On The 40th Anniversary Of Bruce Springsteen’s First Album Born To Run- And More

On The 40^th Anniversary Of Bruce Springsteen’s First Album Born To Run- And More

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 I got my “religion” on Bruce Springsteen ass-backward (something unkind souls of my acquaintance would say was a more generalized condition), meaning, my meaning anyway, was that I was not an E Street Irregular back in the day, the day we are commemorating with this post, the day when Bruce Springsteen sprung his Jersey boy of a different kind magic on the rock and roll scene with the issuance of the album Born To Run to a candid world. You see I was in a monastery then, or might as well have been, and did not get the news of the new dispensation, that there was a new “max daddy” rock and roll star out in the firmament and so I let that past.

Here comes that ass-backward part though. See I really was “unavailable” in that 1975 year since I was one among some guys, some Vietnam veterans who were living under bridges, along the riverbanks, along the railroad tracks of the East Coast from about Boston in summer (and the area which I could from) to D.C. maybe a little further south as the weather got colder trying to cope as best we could with the “real” world. The post ‘Nam “real” world that just couldn’t seem to be the same as before we left whatever we left of ourselves in burning, shooting, napalming, molesting a whole race of very busy people with whom we had not quarrel, no quarrel at all. So not doing a very good job of it mostly not succeeding against the drugs (my personal problem from cocaine to meth and back depending on when you ran into me, if you dared), the liquors (my boy Sean whom I couldn’t save one night when the DTs got to him so bad he went down the Hudson River from the nearest bridge he was so lost), the petty robberies (Jesus, holding up White Hen convenient stores with hands so shaky I could barely keep the gun from jumping out of them ), and the fight to stay away from the labor market (work the curse of the lost boys, the boys who wanted no connection  with Social Security numbers, VA forms, forwarding,  addresses, hell even General Post Office boxes just in case some dunning repo man, or some angry wife was looking for support, support none of us could give for crying out loud why do you think we worked the stinking rivers, the smoke streams trains, faced the rats under the bridges).

Yeah, tough times, tough times indeed, and a lot of guys had a close call, including me, and a lot of guys like now with our brethren Afghan and Iraq soldier brothers and sisters didn’t make it, guys like Sean who if you looked at him you could not believe how gone he really was with that baby-face of his I still see now) didn’t make it but are not on the walls in black marble down in D.C.-although maybe they should be. Of course Brother Springsteen immortalized the Brothers Under The Bridge living out in Southern California along the arroyos, riverbanks, and railroad tracks of the West in a song which I heard some guys playing one night when I was at a VA hospital trying to get well for about the fifteenth time (meth again, damn I can still feel the rushes when I say the word) and that was that. The next step was easy because ever since I was kid once I grabbed onto something that moved me some song, some novel, some film I checked out everything by the songwriter, author, director I could get my hands on.          

Once I did grab a serious chunk of Springsteen’s work, grabbed some things from the local library since my ready cash supply was low I admit I got a bit embarrassed. Admitted to myself that I sure was a long gone daddy back in 1975 and for few years thereafter. How could I not have gravitated earlier to a guy who was singing the high hymnal songs about the antics of the holy goof corner boys who I grew up with, the guys out in the streets making all that noise, trying to do the best they could in the hard working class neighborhood night around Harry’s Drug Store on windless Friday nights  without resources after all the grifter, sifter, and especially midnight shifter stuff was said and done (and where are they now, Frankie, Markin, Jack, Jimmy, Tiny, Dread, and a few other who faded in and out over the high school years, I know where Jimmy Johnson and Kenny Bow are, down on a black marble stone in D.C. still mourned, mourned since they never got to graduate from the corner boy night like the rest of us one way or another).

