say" (1980). He acknowledges his addressee's ability to communicate. This continues until the bridge where he follows a clear pattern that involves interjecting a designation for an auditor in the lyrics

(33):

I would rather feel the hurt inside, yes I would darlin', Than know the emptiness your heart must hide, Yes I would darlin', yes I would darlin', Yes I would baby (1980)

Here the auditor is acknowledged as "baby" and "darlin"'. The speaker agrees to take on the atlas-like burden of his baby's hurt. This is common for dramatic monologue in rock music

(Rauch, 33). "The River" complicates this convention. Instead of an equal relationship between speaker and addressee "The River" uses the title "mister" and "man" to describe the auditor and, Rauch argues, this creates a power relation: "the voice in relation to the speaker is clearly subordinate" (35). What we hear in a song like "The River" is the voice of the

"working man" overwhelmed and alienated, or "what Springsteen called the "spiritual breakdown" that comes with the loss of a "sense of community" (Rauch, 35). Rauch believes what makes this successful is that "it doesn't describe us as much as it does some manifestation of the way we see ourselves at the absolute worst" (36). This is Springsteen's gift. He offers a reality that is, for most, far worse than our own, assuming a middle class reading public, and yet it is somewhat recognizable. In post-Vietnam America many people had gone through hardship, but Springsteen's approach does anything but alienate. He offers a place to belong, whether his public empathetically or actually relates to his narratives.

Springsteen enhances his poetic with dramatic monologue that succeeds remarkably in increasing his accessibility to a wider audience. So, despite his initial fears about The River lacking "unity and conceptual intensity"(1998) Springsteen replaces his old poetic 46 cornerstone with an album that has formal unity and affective intensity. The River is so successful because more people could relate to it than Darkness; it has danceable songs that work in a live context. Bigger concerts means more people, more fun and a larger listening public. In this way Springsteen begins to create a public whose engagement with his poetics involves dancing lost-in-the-crowd. After a turn in formal and thematic style with The River

Springsteen abandoned the fun but continued with dramatic monologue on Nebraska.

Bleak Landscape; Bleak Characters

Nebraska3 completely rejects The River, but not thematically—the way Darkness rejected Born to Run. Instead, Springsteen recorded the album on his own with a four-track recorder and left the E Street Band completely out of the process. This is not Springsteen's first attempt to write geographically. Nebraska refuses to hope and its form is similarly bleak; this album moves thematically beyond its title. Like much of The River, Nebraska is written as dramatic monologue, but the element that stands out is its characters.

Some of Springsteen's characters on Nebraska defy the listener's ability to sympathize with them while others demand the listener's empathy. The title track "Nebraska" is an example of the first. It is told by the mass murderer Charles Starkweather as he and his teenage girlfriend Caril Anne Fugat went on a killing spree between Nebraska and Wyoming in 1957-58, killing eleven people. The character is reprehensible; some would deem this tale unsuitable as the subject for a pop song. The lyrics are sparse for a four minute recording:

I saw her standin' on her front lawn just twirlin' her baton Me and her went for a ride sir and ten innocent people died

From the town of Lincoln Nebraska with a sawed off .410 on my lap

33 Nebraska is also Springsteen's first album cover without him on it since Greetings. This is further evidence of its separation from his previous, and subsequent, albums. 47

Through to the badlands of Wyoming I killed everything in my path

I can't say that I'm sorry for the things that we done At least for a little while sir me and her we had us some fun

The jury brought in a guilty verdict and the judge he sentenced me to death Midnight in a prison storeroom with leather straps across my chest

Sheriff when the man pulls that switch sir and snaps my poor head back You make sure my pretty baby is sittin' right there on my lap

They declared me unfit to live said into that great void my soul'd be hurled They wanted to know why I did what I did, well sir I guess there's just a meanness in this world (1982)

As Rauch notes this song begins as a confession and moves "quickly and powerfully into a narrative" that is both "fascinating and appalling" (37). The rhyming couplets found at the end of each line suggest a fairy tale or nursery rhyme complete with twisted moral at the end: "well sir I guess there's just a meanness in this world" (1982). Here the auditor is "sir"; as Rauch points out, if this sense is ironic, it is because "the character in the song has been brought so low, that irony is the only outlet available to him." He also notes, "The voice not only allows for rich colloquialisms and 'street' grammar, but also for a kind of descriptive detail" (35). These observations point to the material available through the study of dramatic monologue and to Springsteen's poetic development. Starkweather is a character that, by the end of the song, we feel no pity for, but however briefly because of his position, we consider his story. Springsteen's characters feel real. They occupy "real world" stories, make mistakes, and speak with the voices that Springsteen's listening publics would expect them to.

The concert hall is not the only "holy place" in Springsteen's church of rock and roll.

Nebraska allows us to build more serious relationships with its characters and even to empathize with them. For instance, in "Highway Patrolman" Joe is forced to make a moral 48 decision between family and state. As a patrolman, we expect Joe to choose his occupation, but, as Springsteen sings, "Man turns his back on his family well he just ain't no good"

(1982). Joe's character flaw is gripping. Springsteen rhetorically ends "Highway Patrolman" by placing a chorus after the narrative has concluded itself (Frankie escapes across the

Canadian border). The song becomes an American folk tale; this is a story the listener should learn from. Whichever choice Joe makes will have negative consequences. If he resists his familial code, and captures his brother, he could potentially ruin their relationship (if Frank operates under this logic he should have never put Joe in this predicament). Alternatively when Joe lets his brother go he commits an act that will stay with him, scarring his own morality. Joe's rumination is evident in the repetition of the chorus a final time.

Springsteen again shows poetic development through his use of unstable irony. In the case of Joe Roberts, he has a listening public in the palm of his hand one minute, and turning away the next. The feeling Joe elicits in the listener is evidence of the affective experience

Springsteen's music creates, whether it is suited to dancing or rumination. Rauch's concern here, in terms of dramatic monologue, is that Joe Roberts "requires our serious consideration and critical judgment" and that he "raises the issue of his reliability as a narrator" (39).

Springsteen develops themes from Nebraska, incorporates the fun from The River, and develops a subtle irony on BITU.

Born Again, this Time into Fire

From the low resonant hum of the synthesizer to the harsh staccato of piano, the melodic hook and simple mirrored two-chord progression, Bruce Springsteen's 1984 hit single "Born in the U.S.A." creates a lush wall of sound. But how many of its listeners know the forces at work underneath this radio friendly pop tune? Due to Springsteen's use of 49 unstable irony there are several disparate readings of this song. A reading from the political left—as we see with Jim Cullen who calls it the depiction of a "betrayed American Dream"

(77)—tends to over-read the narrative verses as a subversive protest or an indictment of state hegemony and sovereignty, as seen specifically in America's engagement in Vietnam. But a reading from the political right, as we see with George Will, emphasizes the anthemic refrain, "Born in the U.S.A.!" as a patriotic answer to the disillusionment of the working class. A third reading recognizes the difficulty of believing in a national dream that seems unreachable. As Cowie and Boehm articulate, "in the summer of 1984, America's foremost working-class hero stood on the stage, dwarfed by an enormous Patton-like flag, pounding his fist as if it mattered" (2006, 353). This intense statement is rock euphoria in its own right, but it does matter. There is more going on here than a group of people slamming, wailing and jamming on their instruments in front of a crowd of humanity that pulsates with each power-chord and reverberates with each drum roll. The poetic facet of this debate is that it was Springsteen's honed sense of irony that complicates this song -originally written for

Nebraska?4

The choice that Springsteen made—the song was originally a folk song, but

Springsteen recorded it as a pop song—arguably catapulted his status from a rock and roll deity to politically savvy rock god. Springsteen, in Songs, says,

You need to invest a certain amount of time and effort to absorb both the music and the words. But that's not the way a lot of people use music...On the album, "Born in the U.S.A." was in its most powerful presentation. If I tried to undercut or change the music, I believe I would have had a record that might have been more easily understood, but not as good (164-65; mine). j4 There is an interesting and funny anecdote that goes along with "Born in the U.S.A." In 1981 Springsteen was approached by Paul Schrader with a script called Born in the U.S.A. It was about some fictional musicians in Cleveland, and Schrader wanted Springsteen to score the film. Springsteen tabled the idea until one day he was working on a song called "Vietnam" when he noticed Schrader's cover page and sang it out. Within six months he had cut the song with the band and given Schrader a song called "Light of Day" that worked as the movie title as well (Springsteen, 1998, 163). 50

Springsteen's sense of what works and what does not is evident in his use of the word

"good". While this appears to be an argument about his intentionality, it is really a case for his prowess as a rhetorician. However, there is an argument against this means of performance. While Springsteen's concerts engender a community, indeed a public, and while his songs have specific messages, the question that remains is, so what?

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band had no problem filling stadiums. In his biography of Springsteen, Glory Days, Dave Marsh dramatically describes the crowd at a

Springsteen show:

The sun had dimmed now, sunk beneath the stadium's rim eclipsing the crowd, which looked so colorful—all reads, whites, and blues—just half an hour before. From above, the audience seems a single primitive organism, waiting to be fused into a single shape and voice and purpose (Marsh, p. 4)

The crowd is imagined as a complete being. They are a body of strangers, each with his or her own purpose for being there, and each with his or her own dreams. Yet, somehow when the first chord of "Born in the U.S.A." is struck on the synthesizer this crowd will be of one mind and one dream. As Boehm and Cowie put it, "Fists and flags were thrown into the air at the first hint of the famous melody as thousands of bodies shadowboxed the empty space about the crowd to the rhythm of the song" (Cowie and Boehm, p. 353). If you are a part of that crowd there is no safer place to be, but to observe is to witness the unimaginable. A

Springsteen concert can be described as "equal parts rock concert, spiritual revival, and nationalist rally" (Boehm and Cowie, p. 353). Boehm, Cowie and Marsh articulate public formation through the affect of catharsis in Springsteen's music identifying the release offered to the membership of concert publics. These individuals become a collective identity that works off the excess emotion generated by an E Street band performance. But, despite the cathartic release the question, so what, reverberates. 51

There are two important ways to approach the so what? question. At stake is formation of publics and the affect of catharsis. As Warner indicates in "Publics and Counterpublics",

"One's place in the common order is what it is regardless of one's inner thoughts, however intense their affective charge might sometimes be" (89). Warner is arguing that our inner worlds are not recognized by publics—that as social beings our place is not linked to our inner feeling. He writes "the appellative energy of publics puts a different burden on us: it makes us believe our consciousness to be decisive. The direction of our glance can constitute our social world" (89). Our inner being is subsumed by belonging in the crowd. In the context of a rock concert all attention is fixed on Springsteen and the band. The show that they perform guides the audiences' collective emotions and directs their purpose. However, uniting an audience in single-organism-like unison is less challenging than affecting change post- public /?05f-catharsis.

The catharsis of rock is equal parts a poetic necessity and rhetorically problematic for introducing change. If Springsteen's ironically anthemic "Born in the U.S.A." is supposed to cause a riot one has yet to be seen. The release offered by catharsis drains the audience of their fervor leaving them with a post-coital, not pre-revolutionary, affect.

Likewise, the song has a history of being drastically misread. George Will, a conservative columnist wrote, "I have not got a clue about Springsteen's politics, if any, but flags get waved at his concerts when he sings songs about hard times.. .He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seems punctuated by a grand, cheerful, affirmation: 'Born in the U.S.A.'" (Cowie and Boehm, p. 359). Will's description of the chorus as "cheerful" indicates that he has most likely never listened to the song. This

35 Problematically, if catharsis was indeed a release capable of uniting and public forming, the Olympic Game should have prevented two World Wars. 52 is compounded by Ronald Reagan's famous request for Springsteen, a staunch Democrat, to support his 1984 presidential campaign (Cullen, 1-5). Springsteen's song, that can be read as an indictment of American conflict in Vietnam, can also be read as a patriotic jingoistic salute to the American flag.

The heavy irony of "Born in the U.S.A." creates a symbolic rift. In The Invention of

Tradition, Hobsbawm speaks to this kind of disjuncture: "The crucial element seems to have been the invention of emotionally and symbolically charged signs of club membership rather than statutes and objects of the club" (Hobsbawm, p. 11). Here the American flag represents this membership, and acts as a sign of patriotism. Marsh reads the flag displayed behind

Springsteen in a different light,

A fifty foot flag, fiat without a flutter, at once an icon of the most deeply fixed symbolism and a blank slate on which the evening's meaning will be inscribed. You could write almost anything here, and for the past eighteen months everyone from the president down has tried. But right now, all that's clear is the ambiguity of the image and the intensity of the figure it dwarfs (Marsh, p. 4).

Marsh offers a third reading of Springsteen's acclaimed song: ambiguity. Here Springsteen, the boss, one of the shortest, tallest men in America is dwarfed by the symbol he has chosen to ironically describe. The redeeming quality of taking national identity into poetics is the danger of misinterpretation. Springsteen's rhetoric, to ambiguously depict a political agenda aesthetically, leads him into dangerous territory. The crux of the problem is whether to write music to be clear or to be good. Springsteen's recent involvement with democratic political campaigns has helped to clear away any uncertainty—we can assume this was the problem for George Will and Ronald Reagan—and allowed him to continue to write music suited to his, albeit unstable, use of irony. However, the creation of divergent contradictory publics should not be misread as problematic; they stand as a testament to the affective potential of

"Born in the U.S.A." and the engagement of Springsteen's listening with his material. 53

The romantic escapism of "Cover Me" lends itself to be read politically, especially

after "Born in the U.S.A.", but after listening this song's shallowness becomes apparent. The

raucous music hides the sensitivity of the lyric. Here Springsteen reveals a tender voice:

Promise me baby you won't let them find us Hold me in your arms, let's let our love blind us Cover me, shut the door and cover me Well I'm looking for a lover who will come on in and cover me (1984)

The ambiguous state of the narrator and his "baby" foreground the imbalance of music and

lyric. The lyrics are simple and repetitive; in particular "cover me" is repeated ten times. The

word "cover" takes on dual meanings: from the physical act of embrace to its figural

meaning in terms of assistance, assurance and insurance as the narrator pleads for help.

However, music works against lyric. The driving tempo, insistent lead guitar, and choral back up create the sense that this narrator is in fact a confident individual and his desire for aid is misleading. The drum flair in time to the lyric ".. .wild wind blowing" is an engaging example. This song's ambiguity and its confused music-lyric dichotomy make it a dynamic, yet hollow, song. It lacks the political message of the first track, but does remain listenable.

The problem of misinterpretation comes up two more times on the album in "Bobby

Jean"36 and "I'm on Fire". "I'm on Fire" contains one of the greatest lyrical ambiguities,

although I argue against this ambiguity, in Springsteen's canon. Before debating this I offer a close reading of the song. The speaker in "I'm on Fire" obsesses with his fantasy and desire.

The object of his lust is never specified, but it is archetypically beautiful:

Hey little girl is your daddy home Did he go away and leave you all alone I got a bad desire I'm on fire (1984)

j6 "Bobby Jean" is about the end of a close relationship. Springsteen wrote it just before Steve Van Zandt left the E Street Band. We will return to it in Chapter III. 54

"Daddy" functions within the terminology of patriarchy and represents any man that would be protective of this "little girl". Springsteen uses the word "bad" to indicate both the quantifiable nature and quality of the speaker's desire: it is overwhelming and sinister. This lust is recognizable from earlier work in Springsteen's canon, but "I'm on Fire" violently separates itself. Like "Candy's Room" the speaker imagines being with the object of his lust:

"Tell me now baby is he good to you/ Can he do to you the things that I do/1 can take you higher"(1984). This imagined dialogue is a fantasy of the speaker as indicated by the music video37. However, desire is interlaced with self mutilation and violence—this is where the ambiguity enters. Springsteen's lyrics online, in Songs, and in the liner notes all read:

Sometimes it's like someone took a knife baby edgy and dull and cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my soul (1984).

The debate hinges on the word "soul" and has two distinct dimensions. "Soul" is a slant rhyme of dull and it is too ephemeral for Springsteen. The other conjecture, and ultimately the one with the most authority, is that on the album and in performance Springsteen says

TO

"skull"—a word more suited to both Springsteen's poetics, his canon, and the song . The

Live 1975-85 liner notes do read "skull"39 therefore substantiating this ambiguity as the skull-soul debate. The issue this debate takes within Springsteen's poetics hinges on the reliability of the speaker. In the music video for "I'm on Fire" Springsteen meets a lady at the car garage where he works. The rest of the video is a sequence of scenes in which he lays awake all at night and then drives around in her car. The video concludes with Springsteen at her house, dropping off the keys in her mailbox. The critical moment of the video is when Springsteen almost rings the door bell to her house, but hesitates opting instead to walk home alone. The study of music videos as publicly formative is engaging, but beyond the scope of this project. 38 There has also been a reading of the skull-soul ambiguity as not a strict binary opposition and it has been argued that a third word "self need be added. While this may be a valid claim it has never been substantiated by print. j9 The word "skull" has an early precedent in Springsteen's canon. "Blinded by the Light" contains his first recorded use of the word in the line, "Well I unsnapped his skull cap and between his ears 1 saw/ a gap but figured he'd be all right" (1973). This space "between his ears" is precisely where the "skull" in "I'm on Fire" would be split lending further evidence to the deployment of the word "skull". 55

The violence evoked by the speaker in "I'm on Fire" is the opposite of the violence we

see in "Born in the U.S.A.". This violence is self-inflicted. Rauch argues that "the listener, although at first transfixed by the passionate drive of the speaker, simply cannot allow him/herself to be swept away by the emotional and possibly irrational force that compels

[him]" (38). Violence is not the only theater of change. Rauch argues that the affective relationship between speaker and listener is disturbed: "What at first appears to be a story that demands our sympathy, becomes, after consideration, a story that very much requires our serious consideration and critical judgment" (Rauch, 39). The unreliability of the speaker emerges.

Jumping from BITU to 1987's Tunnel, "Brilliant Disguise" is about how we can never truly know another person. The speaker avoids blaming the addressee, his lover, assuming that the problem is within himself:

Well I've tried so hard baby but I just can't see What a woman like you is doing with me (1987)

The listening public is given a chance to pity the speaker. As we listen to Springsteen's music we allow him to express our emotions and become affected by the concept of being alone.

