Bruce Springsteen and the Secret of the World

Bruce Springsteen, in the abstract, is just the kind of guy my little New Jersey hometown schooled me to despise. Born seventy-seven days apart, raised maybe fifty miles apart, this beatified greaser and I grew up sharing little more than what came over AM radio. In Mountain Lakes, a community of 4000, we had a word for people like Bruce: Newarkylanders. The urban canker of Newark-Elizabeth was their state capital, but they lived and played along the boardwalked Jersey shore. They wore those shoulder-strap undershirts some people called "guinea-T's"; we called them "Newarkys." They drove muscle cars and worked in garages and metal shops. They ate meatball subs made of cat parts for lunch, and after work they shouted at their moms, cruised the drive-ins, punched each other out and balled their girlfriends in backseats.

Our contempt for Newarkylanders cut almost as deep as our fear of them. We looked on them as prisoners, a subclass that would not get the college degrees and Country Squires we were marked for. But we realized that prisoners sometimes bust out of their cages with a special vengefulness. The fear was as real as a black Chevy rumbling down your tree-lined block, and inside are six guys with baseball bats and tire irons.

Bruce Springsteen has seen all this from the inside, he's seen the gates swing shut, he's watched people turning the locks on their own cages. You can hear it in his music, a music with shack-town roots; paradoxically, it saved him from that life. I could not have heard his songs, especially the early, wordier ones, and expect our meeting to boil down to the wracking Jersey nightmare of Joe College vs. Joe Greaser.

While even among his ardent fans there are people who say Springsteen has gone to the well too many times for his favorite themes of cars, girls and the night, watching him perform the new songs, I came to believe he really was battering at new riddles: marriage, work and how people in America turn themselves into ghosts.

I would come to understand that this jubilant rock & roll cock of the walk never had cut it as Joe Greaser, that what had fathered his obsessiveness was doing time as a runty, bad-complected kid whom the nuns, the girls and greasers had taken turns having no use for. There is finally something irrevocably lonely and restless about him. He's never claimed any different. Springsteen wants to inspire by example -- the example of a trashed and resurrected American spirit. "You ask me if there's one thing in particular," said E Street Band pianist Roy Bittan when we talked about Springsteen's commitment. "There's too many things in particular. He's older and wiser, but he never strays from his basic values. He cares as much, more, about the losers than the winners. He's so unlike everything you think a successful rock star would be."

Springsteen comes down the ramp at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport and looks down the empty corridor: "No autographs," he says in his characteristic parched cackle. "No autographs, please."

This is exactly what he never says, of course, and when the tour party breaches the corridor's double doors, he greets a pack of young, denim-jacketed guys familiarly. Some are holding copies of The River, released just this day and headed quickly for Number One. As the entourage loads itself into a string of station wagons, a kid who has been hanging at the edge of the pack tells Bruce about a friend who's critically ill in a local hospital. Bruce tells the kid to get his friend's name to him through the record company. Doors are slamming and engines gunning. It's bitter cold. Just another stranger, I think.

Thirty-eight hours later, after performing "Out in the Street" onstage at the St. Paul Civic Center, Springsteen halts the show. "I met a bunch of guys at the airport yesterday coming in. One told me he had a friend who was sick. If that fella who told me his friend was sick will come to the side of the stage during the break, I got something for your friend backstage."

After the kid appeared, and was duly loaded up with autographed mementos, I pondered the gesture. Springsteen could have scribbled his good wishes on the album and been done with it. But he had left the benediction to be arranged in public. There's a lot of showman in Springsteen, and not a little preacher. Why had he let the anonymous kid slip so close to being forgotten, then given him his last rock & roll rites before a crowd?

"There's not much people can count on today," says Springsteen. "Everything has been so faithless, and people have been shown such disrespect. You want to show people that somehow, somewhere, someone can . . . I guess you just don't want to let them down. That's probably why we come out and play every night, there's that fear, 'cause then nothin' works, nothin' makes sense. As long as one thing does, if there can be just one thing that goes against what you see all around you, then you know things can be different. Mainly it's important to have that passion for living, to somehow get it from someplace."