Bruce Springsteen, the passing of his mother, his impromptu 63rd birthday party in 2012, and becoming the elder generation

One of the most ironic things about getting older is that, mentally at least, you rarely feel your own age.  Your body might be well past your middle years, but in your head you’re still a teenager.  This fiction is far easier to keep when your parents are still alive because no matter how old you are, you will forever be a child to them. 

Bruce Springsteen and I have next to nothing in common save for coming of age on the Jersey Shore.  He is fabulously wealthy and famous, with millions upon millions of devoted fans.  I am reasonably well off, but without any of the trappings of fame, producing thousands upon thousands of words read by a precious few while working as a technology executive for my real job.  He is notoriously liberal.  I am devotedly conservative.  Despite living in relatively close proximity for decades, our paths have never crossed, but I was honored all the same to be at what ultimately became his 63rd birthday party on September 23, 2012 along with 60,000 screaming fans at MetLife Stadium.  As fate would have it, the concert began on the 22nd, the day before his birthday proper, and was not not originally intended to be a birthday party.  The hours before showtime were typically glorious for that time of year in New Jersey, warm enough to enjoy being outside but without the heat and humidity, or the “mosquitos that grow big as airplanes” as Springsteen once sang that can mar an otherwise excellent tailgate.  A sudden thunderstorm swept in, however, seemingly as if it was conjured out of thin air, just before the concert was supposed to start.  Perhaps the alcohol was altering my perceptions, or reality itself really did dump a storm on us with no warning, or there some combination of the two, but I distinctly remember making our way to the stadium with my future wife and some friends, showing our old fashioned ticket as we did barely ten years ago, and entering the gates without the slightest threat of rain, only to have the skies open up, thick, heavy drops, lightning, thunder, wind, and all the rest, enough to delay the start of the show by more than two hours.  We grabbed a beer, huddled on one of the ramps away from the rain, and fretted about what may happen to the concert if the delay continued for more than a few minutes.  2012 was a far cry from the 1970’s or even 1980’s when bands would play late into the evening.  Everything was carefully timed and regulated, from when the artists took the stage to when liquor sales were stopped.  None of us could remember any concert at any large venue running much past 11 PM.  Midnight was an almost inconceivable stretch.  The Boss, of course, has long been known for marathon shows.  What would he do if he took the stage with the E Street Band approaching 11 itself?  We had no idea, only that we were about to find out, whether we liked it or not.

As you can probably guess, the rain lingered for longer than anyone expected and the show didn’t begin until 10.27 PM, two and half hours later than usual, well past any point where we believed a full show would be possible.  The band itself was aware of the circumstances, coming on stage to Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour,” suggesting before they even started playing that this particular night was going to be different than anything we’d seen before, but whether that would be better or worse, we couldn’t say as they launched into the first song, which seemed to be another statement in and of itself.  “Out in the Street” is a perennial in Springsteen’s setlists, but rarely does it open a show, and hadn’t on any recent nights.    The trend continued through the initial seven songs, all radically different than his previous outings including the tour premiere of a personal favorite, “Cynthia,” one of Springsteen’s many odes to a woman who doesn’t even know he exists, a cover of “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” and a searing combination of “Cover Me” and “Downbound Train.”  With the exception of “The Ties That Bind,” none of these songs had opened any of the early nights on the tour and none of them resembled any Springsteen opening any of us had ever seen.  For that matter, “Badlands” in only the fourth slot bordered on sacrilege, frequently being a song that closed out concerts before the extended encores.  As NJ.com noted at the time, “Look at those opening seven songs, pretty wild!”  Regardless, this could also be seen as sign that Bruce would shorten the show and he was pulling out all the stops now to help alleviate the disappointment of attending what would be his briefest performance in decades. “Badlands” that early could have meant anything at the time, good, bad, or even indifferent, but music in general has a way of making you forget all your cares, lost in the magic of the moment.  Concerts in particular are communal experiences, and we soon find ourselves swept up along with everyone else.  The night would be what it would be, and whatever concerns we might have had, Bruce and the band kept playing, rolling through the traditional material on the tour and some extremely out of the ordinary treats for fans that follow his shows as closely as I do.

