Rising - Josh Tyrangiel interviewed

Rising - Josh Tyrangiel interviewed Bruce Springsteen about The Rising, and its links to September 11, in the current Time magazine.

I've seen Springsteen twice - nothing compared to the dozens of times some of my friends have seen him.

But each of the dates came at turning points in my life. I saw the second night of the Born in the USA tour, in 1984 in St. Paul. I was just about to start my senior year of college, and I hadn't given one moment of thought as to where I fit into the world or what I was going to do in it. And it'd be melodramatic to say that I had an epiphany that night in June, 1984. Again, with the melodrama that comes from being an overly-imaginative post-adolescent of the type so perfectly satirized in Hi Fidelity, I felt the words to my favorite song of all time, "Darkness on the Edge of Town", deep in the pit of my heart:

Well, some folks are born into a good life,
other folks find it anyway, anyhow.
Well, I lost my money, and I lost my wife,
them things don't matter much to me now.
Tonight I'll be on that hill, 'cause I can't stop,
I'll be on that hill with everything that I've got.
With the lives on the line, where dreams are found and lost,
I'll be there on time, and I'll pay the cost,
for wanting things that can only be found,
in the Darkness on the Edge of Town...

-...and I came back to North Dakota realizing that the bigger world out there was where I belonged, and that, somehow or another, I had to leave North Dakota, before I turned into just another bag of empty dreams smeared along the pavement. 18 years later, it's hard to say how it worked - but I'm glad I did what I did. I won't be bathetic enough to say it all started that night - but it played its little role, in the incremental way so much art does to so much of life.

I saw him again in 1999 - a few nights before my wife (at the time) moved out. My life was near rock bottom. I was entering the most gruelling adventure of my life - which over the following year led me to the extremes of joy and near-madness. And standing there, November 19, 1999, high in the nosebleed seats (one row from the top!) at Target Center, I heard all the old songs - feeling like the old Battle of the Bulge veterans hearing White Christmas at the opening chords of "The Ties that Bind". The threads of the evening and my life began intertwining way too early - and by the time the band closed with "Land of Hopes and Dreams"...

I will provide for you
And I'll stand by your side
You'll need a good companion for
This part of the ride
Leave behind your sorrows
Let this day be the last
Tomorrow there'll be sunshine
And all this darkness past

Big wheels roll through fields
Where sunlight streams
Meet me in a land of hope and dreams

This train - Carries saints and sinners
This train - Carries losers and winners
This Train - Carries whores and gamblers
This Train - Carries lost souls
This Train - Dreams will not be thwarted
This Train - Faith will be rewarded
This Train - Hear the steel wheels singin'
This Train - Bells of freedom ring...

...I was bawling like a friggin' baby. Mourning everything I'd blown and would never see again, rejoicing that I was still there to try again another day. Crying openly - and I didn't care. He pegged it. As usual. Just as so many other of his songs - "Night", "The Promised Land", "The Ties that Bind", "My Hometown" - nailed it for me. This is my life. And there is hope for it.

Like anything else in life, I don't know what'll happen - with this record, with this world, with the little chunk of it where I'm trying to raise two kids. Maybe September 11 was just the beginning of a deguello that will last until my grandkids' time. Maybe life will get better, maybe worse. Maybe there will be no earth-shattering revelations, no vital streams of thought kicked loose.

But Springsteen has (again with the High Infidelity-level specious associations which, as damnable luck would have it, seem just as credible as they are ridiculous) always caught my mood perfectly - the longing for deliverance in Darkness on the Edge of Town, the wary appraisal of The River, the weary acceptance of Tunnel of Love, the disconcertion of real life, and reconciliation with the ghosts of one's earlier life, from Human Touch and Lucky Town.

Now, The Rising - on one level, "about" September 11 (sometimes very directly). On another level...

...I almost wrote "It's about all of us", but I haven't heard the album, and that'd be a pretty pretentious thing to say anyway.

But five'll get you ten it's about me. Or that's how it'll feel, as I try to raise a couple of kids in a world that has nothing to do with the world I or my parents grew up in. To paraphrase one of his greatest moments - I'm 39, I've got a boy of my own now. I sat up with him the other night, and said this is your world, now.

I'll be waiting at midnight, tomrorow night, for the album to come out of the shipping box. I'm a fan.

I have my reasons.

Posted by Mitch at July 28, 2002 05:51 PM