Implicitly ironic, "Brilliant Disguise" witnesses the listener's empathy with the speaker, manifested by Springsteen's voice. His main argument is that we can never know anyone but ourselves. Springsteen even subverts that premise through the depressing, if somewhat pathetic, moral: "God have mercy on a man/ Who doubts what he's sure of (1987). While doubt is the pivotal trope of "Brilliant Disguise", Springsteen cannot help but use another of his figurative tools.

Springsteen cannot avoid work even as he writes about relationships. Springsteen 56

writes, "I've tried so hard baby" (1987). The effort points to the speaker's labour. Despite the

use of the word "play" this relationship is work:

Now you play the loving woman I'll play the faithful man...... So when you look at me

You better look hard and look twice (1987)

Springsteen acknowledges the effort and labour of the relationship. The idea of role

playing—loving woman and faithful man—places emphasis on the speaker's role; he doubts

his faith, not hers. The characterization of this doubt is telling of Springsteen's writing from

the end of this period. After the stadium-filling BITU his writing takes an inward turn

abandoning the politicized and ironic approach for that of a humble and hopeless romantic.

The final image of the song recalls "Backstreets" and "Darkness" but cannot live up

to them. "Tonight our bed is cold/ I'm lost in the darkness of our love" (1987). The images of

the cold bed and the darkness try to consume the listener with an cathartic grief and they

would, if you let them. But, if Springsteen and rock and roll have so far been about release,

realization, grieving, and self-expression, then this is something new. There is no anger and

no dismay here. There is only a quiet acceptance and a whimpered lament. When

Springsteen warbles, in a live version, "is that you baby/ or just a brilliant disguise?", instead

of the usual engagement, we are forced to ask, how brilliant?40

Tunnel, while an accomplished album, falls short after The River, Nebraska, and

BITU. Where these albums successfully pushed Springsteen's music towards a looser type of

fun, a deeper expression of character, and into politically critical territory, Tunnel attempts to

simultaneously obfuscate and reveal the inner truths of love. It foreshadows the style and

content of Springsteen's writing on Human Touch and Lucky Town in 'The Era of the Fake

40 This may seem like a harsh critique, and I really do like the live version of the song, but it is musically and lyrically lacking, and it is riddled with cliches. 57

Band*.

The Era of the Fake Band

Springsteen in the Nineties

For all intents and purposes Springsteen disappeared from the sphere of music between

Tunnel and Ghost. He moved to California and started a family. The working class hero began to lose credibility and authenticity. Simon Frith comments on his suitability for light beer commercials: "Springsteen's music has, after all already been recuperated as nostalgia

(it's classic radio accompaniment to ads for classic jeans and classic beer) and will, inevitably, become "lite," "gold," and "easy-listening" in the years to come" (84). Nick

Hornby, although not replying directly to Frith, forwards a cunning counter-argument in

Songbook:

So, even though I'm not American, no longer young, hate cars, and can recognize why so many people find Springsteen bombastic and histrionic (but not why they find him macho or jingoistic or dumb-that kind of ignorant judgment has plagued Springsteen for a huge part of his career, and is made by smart people who are a lot dumber than he has ever been), "Thunder Road" somehow manages to speak for me (10; mine)

Despite Hornby's valiant efforts the disconnect Frith emphasizes reverberates in

Springsteen's music from this period.

Human Touch and Lucky Town share a release date. One was written as an exercise in writing, the other was written as the offspring of that exercise. While Human Touch was written over the course of years, Lucky Town was completed in three weeks, much like

Nebraska and Tunnel. Most of Human Touch was a collaborative effort between Roy Bittan and Springsteen; Lucky Town was a solo effort. Springsteen wanted to try playing with 58

different musicians in order to see "what other people brought with them into the studio and

how my music would be affected by collaborating with different talents and personalities"

(1998, 216). It is humorously ironic that Springsteen included songs about second chances,

"Better Days", "Book of Dreams" and "Leap of Faith", on Lucky Town, not only because he was taking a different approach to writing and recording, but also because Lucky Town was

such a good record in comparison with Human Touch. The true strength of Springsteen's writing in the 90s was his return to the road, and the folk music he pursued on Nebraska on the Ford and Steinbeck inspired The Ghost of Tom Joad41

In terms of its subject matter, The Ghost of Tom Joad is an example of Springsteen's dynamic poetics. Like Tom Joad in Grapes, Springsteen makes the Steinbeckean transition from "I" to "we"42. Like Ford and Steinbeck, Springsteen was consciously trying to create art that functions as social commentary. This suggests, as Gavin Cologne-Brooks argues, in

"The Ghost of Tom Joad: Steinbeck's Legacy in the Song of Bruce Springsteen", that

Springsteen takes a position in writing that is tied to the historical moment, and within this rubric Springsteen emphasizes his characters in relation to each other and their environment

-importantly Springsteen echoes Steinbeck in "arguing for collective responsibility rather than individual isolation" (36). For Brooks, and rightly so, this emphasis marks Springsteen's maturation "away from individual desire to escape, to an awareness not only of his immediate environment -something evident in previous albums- but also that this story is part of American history and culture" (37). He points to songs like "Sinaloa Cowboys" and

41 "The Ghost of Tom Joad" bitterly rejects the road and starkly contrasts the difference between immobility and freedom. The image of the homeless man sleeping under the turnpike, in particular, demonstrates an awful stratification of class. The turnpike is a symbol of mobility: it is the mouth of the river, the gateway to freedom, etc. In the song it acts as shelter instead. Springsteen's haunting lines, "The highway is alive tonight/ But nobody's kiddin' nobody about where it goes," (1995) inverts the metaphor of the road. It becomes a site to gather not a site of transformation. The road leads no where. 42 The transition (from "I" to "we") is something that had been organically happening with Springsteen's listener and concert publics, but not something he had specifically written into his music until Ghost. 59

"The Line" as songs about "friendship and community" (38).

This poetic transformation occurs not only in theme, but also in style. Springsteen's writing on Ghost evidences this new sense of community as he develops an hybrid/ historic mode of writing. "Youngstown" for instance, is performed in this manner. The narrator cycles through historic moments, taking on the voice of his ancestors and descendants, as he details the harsh conditions of working to wage war:

Here in north east Ohio Back in eighteen-o-three James and Danny Heaton Found the ore that was linin' yellow creek They built a blast furnace Here along the shore And they made the cannon balls That helped the union win the war (1995)

The specific location detailed by the speaker contextualizes the song in a way that recalls

"Darlingston County", "Incident on 57th Street", and 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)", among others. The verse is concrete and distinct from the chorus that offers a general summary of the speaker's emotion.

The chorus is timeless; as the narrator addresses his wife or lover this introduces the auditor of the song. The specific word choice and repetition further a cyclical reading of

"Youngstown":

Here in Youngstown x2 My sweet Jenny, I'm sinkin' down

Here darlin' in Youngstown (1995)

The assonant repetition of the syllable "-own" drones on like the work the speaker is doing.

It seals his fate. By calling Jenny "sweet" the speaker apologetically acknowledges his role in this cycle. The word "here" is emphasized. The speaker needs the auditor and listener to know that this wrongdoing is not happening in a far away place, it is committed "here in 60

Youngstown".

The speaker cycles back and forth through time telling of the workers who make

"tanks and bombs" to "win this country's wars". Springsteen, through the vehicle of dramatic monologue, writes an allegorical Marxist critique of the occupation that alienates the workingman from himself. The auditor is made rich by the subordinate narrator; note the word "sir", "rich enough to forget my name" (1995). The speaker is so down-trodden and self-alienated by the end of his story that he can only conclude one thing:

When I die I don't want no part of heaven I would not do heaven's work well I pray the devil comes and takes me To stand in the fiery furnaces of hell (1995)

This literally comes true through the structure of the song. After the voice fades away the music carries on its melody in a haunting outro slowly fading as no one else steps in to add their story. Arguably it is this style of writing, and the poetic concern with community that enable Springsteen to write The Rising another seven years later.

Renaissance

Destruction, Desolation and Aftermath

The Rising is a response to 9/11, but should not be mistaken as an historical reading of it . By considering the themes of loss and renewal couched in crisis that The Rising offers, its listeners are affectively linked and form a special type of listening public. They share more than just a readership; they share grief. This listening public is steeped in already existing social connection—it feeds on already existent feelings of loss and hope. The Rising

4"' See A.O. Scott "The Poet Laureate of 9/11: Apocalypse, and Salvation on Springsteen's New Album", June Skinner Sawyers Tougher Than the Rest, and Springsteen's Songs. 61 marks Springsteen's most immediate response to an historical moment44. This album is not celebrated for its connection to literary tradition, or for its composition. It is important because of its subject matter. The affective work that it does is the work of healing, remembrance, and forgiveness.

"The Rising" and "My City of Ruins" are about loss and the struggle to find one's place in the world after such loss. Springsteen, once again, alters his poetic approach to writing; the affective power of these songs is rooted in their lyrical simplicity and use of imagery.

"The Rising", whether read literally, as the story of a New York City firefighter entering the towers on September 11* , or figuratively, as the journey of a soul from this life to the next, depicts remarkable life in the midst of destruction:

Can't see nothin' in front of me Can't see nothin' coming up behind I make my way through this darkness I can't feel nothing but this chain that binds me Lost track of how far I've gone How far I've gone, how high I've climbed On my back's a sixty pound stone On my shoulder a half mile line (2002)

The transition from an external experience, "can't see nothin," to an internal one, "I can't feel nothin" poetically expresses feelings of loss and the realization of one's own imminent mortality. The end of the first verse enables a literal reading, but it is the listener's ability to identify with the feeling of being lost that enables the figurative reading. The third verse is similarly split between images that create a mystic narrative, and concrete images that relate the events of the day:

Spirits above and behind me Faces gone, black eyes burnin' bright

44 For instance, BITU was released a decade after the conflict in Vietnam. 62

May their precious blood forever bind me Lord as I stand before your fiery light (2002)

The "spirits" can be read as lost souls—those that died in the towers. The faces could be

other firefighters, or the last images of life in someone's eyes. Springsteen characterizes his

speaker by having him embrace fiery destruction as he would God's warm embrace. The

images of the "garden", "Mary", the "children", a "sky filled with light", and "catfish

dangling on the end of my line" witnessed by the speaker in the bridge create an Edenic paradise. This figurative heaven appears as the speakers' life flashes before his eyes.

The call and response in the bridge simulates a performer-audience relationship. After the bridge Springsteen chants a series of blessings and curses each followed by a response,

"a dream of life", that follows whenever his vocal has finished. It is not tied to the tempo or

melody of the music; it exists beyond the music yet it touches the lyric:

Sky of blackness and sorrow (a dream of life) Sky of love, sky of tears (a dream of life) Sky of glory and sadness (a dream of life) Sky of mercy, sky of fear (a dream of life) Sky of memory and shadow (a dream of life) Your burnin' wind fills my arms tonight Sky of longing and emptiness (a dream of life) Sky of fullness, sky of blessed life (a dream of life) (2002)

This incantation is the only one of its kind in Springsteen's poetics. While "Into the Fire" is

similar, "The Rising" resists the tempo by keeping the response "a dream of life" off time.

This listing fitful chant recites the thematic elements of the album. The repetition of "a

dream of life" emulates the affective response of a listening public. This is a beautiful song that characterizes the bravery and selflessness of the individuals who, in doing their job, lost their lives to save the lives of others.

The verses in "My City of Ruins" move from the general scenes of Asbury Park, to the

New York City aftermath, post-9/11, to the specific loss of individuals. The general scenes 63

are characterized by adjectives and metaphor: "sweet bells of mercy", "evening trees",

"young men on the corner/ Like scattered leaves," "empty streets" (2002). The adjectives

bring the New York street to life. This song was written pre-911 about Asbury Park's decline,

and it adapts perfectly to the cathedral of death that was the towers. The words "Scattered"

and "empty" are striking because of Springsteen's past depictions of youth in the streets

(Born to Run, "Out in the Streets" and even "Streets of Fire" offer an alternate depiction).

The bare streets speak to the nature of the loss, and the change it has wrought physically and psychologically.

The effect of this song on the speaker is similarly inscribed on the listener. The verse of personal loss is unsettling as he addresses his dead lover:

Now's there's tears on the pillow Darlin' where we slept And you took my heart when you left Without your sweet kiss My soul is lost, my friend Tell me how do I begin again? (2002)

Springsteen's poetics have been successful at eliciting emotion -joy, celebration, hope, loneliness, even sadness- but, never like this has he allowed his listening public to feel irreparable loss -to feel absolutely empty. Even the speakers from Darkness acknowledge their part in their position, but here this is not so.

Springsteen expresses heartbreak and loss as he takes us from a steady world to a cataclysmic change. The question "...how do I begin again?/ My city's in ruins," is answered.

Springsteen sings,

With these hands, I pray for the faith, Lord We pray for your love, Lord We pray for the lost, Lord We pray for this world, Lord We pray for the strength, Lord 64

...Come on, rise up (2002)

Springsteen takes on national grief in this refrain. The rhetoric of prayer and salvation make this song gospel as Springsteen leads a heavenly choir called the E Street Band in a refrain of hope. This activity embraces Cvetkovich's concern with "how [the] cultural production that emerges around trauma enables new practices and publics" (10). She argues that affect serves as the foundation for the formation of public cultures and that "trauma and modernity...can be understood as mutually constitutive categories" (17). Similarly we see the development of Springsteen's politics and poetics parallel one another. For Cvetkovich, " trauma is one of the affective experience^]...that characterizes the lived experience of capitalism" (17). Here Springsteen's politics and poetics engage the trauma associated with

9/11. It is a burden that becomes doubly public forming: once nationally because of grief and rage, and again through Springsteen's transformative poetics.

Springsteen's early albums and poetics make their listening public feel, but none are as unequivocal as The Rising. As they engage the text Springsteen's listeners are able to feel loss, mourn, and, finally, find spiritual renewal. By engaging national public affect he blurs the line between a public and the public. The Rising engages its public both as a musical endeavor and a coping mechanism for what is considered national grief.45 In times of emotional and spiritual trauma people turn to religion and family; here they turn to

Springsteen's public. Springsteen offers a similar affective outlet through the transformative poetics of The Rising.

Where The Rising offers affective support for national trauma Devils and Dust is, in

45 See Cvetkovitch An Arcive of Feelings where she explores "cultural texts as repositories of feelings and emotions, which are encoded not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception" (7) and asks "how affective experience gives rise to public culture" (17). 65 part, an indictment of the U.S. government's response to that trauma. Devils and Dust addresses an entirely different problem from The Rising. The title track addresses the question head on: what is the justification for the U.S. presence in Iraq? "Devils and Dust" explores uncertainty and asks the question: "what if what you do to survive/ kills the things you love?" Springsteen enters the core of an existential issue and exposes a theme he will follow in Magic:

Fear's a dangerous thing It can turn your heart black you can trust It'll take your God filled soul Fill it with Devils and dust (2005)

The love and reassurance of The Rising is replaced by cynicism and mistrust. "Trust" is an ironic word choice. That fear is corruptive is not something we want to count on.

Springsteen's subtext is clear: there are those convinced of their cause, and their justice, but having God on one's side does not guarantee being on the right side.

The characters on Devils and Dust are devious at best, and at worst are untrustworthy.

The speaker in "All the Way Home" attests to this himself:

I know what it's like to have failed, baby With the whole world lookin' on I know what it's like to have soared And come crashin' like a drunk on a bar room floor

Now you got no reason to trust me My confidence is a little rusty But if you don't feel like bein' alone Baby, I could walk you all the way home (2005)

Unlike the speaker from "Prove It All Night", this narrator has decided that honesty is the

The album was released in early 2005 and spawned a solo tour by Springsteen where he reinvented many old favourites including: "Reason to Believe", "For You", and "Youngstown". The performances were characterized by Springsteen's sparse approach to the music and the personal narrative he wove for the songs from the album. I attended his show in Detroit in late April. It became evident that these song were meant to be heard live. At an Ottawa performance the power went out after a lightning strike and Springsteen never stopped playing; his audience was enthralled. 66 best policy. His frank approach and admission of failure may work. The speaker in "Leah" is similarly determined. He rejects "this road, filled with shadow and doubt" in the hope that a house and "searching for the same proof will bring him his soul's desire. "Maria's Bed" describes a character47 that finds salvation in escape. "I was burned by the angels, sold wings of lead/ Then I fell in the roses and sweet salvation of Maria's bed" (2005). This characterization sets Devils and Dust apart from The Rising and from Magic. Springsteen's

2007 release holds none of the hope that we saw resurface in Devils and Dust and The

Rising. Its success lies in its bitter indictment of the American situation and contains

Springsteen's most overt political criticism.

The Beginning, and the End

Springsteen is not known as an apocalyptic writer, but Magic has dark themes suggesting a near and real judgment. The title-track captures these themes in the haunting lines: "the freedom that you sought's/ Driftin' like a ghost amongst the trees" (Springsteen,

2007). The heavenly imagery from songs like "Thunder Road" and "The Rising" is replaced by this haunting as the angel becomes a ghost. The song slouches towards Armageddon:

Now there's a fire down below But it's comin' up here So leave everything you know And carry only what you fear On the road the sun is sinkin' low There's bodies hangin' in the trees This is what will be, this is what will be (2007)

This passage, like many others in Springsteen's work, carries biblical, apocalyptic weight.

We have encountered this character before, possibly in "Lucky Town", "Had a coat of fine leather and snakeskin boots," (1992) and certainly in "Further on Up the Road": "Got on my dead man's suit and my smilin1 skull ring/ My lucky graveyard boots and song to sing," and "Now I been out in the desert, just doin' my time/ Searchin' through the dust, lookin' for a sign/ If there's a light up ahead well brother I don't know" (2002). The lyrics from "Further" are repeated verbatim in "Maria's Bed". 67

The fire down below is imagined as the fires of hell that will eventually claim the earth

during final judgment. The truth of judgment and apocalypse is that our knowledge no

longer affords us protection; it is in fact our deeds, and our fear that will have a bearing before imminent death. Describing the sun over the road Springsteen wittily eclipses his own metaphor, and confirms its own dying potency. Unlike Darkness, where the road was aimlessly traveled, on Magic it becomes nothing more than a witness to the horrible scene of the victims. Where the road was once a distraction it becomes a national gravestone.

