The ghost of Tom Joad: while Washington tries to deny reality, Bruce Springsteen faces it - rock singer

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 1997 by Joshua Wolf Shenk

Walking past the White House on my way to a Bruce Springsteen performance a year ago, I passed a stream of tuxedoed congressmen headed for the Clintons' Christmas party. As I think back on it, I wish some of those tuxedoes would have followed me to Constitution Hall. We all had something to learn. Still do.

When Springsteen burst forth in 1971 with "Greetings from Asbury Park, New Jersey," his lyrics were exuberant, poetic, even mildly hallucinogenic. "Political" was not a word that came to mind. But over the next decade, Springsteen's stories grew considerably more complicated. His epic album "Born to Run" captured the fierce yearning of young lives trapped in dying towns. "Darkness on the Edge of Town" had an explosive anger. And in 1982, Springsteen produced a fierce, soulful work called "Nebraska." It is an album of distressing, piercing stories - of criminals and state troopers, of men with grease under their fingers that never washes out, of people living with darkness, disadvantage, and disappointment.

Suddenly, "political" no longer seemed such a strange fit. Springsteen's stories were of people that many Americans would rather simply ignore. With songs about Mexican immigrants and migrant workers and men riding the railroad tracks, "The Ghost of Tom Joad," Springsteen's latest album, has been called a western complement to "Nebraska." But the border he explores is not just a geographical one; it is also about the emotional and economic divisions that separate Americans from one another. Springsteen's concern is for the men stuck on the wrong side. In "Youngstown," a man eulogizes the steel yards of that Ohio town. "Seven hundred tons of metal a day, now sir you tell me the world's changed. Once I made you rich enough, rich enough to forget my name."

Though he is the exact opposite of an ideologue, the stories of Springsteen's music do coalesce into a vision. And, in a time for liberals of fracture and defeat, it may offer the simplest and best and most beautiful response to the armies of the right. Springsteen's music is about the struggle to engage - ourselves, our families, and the larger community with which we are inextricably bound. "Economic injustice," he said in a 1987 interview, "falls on everybody's head and steals everyone's freedom. Your wife can't walk down the street at night. People keep guns in their homes. They live with a greater sense of apprehension, anxiety, and fear than they would in a more just and open society."

And yet, Springsteen's liberalism is a confounding sort. For one, politics, expressed in any literal sense, almost always suffocates the art it is attached to. Artists can express their opinions. But if their work isn't larger than a "message," it's probably not art in the first place. More importantly, Springsteen's music is not oriented around the body politic, but around the human spirit. Introducing "Growin' Up," a song from his first album, Springsteen often tells the story of his misfit childhood: The nuns at his school hated him. His father would constantly scowl, "Put down that god damned guitar." But for a poor kid in a family that struggled financially and emotionally, the guitar was not just a hobby. It was, Springsteen said later, "my connection to the human race."

"Growin' Up" contains the crucial line, "I came out with my soul untouched." And it is from that soul - and with an extraordinarily prolific imagination - that Springsteen has spun so many stories. Springsteen's music is not about public policy; it is about sons and their fathers, men and women. Even in "Streets of Philadelphia" and "Dead Man Walking," AIDS and capital punishment aren't social problems. They are individual realities.

Still, there is a larger meaning to these stories. And though music may seem more indirect or less intellectual than poetry or fiction, Springsteen's reach is as broad - if not more so - as the likes of Charles Dickens and Pablo Neruda. In 1984, Ronald Reagan proclaimed that America's future "rests in the message of hope, in the songs of a man that so many young Americans admire. Bruce Springsteen." Springsteen was then on a tour that drew crowds as large as 200,000. It's no surprise that Reagan wanted a piece of him.

Of course, to anyone who had listened to, "Born in the USA" with any care, Reagan's invocation was a grave, if hilarious, error. The album's patriotism is one of tragic irony, with a title track telling the story of a Vietnam veteran abandoned by his country, with "nowhere to run ... nowhere to go." Unlike Reagan's stories of Cadillac welfare queens, evil empires, and demonic bureaucrats, Springsteen doesn't pigeonhole and scapegoat those who are different. He climbs into the minds of the down-and-out - not to simplify, but to complicate. Springsteen's characters are almost invariably torn between "straight time" and the lure of easy money, between the woman at home and the boys on the street. "Springsteen never resolves the conflict," a reviewer wrote in 1974, "(if he ever does, his music will probably become less interesting)."