{"id":4155,"date":"2010-10-25T12:00:59","date_gmt":"2010-10-25T17:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4155"},"modified":"2011-11-06T15:47:36","modified_gmt":"2011-11-06T21:47:36","slug":"you-cant-break-the-ties-that-bind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4155","title":{"rendered":"You Better Run, You Little Wild Heart"},"content":{"rendered":"
It was sometime in early November, 1980. It was my senior year of high school.\u00a0 I was visiting friends in Watson Hall at Jamestown College – which, in a few years, would be my own home for three years.<\/p>\n
I was keenly aware of a bunch of things; that I was on the brink of having to go out and take on the big world, on the one hand. On the other, I had no idea what I was going to do.\u00a0 Ideas swirled through my head – college, the Army, moving somewhere else and joining a band and playing guitar for a few years, the usual stuff…<\/p>\n
…that’s faded with the years, of course; “what am I going to do with my life?” has pretty much answered itself over the past few decades.<\/p>\n
What happened next hasn’t faded a bit over thirty years, though.<\/p>\n
I was walking down a hall on the second floor, heading toward the bathroom.\u00a0 The place smelled like a guys’ dorm – dirty laundry and disinfectant.\u00a0 There was a low din of voices and TVs and boomboxes.<\/p>\n
And echoing down the hall on someone’s stereo through an open dorm door came a sound that stopped me in my tracks; a howling, mournful harmonica over a foreboding, minor-key acoustic guitar part.\u00a0 I turned toward the sound as the vocal started:<\/p>\n
I come from down in the valley, where mister when you’re young, \nthey bring you up to do like your daddy done. \nMe ‘n Mary, we met in high school, when she was just seventeen. \nWe drove on out of the valley, out to where the fields grow green…<\/em><\/p>\n
We’d go down to the River, and into the river we’d dive, \noh, down to the River we’d ride…<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
“Valley? \u00a0Doing “what your daddy done?”<\/p>\n
In that way that adolescents find to link everything to their own situation, I found resonance. \u00a0Jamestown was a valley! \u00a0Everyone expected I was going to be a high school English teacher, like Dad!<\/p>\n
I leaned up against the wall and listened some more:<\/p>\n
Then I got Mary pregnant, and man, that was all she wrote \nand for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat. \nWe drove down to the courthouse, and the judge put it all to rest, \nno wedding day smiles, no walk down the aisles, no flowers, no wedding dress.<\/em><\/p>\n
That night we went down to the river, \nand into the river we’d dive. \nOh down to the River we did drive.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This was…well, friends of mine, anyway.<\/p>\n
I choked back my (believe it or not) crippling shyness and walked to the open door as the harmonica solo kicked in. “Er – ‘scuze me – sorry, but what’s this playing?”<\/p>\n
“The new Springsteen!” said the guy (who in two years, it turned out, would be my next-door neighbor), hunched over a nursing textbook.\u00a0 “Great, ain’t it?”<\/p>\n
He had no idea.<\/p>\n
It was thirty <\/em>years ago today that The River <\/em>came out.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The last of what Springsteen fanatics call “The Holy Trinity” (along with Born to Run <\/em>and Darkness On The Edge Of Town<\/em>)<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.guitarmasterclass.net\/wiki\/images\/2\/2c\/River.jpg\")
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