Magic resists the the road as pivotal for salvation—resistance should be distinguished from disillusionment. "Radio Nowhere" is an exploration of the death of radio; subtly

Springsteen eclipses the road and the cultural practice of driving with your radio on. "Your

Own Worst Enemy" does not specifically address the road but features play and conflict between music and lyric. In "Last to Die" Springsteen returns to the political mindedness of

BITU and the road. Instead often, it was almost 24 years "burning down the road" (1984).

These songs exhibit the themes of grief, loss of hope, and betrayal.

A secondary concern of Magic is that no one is listening. The speaker in "Radio

Nowhere," is "spinnin' 'round a dead dial" and describes the flaccid impotence of radio.

"Radio Nowhere," intertextually, replies to Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing."

Where Whitman hears, "varied carols," (In. 1) Springsteen hears nothing. This tragic loss of voice implies that no one is responding, but this does not mean they are not listening. The speaker cannot find anyone and loses hope, furthering a reading of Magic as the portrayal of a fallen world.

From the first percussive notes of "Radio Nowhere" to the quick fade of Nils Lofgen's

48 Springsteen says that Magic is to be the last traditionally bought and sold rock record. We see evidence of this with Radiohead's new release, In Rainbows. It was being distributed through their website for whatever price the consumer desires. 68 piercing lead we are incited to throw our fists into the air and pump madly announcing to the world that we too want to "feel some rhythm." "Radio Nowhere" is a disconnect and represents the loss of a national voice, but remarkably it unites its listeners. To begin with, the song asks, "This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?" (2007) This question operates as a preface to his work. Springsteen wants to make sure his public is in attendance, and the phrasing begs a response: is this radio nowhere (cynically)? Warner argues that the social space of a public is created through "reflexive circulation of discourse," (90) and the feedback demanded by Springsteen creates this circulation. Warner also argues that the framework for creating a public through text is limited and can only occur "when a previously existing discourse can be supposed, and when a responding discourse can be postulated" (90). Therefore, in response to Springsteen: There is somebody alive out there! The interpellation, "is there anybody alive out there" immediately involves the listener and forms a listening public. By engaging the song's listener he forms a bond that will hold for the album.

Magic operates as an intertext and is full of allusions to Springsteen's earlier works.

This is important because it allows for Springsteen to build on circulations of thought and discourse over the course of the album and continue to construct publics formed from earlier work. For instance, in "Radio Nowhere" the opening line, "I was tryin' to find my way home" clearly sets up "Gypsy Biker," and later, "Long Walk Home" - both from Magic - while "searchin' for a world with some soul" brings to mind "Devils and Dust," and "Land of Hopes and Dreams". These are all songs that are familiar to avid listeners of Springsteen.

Furthermore, Springsteen alludes to "Dancing in the Dark,"49 with "Dancin' down a dark

49 "Dancing in the Dark" was released before the album as a single. On the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 the song peaked at #2. The #1 spot -Prince's "When Doves Cry"- kept Springsteen from a #1. The only song 69 hole...", "No Surrender," with "I want a thousand guitars/1 want pounding drums..." and

"Downbound Train," in the lines "I was driving through the misty rain/ Searchin' for a mystery train". Here Springsteen's allusions function even more successfully to construct publics because they point to works that even whose unfamiliar Springsteen would know. If

"Radio Nowhere" is a frantic search for "anybody alive out there" then these are the songs that should be playing on the radio. The implicit irony is that Springsteen does have an avid listening public. So that even though the speaker cannot find Springsteen's music on the radio we know that on a personal level Springsteen's concern—no one is listening and no one cares—is not true. Springsteen's stance as an everyman further complicates this point and blurs the distinction between him and his listening public.

As the song fades, abruptly, I cannot help but wonder what music I am missing, what has been truncated. On first listen (to an early leaked release of the song) I assumed that this quick fade was a mistake that would be corrected on the album. This assumption was naive.

Springsteen shows his audience the same dilemma the speaker faces in this song: the fear of quiet, the fear of being alone and the energy drained in a call out, "Is there anybody alive out there?" What is astonishing is how Springsteen uses the line as a clarion call at his shows; it is the first thing he bellows at a concert; the response is deafening. Again, the irony is that

Springsteen knows his public is "alive out there". The crowd seethes in response, enunciating a blurred noise that could almost be ayes.

The lyrics and music of "Your Own Worst Enemy" are dynamically related as they teeter between conflict and resolution. The musical elements work together to create a soothing tune. The Spector-like wall of sound, created with violin, cello, piano, church bells,

Springsteen wrote that ever hit number one was "Blinded by the Light" (unfortunately it was Manfred Mann's version, released 1977). 50 We could read this as the narcissistic and selfish tendency of a bloated ego - see nickname the Boss. 70

guitar, drums, bass guitar, and organ is joyfully played in a major key.51 This joyful music is

punctuated by frequent lead line trade-offs between strings and organ. The vocal harmony of

the bridge, or high eight, is reminiscent of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds. This is one song on

the album which does not feature the guitar prominently -especially noted is the lack of

distorted guitar. This leads us to a picture of the music as a whole: nonabrasive unadulterated pop.

The song's execution introduces a level of irony that inverts its apparent meaning.

Initially, Springsteen's sing song rhyme structure sets the listener at ease. The verses are organized into rhyming couplets (except for the first verse, which follows an ABCB rhyming pattern). These elements synthesize an aurally joyful sound. The first sign of discord is fleeting: the song starts and ends on a minor chord. The next signal is the chorus music. The chorus builds towards the tonic of the scale -the note we expect to hear from pop music- but only reaches it when Springsteen sings, "Everything is upside down." This statement implies that even though the music is happy there is a dark subtext. The third signal is that the words resist the rhyming structure, "The times they got too clear/ So you removed all the mirrors"

(2007). Springsteen mumbles the end of mirror, constraining the word to fit the rhyme scheme. This clarifies the words. The mirrors became problematic for the speaker so they were literally removed. This tension is reminiscent of Springsteen's question "Is there anybody alive out there?" Together, these indicators are enough to warrant an ironic reading of the lyric.

The lyrics describe the speaker's subordination of the addressee. Springsteen resists his earlier tendency to dramatic monologue by not naming the auditor. The speaker only refers to the addressee as "you". Springsteen inverts the listener's expectation—built on

51 Like we hear on Born to Run. 71

Nebraska's use of dramatic monologue—of the subordinate speaker. The lyrics portray a world that keeps spinning, life goes on, even though "everything is upside down" (2007).

The tag at the end of the song breaks the pop song alternation of verse and chorus, "Your flag it flew so high/ It drifted into the sky," (2007) and ensures that there is no escape from what the addressee has become. The addressee's dreams are transcendental and abstract; they are not attainable and cannot be reality.

"Last to die" is the climax of the album musically and lyrically. Springsteen's anger on Magic is fully realized in this song. There are no tricks here. Springsteen's allusions to

John Kerry's 1971 speech, and the White Sands Missile Range show his frustration at the actions of his country. Springsteen's 1984 album —BITU— dealt with the crisis faced by many Vietnam War veterans. "Last to Die" returns to this problem. Springsteen draws an interesting line between Vietnam, a war arguably against communism, and the current war in

Iraq and Afghanistan against so-called terrorism (or, more specifically the "war against terror"!). In "Last to Die" Springsteen writes, "A voice drifted up from the radio/And I thought of a voice from long ago." He shows us the relevance of what John Kerry had to say in 1971.1 quote Kerry in the following:

Now we are told that the men who fought [in Vietnam] must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.. .Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war." We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? (1971)

Kerry's call for an admission of failure appears to be counter intuitive to American exceptionalist discourse. His direct indictment of Nixon—just before the Watergate scandal 72 would explode—attempts the same things as Springsteen thirty years later. Kerry's speech is bitter and cutting; he is trying to shock the American people into action with the truth.

Kerry's anger and determination survive as Springsteen adapts them to lyric.

Springsteen questions what it means to be American in "Last to Die". Truth or

Consequences is a town about 70 miles outside of the White Sands Missile Range, where the

"road turns black" (2007). Springsteen's allusion to the missile testing ground begs the question once again, who will be the last to die for the ultimate mistake: nuclear war. The name of the town is poignant; there are always consequences, but they may not be brought to bear against those deserving of punishment. The chorus reinforces this with its violent imagery. "Whose blood will spill, whose heart will break?" Like John Kerry, Springsteen must in some way reconcile his love for America with the terrible actions committed in the name of the American people. With apocalyptic grandeur Springsteen writes about the burning of a city:

The sun sets in flames as the city burns Another day gone down as the night turns And I hold you here in my heart As things fall apart (2007)52

As in "Magic," the sun sets figuratively. Springsteen's incorporation of the eclipse as a figural image points to the speaker's own eclipsed hope. Past mistakes are no longer visible and the destroyed future that they created is shrouded in darkness. The "you" can be read as a friend or a lover, or perhaps more rightly as America itself. In the last chorus Springsteen angrily calls out: "Will Darlin' tyrants and kings fall to the same fate/ Strung up at your city gates?" When will the leaders, the people making the mistakes, be held accountable for their actions? The quiet acceptance of "Magic" and the frantic search of "Radio Nowhere" has

This line is from Yeats' apocalyptic poem "The Second Coming". 73 disappeared and is replaced with burning anger.

The end of the album "Devil's Arcade" is a musical symphony. The song opens with forty seconds of distorted guitar dissonance and synthesizer hum. With each verse

Springsteen builds the marching rhythm. The melodious strings act as the voice of the officer, telling his story and expressing his emotions. Even the uninvolved tone of

Springsteen's voice indicates to the listener that the end is near. The musical crescendo from

3:30 to 4:10 leads to the soldier's last melodic words. The ending is worth considering as well. The soldier's life line seems to be tied to the drums so as they beat, like "the best of your heart" we know the soldier is alive. All of a sudden the drums stop; this abrupt ending signals not only the death of the soldier but the death of the album. Unlike the fade of "Radio

Nowhere," the end of "Devil's Arcade" is the death of the last great rock and roll record.54

There is a lot of material to synthesize in this chapter. Historically we have covered close to 45 years (1972-2007) of recorded material with only passing mention of live performance and bootleg material. The importance of Springsteen to the study of literature, within the context of publics theory, is a primary concern of this project. Publicly,

Springsteen is a figure that has affective power over crowds at concerts, intellectual sway in the political sphere and philosophical importance on vinyl. Just as he eclipses the metaphor of the road on Magic so too do listening publics eclipse Springsteen. This project moves beyond his person to the supporting framework of his listening publics. To do this we will turn to the American literary tradition of the road and to changing displays of masculine

5j This does not take into account the hidden track "Terry's Song" written for a recently deceased long time stage hand and companion on the Road. 54 Springsteen released another album, Working on a Dream January 27lh 2009. Whether it will live up to the thematic and poetic achievement of Magic is yet to be seen. 74 affect in the American public sphere in Part II. 75

Part II: Springsteen and "the Road"—Chapter II: Five Ways to Look at "the Road"

The "Accents" and Publics of "The Road"

Public response to narratives of the road is similar to the 19th century dime novel phenomenon. In Mechanic Accents Michael Denning articulates the tendency of dime novels to tell two stories: one about the characters, and one about working class reading publics.

Denning emphasizes that "the accents in which the stories are told,"..."the disguises they use," and "the figures that condense and displace worker's thoughts, feelings, and doings" (3; mine) signify a working class reality. Since "Thoughts, feelings, and doings" is ambiguous,

Denning situates it "in conflicts over and within working class culture and the culture industry" (3). Similarly, narratives of the road articulate the "accent" of their public.

Denning's argument that "[t]he forms and figures that recur on these [narratives] are marked by the imprint of their working class audience" also applies to road narratives. Denning's allegorical reading allows us to hear the mechanic accents of dime novels (5).

My reading of Whitman, Steinbeck, Kerouac, McCarthy, and Springsteen pays attention to "accents" of the road allowing us to hear its publics fire-up-their-engines and turn-their-pages. The way these narratives portray the road and how characters experience it models potential ways-of-being to the reading publics of the road. For instance, the disjunction between Springsteen's portrayal of the road on Born to Run and Darkness expose

"accents" that represent a fantasy version of small-town America: a symbolic representation that allows Springsteen's listening publics to form opinions and ideas about the road and their figurative relation to it.

The antagonism of the characters, or the disjunction between society's expectation of acceptability and the way that they are, creates and builds the possibility of the American 76 public of the road. The characters on the road act as a metonym, for the American people. In other words, the characters within these narratives collectively represent their readership and their nation. Their actions transform the reading public through the work of its collective imagination. In other words, the character's actions serve as mechanism to allow the road to create its own set of "accents ". The selected narratives share themes and relate to publics through their "accents". Whether, like Whitman, we too embrace and question the troubadour's freedom in "Song of the Open Road", or we struggle alongside Tom and Al to get the truck back on the highway in Grapes; whether we feel the call of the open road, or fear being caught out in the open, as in On the Road and The Road, we affectively engage in the act of reading and participate in the publics of these works and the public of the road.

Despite the reader's imagined position on the road, it is a shallow representation of false reality that ultimately serves ulterior interests. On the surface the road serves as a guide, or as a representative of the power of choice and free will; however, it simultaneously serves as a symbol of determinism. The road is a structure that only leads in certain directions. Even though it will inevitably lead to some destiny, that destiny lies at a fixed point. These characters are trapped on the road because of its nature, and their solely literary existence. In effect, the public of the road understands it as a structure that, like narrative, is designed to be followed.

I argue in Part I that it is Springsteen's transformative poetics that enable public formation and growth. As road narratives and their readership proliferate, a mass public emerges. It is connected through collective memory, physically tied to the soil, and the soul, of the American road, and represented by its "accents" as a consumer of this narrative.

Without these foundational narratives Springsteen's own brand of storytelling could not have been successful; like these other writers of "the road," he is intricately tied to road publics. 77

And, the connection to this rich tradition positions his narratives as the latest in a succession of public texts expressing "accents" of the road.

Five Ways

The first section in this chapter, A Long Brown Path, selects poetry from Whitman that speaks to the road, and the relationality of the "stranger" required for public formation.

The second section, California Bound, engages archetypes of the American frontier, such as the cowboy. A figure that is transformed from the cowboys of Wild Bill Hickok and Louis l'Amour serials to still individualistic, yet less violent, characters found in John Steinbeck's

Grapes and Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The third section, Old Jalopy Chariots, observes the rugged hero figure of the cowboy as it is tempered and the American hero becomes an

Anti-Hero. The seminal difference between these works is the reason, or purpose, for life on the road. This change calls into question the viability of the metaphor while providing markedly different approaches to the American road novel.

The fourth section, Carrying the Fire, challenges early conceptions of the road.

Cormac McCarthy writes a vision of American post-apocalypse in The Road. In the new frontier, survival becomes the primary concern as hopes and dreams for the Promised Land become replaced by fear of being destroyed by the elements, or cannibalized by the cult remnants of a once domesticated human race. Finally, The Road is Dark, adds Springsteen to this circle of American writers of the road—from the road as salvation to the road as apocalyptic.

A Long Brown Path

Whitman and Springsteen share a poetic approach to writing the road. Springsteen's 78

early writing, especially songs like "Blinded by the Light" and "The E-Street Shuffle",

resembles Whitman's in his proliferation of the poetic line. The aesthetic qualities these poets

share (internal rhyme, end line rhyme and long lines) gives their work a similar feeling. In

Born in the U.S.A. Jim Cullen links Springsteen to Whitman: "Guthrie, for example, fused

Whitman's democratic poetics with [Stephen] Foster's vernacular music, and became a major

influence on Bob Dylan. Dylan, in turn, directly influenced Springsteen" (32). Cullen's

placement of Springsteen and Whitman beside each other invites more than a literary

reading.

More interesting is Cullen's visual placement of Springsteen and Whitman side by

side (34). There is an image of each; Whitman is famously posed with tweed pants, a hat

flopped on his head, and his hand on his hip, while beside him Springsteen leans on a

banister in a partly unbuttoned white shirt with a stoic half smile on his lips. Cullen's

comparison of these figures is evocative and draws a portrait of the artist as participant on the road. Cullen extends his observation to poetic comparison:

Camerado! I give you my hand! I give you love more precious than money, I give you myself before preaching our laws; Will you give me yourself? Will you travel with me? Shall we stick by each other as long as we live? (Whitman, 11. 212-216)

And,

Will you walk with me out on the wire? 'Cause baby I'm just a scared and lonely rider But I gotta know how it feels I wanna know if love is wild, I wanna know if love is real Can you show me? (Springsteen, 1975).

Their demands are strikingly similar. Springsteen is searching for the reassurance of a visceral experience; Whitman is offering a partnership. While Springsteen admits to being

"scared and lonely," the love he craves is characterized as "wild". Whitman does not 79 question love's reality like Springsteen does; instead, he describes it as something whose reality is assured and values it. Both need the addressee to follow them; Springsteen asks,

"Can you show me?" and Whitman wonders, "Willj>o« give me yourself?". The need for someone else on the journey characterizes the human need for companionship, the poets' need for audience, their recognition of a listening/reading public, and their shared "accent" of the road.

Whitman's "Song of the Open Road", articulates the road as occupation and salvation. It is a symbol of choice and free will. One's decision to lead a life on the road can not only lead anywhere, but can also forge connections with other travelers, the past and future, and within the self. The road embodies unity, destiny, freedom, time for reflection, and being in an absolute moment. No matter how we read "Song of the Open Road", the road as a structure is highly valued by Whitman. He is recommending how to lead a full and complete life. In section 8, Whitman believes the answer is simple, "The efflux of the Soul is happiness—here is happiness;/1 think it pervades the open air, waiting at all times;/ Now it flows unto us—we are rightly changed" (Whitman, 11. 106-108). The function of the road in this version is rejuvenation. It acts as an alignment. Without the road where, and how, would we travel? Not in unity, but separately. Inevitably the road unites strangers, and forms its own public.

