Every eighth grader in my school faced a choice: Michael Jackson or Bruce Springsteen. Jackson was selling more pop albums than anyone in history. Springsteen was engaged in the continent’s largest ever rock tour. And every eighth grader faced a choice. The choice decided all matters of style and standing. Red patent leather or faded denim? Shiny penny loafers or scuffed boots? The shiny pop kids or the grouchy farm kids?
I chose poorly. It wasn’t until much later in life (in a late-night grocery store) that I first listened—really listened—to one of Springsteen’s songs. The song was “Thunder Road.” I had heard it many times before, but never really listened. That night, in the cereal aisle of a fluorescent grocery store, I listened to Bruce singing to the nearly-mythical Mary. Ahhh … the poetry of it!:
There were ghosts in the eyes
Of all the boys you sent away
They haunt this dusty beach road
In the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets
They scream your name at night in the street
Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet
And in the lonely cool before dawn
You hear their engines roaring on
But when you get to the porch they’re gone
Gone on the wind … so Mary climb in
It’s a town full of losers
And I’m pulling out of here to win
Like many of Springsteen’s early songs, “Thunder Road” was written in the style of his early hero, Bob Dylan. They are three-minute collages of vibrant images, earnest passions, and youthful ideals. These songs are about the youth who are in a desperate search for transcendence. Springsteen takes scenes from the street, the bedroom, the road, and from nightclubs and arranges them into a mosaic of youth clutching for real life—for life-lived-really-lived-life. His characters are hopeful: naively and beautifully hopeful. And the only hint of desperation found in them is a desperation to live life really. His songs describe …
the ones who have a notion
a notion deep inside
that it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive
—from “Badlands”
Every artist writes what he knows and Springsteen is no different. He writes about his hometown New Jersey, which, like most American cities is crowded with wet asphalt, abandoned cars, and chain link fences all cast in the neon glow of gas station marquees. But, for Springsteen, this terrain is no mere urban wasteland; it is the terrain where folklore is made, where honor is rewarded, and where music is the blood of life:
There’s an opera out on the Turnpike
There’s a ballet being fought out in the alley
The street’s alive
As secret debts are paid
Kids flash guitars just like switchblades
Hustling for the record machine
—from “Jungleland”
The men and women, in these songs, are desperate for the thing—that unnamable thing—that is the hope of all human beings. And in their quest they burn with all the flash and stamina of fireworks.
But somewhere along the way, something happened. Springsteen’s songwriting, and Springsteen himself, changed. He says that, while making his album “Darkness on the Edge of Town” (1978), he found his adult voice. Earlier albums were marked by the reckless drive toward the thing, but now that drive was sputtering. Fewer songs contained diffuse lyrical bursts. More songs took the shape of stories: Begin with a man who pursues a dream. Then comes the crisis: the dream runs upon the rocks. Then the end: the man’s dream begins to elude him and he is left to stand alone, unsure of his fate.
The pattern can be seen in Springsteen’s classic, “The River.” It can also be seen in the lesser-known “Racing in the Street” which tells the story of a man who drives a ’69 Chevy from town to town, racing for money. But the man isn’t a thrill-seeker; he drives from fear that his dream to live is fading. He is determined not to give up, to not let his soul die. No, not him. He will go racing in the street.
Some guys just give up living
And start dying little by little piece by piece
But some guys come home and wash up
And go racing in the streets.
He holds against hope that somehow, someway, he will catch that that ineffable thing that he hopes for. Sadly, the woman he loves has already begun the death that he is so afraid of:
Now there’s wrinkles around my baby’s eyes
And she cries herself to sleep at night
When I come home the house is dark
She sighs, “Baby did you make it all right?”
She sits on the porch of her daddy’s house
But all her pretty dreams are torn
She stares off alone in the night
With the eyes of one who hates for just being born.
The man is now desperate and he craves some saving grace, not just for he and his baby, but for, “All the shut-down strangers and hot rod angels/Rumbling through this promised land.” So he and his lover climb into the car one more time:
My baby and me we’re gunna ride to the sea
And wash all these sins off our hands.
Even if I had listened to Springsteen in the eighth grade, I was not world-weary enough in the eighth grade to understand him. Now I understand, all too well, words like these from “Dancing in the Dark”.
I get up in the evening
And I ain’t got nothing to say
I come home in the morning
And I go to bed feeling the same way
I ain’t nothing but tired
Man, I’m just tired and bored with myself.
Hey there baby I could use a little help
You can’t start a fire
Can’t start a fire without a spark
This gun’s for hire
Even if we’re just dancing in the dark.
The primary problem, said Pascal, is that a man cannot sit alone in his study and be content in himself. Springsteen said it another way: “Everybody’s got a hungry heart.” So you go racing in the street or dancing in the dark. Anything to feed the ache for that thing.
Springsteen believes that both our trouble and our hope are born out of that same desperation for transcendence. I’m convinced he’s right. | 
