Springsteen’s 75th birthday, and recent epic performances of “Darlington County” and “Youngstown” in Baltimore

It’s almost inconceivable that he can keep this up much longer, but it’s a near miracle that we can still marvel at it right now while we can.  If you don’t believe me, you don’t need to take my word for it any longer.  My lovely wife finally agrees after a rousing performance at Camden Yards.

Bruce Springsteen turns 75 today, but you wouldn’t know it from his recent performances.  Last weekend, he played a three hour set in Baltimore on Friday, appeared in a surprise set at the Stone Pony on Saturday, joined Phish’s Trey Anastasio on Sunday afternoon to play “Kitty’s Back,” and then took the stage himself that same evening for another three hour and fifteen minute performance.  To put this in perspective, Springsteen at 74 years of age, barely a week before reaching three quarters of a century, played around 65 songs at three different venues, across four different appearances, in less than 72 hours covering a distance of around 200 miles.  About 25% of the material he selected, some fifteen songs, was unique to each performance as well, and the two briefer special appearances weren’t even with his own band.  This would have been a pretty astounding weekend for a rocker half his age.  Indeed, there are no modern rockers, much younger and therefore presumably more spry, who even come close to that level of energy, commitment, and overall versatility at least that I can think of.  While his epic trip down memory lane in his old stomping grounds of Asbury Park on Sunday evening has received most of the media attention for obvious reasons (“Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?” Anyone?), my wife and I were lucky enough to be in Baltimore at Camden Yards that Friday for a performance that would have been described as equally epic in isolation.  This was my fifth show on this tour, beginning with Madison Square Garden in 2023, my wife’s fourth.  Generally speaking, she’s a Springsteen fan, a rather big one to be sure, while I’m a Springsteen fanatic, a rather extreme one if I don’t say.  It’s not as if I precisely drag her to these shows as I’m sure some other couples do if the interesting fan video documentary Springsteen and I was any indication, but last Labor Day, when a friend had only one ticket to the first of three at MetLife Stadium, she urged me to take it without hesitation.

Friday night was different, however.  By the time Bruce and the E Street Band had wrapped up their third song, one of her personal favorites from The Rising, “Lonesome Day,” she turned to me with wonder in her eyes and said, wow, he sounds amazing, as though a lightbulb had finally gone off and she realized at last that Springsteen is doing what has never been done in the history of music, even before it was recorded for posterity and released on albums for our convenience.  Perhaps needless to say, my response, a little louder than it should have been to rise about the din and more than a few beers, was, where have you been for the past year and a half?  That’s what I’ve been telling you.  Springsteen isn’t just an old rockstar on tour to add another couple of million to his billion dollar fortune.  This isn’t even to suggest that aging rock stars necessarily sound bad and can’t or shouldn’t perform.  Billy Joel for example puts on a fine show.  We saw John Fogerty earlier this year, and he’s still worth checking out.  Springsteen, however, isn’t just playing a concert.  He’s breaking new ground with each show, pushing himself to the absolute limits, and almost miraculously creating performances of songs where he quite possibly sounds better than ever, pounding out what might well be the definitive live version of certain tracks, which is saying something for a career that spans well over fifty years.  In Baltimore, two songs from two different eras with two completely different styles and two completely different themes typified this phenomenon, the soul-crushing, mournful “Youngstown” from 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad and the upbeat, altogether joyful “Darlington County” from his biggest album of all time, 1984’s blockbuster Born in the USA.

“Darlington County,” one of my personal favorites among his “party” songs, so much so that it was featured at our wedding, which was interestingly enough eight years ago today as well (a happy coincidence considering we had the world’s oldest running cover band, The B Street Band perform), was up first in the set list, slotting between “The Promised Land” and “Reason to Believe.”  “Darlington County” is one of those rollicking tracks that seamlessly blends country, rock and roll, and even hard rock with a light-hearted spin on common Springsteen themes, meaning there might be something dark in there somewhere, but it doesn’t seem to matter as you’re carried away by the riff.  The song imagines two New Yorkers, the speaker who’s unnamed and his buddy, Wayne, on a road trip to South Carolina on the Fourth of July, looking for both work and a good time.  From the very onset, it appears the good time, primarily the chance to meet Southern women, are far more top of mind than the work, because women are hard to find where they come from, “New York City Where the girls are pretty but they just want to know your name.”  On the ride down, they drove “800 miles without seeing a cop, [They] got rock and roll music blasting off the T-top, Singing sha la la sha la la la la.” The reference to T-tops, anachronistic at this point, suggests they’re in some kind of Camaro or Trans Am, having the time of their lives before they even arrive.  Once they get to Carolina, they keep the fun goin by claiming they’re just two wealthy travelers looking for a good time:

