WHY I LOVE BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
BY Christine Shaffer

Larry, myboyfriend introduced me to Springsteen in 1975 in our local Queens, New York
record shop. “You gotta get this album,” he said handing over Born to Run. Since I was captivated by everything Larry did being that he was a senior and I, a sophomore who loved him with that complete baby love I still had at fifteen, I bought the album and listened to it that afternoon.

From Springsteen’sfirst gravelly vocal notes of “Thunder Road” to his last moaning cry of
“Jungleland,” his words fed the embryonic writer in my brain. Born to Run was not just an album of eight songs, for me they were short stories, plays, movies, poems, essays set to music. I was giddy with the workings of it all. You could do that? Write gritty stories of one’s neighborhood, one’s friends, shady people, using one’s actual streets names –– give them all credence? Then perhaps I could, too. There were stories of struggle, of lost loves, of dreams that would never be realized on that record. At the same time, I saw characters of my beloved English Lit class come to life –– Romeo and Juliet lived in the title song and in “She’s the One,” Mercutio and Tybalt fought in “Jungleland.”

I realized thiswas no longer my world of David Cassidy and Donny Osmond. This was serious, exciting, complicated. It was the adult world and I was getting ready for it. I had already let Larry, in his to-sir-with-love moment, take me from Tiger Beat Magazine to Rolling Stone, from the Jackson 5 to Jimi Hendrix. Larry became my pseudo Bruce boyfriend being that he conveniently looked like Bruce –– except for his purple tinted aviator eyeglasses and the
fact that he was a Greek-American, Larry had Bruce’s permanent five o’clock shadow, tousled brown hair, was skinny, wore a motorcycle jacket every day, tight Levis and dusty, black biker boots. And Larry was practically from New Jersey himself, being that his family rented a summer house in Point Pleasant Beach just six miles from Bruce’s Asbury Park. It was all perfect.

My mother forbademe to be with him. “He’s already a man,” she said, “much too old for you.”

So of course,Larry and I spent a lot of time together, secretly driving in his dark blue
Camaro –– not down Kingsley as Springsteen sang about, but down Astoria Boulevard to Astoria Park –– stopping between drag racers, drug dealers and other bored teenagers like ourselves looking to make out beneath the Triboro Bridge. Afterwards we’d hold hands, my head leaned back in the crook of Larry’s leather jacketed arm, while looking at New York City’s diamondesque lights across the East River, hearing the endless thump-thump of cars above our heads mingling with Born to Run playing on the car’s cassette player.

I felt Springsteenwas in Larry’s back seat the whole time, saying, “I know how it is, man, I know all about it.” As though Springsteen knew our lives: our alcoholic, absent unemployed fathers, our bitter, tired mothers, our crowded apartments, our graffiti-ridden public schools, our downtrodden teachers, our tumbleweed existence. Bruce gave us, gave me, hope in his famous line, “baby we were born to run” and I sincerely believed I was going to run out of there someday.

In time I had tolet Larry go, buckling under the pressure of “doing it” or in my case, not
doing it. “How long do you think Larry’s going to walk you home after school and take you for car rides, Chris? Huh?” my best friend, Patty would ask me, “how long before, you know ––– Jeez, Larry’s not a monk, for gods sake. You know what Bruce says? ‘From your front porch to my front seat, the door’s open but the ride ain’t free.’ The. ride. ain’t. free. Chris. Get it?” Bruce and Patty were right. It wasn’t free. So I released Larry to willing girls and the open maw of quasi-illegal activities that surrounded our high school while I took my place in regret.

I kept Brucethough, and graduated to his other albums so that by my senior year he had
cemented for me the last stage of my evolution in becoming an American teenager. I was born in Paris, France and arrived in New York City with my parents at eight months old in 1961.
My musical heritage was Edith Piaf, Tino Rossi, Serge Gainsbourg and Johnny Hallyday but they weren’t my generation and I didn’t understand, couldn’t interpret their nuances, the cadences, the underlying net of their stories.

How could I when Ihad scalpeled most of my being away from my French self by then, leaving only a quick desire for crème brulee, Tintin comic books and Petit Bateau t-shirts?
Springsteen supplied the sealant as I grafted myself onto my American world.

