Photo: Alexia Arizzabalaga
I love America. I love its vast open spaces, its dustbowls and its roads that stretch on endlessly. I love its deserts, its mountains, its canyons and its cities. I love its wildlife, the fauna so much more exotic and exciting than we get over here in Britain. I love the size of it and the way that small rustic towns can be quintessentially American. I love its sense of ambition and endless optimism. When reality intervenes and it does something incredibly awful and/or stupid, I’m saddened, slightly disappointed, as though someone ripped the canvas of my painting of an idealised place.
It’s fine though (obviously it’s not actually fine, far from it, but grant me white, straight, male privileged artistic license here), because I have Bruce Springsteen. I have an artist whose early work, up to Born in the USA, arguably, painted that picture of America for me. When I first listened to Born to Run I had been to California, I had seen the pretty girls and his romantic songs about escaping across America with them sounded pretty damn good to me. Now, a dozen or so years later, I’m in a happy relationship, the idea of going on an adventure to that place where we really want to go and walking in the sun, of hiding on the backstreets, of meeting ‘neath that giant Exon sign, taking a stab at romance and disappearing down Flamingo Lane, has lost none of its appeal.
Springsteen’s vision of America is far from a one-dimensional ideal, though. His songs range from small town frustrations and ambitions to pull out of there to win, to the grander scope of ‘Born in the USA’, and ‘Wrecking Ball’, via the introspective Tunnel of Love or the storybook of Nebraska. Whatever your kind of romance, Springsteen has it and, while perhaps not as revered as Guthrie and Dylan for his ability to do so, he makes it intimate.
The Boss is, to the great surprise of the galactically stupid and literally no one else, the biggest live act of 2016. His River Tour was the highest grossing but there was so much more to the size of it than that. There are precious few other artists who can sell out ginormous stadiums as Bruce can night after night after night after night, with the end of the tour seemingly never even a dot on the horizon. 35-plus songs a night, too, spread over three-and-a-bit-to-four-and-a-bit hours. For a guy who is so synonymous with small-town America and initmacy, Bruce Springsteen does like to do things in a big way.
But that’s his thing. Springsteen can play ‘Growing Up’, ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’ and ‘This Hard Land’ to however many millions of fans on an acoustic guitar and sell it to them. You can be one of 100,000 people, a dot stood on the halfway line of a British football stadium. You know you don’t really exist to the all-American guy on the stage 60-odd yards away. He can’t see your face from the others. But Bruce Springsteen, damn it he has something to say. The guy has worked with, or knew, just about everyone important, everyone you love, over the past 50 years of Western music and he’s among the last of them. What he has to say isn’t just a beautifully eloquent image of something romantic; what he has to say matters. And no matter how small you are, and no matter how big or small the idea he’s singing about, every single person listening will fucking feel it.
