It’s not that I didn’t like Bruce Springsteen before. I enjoyed watching The Boss at Glastonbury, and I have been found drunkenly air-guitaring to Born in the USA on more than one occasion. Who hasn’t? But to call me a “casual Springsteen fan” (the ones super fans regard with much contempt) would have been pushing it.
It’s not really my fault. I just wasn’t raised on Bruce the way some of my friends were. Round our house it was all Neil Diamond and Fleetwood Mac - still two of my all-time favourite acts and they always will be. My boy is not massively familiar with The Boss’ back catalogue either. When I asked him what his favourite Bruce track was, he burst into a rendition of Money for Nothing. Yeah, you know. The one by Dire Straits.
So let’s just call me a little uneducated and through no real fault of my own, a bit oblivious to the many charms of most of Springsteen’s work. But now of course, things have changed. Now that I have witnessed The Boss himself, jauntily perched on a bar stool, fielding questions (one of them from me – “Hi Bruce!”), working the room. Now that I have shared in the love, admiration and (verging on geekish) enthusiasm he elicited from the men of a certain age that gathered beside me. They hung on his every word, laughing loudly at every hint of a joke, their beaming faces turned up towards him. One journalist and fan of 20 years standing had flown all the way from Australia to be there! That kind of excitement couldn’t help but rub off. I was beaming and laughing too! Not to mention toe-tapping. And when said Aussie was rewarded with a private chat with Bruce backstage (who he met on the street Down Under several years ago), you couldn’t help but agree with the general consensus: Bruce is a bit of a ledge.
For any fans wanting to hear about the actual album, well Bruce gets angry on Wrecking Ball - plenty of which was inspired by the financial crisis that hit the US in 2008. Opening track We Take Care of Our Own (performed at the Grammys last weekend) forms a question that the album answers (as in… Do we take care of our own? Not so much). In Shackled and Drawn "It's still fat and easy up on banker's hill", on Jack of All Trades (featuring Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello) he sings “the banking man grows fat, working man grows thin, it’s all happened before, it will happen again”. On Death to my Hometown, there are “greedy barons” and in Wrecking Ball he suggests “hold tight to your anger”. In Bruce’s own words: “My work has always been about judging the distance between the American Reality and the American Dream”. And he’s not about to stop now.
There was more charm than anger on show just off the Champs-Élysées though. Springsteen shared his thoughts on politics (he’s glad he supported Obama as “with Bush, things got so bad, if you had any cache, you had to cash it in”), jokes (about how hard life is when he’s asleep in his big rock star bed, and that Obama’s better at hitting the high notes than him), anecdotes (he does the school run!) - and a touching tribute to legendary E Street Band saxophone player Clarence Clemons, who died last year.
"I met Clarence when I was 22, my son's age, still a child really,” he said. "Something happened when we got close, it fired my imagination. So losing Clarence was like losing something elemental, the air or the rain. There's just something missing.” Clarence does feature on one track on the album. "We were lucky to get him on The Land of Hope and Dreams,” Bruce said. “When the sax solo comes up, it's a lovely moment to me."
Bruce fans can check out this video of highlights from the evening. And while there's every chance The Boss will remain oblivious to this pivotal turning point in our relationship, I will always remember it as the day I had a bit of a Springsteen moment.
