BOOK OF THE DAY: JOE BREENreviews Magic in the Night: The words and music of Bruce Springsteenby Rob Kirkpatrick Souvenir Press 279pp, £12
IT IS always salutary to be reminded that no matter how much you think you know about something, there is always someone who knows more. And when it comes to Bruce Springsteen – who plays
Dublin this weekend (July 11-12th) – Rob Kirkpatrick knows more, a lot more. In a way he almost knows too much, such is the welter of detail that he lays out as he crawls through the undergrowth of the New Jersey singer/songwriter’s output over the past 40 years or so.
Born into a working-class New Jersey family 60 years ago, Bruce Springsteen has managed to achieve and sustain popular and critical approval for the bulk of his career.
However, I doubt whether he would be happy with the dustcover description of him as “the greatest songwriter of his generation, the political conscience of his country and an inspiration to younger writers, musicians and film-makers”.
That kind of hyperbole tracks Springsteen because he is a critic’s dream. While musically he has never been a ground-breaker, initially preferring to recycle the Dylan-influenced folk and urban pop/rb influences of his youth before donning the cloak of a stadium rock god, lyrically he has managed to translate the experience of blue-collar America into a cohesive and compelling narrative.
This evolving story spans the decades from 1973, when his debut album, Greetings from Asbury Parkwas released, through to Working on a Dreamwhich came out earlier this year.
In that time, much has changed and yet in Springsteen’s world much remains the same. The tyro with words to burn and colourful stories to tell of a small beachfront community has matured into a world figure whose stripped-back references are parsed for profundity.
Yet it seems that the characters in his word plays, if not the same people he had in mind in 1973, share many of their characteristics. It is not difficult to trace the jive-talking dreamer of 1973's epic The Wild, the Innocent and the E-Street Shufflethrough to the disillusioned and reality-burdened narrator of 1978's Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River(1980) and Nebraska(1982) and onwards to Dream's sense of almost reluctant maturity. Within this career arc, Springsteen's language and emotional range has referenced the Catholicism and working-class culture of his upbringing, the yearning to escape a preordained future via the ubiquitous highway ( Born to Run, Thunder Roadetc), the fallacy of the American Dream ("Is a dream a lie if it don't come true or is it something worse?") and the need to question the powers and processes that be.
In doing so, he has become almost a comic book superhero – Kirkpatrick quotes a man hollering at Springsteen “we need you now” after the Twin Towers attack in 2001.
It helps that he is rooted. He now lives again in New Jersey, has remarried (his first marriage ended in divorce) and had children with fellow New Jerseyite Patti Scialfa (who sings in his band) and still performs with the E-Street Band – the core of which was formed way back in Asbury Park. Though a multimillionaire entertainer, he is perceived as one of us, an ordinary and honest Joe working on his dream. It is some trick.
Rob Kirkpatrick’s book manages to navigate Springsteen’s recording career and point out the twists and turns, the ups and downs, the references and the meanings. In that, it is a valuable guide. We could argue over some conclusions, but the real weakness of this tome is it lacks the kind of overview that would knit the various strands together. It just wades into the detail with great relish and you need to be a pretty hard-core fan to stay the distance. I’m glad I am and I did.
Joe Breen is an Irish Timesjournalist. He has written on music for many years