The First Dance at my wedding reception was to Bruce Springsteen’s version of “Jersey Girl.” And as hard as I try to walk away from his music over his politics, I just can’t do it. The Sirius XM tuner slips past E Street Radio, some stunning live track rips through my speakers, and I’m sucked in again.
“Curse you, Bruce!” I think as I’m shouting along to “Badlands,” stomping my foot to “American Land” or tearing up to “This Hard Land.”
Yet when I consider the bile Springsteen spewed at President Donald Trump while standing on foreign soil, and die-hard fan Lee Habeeb’s heartfelt letter to The Boss in response, I think of the promise Springsteen made with his audience half a century ago now. Or more accurately, the promise his fans read into his music.
As he sang, “You be true to me and I’ll be true to you.”
Bruce sings about the lives and struggles of blue-collar workers, of those looked over by the elites, from the “coal mines of Appalachia” and “fiery furnaces” of Youngstown, to the Rattlesnake Speedway in the Utah desert. But he’s not one of them. Never has been.
And he’s not true to them today.
He’s as much that blue-collar persona you see on stage as David Bowie was Ziggy Stardust or the Bible-believing preacher’s son Vincent Furnier is Alice Cooper.
Don’t believe me. Believe his guitarist, lifelong friend and consigliere Steve Van Zandt. In his autobiography “Unrequited Infatuations,” Van Zandt said that between the “Born to Run” and “Darkness on the Edge of Town” albums, Springsteen “completely, 180 degrees changed his identity. He’s fronting, he’s playing a character. That was the most important moment of his life, because he stayed in that persona forever.”
Which gets us to the politics. Van Zandt himself is a hard-core, studious Leftist. The liner notes on his political albums come with footnotes, and study guides and quizzes. (I exaggerate, only slightly.) He sings what he means and means what he sings, as with his hit political anthem “Sun City.”
Springsteen? He wouldn’t play Sun City. But he’d play for Kamala Harris for the right price.
Let me ask. If you were a performer, and truly thought someone was a dictator, how much would you charge to help their opponent? You’d say, “Gimme a mic, and my ‘three chords and the truth’ will do the rest.”
That’s hardly the only example of Springsteen not being “true.”
Consider his remarks in Manchester, England. The guy who had a hit with “War” shredded Trump as “incompetent” when Trump had that very same week mediated a ceasefire between nuclear-powered India and Pakistan, brought Ukraine and Russia back to the peace table, and moved closer to a war-evading deal with Iran.
If Springsteen were true, he’d admit that.
The Boss also attacked free speech in America while performing in a country putting people in jail for memes and protesting Muslim rape gangs.
If Springsteen were true, he’d have the guts to call the Brits out.
In response to the outcry over his remarks, Springsteen released an EP Wednesday featuring his monologue and four tracks from his Manchester show. The choices prove my point.
“Land of Hope & Dreams”—a soul-stirring tribute to America, the “train” that welcomes “saints and sinners” and “fools and kings.” Just not the president and his 77 million supporters.
“Long Walk Home”—A 2007 song expressing disillusionment with America’s direction during the George W. Bush era. A year earlier, Springsteen lambasted Bush for his nonchalant response to Hurricane Katrina, singing “He looked around, gave a little pep talk, said I’m with you and took a little walk.”
Fine. Where was Springsteen last year when the Biden administration “left to drown” hurricane-ravaged Western North Carolina?
Bob Dylan’s stirring “Chimes of Freedom”—Who were “the luckless, the abandoned and forsaked” Springsteen is singing about? How about the victims of those illegal immigrants Springsteen complains are being “rounded up in the streets.”
“My City of Ruins”—Originally written about the economic devastation that wrecked his hometown. Yet he’s trash-talking the man who’s busting his butt to restore economic vitality to the towns left to die by Democrat administrations—while Springsteen himself partied on yachts with former President Barack Obama.
In 2023 The Boss shrugged off a ghastly pricing scheme that sent ticket prices for his first tour in seven years to outrageous heights.
His indifference, his betrayal of his musical identity, was so great that the go-to website dedicated for decades to everything Springsteen, Backstreets.com, shut down in despair. Even the folks at E Street Radio struggled at first to grasp that The Boss wasn’t a “tramp like us” but a “rich man in a poor man’s shirt.”
Look. It’s not all an act. You can’t create such rich characters and sing your heart out about those characters unless a part of them lives in you. And Springsteen’s done an enormous amount of good over the years in ways large and small. And he and his “Jersey Girl” wife have a son who’s a firefighter, for gosh sakes.
Ultimately, it’s on us. It’s our fault for putting so much faith and trust in Springsteen and holding him to the promise we thought he had made.
But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. As he sang in “The Promise”:
“When the promise is broken, you go on living
But it steals something from down in your soul
Like when the truth is spoken and it don’t make no difference
Something in your heart turns cold.”
Dang. That’s a great couplet. Curse you, Bruce. You did it to me again.
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