“It’s Hard To Be Saint In the City” made an appearance from his first album.  A folk cover of “Pay Me My Money Down” from The Seeger Sessions, this time played by the full band.  There was even a special guest, Gary US Bonds, and gradually or quickly depending on where you were in the moment, the midnight hour approached. As the Bruce and he band ended the tour premiere of “Janey Don’t Lose Your Heart,” the 22nd became the 23rd and Springsteen himself turned 63.  The entire crowd of 60,000 suddenly sprung into “Happy Birthday,” and Springsteen himself kicked off the celebration by playing “In the Midnight Hour” for real, a track he hadn’t covered since December 31, 1980 at Nassau Coliseum, what was well known as a legendary performance.  The moment itself was bittersweet.  Even that point, it was obvious we had witnessed something special, the kind of magic that can only happen when you get off your ass and see a live show, but surely, we all thought to ourselves, he has to be winding down, no?  How much longer can they let him go on?  Even if Bruce himself wanted to keep playing, a stadium the size of MetLife requires thousands of people to operate and secure.  He couldn’t possibly hold all of them there much longer, could he?  After all there were union contracts, trade agreements, labor laws, overtime rates, and everything else in the big business world of 21st century concerts.  Even Springsteen, as legendary as he was especially on his home turf, couldn’t simply deny all that and do what he wanted, but on that particular night, the Boss lived up to his name and he just kept going.  Midnight soon became 1 AM, and still he and the band were ricocheting between songs that were staples on the tour and premiers from across his catalog, including the unmatched one two punch of “Meeting Across the River” into an epic “Jungleland,” a rarity even when Clarence Clemons was alive and a song I would not hear again until April 1, 2023 at Madison Square Garden.  If that – the 25th song of the night – didn’t bring the proceedings to a close, what possibly could?

Incredibly, he had eight more songs to play, finally bringing the show to a triumphant end with “Twist and Shout” at 1:55 AM, well, well past my bedtime and most of his middle aged fans, I am sure.  There was one more surprise in store before then, however:  As the last song began, Bruce’s mom Adele, his oldest sister Ginny, Patti Scialfa’s mother and brother, and Steve Van Zandt’s wife Maureen came on stage with a tremendous birthday cake.   Little Steven himself would do the honors of singing “Happy Birthday” this time and as if it was any ordinary party, at some hall or house, a small gathering with a just a few close friends, somewhere completely unremarkable rather than a massive stadium at near two in the morning, Springsteen blew out the candles, casually started cutting up the cake, and serving the slices – to the audience.  The first piece went to a man known as his “first fan,” Obie who was in the front row. “Obie we love you. Obie was following us when we were 16,” Springsteen explained.  He continued to hand out cake until he ran out of plates, then made sure his mom had earplugs before cranking up the classic track.  “It’s going to be loud as hell. Do we have any earplugs? Can a man deafen his own mother on his birthday? I don’t know,” Springsteen joked and his mother laughed along, as everyone on stage including her and the audience at large started dancing uncontrollably, a concert turned into a wild, late night, early morning birthday celebration.  It is believed that this was the latest Bruce had ever played in his entire career, and all of it was prompted by a literal act of god.  No one, not even the performer himself knew what was coming, a concert as a metaphor for life itself.

Last week, Adele Springsteen passed away at 98 years old after a long battle with Alzheimer’s.  Even at the end, however, Springsteen insisted she still loved music and enjoyed dancing, posting a recent video of the two of them having an impromptu number on a porch, obviously enjoying themselves with the music filling the air.  The recording was taken on a cell phone, perhaps by Springsteen’s wife or sister, and unlike the thousands of professional quality shots a celebrity of his magnitude releases, there was a homespun, intimate quality to it, as if they were two ordinary people and in this case, they were.  Springsteen was in shorts, a rarity for him and sported a little belly, perhaps even more rare and perhaps as a result of his recent battle with ulcers, and though the moment was filmed, neither seemed to show any awareness of the camera, lost in the feeling of being together, at least one of them aware given his mother’s condition that these these moments will not last forever, even as they might be all you have left.  Personally, I was struck by a similar moment in my own life, a few years ago now.  My mother in law passed away from Alzheimer’s last November, but she too retained a love for music and, save for her final couple of weeks after suffering a stroke or some other cardiac event, we would often hear her spontaneously break into song in her room, frequently gibberish or something unrecognizable, sometimes just humming, but singing nonetheless.  While we were going through the photos and memorabilia for her funeral service, my wife stumbled upon a video we’d both forgotten.  Taken a couple of years earlier, it was of me and her mother dancing in the family room to Frank Sinatra.  At the time, she was already starting to show significant mental deterioration, but the music was more powerful than an illness.  Springsteen, of course, has a lot more rhythm than I do.  My dancing is far more akin to the marionette of a monkey, pulled on strings beyond my control, what my brother has described as an astonishing display of spasticity, and yet talent or lack of it wasn’t the point.  The moment itself was, how music can turn even an ordinary afternoon into something special, connecting us across time and space on a level beyond the purely rational, even the depths of a devastating illness.

Springsteen has expressed some of his feelings and admiration for his mother in his music, along with his far more troubled relationship with his father, Douglas.  The clip of them dancing was accompanied by a snippet of lyrics of a largely autobiographical song, “The Wish,” that sheds some emotional light on both.  After describing how getting a guitar for Christmas changed his life, later noting “it’s a funny old world, mama, where a little boy’s wishes come true,” he sings:

I remember in the morning, ma, hearing your alarm clock ring
I’d lie in bed and listen to you gettin’ ready for work
The sound of your makeup case on the sink
And the ladies at the office, all lipstick, perfume and rustlin’ skirts
And how proud and happy you always looked walking home from work