How was I going toexplain to my French cousins, Bruce’s words: “…Magic Rat drove his sleek machine over the Jersey state line?” or “the highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive?” How was I going to explain his characters of Wendy, Eddie and Bad Scooter to them? I wasn’t. We were on different planets. One cousin knew it when I visited him one summer in France. I was nineteen. I arrived wearing my navy blue and goldenrod yellow cowboy boots and a denim jacket with the inside of Led Zeppelin’s IV album painted on the back. “She’s a rocker,” my cousin whispered as I walked by. He said it with such heaviness as though he was saying goodbye to his best friend. He was saying goodbye. I wouldn’t return for another sixteen years.

In that time,Bruce delivered more of America to me as he himself delved deeper with parts of
The River, Nebraska and the Ghost of Tom Joad –– albums that arced away from his arena-anthemed, pop songs and paid quiet homage to Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan –– an American musical tradition seeped in grit and struggle. With just his guitar, harmonica and a far off fiddle, Springsteen described the histories of the Depression and its harshness, Mexicans crossing U.S. borders into horror, prisoners on death row, highway patrolman doubting the law, bank robbers, Vietnam vets all living in places I knew nothing about: Fresno County, Youngstown, the Sierra Madres, Sinaloa, the Mesabi iron range. This was the music of how America explained itself and Springsteen, in those albums laid it out for me like an ever-expanding triptych.

I now useSpringsteen’s music to explain calamities to myself. Two years ago when my father was dealt his double death sentence of liver and bile duct cancer, while my mother was diagnosed three months later with Lou Gehrig’s disease and became paralyzed, I listened to all
my Springsteen albums one after the other almost every day. I also listened to Maria Callas, The Who, Mary J. Blige, the Decemberists –– but mostly I listened to Bruce because only through his music could I take an Alice-in-Wonderland tumble back to 1975 where reliving the story of two teenagers in a Camaro gave me respite from the crushing gears of the business of the dead and the deformed. His songs gave me repose from the words “terminal,” and “low survival rate” which continue to press against me daily.

His songs appeal to the pessimistic sidemy parents planted in me long ago but Bruce then goes one more step –– deliverance, even if it’s temporary. He throws me the rope to get out, leads me to the escape hatch. Show a little faith. Roll down the window and let the wind
blow back your hair. Let the brokenhearted love again. Viper’s in the grass, this too shall pass. Together, Wendy, we can live with the sadness. Someday girl, I don’t know when, we’re gonna get to that place where we really want to go and we’ll walk in the sun. You work nine to five and somehow you survive. Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact. But maybe everything that dies some day comes back.

I carry thoselines with me as armor, as inoculation against sheer despair so that when I see
my mother I can cheerfully say “Hi Mom, how’s it going today?” without breaking down, or I can look into her eyes, smile, even though she can no longer breathe without a machine. It’s all right. Springsteen taught me to put one foot in front of the other and to march on. He has become my reference guide, my what-would-Bruce-say gauge, my go to guy. And I do go to him. I can hear him through his songs saying, look darlin’, these are the cards you’ve been dealt. They’re not all good. Now let’s examine. And when I do, Springsteen tells me that redemption and salvation are hard won and sometimes they don’t come at all. That’s just the way it is.

Bruce has braidedthe three threads of my life, by jump starting my young desire to be a writer, assisting in my transformation from an immigrant kid to an American teenager
and he still teaches me –– now it’s how to push through grave illness.

During hisconcerts, Bruce is my time machine. When the blue light comes down on only him and he sings the slow part in “Jungleland” it’s as though I’ve swallowed an elixir of memory, a vial of the pure past. In that moment, I can almost hear the crackle of Larry’s leather jacket around my neck once more, his stubble at my cheek. In that moment, it is 1980 again. Look how happy Patty and I are dancing in Bruce’s Madison Square Garden audience. We’re happy to be there of course and overjoyed because we’ve got tickets to see him again for the next two nights. Here in this moment, my father is alive and my mother walks this earth.

Christine Shaffer, a writerlives in Westport, Connecticut. She is currently completing her MFA at Fairfield University where she is working on two memoirs, one of which is about growing up in a French household in New York from the 1960s to the 1980s.