The Truths of The Boss. Unshared? [by Tina Kelley]

Bruce Springsteen is in the news today for saying “Hello Ohio!” in…Michigan on Friday, but geez people, how many of us are way under 60 and way less talented, energetic, or able to memorize 27 songs a night, let alone write or perform them?

 I was lucky enough to see Bruce’s last concert ever at Giants Stadium last month, and for a mostly-life-long Jersey Girl, it was a giant treat, one of those serendipitous gifts from above that make me pinch myself.

Sure, I had told my neighbors, I’ll take care of your three cats for two weeks. That’s what pet-loving neighbors do for each other in New Jersey, and do for free. And then the neighbors come home and say “Hey, we fell into two free Bruce tickets, wanna come?”

Is the Boss a hottie?  

I grew up on Bruce. He sang the anthems that described my teens and twenties, the pride we took in finding beauty and meaning where everyone else saw overcrowding and pollution.  

I discovered him in high school, when I was just starting to understand that cool music was out there, when I heard a guy a year older talking about Clarence Clemons.  

This was the music that captured the 80s for me, but also whatever this decade is called. Only Bruce has the power to make me feel what borders on nostalgia for those strange, mournful, and oddly-sunny days right after September 11.

Only Bruce could have written the two songs--“Born to Run” and “Thunder Road”—-that somehow buoyed me and kept me hopeful during a six-week cancer scare in 2007. And when my Dad died the day before I found out I didn’t have cancer, it was hearing “Thunder Road” that made me bawl for inexplicable reasons, but mostly because I had never shared my worry with my parents.

Around me in Giants Stadium were a ton of 40- and 50-year-olds, “my people,” the girls who taught us to smoke, the people who blanket the sands of Point Pleasant, the guys our marching band played for. This is where we go when the weather turns, all 65,000 of us.  

We bring praise for Bruce, for his productivity, for the way he describes our lives. We admire the way he lauds the common man, the way he’s probably a nice guy (and we can’t believe any allegations to the contrary). One of us even carries a sign that says “Bruce is My Religion.”  

Then it hits me, when the Jumbotron displays a close-up of all the hands raised in praise.   I look with my binoculars. I realized, I hadn’t seen that many white people in a public place since I took my mother to see the Cheiftains at NJPAC in Newark.   

Truly, the only black guy I can see is The Big Man  himself, playing the sax. All those arms were white, a a sea of Crayola “flesh” color, or at least that’s what it was called when I was a kid, before we started to know the error of that name, the implication that other colors didn’t count.  

Am I that white that my all-time favorite rock star has no appeal for black Jerseyans? Is this music, which embodies both my youth and my recent years, somehow excluding or repelling people of color? What’s wrong with me for loving something that doesn’t seem to be loved universally?  

I asked a friend of mine who is black, apologizing first for asking someone “what black people think.” (“Ask them yourself,” my college roommate rightly told me once.) My friend said she noticed the same thing at Bono and U2 concerts, maybe concerts are too expensive, who knows? Maybe concerts by black artists have audiences that are less melanin-deprived.

Anyone have any ideas? And, in the meantime, speaking of poetry, can anyone think of a better motto for this particular recession than “No retreat, baby, no surrender”?