“THE DISTANCE BETWEEN AMERICAN REALITY and the AMERICAN DREAM”: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN's AMERICAN JEREMIAD, 2002-2012 by Robert
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“THE DISTANCE BETWEEN AMERICAN REALITY AND THE AMERICAN DREAM”: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN’S AMERICAN JEREMIAD, 2002-2012 by Robert Scott McMillan A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Middle Tennessee State University December 2016 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Pete McCluskey, Chair Dr. Mischa Renfroe Dr. Patricia Bradley This dissertation is dedicated with all the love in my heart to my wife and eternal partner, Jennifer James, who is my dream, my miracle, my absolute joy, and the love of my life. This dissertation is also dedicated in memory of my parents, Bob and Martha McMillan who both instilled in me a true love of learning and the desire to pursue my dreams. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee, Dr. Pete McCluskey, Dr. Mischa Renfroe, and Dr. Patricia Bradley for their patience and support of this project and for their many comments and helpful suggestions. I would also like to thank Dr. Kevin Donovan, the late Dr. David Lavery, and Dr. Rhonda McDaniel for their support. I would also like to thank my family at Volunteer State Community College for their encouragement and support of this dissertation, especially my friends and colleagues Laura Black, Dr. Carole Bucy, Dr. Joe Douglas, Dr. Mickey Hall, Dr. Merritt McKinney, and Dr. Shellie Michael, as well as Dean Phyllis Foley and Vice-President for Academic Affairs Dr. George Pimentel for the institutional support in support of this project. Finally, a special thank you to Bruce Springsteen. Elizabeth Wurtzel has described Springsteen as “a force of good, a presence of thoughtfulness” (73), and I believe these qualities come out in every song, album, performance, and speech. Springsteen has been a truly inspiring force in my life through his music, performances, and activism and for always reminding me that “We learned more from a three-minute record/Than we ever learned in school.” Portions of Chapters Four, Six, and Seven were originally presented at Glory Days: A Bruce Springsteen Symposium in 2005, 2009, and 2012. Portions of Chapters One, Five, and the Career Overview in the Appendix were presented to the Popular iii Culture Association of the South/The American Culture Association in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2013. Portions of Chapters Three, Five, Six, and the Career Overview were originally presented to the Tennessee Philological Association in 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006. iv ABSTRACT During the years 2002-2012, Bruce Springsteen has created a consistent body of work, which includes the numerous songs written, recorded, and performed on the albums The Rising (2002), Devils & Dust (2005), We Shall Overcome—The Seeger Sessions (2006), Magic (2007), and Wrecking Ball (2012) and the tours associated with these albums, as well as various spoken and published prose statements that he made in connection with the 2004, 2008, and 2012 presidential campaigns in support of John Kerry and Barack Obama, we can see that he has worked to create a sustained public narrative, which does work to fully explore “the distance between American reality and the American Dream” (“International Press Conference” 407-08). Springsteen’s narrative can be viewed as an American jeremiad through his lament of the apparent abandonment of basic American ideals that has led to the realities of a myriad of recent problems, such as the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and the economic crisis. Springsteen offsets his lament on the factors leading to these problems with a call to “the generosity that is at the heart of the American spirit” to build a “house that is truer and big enough to contain the hopes and dreams of all of our fellow citizens” (“American Reclamation Project”). Through both his laments on the loss of American ideals and his call for a national return to these ideals, we can see that Bruce Springsteen has created a compelling 21st-century American jeremiad during the years 2002-2012. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………… 1 CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW…………………………………………………………………… 22 Bruce Springsteen’s Writings………………………………………………………………………………… 22 Anthologies, Biographies, Critical Works………………………………………………………………. 29 Other Important Sources……………………………………………………………………………………… 46 CHAPTER THREE: “INTO THE FIRE”: THE RISING………………………………………………….. 49 CHAPTER FOUR: “BETRAYAL’S BITTER FRUIT”: PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENTS AND VOTE FOR CHANGE………………………………………………………………………………………. 70 CHAPTER FIVE: “I FEEL A DIRTY WIND BLOWING”: “DEVILS & DUST” AND WE SHALL OVERCOME—THE SEEGER SESSIONS…………………………………………………………………….. 90 CHAPTER SIX: “IT’S GONNA BE A LONG WALK HOME”: MAGIC……………………………. 