Hey, little girl standing on the corner (Hey!)
Today’s your lucky day for sure, all right
Me and my buddy, we’re from New York City
We got $200; we want to rock all night
Well, girl, you’re looking at two big spenders
Why, the world don’t know what me and Wayne might do
Our pa’s each own one of the World Trade Centers
For a kiss and a smile, I’ll give mine all to you

Forty years later, the verse, like the car chosen for the road trip, seems rather quaint if not tragic considering $200 can barely buy a nice dinner for two these days, much less “rock all night” and the Twin Towers are no more, but regardless, the infectious joy – dare I say it given it’s now a word oddly applied to the political sphere? – of two young people on the road, perhaps for the first time, hoping to live it up even if they need to a lie a little to do it.  Of course, we have no reason to believe the “little girl standing on the corner” believes the speaker’s bullshit.  Instead, she’s probably happy to play along, living in a small town without much action, looking for a good time herself.  As the speaker puts it, “Come on baby, take a seat on my fender, It’s a long night, and tell me, what else were you gonna do?  Just me and you, we could Sha la la, sha la la la la.”  The girl’s reaction to this proposition isn’t immediately known, but in the next verse they appear to be an item, allowing us to imagine a flirtatious dalliance.  This being a Springsteen song, however, nothing can ever be that simple and we immediately learn that the speaker’s buddy, Wayne, has gone missing during this period.  “Little girl, sitting in the window, Ain’t seen my buddy in seven days.”  The reality that they aren’t actually wealthy and need to work for a living also intrudes, “County man tells me the same thing, He don’t work and he don’t get paid,” suggesting that he told his love interest their parents aren’t business tycoons at some point.  Even so, the speaker still appears more interested in having fun with his newfound puppy love, immediately switching gears to tell her, “Little girl, you’re so young and pretty, Walk with me and you can have your way, And we’ll leave this Darlington City For a ride down that Dixie Highway.”  In the final verse, we learn this is exactly what happened – and what happened to Wayne: 

Driving out of Darlington County
I’ve seen the glory of the coming of the Lord
Driving out of Darlington County
Seen Wayne handcuffed to the bumper of a state trooper’s Ford

Neither the speaker nor the listener has any idea what Wayne did to get arrested, but does it matter?  The same way the “little girl” shouldn’t take the speaker seriously, it’s near impossible to take the song seriously, even as it touches on individuals who obviously aren’t rich, looking for work, living paycheck to paycheck, and ultimately getting arrested.  Regardless of all that, which Springsteen in other contexts has used to devastating effect, the key take away, mentioned earlier in relation to Wayne in another parallel between the speaker and the overall impact of the song on the listener, is joy.  To that end, there isn’t even a real chorus, simply a repeated “Sha la la, sha la la la la, Sha la la, la la la la,” as if Springsteen can’t contain himself either.  It should go without saying that, in concert, where it is played with some regularity, “Darlington County” is a showstopper, near impossible not to get up and dance to, singing along at the top of your lungs as my wife and I did last Friday.

From that perspective, “Youngstown” is certainly a showstopper as well, even as the song is as dark as “Darlington County” is bright, ranking among Springsteen’s bleakest and most searing tracks.  Originally released as a mournful acoustic number, “Youngstown,” about the collapse of the mining and steel industry in Ohio, has taken on new life as a full band power ballad complete with one of Nils Lofgren’s finger picked guitar solos, where the instruments sounds more like a banshee than anything stringed.  The lyrics and message might remain the same as its recorded, acoustic forerunner, but the impact of the song live is akin to standing in the very furnaces Springtsteen describes with hellish imagery throughout the track.  “Youngstown” is lyrically and historically complex even by his standards, beginning, in fact, with a short history lesson before leveraging Springsteen’s talent for transforming the universal into the personal, and abruptly centering the result of the preceding decades on the speaker himself: 

Here in northeast Ohio
Back in eighteen-o-three
James and Danny Heaton
Found the ore that was linin’ yellow creek
They built a blast furnace
Here along the shore
And they made the cannon balls
That helped the union win the war