Yeah, singing out loud about the death trap small town that kills the spirit of the young (mine spent up in Carver down Massachusetts way), especially in the close quarters of the working class neighborhoods like the small shack of a house I grew up in(along with four brothers if you can believe that looking at the house today which is owned by a new ramshackle generation caught on the low-down) along with all the other stuff that went with it about keeping your head down, about not making waves, about not bringing public shame, about going along to get along. Yeah, the whole nine yards. The worse part though was to do your duty, do the right thing when your freaking country called, called for any reason. You know what I say-fuck that, get the hell out of Dover, Auburn, Saratoga, Naples, Oceanside, Fayetteville, Steubenville and a million other Carver-like towns before the bastards eat you alive. That was the message, or one of the messages, Brother Bruce laid down.

Here is another part to consider too, the constant hanging around with nothing to do looking for the heart of Saturday night and maybe a date with Lorraine who had been promising to take me “around the world,” (I’ll let you smart people figure out what that meant on your own) when we got married and settled down after I got out of the Army (which was in our stink-hole of a town considered automatic, double automatic as the war clouds heated up in Vietnam as we were getting ready to graduate. Lorraine, if you can believe this and you should, lived in an even more ramshackled shack of house than I did, even more run down because her old man was a drunk and her mother had some kind of mental problems that nobody could ever figure out (she would years later be “put away” as the saying went so there was truth to her problems, maybe that old man drinking and belting her around added to the pain in her head and she just nodded out into her own world, I guess). Lorraine maybe dirt poor, maybe not the best dresser since her clothes came out of the local Bargain Center that she was afraid to admit to me until I told her my stuff was strictly hand-me downs from my older brothers and my mother made her purchases for us at that same store, was the smartest girl in her class (she was a year behind me), was in the College Prep classes while I was in some dink General Ed track. But here is where having too much time on your hands, and too much “from hunger” too got in the way.

Not so sweet Lorraine was two-timing me, she was two-timing me with a guy from Hingham in the back of his Chevy half bare-assed, taking him “around the world,” which I figure that you have figured out by now what it means, as my friend Jack found out from his sister who was dating the guy’s younger brother and passed on to me, the bitch. Yeah, I took it hard, took it harder when she lied to me that they were “just friends,” that our thing was real. I dropped her like a hot potato, gone (although not forgotten obviously since I still have a slow burn about that situation, hell, she was my first love). I heard later when I was in ‘Nam from that same Jack that she went with this Hingham guy out to California for a while, that the guy had treated her right, that they had been on the same wavelength about getting out of Podunk, getting out of that public shame stuff too. Jack said he heard she had become a “flower child” or something but then his sister stopped dating the guy’s younger brother and she kind of just faded from the earth.        

The guys were right, my corner boys were right, right as hell, live fast, live very fast and don’t look back because there ain’t nothing to look back to. Just keep looking for some new Lorraine to break your heart, you know you will so you don’t have to take it from me, to take you “around the world” if she decides not to two-time you for some new Jimmy. Just keep looking and moving, that’s the ticket. Yeah, it’s a sad, cold world so damn you had better run, run as hard and fast as you can. That’s the score, Jack, that’s the score.   

Singing songs from the soul about getting out on that Jack Kerouac-drenched hitchhike highway that I dreamed of from my youth, of hitting the open road and searching for the great American West blue-pink night that before ‘Nam every one of my corner boys dreamed of and Sam, Sam Lowell even did, of hitting the thunder road in some crash out Chevy looking for Mary or whatever that dish’s name was, looking for that desperate girl beside him when he took that big shift down in the midnight “chicken run,” in taking that girl down to the Jersey shore everything is alright going hard into the sweated carnival night. Later getting all retro-folkie, paying his Woody and Pete dues looking for the wide Missouri, looking for the heart of Saturday night with some Rosalita too (and me with three busted marriages to show for those dreams), and looking, I swear that he must have known my story for my own ghost of Tom Joad coming home bleeding, bleeding a little banged up, out of the John Steinbeck Okie night, coming home from Thunder Road maybe dancing in the streets if the mood took him to that place that you could see in his eyes when he got going, coming home from down in Jungle-land the place of crashed dreams out along the Southern Pacific road around Gallup, New Mexico  dreaming of his own Phoebe Snow. Yeah, thanks Bruce, thanks from a brother under the bridge.