104 CHAPTER SEVEN: “WHERE’S THE PROMISE FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA”: WRECKING BALL……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 131 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 163 APPENDIX A………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 204 Appendix A: “This Life”: Bruce Springsteen—A Career Overview…………………………. 205 vi 1 CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION Throughout his career as a performer, Bruce Springsteen has occasionally adopted the persona of a preacher in order to forcefully spread his gospel of the “ministry of rock n’ roll” to his congregation of the faithful in his audiences. One of his more notable “sermons” appeared during Springsteen’s “Reunion tour” with the E Street Band during 1999-2000 during performances of the song “Light of Day.” One particular “sermon” during the performance of this song is captured on Springsteen’s Live in New York City DVD filmed during the “Reunion tour” in 2000 and features him telling the audience, “I’m here tonight [which he repeats several times] to re-educate you, to resuscitate you, to regenerate you, to re-indoctrinate you . with the power and the glory, with the promise, with the majesty, with the mystery, with the ministry of rock n’ roll!” Springsteen explains further when he shouts, “Unlike my competitors, I cannot, I shall not, I will not promise you life everlasting, but I can promise you life right now!” For Springsteen, this sermon emphasizes that the concert experience with him can somehow change us through the shared experience of rock music. Although Springsteen’s minister of rock n’ roll persona is certainly entertaining, there is also the presence of something more significant to both his preacher persona and sermons than just an entertainment aspect, especially for an artist whose work explores the varied contours of American life from its idealized promise to its darker corners of despair. As Jeffrey Symynkywicz argues, the larger religious connotation for Springsteen and his “ministry of rock n’ roll” beyond its entertainment aspect in the concert hall is that “His 2 music helps us to make sense of the sometimes tangled, often disparate threads of our lives. This is, at its foundation, a religious undertaking, a ministry of healing” (xii). For Springsteen, however, the “ministry of rock n’ roll” not only functions at a personal level but also at a national level through songs dealing with all of the various components of American life, as he attempts to raise a larger national awareness of both our ideals and our failures by morphing from a rock n’ roll minister into a rock n’ roll Jeremiah. During the years 2002-2012, Springsteen has created a consistent body of work, which includes the numerous songs written, recorded, and performed on the albums The Rising (2002), Devils & Dust (2005), We Shall Overcome—The Seeger Sessions (2006), Magic (2007), and Wrecking Ball (2012) and the tours associated with these albums, as well as various spoken and published prose statements that he made in connection with the 2004, 2008, and 2012 presidential campaigns in support of John Kerry and Barack Obama. During this period, we can see that he has worked to create a sustained public narrative that does work to fully explore “the distance between American reality and the American Dream” (“International Press Conference” 407-08). Springsteen’s narrative can be viewed as an American jeremiad when he laments the apparent abandonment of basic American ideals that has led to the realities of a myriad of recent problems, such as the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and the economic crisis. Springsteen offsets his lament on the factors leading to these problems with a call to “the generosity that is at the heart of the American spirit” to build a “house that is truer and big enough to contain the hopes and dreams of all of our fellow citizens” (“American Reclamation Project”). Through both his laments on the loss of American 3 ideals and his call for a national return to these ideals, we can see that Bruce Springsteen has created a compelling twenty-first century American jeremiad during the years 2002-2012. In his classic work The American Jeremiad (1978), Sacvan Bercovitch argues that the jeremiad as a religious rhetorical and literary form, particularly as a sermon, associated with the Puritans in seventeenth-century New England has continued to function throughout American literary and political history as a vehicle through which America “despite its bewildering mixture of race and creed, could believe in something called an American mission, and could invest that patent fiction with all the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual appeal of a religious quest” (11). The jeremiad “played a significant role in the development of what was to become modern middle-class American culture” (Bercovitch 18) as an expression of American nationhood and led to the emergence