Whitman rejects reason and rationality in order to adopt other values: "Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,/ Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms/ Strong and content I travel the open road" (11. 5-7). He sets aside these things to be a part of a larger group: travelers on the road. This choice highlights two functions of the road: relief from a life of toil and a place of belonging. The road devours and reconstitutes the American frontier. As the landscape is chartered and road laid, the earth 80

is drawn and quartered, and the road becomes a new frontier. For Whitman, the road is the

link binding the earth and the soul because it presents an opportunity to think.

Whitman later overtly attacks the academy and reason. He argues for a rethinking of

thought itself: "Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,/ they may prove well in

lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and

flowing currents" (11. 83-84). Whitman yearns to find a philosophy that exists under the skies

and of the feet. In these lines he clashes disparate ontologies: philosophy, the inquisitive

nature of being human, and religion, the unsatisfactory offering of muted-half-answers to

burning questions. In "Song of the Open Road," Whitman rejects regimented intellectual

pursuit for the path even though the journey can answer only some of his questions.

Even though the road allows its travelers to exist, more than anywhere else, in the pure present, it is an ideal location for reflection. In the first section, Whitman's aside catches

his reader off-guard. He admits that this beautiful new way to be does not erase the past or

uncover the future:

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens; I carry them, men and women—I carry them with me wherever I go; I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them; I am fill'd with them, and I will fill them in return) (Whitman, 11.11-14)

There is something terribly sad in these lines. The tone echoes through line 13 almost

bemusedly, but is filled with sorrow. Whitman's admission of this burden at the beginning of his celebration of the road should not be read as lament, but as a statement of reality. His romanticization of the road as a liminal space would not exist or be attractive to those

without the burden he describes above. The road literally allows its travelers to move

forward, but it does so figuratively as well. For Whitman, the road is a place of healing, and even if he cannot move through and beyond his "old delicious burdens," here he can 81 perpetually avoid them.

Throughout "Song of the Open Road," Whitman reiterates the latent experience trapped within life's journey on "the road." "From all that has been near you, I believe you have imparted to yourselves, and now would impart the same secretly to me;/ From the living and the dead I think you have peopled your impassive surfaces, and the spirits thereof would be evident and amicable with me" (Whitman, 11. 37-38). Whitman depicts the "doors",

"windows", "arches", and "steps" as porous containers that soak up ambient and tangible memory from the world around them. The act of passing inscribes a trace of the passer-by on the objects surrounding them. These imprints impart the experience to the next travelers who pass—inscribing and re-inscribing their stories as ghostly traces of the adventurous and road-weary. They are "accents" of the road left on the physical structure and narrative tradition for those who follow to ponder. Whitman acknowledges that although we are drawn to treat the travelers' wonder as a private visceral experience we should consider it public.

Those witnessing the beauty of the world are not doing so together temporally, but rather they occupy the same space at different times. In our terms, Whitman is describing the public of the road.

California Bound

Springsteen responds directly to Steinbeck's Grapes with 1995's Ghost of Tom Joad.

The writers, in both works, share a voice for the working class and the dispossessed. Like

Guthrie and Seeger, Steinbeck and Springsteen write for and about marginalized groups.

Although 'the perception of Springsteen's politics are complicated by his income, his aesthetic and purpose remain close to Steinbeck's, writing about inequality in America. In a literary sense Steinbeck and Springsteen share the voice of the everyman. Steinbeck's skilled 82 employment of dramatic persona, seen especially in the chapters interceding the Joad narrative, is replicated by Springsteen. Both writers are able to focus on the voice of the individual, which is arguably why Grapes has been so readily adapted to film and music.

The reader is aware that we encounter characters from the Joad narrative in the interceding chapters, but they remain nameless. They become part of the historical backdrop of the

"Okie" migration.

Steinbeck gives the reader the opportunity to connect these figures to the Joads—an intelligent way of demonstrating the larger argument present in Grapes: All men are created equal, and should be treated as such. Furthermore, if this is not the case it is only by working in unison that this state can be rejected and an equitable one reached. Thus the repeated discussion of individual versus community in the novel, or as Steinbeck puts it, "the beginning from T to 'we'," (152) can first be seen in the unity of the "fambly", but more accurately emerges in the roadside camps—physical manifestations of a road public—along route 66. The transition culminates in the Californian commune camp. Even as these publics form they must separate. The temporal flux of their existence recalls Whitman's public of the road.

The literature of America simultaneously reinforces and destabilizes myths of the

American land. In these myths individuals are consistently pitted against the American wilderness, the institution (be it the state or an imagined greater, but ultimately, oppressive force), and most frequently themselves. Replicated in these American tales are narratives of the frontier and the highway. The frontier is built upon American creation myths about the single man—rugged against a sprawling landscape—alone in the wild.55 This version of the

55 In The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Expierence of the American Frontiers, 1630—I860 Annette Kolodny presents a view of the American frontier from the perspective of women. She contends that, while men had 83

frontier is most often associated with Wild Bill's Circus, Louis l'Amour serials, and, later,

John Wayne flicks. In Steinbeck's Grapes the frontier myth is closely tied to myths of the

Promised Land where the journey from the known, Oklahoma, leads to the unknown

Promised Land, California. "The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the

West was one dream" (Steinbeck, 193). This myth originates from a biblical source, the

Israelites' exodus from slavery in Egypt toward the land promised to them by the Lord, and

re-emerges as the first waves of European emigrants leave for the New World. Just as the

Israelites were led by Moses from slavery into the desert, the new Americans too, led by

scouts and native tribesmen, were greeted by the wilderness. The Joads are led by a promise

of something better, just as the emigrants coming to the New World, and the Israelites

heading for a land of milk and honey, the terminus of the road.

Before the road the American land was wild. It is metaphorically depicted as a rough

and wild frontier to be charted and contained—usually by white European males. The

frontier, while full of bounty and life is a dangerous place where law and order, from a previous life and time—half a world away—serves little purpose. Turner scouts the frontier

in The Significance of the Frontier in American History. He argues that American

development can be explained by " ...(t)he existence of a free land, its continuous recession,

and the advance of American settlement westward"(l). Most succinctly Turner describes the

frontier as, "the line of the most rapid and effective Americanization" (3-4). He links the

social and cultural development of America to its own geographic expansion:

American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new

a clear presence on the frontier, women populated the western expansion of the U.S. physically and with their own stories (3). Kolodny reads women's place on the frontier as divergent from the metaphorical and literal penetration of the wild made by men; instead of ravaging the landscape, women domesticated the west, cultivating gardens and communities (xiii). 84

development for this area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character (3).

In many ways Turner's thesis is dated. His use of "primitive" as a modifier for Native

Americans is as objectionable as his suspicions about a distinctly "American character". He

intellectualizes the frontier as a dominant structure in forming American behavior, and as

such creates a model—one that analyzes and depicts the human drive to explore the

unknown—that adapts to the study of American literature; specifically, the call of the road

exhibited in these narratives.

Despite these shortcomings Turner provides a space to ground a literary reading of the frontier. In a literary sense it is inhabited by American figures. For instance, the cowboy

is an archetype of the frontier. As a rule he is usually not accepted. The people he protects

and frequently associates with are those seen to be outside of society such as stereotypical, rugged mountain men, or "Indians". He is always on the move—characterized by the trope

of thwarting his foils and riding off into the sunset. This is only made possible by his horse; the cowboy's constant companion offers him mobility and freedom on the American frontier.

The cowboy sets the stage for the-dawn-of-the-modern-masculine-American-hero, and more

importantly the archetypal American male, or, as found in road narratives: Tom Joad, Sal

Paradise and Dean Moriarty.

As the frontier diminished the cowboy was forced to change along with it. The nature

of the frontier changed with the development of railway and the highway that linked the

American continent from sea to sea; the romantic figure of the cowboy transformed with the proliferation of steam power, and later the advent of the automobile. The finite amount of

American soil places limits on expansion is also a problem for Turner: 85

So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power. But the democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers as well as its benefits. Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and all the manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly developed civic spirit (32).

The manifestation of this danger is clear and present in Grapes as we witness the re- emergence of the frontier, significantly through metaphor. The rugged wilderness still existed, but only between the lines of travel. Still, the West in Grapes held the same promise as the frontier had done for previous generations, but, unlike the frontier, the West did not live up to the hope the Joads, and other Oklahoma families had for it.56 Steinbeck engages the damaging potential of myth. In Grapes the west is depicted as a land of potential, a land of hope and dreams, but avails only a substandard work and substandard way of life.

Grapes is situated long after the disappearance of the frontier but recalls it both as a device of the narrative and through Tom's rugged take-matters-into-his-own-hands sensibility. Initially prison is a viable alternative to poverty for Tom: "You eat regular, an' get clean clothes, and there's places to take a bath. It's pretty nice some ways. Makes it hard not havin' no women." (26). He admits that without women (i.e. the embrace of a lover) it would be difficult. In step with the masculine archetype, Tom shows no fear when he, Casy, and

Muley hear a car approaching outside the old Joad place. Tom figures he can take it on

Turner theorizes the west:

The West, at bottom, is a form of society, rather than an area. It is the term applied to the region whose social conditions result from the application of older institutions and ideas to the transforming influences of free land. By this application, a new environment is suddenly entered, freedom of opportunity is opened, the cake of custom is broken, and new activities, new lines of growth, new institutions and new ideas, are brought into existence. The wilderness disappears, the "West" proper passes on to a new frontier, and in the former area, a new society has emerged from its contact with the backwoods (205).

The frontier is a liminal membrane that separates the wild from the America, and the west from the east. This motion can almost be described as osmosis; here we see the leakage of customs and behaviors across permeable borders. 86 alone, but heeds his friends' advice to stay hidden. Each instance depicts Tom as a strong character willing to go it alone if need be, and do whatever needs to be done.

Tom breaks out of the archetypal masculine role as he takes on responsibility. It is through Casy's Whitmanesque sermons that Tom begins to recognize that the strength of people comes from them being united (24). Furthermore, once he assumes, alongside Ma

Joad, the leadership of the family, he cannot put up with being treated so negatively by the

Californians. Ultimately he cannot do anything about it on his own. The individualism that marked the outset of the novel is displaced by community as Steinbeck resists the archetypal

American hero. As Steinbeck pushes against the character of the American hero he also shakes loose ideas concerning that hero's place and purpose: delivering or restoring an ideal state i.e. the promised land.

Steinbeck destabilizes promised land myths, and myths of American exceptionalism, by destroying the image so firmly rooted in the minds of the Joad family. In other words, the

Joads fantasize about lazing and eating grapes all day in California. They do not realize the toll the journey will have on them, or the bleak situation that awaits their arrival in

California. The Joads travel along route 66:

Highway 66 is the main migrant road. 66—the long concrete path across the country, waving gently up and down on the map, from Mississippi to Bakersfield—over the red lands and the gray lands, twisting up into the mountains, crossing the divide and down into the bright and terrible desert, and across the desert to the mountains again, and into the rich Californian valleys (118).

The sublimity of the American landscape acts as a force against the road and an obstacle for the Joads'. Steinbeck juxtaposes the image "concrete path" with "waving gently"; placing dichotomous images together he points to the futility of the Joads'journey. The juxtaposition between experienced reality, "bright and terrible desert," and fantasized existence, "rich

Californian valleys," Steinbeck notes, is the nature of the mind. If it is this bad here, it must 87 be better somewhere else. In this way, Route 66 takes on the role of illusionist directing people to someplace better-than-here: "People in flight along 66. And the concrete road shone like a mirror under the sun, and in the distance the heat made it seem that there were pools of water in the road" (122). The highway takes its toll on the Joads and on their personified vehicles in a way that binds them to their machines.

Mark Seltzer theorizes the connection between man and machine in Bodies and

Machines. He traces how cultural forms "couple the body and the machine" (4). He details the connection of the oppositional relationship between nature and machinery, "modes of production and means of production," (3). He conjectures that there are three distinct, though not entirely compatible, ways of reading the body as machine: that machines replace bodies, that persons are already machines, and that technologies make bodies and persons (12).

What is of importance is not the body's subversion to the machine, but the interrelation and correlation of both (13). Steinbeck writes this correlation, integrating man and machine:

"Cars limping along 66 like wounded things, panting and struggling. Too hot, loose connections, loose bearings, rattling bodies" (122). Car and man are tied together in the struggle for survival during the exodus along the road.57 Seltzer argues that, "On the one side...we find the insistence on the materiality or physicality of persons, representations, and actions in naturalist discourse; on the other, the insistent abstraction of persons, bodies, and motions to models, numbers, maps, charts, and diagrammatic representations" (14: theirs).

Steinbeck's abstraction of the body is apparent as writes: "He had become the soul of the car" (123). The Okies body-machine connection calls for a literal reading of Deus ex machina.

57 Cars are agents in public formation. Strangers swap oil, parts, advice, and stories over their cars. These people are united in their mobility and their pursuit of a better life, and form publics of the road. 88

Seltzer places the body at the core of mobility as he theorizes how railways put

"stilled bodies in motion" (18). He writes, "what these mobile technologies make possible,

in different forms, are the thrill and panic of agency at once extended and suspended" (18).

The "thrill and panic of agency" is easily transposed to the automobile, but it quickly turns to apocalyptic vision as mortality becomes the reality of flight: "The people in flight from the terror behind—strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is retired forever" (122). As life on the road grows harsher, worry sets in, and Ma

Joad realizes that their destination is not the promised land. The reality is dystopian as

Steinbeck reveals the truth behind the rhetoric of myth.

Violence in the Joad narrative is negative. Two instances where violence is avoided yield positive results. The Joads are stopped on their way to the government camp. Ma Joad cautions Tom to not lose his cool, and a violent encounter is avoided. Again, at the dance, the rumor that the Californians will try to start a riot is heeded and the situation is avoided. In both cases violence is not used as a means of escape. But, before the novel begins Tom's violent reaction to having a "knife stuck in his side" lands him in jail. The violence at one of the roadside camps causes a woman to be shot, and Casy to depart from the Joads. Finally,

Tom's revenge of Casy's murder leads to the final destruction of the Joad family and the conclusion of the narrative, but yields Tom's famous, conclusive speech:

Then I'll be all aroun' in the dark. I'll be ever'where—wherever you look. Wherever they's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever they's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad an'—I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready. An' when our folks eat the stuff they raise an' live in the houses they build—why, I'll be there... (419).

Springsteen aptly appropriates this narrative for The Ghost of Tom Joad, but instead of the

Californian immigration setting, he focuses on issues of homelessness and the U.S.-Mexico 89

border.

Steinbeck and Springsteen share affect and politic in their presentation of Tom's

monologue. Springsteen's use of the passage in the title track of The Ghost of Tom Joad is just as striking as the original:

Now Tom said "Mom, wherever there's a cop beatin' a guy Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries Where there's a fight 'gainst the blood and hatred in the air Look for me Mom I'll be there Wherever there's somebody fightin' for a place to stand Or decent job or a helpin' hand Wherever somebody's strugglin' to be free Look in their eyes Mom you'll see me." (1995)

Springsteen re-writes Steinbeck's passage but it does not lose its passionate intensity, ethical

decisiveness, or quiet reassurance. The intimacy of Tom's address is perhaps the most

important aspect of it. Both Springsteen and Steinbeck write Tom as the speaker and Ma

Joad as the addressee, but the hidden third party, in terms of dramatic monologue, is the

listening/reading public. Tom's affective appeal and political message should not be

separated. It is only by accepting the affect of pain as a signal of the economic plight of the poor and acting upon that signal that we can truly legitimize cultural practice and utilize publics beyond the affirming sense of belonging they provide. Tom becomes an American

symbol of unity stronger than any flag or any national anthem. He claims the glory of knowing the elated and terrifying scenes he describes for himself, and for the people. Tom's,

Springsteen's, and Steinbeck's message is a simple one: equality over greed, unity over

singularity, and co-operation over violence.

The insistence against violence is furthered by the embrace of community.

Steinbeck's insistence throughout the novel, especially voiced by Casy that by banding together the people will be stronger is evidenced by the growing unity of publics along "the 90

road." "In the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the

children were the children of all" (193). The unity of the wayfarers, partially a response to

the arduous journey, and partially human nature, is centered around the figure of the

troubadour. "A guitar unwrapped from a blanket and tuned—and the songs, which were all

of the people, were sung in the nights. Men sang the words, and women hummed the tunes"

(194). Steinbeck reveals unity as the saving grace of the migration. These families survive

the journey because they work in unison, foreshadow Steinbeck's conclusion of the novel. It

is worth quoting the following completely:

And perhaps a man brought out his guitar to the front of his tent. And he sat on a box to play, and everyone in the camp moved slowly in toward him, drawn in toward him. Many men can chord a guitar, but perhaps the man was a picker. There you have something—the deep chords beating, beating, while the melody runs on the strings like little footsteps. Heavy hard fingers marching on the frets. The man played and the people moved slowly in on him until the circle was closed and tight, and then he sang "Ten-Cent Cotton and Forty-Cent Meat." And the circle sang with him. And he sang "Why Don't You Cut Your Hair, Girls?" He wailed the song, "I'm Leaving Old Texas," that eerie song that was sung before the Spaniards came, only the words were Indian then.

And the group was welded to one thing, one unit, so that in the dark the eyes of the people were inward, and their minds played in other times, and their sadness was like the rest, like sleep.. .the children drowsed with the music and went into the tents to sleep and the singing came into their dreams.. .And each wished they could pick a guitar, because it was a gracious thing (199).