My own mother and father are a generation younger than Springsteen’s but, here too, there are some parallels to my own life as I am sure there are to millions of others.  My mother has always and will always be the rock upon which the rest of the family is built, and without her everything would have fallen apart long ago.  She held the family together after my parents separated when I was 11, waiting on tables and working at Macy’s to make ends meet until she could rebuild her career as a teacher.  At the time, I was a little young to truly understand how radically our life had changed, from Cadillacs and heading to prep school to food stamps, Aid for Dependent Children, and the kid’s menu at Friendlies’ because kids ate free on that particular day.  I remember that being somehow unfair, an insult, if not outrageous to me for some reason, unable to understand that she simply didn’t have the money for dinner otherwise and we were lucky to go out once a week as a family at all.  Years later, I would realize it was my mother (with some help from her mother) that made it so this little ignominy was one of the few differences in our lives from a child’s perspective and it was solely because of her that I didn’t wind up bearing an array of emotional scars for life.  To this day, she sets the example everyone else aspires to and without her, it’s impossible to believe I would be where I am or even the person I am without her and all she had done.

My father, educated as a lawyer, doesn’t bear much personal resemblance to Douglas Springsteen who struggled simply to hold a steady job, but there was a darkness and a depression in him that might well have dragged us all under without my mother.  Springsteen described it in the next line of “The Wish,” “If pa’s eyes were windows into a world so deadly and true, You couldn’t stop me from looking but you kept me from crawlin’ through.”  The darkness in his father and the strain on their relationship surfaced throughout his career, “Adam Raised A Cain,” “Factory,” “Independence Day,” and others.  In his memoir and as part of his Broadway show, Springsteen described how he experienced something of a reconciliation with his father after the birth of his first child, less than a decade before his father passed.   “When I was searching for a voice…It was his voice,” he described their previous relationship. “I put on a factory worker’s clothes because they were my dad’s clothes…my father was my hero, and my greatest foe.”  Years later, his father arrived at his house in Los Angeles one morning out of the blue and sat down with him for a beer.  During this conversation, Douglas didn’t apologize, didn’t really explain himself, didn’t justify his actions, but simply said that he wanted to be part of Springsteen’s life and the life of his grandson moving forward.  My father was never a drinker, but to some extent, his attitude and feelings were the same.  Not once in the more than thirty years he lived after my parent’s divorce did he ever attempt to speak about it to me in any meaningful way.  When he did mention the past, it was always in terms of something that happened to someone else, an accident or coincidence he had no direct control over.  Like Springsteen, however, this didn’t mean that I didn’t have a relationship with him in the aftermath.  In an ironic twist, I was perhaps closer to him in high school and college because we worked together in the car business, spending more time with him as a colleague than ever as a father and son.  Springsteen described how you have to move past any prior tragedies in a conversation with former President Barack Obama.  “The trick is you have to turn your ghosts into ancestors. Ghosts haunt you. Ancestors walk alongside you and provide you with comfort and a vision of life that’s going to be your own. My father walks alongside me as my ancestor now. It took a long time for that to happen.”

In 2003, Springsteen revisited some of these themes in “Long Time Comin’,” a song that while not precisely autobiographical, certainly has some emotional resonance for his own life.  The speaker described his father as “just a stranger, Lived in a hotel downtown, Well, when I was a kid, he was just somebody, Somebody I’d see around, Somebody I’d see around.”  As an adult, the speaker now has children of his own, and if he had one wish:

…in this god forsaken world, kids
It’d be that your mistakes will be your own
Yeah, your sins would be your own
It’s been a long time comin’, my dear
It’s been a long time comin’ but now it’s here
And now it’s here

The speaker doesn’t definitively describe what has been a long coming, concluding only that he’s “not gonna fuck it up this time,” and allowing the listener to fill in the details from their own life.  To me, at this moment, I’m reminded of a conversation my wife and I have had several times in recent years as she’s lost both parents and I’ve lost one:  We are becoming the elder generation and soon we will be the oldest ones left.  Whether we like it or not, generations come and go, and someone has to do the hard work of keeping the family together, of being that rock upon which everything else is built.  Having had our first grandchild last year, it might be said that we’re already there and surely, given Adele Springsteen’s struggles with Alzheimer’s and Springsteen’s own iconic stature, we can assume he has assumed the role of patriarch for some time now, but it’s still not the same when you parents are alive.  One of the most ironic things about getting older is that, mentally at least, you rarely feel your own age.  Your body might be well past your middle years, but in your head you’re still a teenager.  This fiction is far easier to keep up when your parents are still with you because no matter how old you are, you will forever be a child to them.  You might have kids or even grandkids of your own, but you’ll always be mommy’s boy or daddy’s little girl – until one day, you aren’t and there’s no one from that generation left.  For Bruce Springsteen, that day was last week.  For each of us, it will come whether or not we are ready and only if we are lucky enough to live that long.  For right now, I can only wish the Springsteen family well, offer my deepest condolences and sympathies, having been lucky my path crossed with Adele once among a crowd of 60,000 on a night that wasn’t supposed to happen to begin with.