A Springsteen Odyssey is an ambitious effort to tell the story of one Springsteen concert, from one fan's perspective. What makes it ambitious is that it is twenty-six parts long, one part for each song played by Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band that night, with each song helping to tell one part of the story. Taken as a whole, they provide a comprehensive picture of a fan's relationship to an artist and his music, but each part also stands completely on its own. This is part 4 of 26. You can read part 1 here.
Let’s see, where were we?
I believe we were on our way up at the end of song
three. A quick check of the previous post, and yes, that’s exactly where we were.
All of us in the audience, it seemed, had been caught up in
the spontaneous, swelling exuberance of I’m
a Rocker. Coming as it did after a
slow start, and a disappointing one for me, the relief I was feeling at that
moment was indescribable.
Well, perhaps not completely indescribable.
I used to have an old pick-up truck with a clutch that was
nearly worn out. It became progressively
harder to get going in the morning, and one day I couldn’t seem to get the
truck into gear at all. I was sitting
there, the engine idling, gears spinning incoherently, mashing the stick into
the flywheel over and over, and it seemed like no matter how many times I
tried, it just wouldn’t catch. I found
myself suddenly wondering if this is it, if my old truck’s finally had it, and
what will I do now. But then the clutch
somehow magically did engage. I could
feel the harness slipping once again over the flailing beast of a motor, futile
energy channeled into useful power one more time. I set off for work, sighing with relief, happier
in that moment than I ever would have been had the darn truck been working
perfectly all along.
It felt something like that.
I’m guessing that Springsteen felt it too, knew that he had
things moving in the right direction, and understood, with a veteran performer’s
canniness, not to let the surge falter. That
might be why, while Max Weinberg was still busy splashing around on the cymbals
during the song’s finale, The Boss began counting out “One..two..,” forcing Weinberg
to rapidly alter direction in mid-splash.
Even so, he was able to pick up the count before Springsteen could get
to ‘three,’ and belted out five big, staccato beats. Then he held up momentarily, letting silence
fill the next two counts, creating an instant, electric anticipation in the
crowd, like the one that comes during a fireworks display, each time there’s
that long, expectant moment of silence between the fizzle of the rocket’s
fire-trail and the booming blossom of color in the sky.
In this case, though, the pause was broken by a prancing piano
jangle synchronized to the deep Bahm..Bahm,
bah-bah-Bahm..Bahm, of the saxophone.
Recognition flashed through the arena, and the audience roared out in
spontaneous reaction.
Elizabeth and I turned to each other, smiling like
idiots. We were smiling because we knew
what this meant.
This is what we had been waiting for. There will be redemption tonight.
Four songs in, the band launched into Hungry Heart.
The funny thing is, Elizabeth
had no rightful reason to expect that he was going to play Hungry Heart at that concert in ’93. As far as I know, she possessed no inside
information about the set list, wasn’t privy to any special announcements, had
received no personal assurances from The Boss on our answering machine. Nothing like that. As far as I can tell, her conviction was
entirely predicated on the fact that Hungry
Heart happens to be her favorite Springsteen song.
Ah, but who amongst us can claim to understand the secret
workings of the female heart? Whether
she was being reasonable, whether she had a sound basis for her belief didn’t
matter. What mattered was that she had
an expectation of what she wanted him to do, and he failed to meet that
standard. That was the simple, fatal sum
of the math involved. I actually felt a
degree of sympathy for the man, having occasionally found myself in the same position.
Over the subsequent years, I sometimes thought about raising
the issue of whether her deep and abiding resentment was truly justified. In the end, though, I decided it wasn’t worth
the risk. I felt bad for The Boss, but I
wasn’t about to do anything that might get her thinking that it was somehow my fault. I wasn’t about to play Hector to
Springsteen’s Agememnon in this tale of rage (apologies for the obscure
literary reference; I’m rereading The
Iliad right now).
Of course, how much Springsteen actually knew about any of
this is extremely difficult to ascertain.
He has, wisely I think, remained mum on the subject. I’m fairly sure I was successful in intercepting
all of Elizabeth ’s
midnight-penned, Arbor Mist-stained letters, in which she expressed in florid
and descriptive metaphors the great injustice dealt her by his Hungry Heart betrayal. But, honestly, how can anyone expect to
recover every single recriminatory flyer air-dropped over the state of New Jersey ?
Okay, maybe it never came to that, but for many years I
spot-checked the outgoing mail anyway, such was the persistent depth of her
disillusionment.
We may never really know whether Springsteen’s decision to
play Hungry Heart was coincidental,
or the result of his overwhelming desire to make amends with Elizabeth and restore himself to her good
graces. In the end, I suppose, his motivation
wasn’t the most important thing.
In that moment, as we continued to stare at each other in
rapt disbelief, what was important was that a burden had been lifted. Looking into her eyes, I could see that,
after all these years, my wife was instantly willing to let bygones be bygones.
Redemption.