In this passage Steinbeck's narrative voice holds great authority and authenticity. The reader

imagines Woody Guthrie, Steven Foster, or Pete Seeger, as the subject bard. Steinbeck values the skill of a "picker" much the same way these men would have valued a good farm

hand. It is a practical skill. The fingers are personified in their "march" across the frets— much like the march of the Okies across middle America. Here it unites a people, and tells them the truth of their situation. Songs of lament, of travel, and of what is to come. Each man dreams of playing guitar in such a fashion, and each child rests well. As with 91

Springsteen's poetics in Chapter I, the affective power of the troubadour and songwriter offer peace and rest to weary bodies and weary minds, just as they can incite a riot and build a community of strangers.

Old Jalopy Chariots

Kerouac crossed the American continent in On the Road twenty years before

Springsteen released his first album Greetings from Asbury Park N.J. in 1973. Kerouac was involved in the beat movement58; Springsteen began playing and performing in the late- sixties. These two periods bracket the hippie music and cultural movement of the 1960s, they share a similar aesthetic compared with that of the flower-power revolution: laid back attire, a relaxed attitude and bohemian lifestyle. On the Road celebrates this lifestyle as it fascinates its reader with directionless lusting adventure.

The crossing of America by Sal and Dean in On the Road steps away from the exodus and migration seen in Grapes and towards an aimless life on the road. Unlike the necessity of travel felt by those migrating from Oklahoma, characters and narratives here are driven by their desire to live free and be free. Kerouac's embrace of the road is similar to

Whitman's articulation:

Dean got on the bus that said Chicago and roared off into the night. There went our wrangler. I promised myself to go the same way when spring really bloomed and opened up the land. And this was really the way my whole road experience began, and the things that were to come are too fantastic not to tell (Kerouac, 9).

This is the way that Kerouac describes "the road." It is not the same metaphor as in

Steinbeck. Here it becomes one grand adventure. The road we find in Kerouac is close to

58 On the Road is recognized as an autobiographical work. Kerouac was not permitted to print real names so he created pseudonyms. For instance, Kerouac appears as Sal Paradise, William S. Burroughs as Old Bull Lee, Neal Cassady as Dean Moriarty and Alan Ginsberg as Carlo Marx. 92 early Springsteen—"Spirit in the Night", "Rosalita", and Born to Run.

The desire to travel in On the Road is manifest in the experience of travel rather than the reason for it. "I looked greedily out the window: stucco houses and palms and drive-ins, the whole mad thing, the ragged promised land, the fantastic end of America" (75). Sal acknowledges previous tenets of America as the promised land, but like Springsteen sees it as it is, "ragged." The narrator's admission of greed is interesting in this case, as it places the onus for travel, once again, away from necessity and towards desire.59

The nature of Sal's experience of "the road," as reflected in his observations, is centered in the moment. He lives minute to minute with great expression and little reflection.

Kerouac's diction sounds like Springsteen's, "And now in Zanzibar a shootin' star was ridin' in a side car hummin' a lunar tune" (1978) as Kerouac describes a night in LA: "The grand wild sound of bop floated from beer parlors; it mixed medleys with every kind of cowboy and boogie-woogie in the American night" (77). By describing "bop" Kerouac connects the cowboy and boogie-woogie with the contemporary American music scene.60 Further, by shifting the emphasis in the last three words of the sentence we derive starkly different meanings. The night is geographically taking place in America, but why not write it: that night -in- America? -OR- A specifically American night is possible and this is it. This experience is not available elsewhere. -OR- This is "the American night," and it is so

This is the narrative of the road that Petrusich attacks, or at the least, disregards in It Still Moves, as "a lonely male preoccupied with achieving catharsis, reinvention, desperately fulfilling an awkward, unnamed quest for authenticity" (17). The night filled with jazz and bop is cuttingly analyzed by Roshanak Keshti in "Musical Miscegenation and the Logic of Rock and Roll". He quotes Norman Mailer's The White Negro: "The source of Hip is the Negro." Keshti writes, "African American affective and expressive cultural capital, in the form of jazz and sexuality, is read here as being always already available, on "offer" to whites who place themselves near this "source of Hip" by residing in places such as Greenwich Village, frequenting jazz clubs, and becoming jazz musicians" (1044). Sal and Dean soak up the "Hip" in nightclubs all across America, they trail a jazz musician dragging himto a cab with them, and hear IT emanating from a black player's sax. Kerouac, according to Keshti, is the post-war hipster cashing in on African American cultural and affective capital. 93 important that there is no other night occurring. This is a single moment narrative and nothing else matters. These readings are not mutually exclusive. They work in unison furthering Sal's experience of the road as an individualistic temporal pursuit that is reflected in the language: "the grand wild sound of bop floated..." (77), "...for what's heaven? what's earth? All in the mind..." (221), and "...burning ecstasies..." (233). Despite the

Whitmanesque tendency for reflection while traveling "the road," the pursuit of transcendence is an exercise of the present.

Kerouac's narrative is also a visceral one. The reader is affectively linked to the characters as they crash and burn across the American landscape. Sal's enjoyment of simple things, like apple pie and ice cream (14), is shared by the reader. The repeated consumption of alcohol and "tea" (marijuana) fill the narrative with a smoky blur. "I drank sixty glasses of beer and retired to the toilet, where I wrapped myself around the toilet bowl and went to sleep...What difference does it make after all?—anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? what's earth? All in the mind" (221). The over­ indulgence, and exaggeration, of consumption leads to rumination, and at times, epiphany.

Sal sees his hope of life on the road in Dean. The story we are told places Dean as both protagonist and antagonist, driving and halting the narrative. By the novel's conclusion the reader comprehends that it is Sal, who, from the beginning, loves the road:

Suddenly I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparking flames shooting out from it; I saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers. It came like wrath to the West. I knew Dean had gone mad again. There was no chance to send money to either wife he took all his savings out of the bank and bought a car. Everything was up, the jig and all. Behind him charred ruins smoked. He rushed westward over the groaning and awful continent again, and soon he would arrive (233). 94

This passage is an orgy of creation and destruction. Dean, as Sal envisions him, "a burning shuddering frightful Angel," reveals his true sociopathic self in revelation. Sal later describes his revelation. "It was like the imminent arrival of Gargantua; preparations had to be made to widen the gutters of Denver and foreshorten certain laws to fit his suffering bulk and burning ecstasies" (233). Dean creates new roads as he travels demonstrating a god-like power. Here,

Kerouac makes the same connection Springsteen will make in "Thunder Road": an Angel, with wings, becomes an automobile. Springsteen sings, "trade in these wings on some wheels" (1975). Dean's metamorphosis entices Kerouac's sense that "Everything was up, the jig and all," (233). Thematically it is this feeling of imminence that is missing from

Whitman, but not from Steinbeck, or McCarthy and certainly not from Springsteen. The road takes on a crucial facet of meaning-making here, it can offer deliverance and salvation, but as Sal is quick to point out, it can just as easily rain destruction.

Carrying the Fire

At first look, McCarthy and Springsteen have little in common. McCarthy's writing is sparse, and open space fills the figural landscape of The Road. Conversely, Springsteen fills his music with lush layers of sound. This is most true of Springsteen's albums with the E

Street band. However, if we turn to Nebraska, Ghost, or Devils we hear the space McCarthy writes. Because Springsteen's artistic impulse is to fill each pulse of a song it is interesting to examine the moments when he does not. In this case, McCarthy's writing provides an elegant lens for discovery. Why does Springsteen use white space when he does, and what does

McCarthy's depiction of a bleak future reveal in Springsteen?

In The Road, we find a father and son traveling across an already destroyed country: 95 bleak, infertile, and empty in every sense. McCarthy calls it, "the wasted country," (6) invoking both senses of the word. Some readings of the narrative depict it as a love story.61

McCarthy makes it quite clear that this story is different. Instead of the road symbolizing salvation or at least a chance for it, here, "this was not a safe place. They could be seen from the road now it was day" (5). The opening of the novel suggests a different reading:

In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some gigantic beast...Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders... It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark (3-4; mine).

McCarthy immediately draws on American myth by comparing the father and son to pilgrims.62 The father dreams they are "in a fable" thereby giving some purpose and reason to the events that as the reader follows the narrative he learns more about. He dreams of his son as "the child." This is an alienating noun to use for a familiar being.

Instead of uniting the traveling companions McCarthy drives them apart through language. The ultimate banality of the protagonists'journey is evident when the beast is described in far more detail than we are given about the father and his son. In the dream it lumbers away from them and they are abandoned, literally by the beast, and figuratively by their nation, their people and humanity.

Oprah Winfrey asked McCarthy in an interview if this was a love story he wrote to his son. His response "In a way. A bit." The book is dedicated to his son, but this type of biographical reading does not illuminate the narrative for us. This could be any father and son on the road and that is why it works.

McCarthy competently alludes to works of American fiction. The translucent alabaster beast is reminiscent of Captain Ahab's quarry, Moby Dick. Even the road and journey motif resonates with the exodus of the Joads. If anything The Road should be read as an allegory for American fiction.

This is the story of two, but millions of strangers can occupy the place of the man and the boy qua literature. This raises an interesting question about publics and literary worlds: How many strangers can live vicariously through narrative before its collapses? 96

Abandonment, by the dream-beast and humanity, leaves the man questioning his own instincts. "In what direction did lost men veer? Perhaps it changed with hemispheres. Or handedness. Finally he put it out of his mind" (116). Earlier he made a flute for his boy.

Instead of celebrating the boy's musical birth he laments what has passed along the road:

In the morning they came up out of the ravine and took to the road again. He'd carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin...The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves (77).

The man is not ready to allow any joy or creativity. He quickly turns positive thinking into an allegory of destruction by an imagined threat. The music begins as hope for the future but becomes an ode to the man's twisted dead age. The boy's song can be read both ways; it encapsulates both at once. He is the unassuming herald of both genesis and apocalypse.

Indeed, the man's "mind was betraying him. Phantoms not heard from in a thousand years rousing slowly from their sleep" (116). These phantoms hold him back from a hope for the future, and instead he is left contemplating their demise.

In a narrative that reads like a nightmare the protagonists still have bad dreams. The boy has a dream that is frightening. "I had this penguin that you wound up and it would waddle and flap its flippers. And we were in that house that we used to live in and it came around the corner but nobody had wound it up and it was really scary" (36). The boy feels as though he has not convinced his father of the dream's terror, so he reiterates, "It was a lot scarier in the dream" (36). After the father reassures him he concedes one final detail. The winder on the penguin was not turning. No one was responsible for winding this penguin and it was moving of its own accord. The agency usually afforded those on the road is not 97 granted here. The boy is not in control and his guardian certainly is not either. Even in the

Joad narrative the road is their salvation; it is their last option. Alternatively, the road in The

Road serves only as a physical structure. It cannot lead to salvation or redemption. Whatever atrocities have destroyed the world have also left it unstable and damaged. The old narratives no longer hold the same meaning or agency. The road has grown dark and sinister.

We can continue to see this darkness in McCarthy's employment of imagery. The novel plays out visual archetypes of light and dark: this battlefield will not be sonic but mosaic.

Sensual descriptions reveal the complexity of the narrative. For example, even though the monster, from above, is described with full colour its exit is soundless. The novel is visualized in a grey scale as McCarthy's sparse writing offers stark images of the coastline.

They trekked out along the crescent sweep of beach, keeping to the firmer sand below the tidewrack. They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. At the tide line a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching across the shore as far as the eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast salt sepulcher. Senseless. Senseless (222).

Objects and landscapes are described as grey, or ash coloured, like a silent movie. The grisly seashore has become a graveyard memorial. The bleak and sparse writing allows for an immensity of destruction. It is as if narrative has made room for insurgent death. Like a sponge it holds latent meaning between the lines. The repetitive grey stretches like the shoreline all along "the road." The visual reminder of colour provides a moral clue as well.

Unlike Steinbeck's political agenda in writing Grapes McCarthy's road narrative exhibits an amorality. The rampant cannibalism, while disgusting to the man and the boy, is a fact of survival. And if anything the destruction of humanity is a moot point to the remaining carcasses.

In contrast to the gray scale colour acts as a signifier within the narrative. Colour act as an accent and a reminder of the past. When colour is introduced it is in contrast to the 98

empty landscape:

Everything was alight. As if the lost sun were returning at last. The snow orange and quivering. A forest fire was making its way along the tinderbox ridges above them, flaring and shimmering against the overcast like the northern lights. Cold as it was he stood there a long time. The color of it moved something in him long forgotten. Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember (McCarthy, 31).

This passage is tightly packed with information. McCarthy reveals a part of the

apocalypse—the sun has been blotted out. "As if..." the sun had returned, but it had not.

Colour, lacking from everyday experience, is a novelty here. It is so unexpected and vibrant

that the man is incited to feel something out of the ordinary.

McCarthy's bleak work inadvertently subverts Springsteen's early romanticism from

"Thunder Road" by deploying similar imagery, "And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries exposed to the day" (21). Here Springsteen's

assurance that he and Wendy will "walk in the sun" is shattered and replaced only with

scattered glimpses of colour and memories of warmth. McCarthy breaks up Springsteen's palette with the simplest of movements. A similar image from the sparse title track, "Magic" is better suited to The Road: "On the road the sun is sinkin' low/ There's bodies hangin' in the trees/ This is what will be..." The grey silent landscape is dominated by the hulking skeleton of "the road," and the dead carcases of cities.

The conclusion of The Road subverts the literary tradition of the road. The child's saviour warns him: "If you stay you need to keep off the road. I dont know how you made it this far" (McCarthy, 283). Everything we knew about the road is inverted—from Whitman to

Springsteen. It is not a guide to salvation, or a symbol of free will. In the post-apocalyptic 99

landscape it is a "Supermarket"64 for the roving cults of the once-human cannibals. It has

literally become "a death trap, a suicide rap" as in "Born to Run" (1975). The road has been

forever changed, where it once stood for life—even a life of hardships—it now manifests death and destruction. Similarly, publics are shaken by McCarthy's vision of the road—they can now perceive their own destruction. In the same way as Springsteen, McCarthy

successfully inverts the road as metaphor and genre.

"Where The Road is Dark"

Each road narrative that I have discussed bases itself on the "accents' of the road.

While these portrayals vary, they all relate back to origins of the road, as seen in my discussion of the frontier. The writers of these narratives need to make choices about which aspects of the road to engage and which to reject. Whitman, Steinbeck, Kerouac,

Springsteen, and McCarthy contribute to a growing public of the road, and by creating their own texts they engage an existing public discourse on the road.

Whitman complicates his vision of the road by questioning the nature of its beauty.

"These yearnings, why are they? These thoughts in the darkness, why are they?" (Whitman,

11. 96). They are traces left by other members of "the road's" public. Whitman also asks,

"What is it I interchange so suddenly with strangers?" (Whitman, 11. 101). Whitman acknowledges the mysterious inter-exchange of affect and spiritual connection that occurs in a public. It is here that Springsteen's road leaves Whitman's. Where Whitman ends his poem with questions Springsteen concludes with assurance: "We're gonna get to that place where we/ Really want to go, and we'll walk in the sun./ But till then, tramps like us, baby we were born to run" (1975). Springsteen eventually questions his brash assurance, but it is not until

64 See Working on a Dream track four, "Queen of the...". 100

Darkness that he begins to realize the dubious representation of the road.

Springsteen and Whitman differ in their recognition of publics. Whitman actively

explores and questions the capacity of publics to intellectualize the road, whereas

Springsteen romanticizes the road. Whitman is also aware of his public in a different way

than Springsteen is. Springsteen is able, through contemporary media, rock concerts, etc. to

see his concert public, when Whitman was forced to imagine his through the road. Granted,

Whitman sees those he passes on his way, but the traces of people remembered by objects

along it are the true witnesses of Whitman's public of the road. For Whitman, wanderlust remains a compelling mystery: "You but arrive at the city to which you were destin'd—you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction, before you are call'd by an irresistible call to depart"

(Whitman, 11. 148). The call is of most interest. It is felt similarly by the actors of all road narratives. It is felt if not forced upon the Joads. Its call is answered repeatedly by Sal

Paradise, and conversely, McCarthy's man and boy are forced to move on regardless of any call.

The crucial difference in how the call is experienced is its urgency. For instance, when is the call one of survival, and when of desire? In Whitman and Kerouac the call comes from wanderlust and desire. The open road has proven its merits, and is traveled for its full worth. Whereas Steinbeck and McCarthy write about the necessity of the road, for the

Joads it leads to salvation, and for the man and the boy it leads away from certain death.

Steinbeck's road narratives rapidly turn from desire to necessity not just for the Joads but for all of the migrant workers who found themselves on the road.

The vehicle of the road, except for Whitman and McCarthy, is the automobile. In

Grapes Steinbeck imagines duality between man and machine, Kerouac writes the automobile as a phallic extension in On the Road, whereas Springsteen's metaphoric relation 101 to the car, "Just wrap your legs 'round these velvet rims/ and strap your hands across my engines" (1975) introduces a sexually laden imagery to the body-machine connection.

Springsteen introduces a new element: religion. In "Thunder Road" there is a metaphysical exchange between religion and sexuality. Springsteen's line "trade in these wings on some wheels" is close to Steinbeck's flight of the Okies. Where Springsteen's "wheels" lead to salvation, the Joads would prefer God-granted "wings": "Two hundred, fifty thousand people over the road. Fifty thousand old cars—wounded steaming. Wrecks along the road, abandoned" (122). Springsteen's imagery foreshadows McCarthy's destruction of the automobile as figural in traversing the road. The difference for him is that no heavenly guide exists on the road or at its end.

When Springsteen began a reunion tour in 1999 with the E Street band the song

"Further on up the Road" frequented the set rotation. The song was subsequently released on

The Rising (2002). It had been twenty-seven years since Born to Run was released and despite several songs focusing on the theme of the road since none had isolated it as the central image. It is not surprising in an album about life, death, and redemption to find

"Further on up the Road" although, it remarkably remodels these themes.

"Further on up the Road" is the manifestation of Springsteen's maturation as an artist and his continuing development of the road as theme. It concretizes the issues Springsteen was uncovering as early as Darkness within the rubric of The Rising. Springsteen takes the road to its inevitable conclusion. If the road from Born to Run is about exuberance, free-will and self-realization, like its predecessors "Song of the Open Road", and On the Road, then

"Further on..." is about stagnancy, and lack of control and our unavoidable mortality no matter how far down the road we travel. Springsteen bellows,

Where the road is dark and the seed is sowed, 102

Where the gun is cocked and the bullet's cold, Where the miles are marked in the blood and gold, I'll meet you further on up the road (2002).