Here in Youngstown
Here in Youngstown
My sweet Jenny, I’m sinkin’ down
Here darlin’ in Youngstown

From there, the speaker recounts his own family’s history in a more personal manner and the equivalence between the town and a circle of hell itself begins.  We learn that his father “worked the furnaces, Kept ‘em hotter than hell,” and that the man himself served in Vietnam then followed in his father’s footsteps at the plant.  He worked his way up to “scarfer,” a job that involves cutting metal for low pay under harsh conditions, which he describes as “suiting the devil as well,” but still it was enough to raise a family in the shadow of the plant itself, “smokestacks reachin’ like the arms of God Into a beautiful sky of soot and clay.”  Anyone that has been to a small town in the Midwest in the late 1980’s and 1990’s can likely picture the scene.  Tiny suburban ranches, piled one on top of another in a postage stamp of a yard, barely a fence separating each house from its neighbor, the symbol of the near-impossibly hard, unforgiving work that gave them sustenance ever present in the background.  It wasn’t the sort of existence most young professionals aspire to these days, but to many, it was something to be proud of, lives that produced something tangible with their own hands and hard work.  Before even considering that aspect of his life, the speaker returns to musing about this father, revealing that he followed almost the same path, working at the “Ohio works When he came home from World War II,” but fifty years later, in the present, “the yard’s just scrap and rubble.”  His father is still alive, however.  We can imagine him sitting in a lawn chair as an old man, when he cynically reflects on his own life and remarks to his son, “Those big boys did what Hitler couldn’t do,” perhaps pointing over to the plant and making a face about the wealthy owners that have abandoned the town, those who will resurface again a little later.

Before they had their greedy way, it was the sort of place that inspired a hardscrabble pride, as mentioned earlier.  “These mills they built the tanks and bombs That won this country’s wars We sent our sons to Korea and Vietnam,” but “Now we’re wondering what they were dyin’ for.”  Those left behind like the speaker are doing more than wondering in Youngstown, however, they’re sinking down, as though they were drawn into a pit or whirlpool from which they can’t escape.  The speaker doesn’t reveal what these mean to him specifically, but we can imagine a mix of alcoholism, depression, perhaps even worse, and of course combinations of them all.  These days it would likely be opioids. Whatever the case, there’s an unmistakable sense of isolation, loneliness, and desperation, amplified by the fact that we can’t even say for sure whether Jenny is even there with him in the first place.  She could be suffering by his side like the couple from “The River,” or she could be a high school sweetheart that got away somehow, one he still talks to like a ghost, a ghost that he himself has become.  If anything, “Youngstown” comes to an even more depressing conclusion, repeating the pattern of restating the history of the crumbling town, expanding it to the entire region, and connecting it to the speaker’s personal plight as it ends, darkly.  Throughout northwest Ohio and beyond, “From the Monongahela valley To the Mesabi iron range To the coal mines of Appalachia, The story’s always the same.”  From the context of the song so far, we know this story isn’t a positive one, it’s a tale of abandonment and societal collapse, but it is only at the end that the speaker fully assigns the motive and blame his father pithily referenced earlier.  “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.”  The big boys from earlier are now fully defined, and in a few short lines, their coldness and inhumanity in the face of human suffering is fully realized.  They made their money, exploited their workers, and then left the town in ruin.  The result is an ending perhaps darker than anything Springsteen has ever written, depicting a man so lost, he doesn’t even want to be found anymore:

When I die I don’t want no part of heaven
I would not do heavens work well
I pray the devil comes and takes me
To stand in the fiery furnaces of hell

It doesn’t get more forlorn than that, from the tragic fate of an entire region abandoned by the rich and powerful to the personal suffering of a long time inhabitant who served his country, did his job, and has only hopelessness to show for it, whispering his loss to a ghost.  In concert, however, Springsteen doesn’t whisper.  He howls, he screams, still capable of capturing all the pain and loneliness in a single, lengthy growl while the E Street Band echoes his emotion in a way that would be striking if he was in the prime of his career.  At 75 years old, it’s simply incredible that he may still be in the prime of his career in a sense.  It’s almost inconceivable that he can keep this up much longer, but it’s a near miracle that we can still marvel at it right now while we can.  If you don’t believe me, you don’t need to take my word for it any longer.  My lovely wife finally agrees.