All this occurred during the song’s familiar instrumental
prelude. In a daring move that appeared
to tempt fate, Springsteen chose not to sing the first verse, instead leaving
it to the crowd. What made it so daring
was that he didn’t really announce this beforehand, and so the first words of
the song, “Got a wife and kids-” rose
from the depths of the arena only from a smattering of people in the audience
who were probably too drunk or stoned to realize they were the only ones
singing. However, the rest of us quickly
caught on, and rushed to fill the void with our voices…
-in Baltimore,
Jack
I went out for a ride
and I never went back
Like a river that
don’t know where it’s flowin’
I took a wrong turn
and I just kept goin’
Everybody’s got a
hungry heart
Everybody’s got a
hungry heart
Lay down your money
and you play your part
Everybody’s got a hu-
hu- hungry heart
“Ah, very good!” Springsteen said, either genuinely pleased,
or stroking the crowd. Then he swung
into action, backed by the full faith and credit of the E-Street Band.
It was a gutsy call, invoking complete audience
participation like that so early in the show, and without any obvious warning. All I could think of was how embarrassing it
would have been had the audience failed to respond. Or worse, began singing the words to a
completely different song. It could have
been humiliating if a confused crowd began belting out the lyrics to Pink Cadillac. How Elizabeth
would have reacted in such an event is anybody’s guess.
But it worked. By
requisitioning our communal singing voice, The Boss actively engaged us in the
inexplicable joy entwined in the music, despite the somewhat depressing
commentary on human nature suggested by the lyrics. The energy level in the arena incandesced
further, and now the crowd was positively soaring with an expanded sense of connection
and fellowship. I think every one of us took
it as a personal compliment when he praised our performance with his “Ah, very
good!”
Some of us might have even blushed a little.
I met her in a Kingstown
We fell in love, I
knew it had to end
We took what we had, we
ripped it apart
Now here I am, down in
Kingstown
Everybody’s got a
hungry heart
Everybody’s got a
hungry heart
Lay down your money
and you play your part
Everybody’s got a
hungry heart
I looked over at Elizabeth . At first she was lost in the song. She didn’t know I was watching her, and that’s
when I saw that smile. I was seeing it in profile, but I recognized
it anyway. Then she turned to me, that smile undiminished. I've spent a great deal of time lately thinking about that smile, and here’s what I've come to understand about it.
I live for that smile. I don’t get to see it as often as I used to,
and it’s only when I see it that I am reminded how important it is to me, how
much of who I am is tied up in it. When
we were first dating, it’s the smile I used to get freely, frequently just by
arriving. For those first few years of
our relationship, I had something approaching regular access to it. That
smile is the thing that sticks out most in my memory about our wedding
day. But that was twenty-three years
ago, and after the long-lasting adrenaline rush of love’s first wave wears off,
love turns hard. It becomes work. It becomes challenging, and frustrating, and
sometimes disappointing. And that’s when
you start to find out what you’ve really got between you. That’s when you have the opportunity to make a
love that will stand the test of time.
And that’s what you want your love to do, to stand the test of
time. But that, it turns out, doesn’t
come without its own price.
Somewhere along the way, I lost that smile.
Oh, not completely. I
still see glimmers of it in the way she looks at me. I still see shades of it when we’ve been
apart for awhile, or something happens that makes her remember. But I don’t often see the whole, undimmed,
blissful thing; that doesn’t happen automatically like it used to; it no longer
performs for me like a trained animal upon command. And these days, when I am blessed by its
appearance, it’s usually not me that causes it.
It comes from some interior place that precedes me, or from a place that
exists outside of me. But that’s okay; I’m
just happy to be close to it. I’m just
happy that she’s still connected enough to me that she doesn’t feel the kind of
cold reserve that would prohibit her from losing herself in my presence. That would be the final, unbearable tragedy.
And seeing that smile,
whenever I am lucky enough to see it, always awakens me. It makes me realize that everything I’ve done
that is good has been for that smile. I realize that my greatest hope in life has
always been, and will always be, to encourage it, to make it flourish, or even
just to keep it alive, if that’s the best I can do. I understand that, in my magnificent ineptitude
and selfishness I may have actually done more to break it than to foster it, and
it kills me to know that about myself, but that knowledge doesn’t change how
much I want it for her. It’s all I ever
wanted for her, and it’s everything I still want for her.
It’s what I will always want for her.
For me, that’s what love is.
Everybody needs a
place to rest
Everybody wants to
have a home
Don’t make no
difference what nobody say
Ain’t nobody want to
be alone
Everybody’s got a
hungry heart
Everybody’s got a
hungry heart
Lay down your money
and you play your part
Everybody’s got a
hu-hu-hungry heart
During the song, of course, I was only aware of that smile. That other stuff came out only upon
reflection, long after the fact. That’s
because pain and sadness cannot exist in the presence of that smile. When that smile exists, all is right with the
universe, hers and mine. While it
exists, there is redemption.
That smile…
I never wanted it to end.
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