On this road destiny has been decided, the situation will be settled with violence, and death

and greed serve as the only means to mobility. The road is transformed; it is McCarthy's

road. Springsteen repeats the words dark and cold throughout the song—specifically in the

refrain. "Where the way is dark and the night is cold" (2002). It is the "way" that is "dark",

and the "night" that is "cold." In a surprisingly hopeful turn the speaker assures the listener that there will be a morning to end this night saying, "One sunny mornin' we'll rise I know".

This line suggests a longing for an afterlife that is free from darkness and suffering. At first

listen it sounds positive, but after the grim imagery of the second verse, "dead man's suit,"

"smilin' skull ring", "lucky graveyard boots", it takes on a sinister meaning. "To rise" in the

morning is one thing, but here "to rise" implies that it will be from the grave symbolizing an

ultimate lack of control. If there is no rest, even in death, what have we to look forward to?

Springsteen abandons the assuredness of his earlier road songs as he takes this one step

further: "If there's a light up ahead well brother I don't know" (2002). Springsteen suggests that the end of the road is not only uncertain while we are traveling it, but its is similarly

obscured even upon arrival. He also breaks through the icy imagery and repetition, singing,

"But I got this fever burnin' in my soul". There is no end to the road. The speaker's repetition

of "further on up the road" becomes a startlingly clear self-critique.

If the road leads nowhere its publics, like Whitman, Kerouac, and Springsteen, can

only indulge themselves in it for a time, or they can search for salvation like Steinbeck and

McCarthy. But, crucially, the road will not lead them to safety. The obsession with this narrative is disappointingly hollow. This limitation of the metaphor is reiterated throughout

Springsteen's music, somewhat ironically given his success. The clearest example is 103

Springsteen's seminal hit "Born to Run" in which where he acknowledges "the runaway

American dream..." (1975). This phrasing places a strange emphasis and agency on the dream—the accountability shifts from a free and giving nation to the listener as they pursue this personified dream. Springsteen's "runaway dream" succinctly describes the Joad narrative, from Grapes, Sal's journey, from On the Road, and, almost brutally, the struggle for survival in The Road.

If the road does not lead to truth then what does? Springsteen does offer one small comfort, "I got a song to sing, keep me out of the cold/ And I'll meet you further on up the road". It becomes clear that song is the answer. We see song rise in each of these narratives.

It is born of the road but diverts from it, and while the road offers belonging it is on a relatively small scale when compared to the publics formed through Springsteen's poetics.

While there are many problems with the road—narrative and symbol—its combination with affective catharsis and Springsteen's transformative poetics offers a positive and lasting effect on the American public—specifically on displays of masculine affect within

Springsteen's listening and concert publics. 104

Chapter III: Queering "the Road"

The metaphor of the road is of formative importance in post cold war America as a vehicle for personal change in coming of age stories, serial teenage movies, and American

literary classics, the road, arguably having overcome the lack of "the great American novel" discussed by Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel, disjunctively acts for and against conceptualizations of mass American culture. As road narratives proliferate, the latent underlying principles of American culture spread and infuse themselves into the

American public sphere. These principles are based in a homosocial turn away from treating what Fiedler calls "the passionate encounter of a man and woman" (24). Fiedler's conjecture remains true even fifty years after the publication of Love and Death: the framework for analysis of the American novelists' recession from sexual encounters has only recently emerged in the form of queer theory.

Current discussions of queer theory in America prioritize the importance of understanding the formation of American masculinities and their impact on the public sphere. The public sphere, as theorized by Habermas and Warner, has temporal as well as political65 dimensions, assessing America's position culturally and historically. While there have been several phases, or patterns, of masculinity in the twentieth century the common element of homosocial behavior within narratives is what structurally affects the public sphere. In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Eve Kosofsky

Sedgwick divulges that in its historical and sociological context "homosocial" is meant both

65 What I mean here is identity politics. While the public realm is a space apparently devoid of private sentiment, according to classical definitions of public and private, the emergence of personal politics in public has grown rampantly since the 1960s. This emergence has also been expressed largely through culture, and in a sociological sense, through the phenomena of group dynamics and actions. 105 as an analogy for homosexual and to be distinguished from it (2). For Sedgwick reading homosocial desire becomes the ideal way to "hypothesize the potential unbrokeness [sic] between homosocial and homosexual—a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted" (2). Expanding on Sedgwick I argue that it is the (in)visibility of this continuum, for men, that makes homosocial narratives publicly formative.

In this chapter, I analyze American masculinities, homosocial desire, and publics theory as it pertains to the formative nature of road narratives within American culture. In order to do so, I will read these narratives with special attention to the ways in which they portray masculine homosocial desire in relation to the transformation of the American public sphere. Given the disjunctive nature of the road, as we have seen in Springsteen's poetics and in the literary tradition of the road, we must proceed with special attention to the rift caused in the masculine psyche. My starting point is a rereading of Whitman's early sentimentalized version of the road in "Song of the Open Road" alongside his arguably homoerotic, "I Sing the Body Electric". I focus on reading the hyper-sexual depiction of the male body that we find in Whitman in order to articulate the change we see by Kerouac's On the Road, in the expression of affect between men. I believe that the emerging repression of the display of explicit feelings between men in Kerouac is what led to the adoption of On the Road as a hyper-masculine coming of age text and that, surprisingly,66 it is Springsteen that revitalizes masculine expressions of homosocial and homosexual affect. Springsteen's homosocial, and at times homoerotic, displays of affect with saxophonist Clemons in particular work to dislodge homophobic blockades of masculine expression.

66 Surprising in that Springsteen, a supposedly hyper-masculine figure of American power, revitalizes these displays, not that rock music engenders a strictly homosocial space, for as Keshti writes "Like other homosocial communities and spaces, the same-sex relationships and investments in rock music dangerously flirt with homosexual forms of desire" (1048). 106

The relationship between Clemons and Springsteen is complex given the history of relationships between black and white men in the United States; in literature this pairing has a long history (see Huckleberry Finn and Jim). Eric Lott theorizes the complicated interdependence of white and black men in Love and Theft. In particular, he analyzes

"blackface minstrelsy" as an "explicit 'borrowing'" of black culture for white consumption, a

"borrowing", he argues, that "ultimately depends on the material relations of slavery" (3).

The "borrowing" continues today: "from "Oh! Susanna" to Elvis Presley, from circus clowns to Saturday morning cartoons, black face acts and words have figured significantly in the white imaginary of the United States" (5). It is not a significant stretch to place Springsteen's stage antics with Clemons along the trajectory of Lott's "mixed erotic economy of celebration and exploitation" (6). The re-imagination of this "blackface minstrelsy" relationship is performed by Clemons and Springsteen in a ritualistic re-enactment of a standard American rationalized homosocial relationship. Springsteen and Clemons' way of being together, despite a racialized history, makes inroads towards acceptable masculine displays of affect celebrated by Whitman and repressed by Kerouac.

Displaying Masculine Affect and Embracing Homosocial Desire

Whitman's Franklin Evans is the forerunner of temperance narratives. Glenn Hendler posits that the temperance movement's unabashed stance on drink is a formative element of

19th century American sentimental publics (1). Hendler notes that what is most interesting about Whitman's involvement with the temperance movement, is that alongside "experience

67 Significantly, Bob Dylan's album "Love and Theft" was inspired by Lott's book. It was released on September 11 '\ 2001. 107 meetings, [and] oral Washingtonian narratives," it was an attempt to "articulate sympathy, which might otherwise be seen as a private emotion and individual experience, as something social—or to use a more historically and theoretically specific term, as something public"

(32; theirs). The emergence of the novel as a device of public sentiment literally constructs the public sphere and concretizes acceptable masculine displays of affect. Hendler writes,

"Rather than asking their listeners to condemn these men for their indulgence or their horrible treatment of their families, the Washingtonians wanted their audience to sympathize with the inebriates' plight and to display that compassion through tears" (29). The importance of this to my argument hinges on the public display of masculine affect. These men are emoting in order to support one another. The trust displayed and the lack of judgment are indicators of unconditional love. Instead of moving that far however, and calling this love, we will describe the Washingtonian gatherings as homosocial support networks.

These displays of affect change dramatically with the emergence of a language of difference. In his article, "Coming to Terms: Conceptualizing Men's Erotic and Affectional

Relations with Men in the United States, 1820-1892," Jonathan Ned Katz reveals that before

1892 the terms "homosexual" and "heterosexual" were not in use: "Carnal pleasure was not yet organized on a same-sex/different-sex axis" (216). "Love" was one of the major terms used by nineteenth-century men to "name and affirm their sexual and affectional feelings for men" (217). According to Katz this use of "love" was not yet sexed; it could be used between men and "pass as incorporeal" (217). In his article, Katz discusses Whitman's homosexual homoerotic lifestyle, and Americans' emerging homophobic attitude. Men's magazines, The Sporting Whip and The Rake, wrote vehemently against "sodomy" in a series 108 of articles during 1842 . It is important to note this writing is against "sodomy" not homosexuality, but just because the terminology was not in use does not mean the sentiment did not exist. The emergence of a language of difference began to change the nature and acceptability of affectionate homosocial relationships between men.

Whitman is a figure at the centre of this change. In Between Men Sedgwick argues that

"Whitman's influence on the crystallization, in the later nineteenth century, of what was to prove a durable and broadly based Anglo-American definition of male homosexuality, was profound and decisive" (203). In her chapter, "Towards the Twentieth Century: English

Readers of Whitman," Sedgwick chooses Whitman to "stand for the transition to our crystallized homosexual/homophobic world" (202). Her chapter details Whitman's connection to the emergence of homosexual identity: "Photographs of Whitman, gifts of

Whitman's books, specimens of his handwriting, news of Whitman, admiring references to

'Whitman' which seem to have functioned as badges of homosexual recognition, were the currency of a new community that saw itself as created in Whitman's image" (206).

Whitman is a crucial figure because his sexuality and poetics are linked to emergent homosexuality, homophobia, and the literary tradition of the road.

Whitman displays masculine affect in "Song of the Open Road". The poem opens with grand statements, "Henceforth I ask not good-fortune—I myself am good fortune," (11 4) but at the end of the first section there is an aside that is indicated by parentheses:

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens; I carry them, men and women—I carry them with me wherever I go I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them; I am fill'd with them, and I will fill them in return.) (Whitman, 11.11-14)

68 See Katz. "Coming to Terms: Conceptualizing Men's Erotic and Affectional Relations with Men in the United States, 1820-1892" (1997). 217-222 for Whitman, 222-227 for men's magazines. 109

We can read this as a lament; the speaker is distressed and burdened with emotional baggage.

But a different reading suggests the speaker's equivocation between the binary: man-woman.

If we read this passage figuratively, "fill'd" refers to the speaker's soul and the gender of the speaker is left undecided. However, read intertextually with "I Sing the Body Electric" the

"filfing takes on a new meaning and decides the hierarchy of the binary: man is greater than woman. With the intertext the meaning of this "filfing is extended: "They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,/ And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul" (11 3-4). Here "fill" is electrified as it takes on the "full charge"— generated by the obvious desire of the speaker expressed in the line "they will not let me go". The nature of this aside whispered after declarations to the "earth" and "constellations" should also be considered. The dichotomous yell-whisper points to the contrast and equivocation between the speaker's relationship to himself and to others.

The relationships between the speaker and those he meets continues in "I Sing the

Body Electric". "I Sing the Body Electric" is replete with homo-erotic imagery and desire.

Whitman's account of the male body is picturesque:

The expression of the face balks account, But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face, It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists, It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not hide him, The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth, To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more, You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side (11 11-17).

Whitman's catalogue of male parts is almost obsessive in its separation, fragmentation, and itemization of the male body. A physical desire for the subject is expressed through disjunctive imagery. Even when the physical beauty of the subject is compared to the expression and beauty of a poem, the male body is deemed more beautiful, arguably because 110 its beauty is not fragmented, it is whole.

Sedgwick, in Between Men, characterizes Whitman's reaction to the male body as self- emasculation. The passage is worth quoting in its entirety here:

Early Whitman's unrelenting emphasis in the poetry and in the biography on incarnating a phallic erethism—his erectness, his eternal rosy skin, his injections of life and health into scenes of death and wounds—had, again, at least a double effect. Put schematically, rather than having a phallus, he enacted one. Seeming at first to invite a naively celebratory, male-exalting afflatus of phallic worship, the deeper glamor of this pose lay in the drama of shame, concealment, and exhibition; of being like a woman, since to have to enact rather than possess a phallus is (in this system) a feminine condition; of being always only everything or nothing, and the hilarious bravado of asserting a mere human personality or desire in the face of that (205).

Sedgwick correctly reads Whitman's gesticulations. Her focus on finding a link between homosexuality and feminism is evident. What is most interesting is that she so rightly describes the overacting "hilarious bravado of asserting a mere human personality" and that to be without "phallus" begins the "afflatus of phallic worship". Whitman's own celebration is in the following passage: "To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?/1 do not ask any more delight,

I swim in it as in a sea./ There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well," (11 48-50). In

Whitman's metaphor of a sea physical connection sparks desire. It is all-encompassing and can engulf us. However, he does not draw it out to its violent conclusion. Drowning in desire is an act only capable by the body. But, as Whitman shows, the body is not the only site of homosexual longing.

Occupation acts as a site for masculine performance. "The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty, good-natured, native-born, out on the vacant lot at sundown after work" (11 25). Here Whitman imagines the activity of two robust men as they flex their muscles and exert their energies. The speaker's gaze is erotically charged. Ill

Similarly, "The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine muscle through clean-setting trowsers and waist-straps," (11 28) creates a symbol from the costume that points to occupation. The outfit, in this case, acts as mask for the masculine body and homosexual desire.

Sexual desire is manifest in the speaker's display of more than physical feeling, and expression of love. His longing is anecdotally situated. "You would wish long and long to be with him, you would wish to sit by him in the boat that you and he might touch each other"

(11 44). This expression of desire is not simply for the man, but for a mutual physical encounter with him. Whitman, in an effort to expose the bounty of his subject, projects his love onto the man's family: "They and his daughters loved him, all who saw him loved him,/

They did not love him by allowance, they loved him with personal love," (11 39-40). This love felt by his daughters is, in the 19th century, not differentiated from the love the speaker - a man - feels. Whitman's projection is partially a grand expression of love (I love this man so much that he deserves to be loved by all) and an avoidance of the truth of that love. This is the attitude we see so little of in Whitman, but because of the emergence of a language of difference this restricted masculine affect and homosocial desire begins to act as a counter to homophobia.

The Repression of Masculine Affect and Control of Homosocial Desire

Kerouac, in and out of On the Road, was locked in a continuum of travel and homosocial desire. The two are mutually constituting; each necessitates the other. This is evident in the relationship between Sal and Dean. The more lost and alone Sal feels the more he longs for Dean and the road. In his thesis, The Journey is the Destination: Pursuing 112

Masculinity, Mark Hall reads the homosocial relationship between Sal Paradise and Dean

Moriarty, from Kerouac's On the Road, as mutually affirming and argues that "as much as

On the Road tells the story of two young men's experiences on the road, the novel reinforces the necessity of masculine homosocial relationships in the refinement and (re)construction of a man's masculinity" (35). It is true that this (re)construction is necessary after World War

Two, especially as a form of resistance to the spread of American mass culture , but what

Hall significantly sidesteps is the erotic tension generated by the lack of affective masculine to masculine expressions. Sedgwick's use of "homosocial desire", in Between Men, deliberately places it on a continuum with homosexuality (1-2).

The change in masculine expressions of affect from Whitman to the period between

WWI and WWII is striking. Christopher Breu calls this masculinity "hard boiled". He describes hard boiled masculinity as the "tough guy of film noir", with a "shell like exterior", "rigorous suppression of affect", "moral detachment", and possessing "physical attributes to be proven on the playing field, in the bar, in the bedroom, in the streets, and on the factory floor" (1-2, 6). He differentiates the "hard boiled male" from the Victorian concept of masculinity as an "internal moral quality" to be differentiated from "primitive" behaviors (2). Victorian masculinity sought to separate itself from black masculinity while the "hard boiled male" took on a "darker" aspect flecked with aggression and musculature.

The emergence of the "hard boiled male" is directly linked to the suppression of masculine affect. As Breu writes, "The suppression of affect central to this conception of masculinity was structured by the dynamic of projection, in which forms of affective and

69 Craig Levitt writes about this in the chapter "On the Road:Cassady, Kerouac, and Images of Late Western Masculinity"from Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West. "Interstate freeways sliced across the Great Plains and through the vast spaces of the West, bringing with them the homogenized culture of American capital and conformity" (211). Levitt also argues that the horse, the original phallic extension mode of transport, is replaced by the automobile (214). Levitt connects this transformation in masculinity to Neal Cassady (Dean). 113 libidinal investment foreclosed from representation within the subjectivity of the hard boiled male returned and were punished in various gendered, sexual, and racial others" (1). This projection of affect onto the emotional female, the effeminate queer and jovial black man leaves the "hard boiled male" as an affectless shell devoid of interior, and yet extends the egg metaphor nicely. However, the metaphor collapses as we parse it. The apparent yolky virility of masculinity found in Breu's articulation is an expression of the pregnant womb rather than of the self-proliferating-spermatozoa-producing-survivalist-male—the expected interior of the "hard boiled" candidate. That is to say, parsing Breu's metaphoric description of masculinity reveals a critique of the ultra-masculine. This apparent disjuncture points to the ultimate fragility of an affectless expression of masculinity: "hard boiled" yet emotionally vulnerable.

