Why Springsteen Matters

Being compared to Bob Dylan is an insult to Bruce Springsteen.

Bruce Springsteen is not my favorite artist ever. I don't think he's the most talented or influential artist in rock history. But if you get in my car at any random point in time, there's probably some Springsteen coming on the radio.

A lot of people, myself included, think of The Who as the perfect band of the adolescent teenage boy. I agree with this sentiment unconditionally. You should enter your "Who Phase" sometime after your "Zeppelin Phase" and right before your "Springsteen Phase." This is the way it happens for most suburban teenage boys who don't think they're 50 Cent. You usually hit your Zeppelin Phase between the ages of 14 - 16, your Who Phase between 16 - 18 and your Springsteen Phase 19+. Unless you smoke an abnormal amount of pot, then you can substitute your Zeppelin phase for the Grateful Dead or Pink Floyd. This is acceptable, but not recommended. If you discover any of these bands in another order you won't be able to properly appreciate them.

It breaks down like this: Zeppelin introduces you to the Blues, to Hard Rock and they do it in a way that is intellectually fun and curious. There isn't a lot to understand about Zeppelin. Discovering Zeppelin gets you ready to start listening to the Rolling Stones, who do what Zeppelin does, only better. Zeppelin ripped off and covered a bunch of old blues tunes but modernized them in a way that is enormously fun for a 16 year-old to jam to in his mother's basement. Stairway to Heaven is usually played at every early school dance that you will go to. And not only that, but it sounds completely different from all the Boyz 2 Men shit that they played at the dance before Jimmy Page started slaying his 12-string electric axe. Even after you turn 19 and stop listening to Zeppelin you will actively support and hope for a reunion tour that never happens. Zeppelin is almost always the first non-contemporary band that will universally be adored by a large group of people in their early years.

Listening to Tommy, Quadrophenia and Who's Next when you're 16 or 17 years old will surely give your parents fits, and will turn you into an Angry Young Man in a way Billy Joel could only hope to inspire.

I have very specific memories regarding Quadrophenia and Tommy in a way that I might not ever have with any other albums. But this is not to suggest they're better than those other albums. Because, well, they're not. This is because I haven't heard Quadrophenia start to finish since I was 18 years old. There are two reasons for this. The first is: I can't listen to either one without listening to the whole thing. Tommy and Quadrophenia are like Dark Side of the Moon or Kid A, you can't listen to specific tracks. Except for maybe "Love Reign O'er Me", but that's the last track anyway. Same with Pinball Wizard, but sometimes I think that song was on The Who Sell Out. And ultimately those two albums are about teenage boys. Tommy is about the deaf, dumb and blind kid who goes to summer camp and is molested by his uncle Ernie and can play the fucking pinball machine like Beethoven on a keyboard. Tommy might even be younger than that, but he feels like a teenager. He's dealing with weird teenage shit. So, you should always listen to Tommy before Quadrophenia. Tommy is the first Who album you should listen to after your Zeppelin phase ends. Quadrophenia is about a kid with multiple personalities. When you're 17 years old, you usually have many personalities and you're, mostly passively, trying to pick one. If you don't believe me on this one, just ask Eddie Vedder; he'll back me up.

Which brings us to The Boss.

If you live your life right, then you start listening to Bruce Springsteen when you become an adult. This is right around the time you go off to college. It should be your freshman year, but it can come your sophomore year too. Zeppelin and The Who are for adolescent boys, but Bruce Springsteen is for near-adult and adult men and women. Once you're done discovering yourself, Bruce shows you what else is out there. All the while telling you that it's okay to be nostalgic for the days before you met him.

You start chasing all those silly New York girls on the shores of Asbury Park and two albums later realize it's a town full of losers and you're pulling out of there to win. The only problem is, when you get out of town, you find the darkness on the edge of town and the badlands where it's not okay to be glad that you're alive. Then some of us get a union card and a wedding coat for our birthday, but others find out they still have a hungry heart, even if they don't have a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack. But your hungry heart can start to wonder why you sometimes feel like a dog that's been beat too much and you spend half your life just covering up. But then everything feels fine when the fat man takes the money from your hand and whispers 'good luck' and you ride down that tunnel of love.

Bruce became the biggest rock star in the world, got married to a model, and subsequently broke up with her. His breaking up isn't groundbreaking or any different from anyone else. But he went from relative obscurity to being on the covers of Newsweek and Time simultaneously, within a year. No one had EVER done that before that wasn't running a country. But the breakup clearly affected him more. He broke up his band and wrote an entire album (Tunnel of Love) about the experience. He didn't write an album about how horrible it was to be such a huge star. No one would have cared. Everyone knows someone who felt the way he felt after his divorce. And that's what made Tunnel of Love so great and, ultimately, underrated.

The most important use of this talent was after 9/11 when Bruce wrote The Rising. The Rising was the most important, and best, album of this decade. Some people refer to this as Bruce's comeback. But Bruce never had anything to come back from. He simply went away at the top of his game. The Ghost of Tom Joad and Lucky Town might not be his best-selling albums, but most other musicians would chop their right leg off to write like that.

But The Rising is the singularly most underrated album of this decade. Name one other band or artist that captured the feeling in this country post-9/11. You can't. This was the most important event in recent American history and not only did Springsteen come out with an album about it (a pretty brave move), but he captured the zeitgeist of 2001 like no one else could. Revenge, longing, coping, confusion and hope were the prominent feelings of the time and Springsteen took each and every one on and gave you a glimpse of your own feelings and the of people you'd never know. And, at the end of the day, isn't that what music, movies and art are supposed to do?

The individual songs really aren't important. What is important is Bruce took the biggest national tragedy since 1941 and understood it from every angle. He understood how I felt; he understood a widow's despair; and he understood what it's like to start over again. A topic that seemed too tragic for art to touch was humanized in a one hour musical and poetic tour de force. Who else would have been capable of this universal understanding of the human condition? Certainly not Dylan, Leonard Cohen or even John Lennon. Those virtuosos were too abstract. Bruce is as practical as they come. Sometimes great art is more simple than you think.

The Rising is the perfect Springsteen album because it illustrates how Bruce is able to break down the human experience into a way that seems normal to the assembly line worker that lives down the street or the poet next door. Bruce is the every man. The every man is a personality that he has cultivated over the years, but it isn't an act. He struggles with life and death, love and hate; and success and failure just like the rest of us. Nothing about Springsteen seems contrived, even when maybe it is. But that's not important, because it's easy to believe in Bruce.

A baby-boomer once told me that the reason they loved Bruce so much was because, "I feel like I grew up with him." This is probably true, but not because of their age. Listening to Born to Run feels as much like an adolescent summer night for me as it does for anyone thirty years older than me. Bruce is universal.

Bob Dylan could write songs like "Desolation Row" and impress my Sophomore year poetry teacher, but what is Dylan really saying in "Desolation Row?" The song is riddled with metaphor and unnamed people. It's a great song, but Dylan doesn't sing about me and the people I know. All Springsteen does is sing about me and the people I know. This is an important distinction, because, after all, music is nothing if not autobiographical. We relate to the characters from "Jungleland", "Further On", "The River", and "Brilliant Disguise", because, at the end of the day, they're about us.