If we take our cues from Breu, this newly dominant version of masculinity explains the appearance of its opposite, the homosocial fraternity, the beats, to which Kerouac belonged. The homosocial relationships of the beats can be theorized in, at least, two ways:

1) as a counter-cultural rejection of cultural changes in America, and 2) in opposition to the violent oppression of masculine affect in the mid twentieth century. Fiedler describes this transition, after the "sexual revolution" in what he calls the "Good Bad Boy": "Even though he is allowed now a certain amount of good clean sex (not as the basis of an adult relationship but as an exhibition of prowess) and forbidden in exchange an equivalent amount of good clean violence, his standard repertory of permitted indiscretions remains pretty much the same" (289). This echoes Sal's experience of the road: His interest in and yet fear of women, and his avoidance of violence in spite of Dean's chaotically violent behavior.

The Beats' response to this repressive and controlling depiction of masculinity forged a new masculinity. 114

Kerouac espouses Fiedler's Peter Pan complex—composed of a desire to remain in boyish adolescence and reject heterosexual relationships for homosocial ones—in On the

Road. Fiedler compares Kerouac's writing to Twain's arguing that despite the age difference of the protagonists Kerouac's characters still maintain a boyish demeanor: "Rural no longer in their memories or nostalgia, they yearn for boyhood, and speak in their books through the boy's mask in a language as far removed from literate adult speech as was Huck's" (289).

Fiedler accurately connects On the Road and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

The flight from sexuality led to a literature about children written for adults; but the reading of that literature has turned those adults in their own inmost images of themselves into children. Indeed, the Good Bad Boyhood has not merely impinged upon adult life, it has become like everything else in America, a "career". The age of Kerouac's protagonists is just as ambiguous as Mark Twain's, though for opposite reasons. Twain blurred adolescence back into boyhood to avoid confronting the problem of sex; the newer writers, accepting the confusion of childhood and youth, blur both into manhood to avoid yielding up to maturity the fine clean rapture of childish "making out." The protagonists of the hipsters have crossed the borderline of genital maturity, but in all other respects they have not left Jackson Island (290).

Fiedler implicitly acknowledges the effect that reading these narratives has on their reading public. He brushes against homosocial desire in his explanation for emotional maturity of

Kerouac's protagonists. In Huck Finn the characters are boys playing men, but in On the

Road the characters are still boys at heart, "blur[red] into manhood". Their boyish fraternal nature is an iteration and expression of their homosocial feelings.

The pivotal force of On the Road is the relationship between Sal and Dean. Sal idealizes Dean: "It was like an old fashioned movie when Dean arrived" (233). He imagines

Dean as larger than life. It is significant that Sal and Dean meet after Sal's divorce. Sal's depression is alleviated by Dean's contrasting lively disposition and he finds a renewed sense of his own masculine identity. "The coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road" (1). This begins the attraction and movement of the 115

homosocial relationship that will "drive" the narrative and force Sal to begin his life "on the

road". But this relationship is one without overt displays of affect.

Each trip on the road is realized by Sal in its fullest potential with Dean present. The

second trip he begins by acknowledging this fact: "the bug was on me again, and the bug's

name was Dean Moriarty and I was off on another spurt around the road" (103). Sal

effectively catches the "bug" that is Dean. Hall writes about Sal's third trip, arguing that

despite it being his first assertion of agency he fails as "he realizes his masculine

vulnerability and his need for his homosocial relationship with Dean despite their previous

conflicts" (42). Dean fulfills Sal's need for homosocial support of his masculinity, but their

affectionate relationship is stillborn.

In terms of his masculinity Sal is completed by Dean, but despite this bond their

displays of affect are limited. When Sal is spiritually lost he admits this failure, "I ran

immediately to Dean" (163). Dean is surprised, saying, "I didn't think you'd actually do it.

You've finally come to me" (164; theirs). Sal's reply is telling: "Yep...Everything fell apart

in me" (164). Sal needs the homosocial relationship with Dean in order to maintain his

masculinity, and more. His mental and emotional wellbeing rest haphazardly on Dean's

shoulders. Sal's vision of the future is indicative of his reliance: "I hope you'll be in New

York when I get back.. .All I hope, Dean, is someday we'll be able to live on the same street

with our families and get to be a couple of old timers together," to which Dean replies,

"That's right, man" (228). Dean's assurance allows Sal to continue. But without a performance of affect beyond these kind words Sal will remain incomplete.

For Sal, Dean initially embodies the ideal compromise between carnality and

intellectualism. Sal says that "to [Dean] sex was the one and only holy and important thing

in life, although he had to sweat and curse to make a living and so on" (2). Sal rejoices in 116

Dean's rampant criminal approach to everything from travel to intellectual pursuits. Sal sees

Dean as "the holy con-man with the shining mind" (5), whose "intelligence was every bit as formal and shining and complete, without the tedious intellectualness. And his 'criminality' was not something sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy"

(7). Sal feels a magnetic pull to Dean. This pull is best articulated as homosocial desire, but unlike Whitman's physical displays of masculine affect, Sal represses this desire. The force of Sal's desire grapples with societal rejections of masculine affect.

Dean is desirable arguably because of his expression of masculinity. David Gilmore, in his Marxist anthropological analysis of masculinity Manhood in the Making, argues that in

America sexual performance is linked to a state of being manly. In the case of Dean, his masculinity is magnetic, especially for the emasculated Sal. As readers of Sal's homoerotic desire we are aware of his longing for Dean. Sadly, this yearning is never physically realized.

The road symbolizes masculine self-expression and Dean symbolizes the road. It is sexualized as a masculine place where cars are phallic symbols. Dean's car theft, similar to horse theft, can be thought of as stealing masculinity, or as stripping it from the victim.

Leavitt argues, "On the Road, would turn Cassidy [Dean] into a new icon of masculine western freedom and sexual power, and archetype for the Beat and hippie movements, one of the last authentic cultural heroes to emerge from the Wild West" (212). Dean's virtual cowboyness is masculinizing: "Auto and libido were synonymous throughout Cassidy's life, and the natural symbolism of car as cock was irresistible to the novelist Kerouac. He portrayed Dean Moriarty as "the greatest driver in the world," a force of nature who terrified good citizens with his frightening speed and recklessness behind the wheel" (214).

Conversely when Dean encounters a car he does not like he attacks it. He enacts a 117

hardboiled articulation of masculinity by homophobically lashing out. "The car was what

Dean called a "fag Plymouth"; it had no pickup and no real power. "Effeminate car!"

whispered Dean into my ear" (185). This emasculation of the "fag Plymouth" is an

enactment of "hard boiled" masculinity. Dean is strutting his stuff. He elevates his own

masculine identity by projecting weak qualities—"no pickup and no real power" —onto the

effeminate automobile. Dean's negative reaction to the feminine automobile is telling. His ability to display masculine affect is stunted by his overshadowing "hard boiled" nature. This is particularly difficult for Sal to take given his homosocial desire for Dean.

Sal's general adherence to order, and in some senses sanity, is pivotal in his attraction to Dean. For instance, Dean's orgy of theft occurs while Sal waits at a bar with the police who are looking for him.

Dean rushed out the next moment and stole a car right from the driveway and took a dash to downtown Denver and came back with a newer, better one. Suddenly in the bar I looked up and saw cops and people were milling around the driveway in the headlights of cruisers, talking about the stolen car. "Somebody's been stealing cars left and right here!" the cop was saying. Dean stood right in back of him, listening and saying, "Ah yass, ah yass" (199).

This binary of chaos and order places Sal at the fulcrum; Dean's insanity and potential safety hinge on him. The dramatic conclusion of the episode, when they mistake their cab for a cop car and assume the jig is up, is indicative of the tension that exists between Sal and

Dean. The tension diffuses just as it looks like their journey will be over allowing them to continue their rampage on the road (202). Dean needs Sal as much as Sal needs the affirmation of the masculine identity he finds through his homosocial relationship with

Dean.

What we eventually realize is that the true figure of the road is Sal. The original impression, that Dean is the master of the road is shot by his abandonment of Sal in Mexico. 118

Dean's true approach to reality is far too scatological and schizophrenic to truly find "IT" and to be the actual force behind the travel. Sal forms the idea that Dean is responsible for all the road travel because he needs a reason to live life on the road. He projects his desire for adventure, sex, and discovery onto Dean. In the end it is Sal that puts himself on the road.

Sal never realizes his own agency; but, he is the one who wrote of his travels and it is his impressions, affect, and intellect that leave us with the formative impression of the road.

Conversely, Dean partially occupies the identity of the "hard boiled male". The part of him that does not fit the hard boiled profile only seems interested in "digging" life and searching for "IT". Significantly, this is the part of Dean Sal finds most compelling and attractive.

Dean is often engaged in the act of "digging" everything in his immediate surroundings. This is Dean's attempt to reach some sort of transcendental experience. Dean and Carlo stay up talking for days trying to reach this altered state of being, but they are never able to properly describe it. In a Jazz bar one night Dean tries to articulate "IT" to Sal:

"He's never hung-up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out, he knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth. Man, he's the end! You see, if you go like him all the time you'll finally get to it" (114)70. Confused by Dean's rant, Sal asks, "Get what?" To which Dean replies, "IT! IT! I'll tell you—now no time, we have no time now" (114). That

Dean, exasperated, puts off the explanation is telling; the harder they "dig", the more "tea" they smoke, etc. and this pushes "IT" further away. The only place they ever come close to

"IT" is on the road. Sal recounts experiencing "IT":

"At one point the driver said, 'For God's sakes, you're rocking the boat back there.' Actually we were; the car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives"

70 Recall that Kerouac, acording to Keshti, is the post-war hipster cashing in on African American cultural and affective capital. This is repeated here more forcibly than in the previous example. 119

(187).

Sal and Dean share this transcendental experience. It bonds them—two riotous young men having a laugh together. Significantly this experience occurs just after Sal spontaneously shares his life story.

Sal and Dean's relationship evolves as they share life on the road. In part three, Sal excitedly tells Dean much of his life story, "Then I began talking; I never talked so much in all my life..." (186). Hall reads this:

As much as IT attracts Sal, Dean's awareness of and search for IT induces Sal's desire for homosocial intimacy with Dean; a homosocial relationship with IT as the focus. Dean, aware of Sal's yearning, wants to help Sal realize IT. As a result, their homosocial relationship develops out of their mutual desire for IT. And, the more their desire to obtain IT increases the closer they become (50).

I am tempted to read "IT" alongside homoerotic love as the forbidden quality that prevents their relationship. I have already suggested that "IT" can be read as Sal's homosocial desire for Dean. "IT" is always gestured at but never reached; "IT" acts as a protagonist-antagonist duality—constantly driving and halting the narrative. Sal's feelings for Dean are overt in

Kerouac's writing, but we never know how Dean feels. Unlike Whitman and Springsteen,

Kerouac is negatively trapped—as is Sal by "IT"—in a version of the continuum of homosocial desire, one without displays of masculine affect, on the road. He never transcends, like Whitman, through physical displays of affect, and is never comfortable, like

Springsteen, in the liminal space between homoerotic and homosocial.

Revitalizing Masculine Affect and Expressing Homosocial Desire

Springsteen revitalizes displays of homosocial affect through writing and performance. 120

It may seem bizarre to place Springsteen, seen as hyper-masculine and all-American71, at the forefront of this reclamation. However, the transition in Springsteen's album covers and concert performances, from the thin beateseque Bruce of the early 70s to the pumped ripped- jeans white-tee wearing Boss of the mid 80s, in fact signifies his ambiguous sexual image and, as Martha Nell Smith describes it, his "sexual mobility" (1). Smith interrogates

Springsteen's performance in her article "Sexual Mobilities in Bruce Springsteen:

Performance as Commentary" . Her analysis focuses on ambiguous and homoerotic elements of these videos. She argues that "Springsteen protests the agenda of the narrow- minded who mark homoerotic affections as aberrant and who seek to police desire accordingly" (846). Thus, Springsteen's place historically, at a critical juncture in the

American literary tradition of the road, and politically, as a spokesman of blue collar publics and embedded member of Democratic political campaigns, is well founded, in terms of homoerotic performance.

Springsteen's vibrant live shows, part crazed rock concert, part spiritual revival, are only possible through the collective effort and performance of the E Street Band. Of all the members, it is Clarence Clemons, the Big Man, who stands as an icon of homoerotic tension and homosocial desire. Springsteen's engagement with Clemons, and the documentation of that engagement, positively work to dismantle heteronormative, and frequently homophobic, discourse and reconstruct masculine displays of affect. The homosocial relationship between

Clemons and Springsteen is further complicated by the history of black/white relations in the

United States. It is specifically the history, as discussed in Love and Theft, that plays itself out through the homosocial relationships of the E Street Band. While this project of

71 Some would even argue that "he bleeds red, white and blue". 72 She specifically interrogates Springsteen as seen in videos from the Bruce Springsteen Video Anthology/ 1978-88. 121

revitalization and interplay takes place on the stage Springsteen's writing simultaneously

approaches these issues.

Springsteen's writing contributes to the reconstruction of masculine affect in ways

similar to his affectively charged performance. A cultivation of variety and depth in the voice of the speaker has informed his approach to dramatic monologue allowing him to inhabit alternative perspectives. From the youth breaking free on Born to Run, to the serial killer on

Nebraska and to the weary forgotten homeless men of Ghost Springsteen inhabits these characters' different voices. There are some correlating factors: these voices are all male, they are, for the most part, repressed, oppressed or depressed, and they all have a story to share. In reading Springsteen's revitalization of affect the telling becomes just as important as the story.

Clarence and the E Street Band

The E Street band has been, since the early 1970s, a male dominated act. Just as with

Sal and Dean, in On the Road, the male homosocial relationships take precedence over any male-female relationships. Smith writes about the male dominated band:

In concert footage spanning the last decade, Clarence Clemons is the most prominent, with numerous shots featuring him in various suits and usually intimate poses with the star of the show; depicted almost as frequently, Miami Steve mugs with Bruce (837).

In Glory Days Dave Marsh attempts to account for the then-entirely-male group:

The internal dynamics of the E Street Band represented a., .form of community, as rock bands always have. In this respect, the polyglot look of the group was even an advantage, for looking from Bittan to Clemons to van Zandt, one was given the firm impression that no one—at least, no one male—was excluded. (And when Bruce went into the crowd or brought a fan from the front rows on stage to dance with him, women became an important part of that group) (63). 122

Marsh describes the community of the E Street Band, but what he reads as including women

is actually a ritualistic performance of masculinity. The Boss shows his prowess and

desirability first, by surrounding himself with "the guys" and second, by hauling his female

fans on stage with him. That Marsh brackets this observation is obviously 'the safe thing to

do'. Through the mid-eighties the E Street Band goes through a transition: Patti Scialfia73 joined the band to tour in support of Born in the U.S.A. While her participation changes the

make-up of the group, as it ceases to be exclusively male, it does not change the overt

display of affect between Springsteen and his homosocial partners.

Clarence Clemons in particular stands out as a figure of masculine power. He is

currently the only black member of the band74, plays the saxophone, and shares a ambiguous

and yet somehow tender relationship with Springsteen. Gilmore articulates the relationship

between Clemons the "big man" and Springsteen "the boss". Gilmore describes the cultural

phenomenon simply called "the big man"75: he "inspires an imposing image of true

masculinity and a commanding presence, with its intimations of large penis, size, and

physical power" (110) . Interestingly, Gilmore reads "big man", in western society, as

synonymous with "millionaire" (110). So, the question before us is, in the E Street band who

is the "big man"? Clarence is literally dubbed Big Man on stage in improvised introductions

by Springsteen including titles such as "master of the universe", and "the president of the

world". Springsteen usually ends with, "Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It's a BIG MAN!".

7j Soozie Tyrell, the second lady of E Street, joined the E Street Band for The Rising tour in 2002. 74 The original line up for the E Street Band featured David Sanacious on piano. He left part way through the recording of Born to Run to play in a jazz band at which point Roy Bittan joined the band. Sanacious is actually the man playing piano on "Born to Run". 75 Gilmore was writing at a time when the problematic nature of his anthropological approach to representations of black masculinity in America would not have been an academic concern. While I do not purport to be a Gilmore apologist, as his work is seminal within Masculinity Studies, it is worth note. 75 Keshti humorously, and poignantly, references Lott's Love and Theft as "Love and Heft" in her notes (1055). 123

Despite the theatrics, Springsteen runs the show. He is the boss. His position is of Gilmore's millionaire; he is in charge and holds the power.77

This complicated dynamic between Springsteen and Clemons is neatly trimmed to fit a masterful performance. Separately, Marsh and Smith articulate this dynamic as seen in live performances of "Thunder Road". Marsh briefly details their performance of male affect:

"At the end, Bruce skids thirty feet on his knees to wrap himself in the arms of Clarence

Clemons for a soul kiss" (187). Through a musical reference, to "soul" music, Marsh addresses both demons' blackness and the homoerotic nature of their display. Marsh simultaneously addresses the power of their performance and begins to dismantle homophobic attitudes. To Marsh "soul" denotes this display is not of a physical (homoerotic) nature; however, I read this as a homoerotic display of affect. Readers of Glory Days can turn to the photographs at the centre of the book to see a series of photos detailing this affectionate encounter. Regardless of Marsh's inattention, the overt reaction to this display is not homophobic. The homoerotic tension between Springsteen and Clemons, displayed through performance, shapes audience, and thus public, acceptance of such displays. Smith does a more accurate reading of the "soul kiss": "His performances of the late 1970s often found him kissing and even humping the Big Man, Clarence Clemons," (835). These displays are part of the concert and as such are not questioned or rejected by the crowd, even though they explicitly portray the homosocial, or homoerotic, love of Springsteen and

Clemons. This "kissing" and "humping" revitalizes acceptable male displays of affect.

Springsteen and Clemons' relationship develops, not only through the immediate and

77 Keshti finds the nature of rock and roll, supposedly based on African American musical tradition and yet seriously lacking black rock musicians, problematic. She argues that this points to "the deeply entrenched racist nature" of Frere-Jones's miscegnation in "A Paler Shade of White" and calls it a "process that signifies not only a violent sexual violation by a white man on a feminized and racialized object but a process dictated by technologies of power that police the bodies who can perform this valorized form of musical production" (1049). 124

the physical, but also through the symbolic. Smith reads the photographs in Glory Days for

demons' display of paternal "solace" and "comfort" in the first two photos, as a display of

"longing" and "seduction" in the third, and in the fourth "Clarence locks Bruce in a loving

embrace for a lingering kiss" (842). Smith argues that the fourth pose is especially

significant because Springsteen is still between demons' legs in what Smith "might call a feminine position" (842; mine). What is most interesting about Smith's point is that she sees

demons in the position not only of the masculine, but also of the church. The position of the

two men, for Smith, resembles a baptism into the homoerotic or the feminine. "Contrary to

traditional masculine fears of being swallowed up by and lost in the feminine, Springsteen

begins to find himself (842). This idea of "finding [onejself' is related to the homosocial journey of self discovery that Sal undertakes in On the Road. In similar ways Springsteen

and demons mirror Sal and Dean; however, Springsteen and demons do not occupy fixed

roles, and unlike the repressive nature of Sal and Dean's relationship, Springsteen and

-TO

demons are emotionally and physically expressive.

The interplay of dominant and subordinate position is the signpost that permits a

racially mixed homosociality. This relationship is articulated by Huck and Jim, in The

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where Huck as child is subordinate, but as white is

dominant, and Jim as adult is dominant, but as slave is subordinate. The re-imagination of

Huck and Jim's relationship is performed by demons and Springsteen in a ritualistic re-

enactment of a standard American racialized homosocial relationship. Smith's reading of the

photos (above) retains its accuracy, demons' dominance in the photos is false for two

78 The openness and ease of the E Street homosocial relationships is easily attributable to the desire of the individuals involved. Put simply, Springsteen and demons do not lust for each other. While I still read their displays as positive, it is easier for Springsteen than Sal to perform homoerotic displays because he is not as repressed by the hard boiled masculinity of the mid-century. 125 reasons: l)Springsteen's feminization is a weak subordination—in the end he is "the boss" no matter how much he acts out the subordinate role; and 2) demons' dominance is granted as an act of contrition by Springsteen. Springsteen subordinates himself to Clemons thereby passing him his patriarchal dominance in an act of racialized homosociality. As inroads are made towards articulating and performing masculine affect inequalities are registered in the performative economy of the E Street Band. Springsteen, within Rock and Roll, comes by this honestly,79 engaging race through performance with Clemons, but not through lyric, which returns us to masculine displays of affect manifest in lyric and on record.

Hiding on the "Backstreets", Missing "Bobby Jean", and Becoming "Tougher than the

Rest"

Reading "Backstreets", "Bobby Jean", and "Tougher than the Rest" through either a queer framework or a homosocial lens reveals the deep influence of Springsteen's writing on the growing acceptance of masculine affective displays in America. This rests specifically in

Springsteen's ability to allow his listeners to feel, as we see in "Backstreets" and "Bobby

Jean". Both songs share an interesting temporal aspect, as well as an ambiguous addressee, and like most good Springsteen songs a dynamic relationship between music and lyric.

The question of Terry's gender in "Backstreets" is made more prominent by the theme of confinement and depiction of debilitating loss expressed in the song. The theme of confinement and truth speak to a queer reading of the song. The lyrical repetition of "hiding" emphasizes the position that the ambiguous Terry occupies. Also, the title "Backstreets" points to the hidden border-land between city blocks occupied by the homeless, drug users

79 See Lott on Elvis and McJagger. 126 and others that do not want to be seen. The critical moment, "stranded in the park and forced to confess," embraces queer cultural practice .

Springsteen uses the sad story of the woe-befallen lovers to build an affective relationship with his listener. The speaker's use of present tense, "Laying here in the dark you're like an angel on my chest," in a song set in the past, "One soft infested summer...," problematically places the speaker in a state of rumination. He is in a dream-like state re- enacting his summer with Terry through his imagination. I say problematically because this speaker is trapped in a liminal state of non-reality. For the listener the speaker is destroyed as he recounts the tale of his broken heart; there is no resolution for him. The listener is affected by the catharsis of grief coupled with rock 'n' roll; we temporarily live in the speaker's world with him, but then with the song's end we escape. As the channel for this energy Springsteen develops an affective relationship between himself, the imaginary speaker and the real listener forming a public based on the affect of grief.

If "Backstreets" is the site of a masculine display of sorrow and "Thunder Road" is a safe place to perform male affect then "Bobby Jean" sits somewhere between them. "Bobby

Jean" is an odd-one-out from side B of Born in the U.S.A. In a politically-minded album filled with songs about loss "Bobby Jean" is remarkably courageous and positive. Marsh articulates the musical dimension of the song beautifully: "This simple, spacious music was the essence of rock and roll: effortless, joyous, deeply grieved" (168). In this way "Bobby

Jean" separates itself from darkly opulent "Backstreets"; it is lighter, more palatable and open for interpretation.

Marsh articulates three layers to the "Bobby Jean" narrative. He attributes it as a song

80 In "Sex in Public" Berlant and Warner detail the meeting places of gay men: "In gay male cultures, the principal scenes of criminal intimacy have been tearooms, streets, sex clubs, and parks - a tropism to ward the public toilet" (201). In "Backstreets" the "old abandoned beach house" occupies this space as well. 127 to a "departed friend", says that it must have come "from the circumstance of Steve Van

Zandt's departure," and that in a way Springsteen may be singing to his past self "burned up in the crucible and aftermath of Nebraska" (168). This multi-layered approach is one that we have seen Springsteen often take and one that we should emulate when engaging his writing.

While we cannot be sure about the identity of Springsteen's deceased friend, it was true that

Van Zandt would be leaving the band.

If Van Zandt is the subject of "Bobby Jean", then he inhabits a space similar to demons. Marsh acknowledges the power of their relationship:

Steve Van Zandt wasn't only Bruce's oldest friend in real life; on stage the role he played was the Sidekick, in many of Bruce's yarns, rock and roll functioned on the buddy system, and through them he and Steve and Clarence had achieved a kind of group identity (Marsh, 163).

This group identity acts as a homosocial bond. Marsh argues that Born in the U.S.A. was successful because Springsteen managed to make his sexuality "simultaneously provocative and reassuring" (216). Marsh attributes this to Springsteen's "all-American" appearance and the "running element of male bonding so powerful that its homoerotic undercurrent was undeniable" (216). As Smith posits, "the 1985 "Glory Days" music video foregrounds his elaborate homoerotic dances with Miami Steve Van Zandt" (835). The display of homoerotic and homosocial behavior strengthens the affective nature of the lyrics.

In "Bobby Jean" the same speaker/listener dynamic exists as in "Backstreets" Here, however, the listener is not asked to enter into a black hole of negativity. Instead the tone of

"Bobby Jean" is reflective and pensive, revealing the speaker's regret without melodrama: "I wished I would have known I wished I could have called you/ Just to say goodbye Bobby

Jean" (1984). Even though the speaker laments losing his friend, "Now we went walking in the rain talking about the pain from the world we hid/ Now there ain't nobody nowhere 128 nohow gonna ever understand me the way you did," the response is still positive:

Maybe you'll be out there on that road somewhere In some bus or train traveling along In some motel room there'll be a radio playing And you'll hear me sing this song Well if you do you'll know I'm thinking of you and all the miles in between And I'm just calling one last time not to change your mind But just to say I miss you baby, good luck goodbye, Bobby Jean (1984).

While this reflective mood is similar to the trap of rumination the speaker in "Backstreets" falls into, it is positive. As listeners we ponder Bobby Jean's destination. Is he/she committing suicide or just leaving town? Maybe it doesn't matter. But Springsteen's speaker is caught in a bizarre temporal loop. He imagines the addressee of his song listening to the song when in fact the only one hearing it is the actual listener. This disjunction plays a role in our affective response to the song.

Like "Backstreets", "Bobby Jean" builds an affective relationship between

Springsteen's listening public and the song's speaker. We can describe this as public forming, and as reconstituting displays of affect. Bobby Jean's disappearance, and the speaker's obvious grief, work together to form a listener response. The speaker's obvious closeness and desire to "say goodbye" both point to a healthy affective relationship, one that I hope can be replicated by the listener. The nostalgia implicit in this song should translate to the listener and the listening public placing them on a healthy path to the expression of affect. This positive change can be seen specifically in Springsteen's music video for 1987's "Tougher than the Rest".

The cover of Tunnel of Love places Springsteen directly in line with Fiedler's blurring of adolescence, childhood, and manhood. Smith describes his pose: "Hands in pockets,

8' This is how "Bobby Jean" is read in Jonathan Tropper's Springsteen-infused coming of age novel The Book of Joe. 129 leaning against a creamy convertible, Springsteen appears both manly and boyish, simultaneously hetero- and homoerotically seductive in the portraits on Tunnel of Love"

(835). This cover image is striking after the politically ironic American flag adorning Born in the U.S.A. Springsteen, in his video for "Tougher than the Rest", shifts the focus from the working class portrayed in his video for "Born in the U.S.A." to a portrayal of love and unity.

Springsteen's video for "Tougher than the Rest" portrays couples, hetero- and homosexual, displaying love and affection. In between concert footage he shows vignettes

"These vignettes—in which couples smile at one another, at the camera, rub one another, kiss one another or goofily grin standing side-by-side—allude to the four-for-a- quarter...picture taking booths found on boardwalks, in carnivals, in arcades, and in bus stations" (Smith, 845). Since the acceptability of homoerotic and homosocial displays of affect was challenged so pervasively in the late 19th century and through the 20th, the appearance of these couples could have been omitted and no one would notice. But, as Smith argues, "by refusing conventional silences and calling attention to the homoerotic facts of life many would just as soon forget or disregard, Springsteen protests the agenda of the narrow-minded who mark homoerotic affections as aberrant and who seek to police desire accordingly" (846).

A case for Springsteen's homoerotic and homosocial trends in performance and writing needs to take into account the place of Springsteen in a larger context. It needs to acknowledge his cultural contribution to the American public sphere. As Smith argues,

That he would dare to highlight the homoerotic overtones of this long-term friendship in the photomontage production of his anthem and choose a homosexual encounter as one of the salient details of carnival life in a song produced for commercial

82 Wild Billy's Circus Story "Behind the tent the hired hand tightens his legs on the sword swallower's blade" 130

consumption underscores the fact that one of rock's wealthiest stars is not merely a slave to the marketplace (838).

Indeed, Springsteen's place as one of rock and roll's most authentic figures, is supported by his contribution to revitalizing the American public sphere. As Sedgwick articulates, "The

stereotypical effect of the male-male sexual liaison was to reduce perceived masculinity, rather than to redouble it" (206). In the case of Whitman, Kerouac and Springsteen the

stereotype is wrong.

(1973). 131

Conclusion

In my thesis I argue that the transformative poetics of Bruce Springsteen are public forming, have intricate ties to the American literary tradition of the road, and have a profound effect on the revitalization of homosocial and masculine displays of affect within the American public sphere. In following up on this approach to Springsteen's poetics I would like to to return to an important question raised by Boehm and Cowie: does it matter?

(353)83. In Chapter I, I argue that yes it does matter, that Springsteen's concert publics and listening publics form a collective identity that is real, is positive, and can bring about change (see Chapter III). However, the other side to this debate is that, while membership in these publics is a positive experience, these publics have failed, so far, to effect any structural change within the U.S. I attribute this failure to an intrinsic problem with catharsis but -1 would argue - it is an even larger problem for Springsteen, and rock and roll in general.

Like Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger, Springsteen has long been considered an advocate for the working class (Cowie and Boehm, 353). I would argue that he is less an advocate than a representative of them. Unlike Guthrie and Seeger, Springsteen operates within mainstream American hegemonic discourse. For instance, instead of critically engaging social, political, and economic elements of American society, he supports the

Democratic party. In other words, Springsteen's approach to change is still grounded within established U.S political structures , so that rather than advocating for lasting structural change, he advocates for a political leader who may be replaced after a four-year term; his

8j See Cowie and Boehm, "Dead Man's Town: 'Born in the U. S. A.,' Social History, and Working-Class Identity". 132 approach does not effect change because the two major political parties in the U.S. are not greatly differentiated in their economic policies. This is problematic, as the economic sphere largely reinforces the class-structure in American society. While many (Cullen, Smith,

More...) see Springsteen's involvement as progressive, it is in truth stagnant, slow moving, and politically aloof.

Over the course of his career Bruce Springsteen has been active in several moments of historical importance where his actions could have contributed to social movements.

Social movements, with enough momentum, could have produced enough horizontal solidarity to eventually challenge vertical dimensions of power. It was in the early 1970s, during the decline of 1960s social movement, that Springsteen first took the stage.

Unfortunately, while the political climate was right, Springsteen's knowledge and mindset were not. He was entrenched in a poetics of revelry and local geography (see Chapter I: 'The

Early Phase'), and was not yet concerned with engaging the U.S. on the national scale.

Springsteen had a second chance to contribute to social movements and effect political change during the mid-80s. The chance emerged in part because of the decline of critical theory in academia, coincident with the rise of post modernism, and Reagan-era- politics; it was a real opportunity for Springsteen to mobilize concert and listening publics, therefore converting their attention from his performance to social issues . However, this did not occur; instead Springsteen advocated for veterans' rights, and workers unions without engaging them in a cross-public emancipatory discourse.

Finally, Springsteen's pseudo-political place in the American public sphere was used

84 Springsteen has this opportunity for a number of reasons particular to his case as a rock star: He is not an expected voice of dissent (unlike, Neil Young, for instance, who has a practice of preaching to the choir), Springsteen is seen by his publics, and the American public sphere, as authentic (Frith, Shumway, etc.); he has implanted himself as fixture of the American tradition, and operates on a pseudo-intellectual-political level—recall that Reagan wanted to use him as a Republican poster boy. Finally, no other active musician with this unique position "springs" to mind. 133

by John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, and again, successfully, by Barack Obama in

the 2008 presidential race. I am not arguing that Springsteen's role was crucial, but that he

did contribute by appealing to concert and listening publics across the U.S. during these

campaigns. Here we see Springsteen poised to elevate not only his own place in the public

sphere, but the position of the masses.

The Boss's engagement in this level of politics, at any point in his career, is far from

critical, or radical—he supports the mainstream U.S. political system as it stands. In other

words, he has been co-opted by American hegemonic discourse. To be completely critical of

him, his discourse of working-class struggle, focusing on identarian politics, fails to

challenge real notions of power. In contrast, in Guthrie's or Steinbeck's politics we see two

approaches that offer radical programs. Guthrie's voice of dissent looks to social reform that

would affect both political parties and the nature of the U.S. democratic system. Similarly,

Steinbeck advocates for an intrinsic transformation of humanity placing emphasis on the

good of all versus the good of the individual. His approach moves outside the discourse of

American exceptionalism in which we find Springsteen mired in "somewhere in the swamps

of Jersey" {Greetings, 1973). So, despite Springsteen's apparently vital position, he lacks a

crucial element that can be uncovered by returning to his cynical masterpiece "Born in the

U.S.A.".

Springsteen's critique of the U.S., in BITU, can be seen as yet another rock and roll

project that flips the state the bird. This is especially common after the punk movement of the late 70s, a movement that eclipsed Springsteen's own voice on Darkness and explains, in part, his newly adopted criticism of the U.S. for its involvement in Vietnam—he was

following in the cynical footsteps of the angry punk youth that bumped and jostled him out

of a position where he was on the outskirts and cool, to the man we see in the mid-80s. What 134 made BITU so affective was its ambiguity, but arguably this was also its shortcoming.

Without a clear idea of where he was going the Boss could not be the type of critical thinker that the comparisons to Guthrie and Steinbeck make him out to be. Through this line of inquiry the question, does it matter? gains amplitude; it should be applied to all of rock music. This brings me to my final considerations.

This is an exercise in forecasting our actions, both as academics and as human beings. In order to address these problems and formulate solutions where do we turn now? In a concert in Toronto at the Air Canada Centre, Fall '07, Springsteen began his performance by yelling "Is there anyone alive out there?" Between songs he addressed the audience, challenging us to think about the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. reduction of human rights and civil liberties as part of the ongoing "war on terrorism", and saying that while he did not have the answers to these questions, we should still talk about them.

Discussions within the public sphere have a positive impact on transforming society. While raising difficult questions is a good start Springsteen could have contributed to the organization of the lower class to a greater degree than currently observed. Catharsis is not enough; neither is just talking.

By thinking against my approach to music and literature I am not trying to diminish the important ways that it engages publics, affective catharsis, or the American literary

aft tradition. Instead, I suggest that what we need is to engage in a war of position fought on multiple fronts through the very means I describe in this thesis. First, for working class mobilization, unions are a necessity (as Springsteen observes). Through the interrelated 85 This is clear when he dismantles the E Street Band, and releases Tunnel '87, Human Touch, and Lucky Town both '93 86 The state, which enjoys hegemony, has the ability to transform socially progressive elements, such as redistribution. In order to wield the power of the state a war of position, which changes the hegemonic discourse, is required to change the behavior of the state. Potentially, a societal transformation that can occur, where the goals of the state become aligned with the goals of a free public sphere. 135

communication of the working force we can stand in solidarity and spread information about

the economic times, and what action is needed to work towards class parity. Next, public

talks by intellectuals will introduce a transparent and socially connected intellectual tradition

that by engaging the public moves beyond academia. College radio already operates on this

level, as a counter hegemonic force; it is a link between academia and the community. By

working in unison these approaches can swell into social movements with horizontal ties.

However, without political parties social movements lack legitimacy. Therefore, socially

connected political parties are necessary for working class representation and counter-

hegemonic advocacy.

Crucially, Springsteen, as I have articulated, is in a vital position, but the question remains, can rock and roll contribute to a war of position? Can it be transformative and

counter-hegemonic? The application of publics theory with an understanding of hegemony

shows, at least theoretically, that music can effect change, but only if it is properly tied to

social and intellectual movements working in harmony. It is critical not only that we

mobilize a war of position, but that we follow through and pass the war down to the next cohort of academics and political advocates for the left. If instrumented properly the war can be continued; slowly, through attrition, state hegemony can be altered. 136

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