Bruce Springsteen and the Story of Us

Abstract

THE FIRST TIME I HEARD a Bruce Springsteen song performed live was in 1979, when I was in the tenth grade and Larry Weinberger and AJ. DeStefano stood in our high school parking lot shouting all the words to Thunder Road from start to finish, zipping right through that tune at fast-forward speed. Eyes squeezed shut into brief black hyphens, shoulders pumping to an imaginary drumbeat, they sang to an audience of ten or twelve sophomores sprawled against the hoods of their parents' old cars, their red and green and blue looseleaf binders strewn right side up and upside down like blackjack hands along the pavement at their feet. This was October, the second month of the school year, and the time between 3:40 p.m. and dinner was still a flat landscape of vast and open hours. A single cigarette slowly made its way around the circle, passed be tween the tight Vs of fingers and held just long enough for each of us to blow a smoke ring for effect. Across the parking lot, students called to each other by last name (Yo, Speee-VAK!), car doors slammed, engines revved like short-lived lawn mowers. Larry and AJ. finished their song and started on Jungleland, pausing after The Magic Rat drove his sleek machine over the Jersey state line just long enough to allow: Into Rockland County! The Ramapough Inn! Yo mama's backyard! Hey! Your sister's bedroom, asshole. We all knew the words to Springsteen's songs, and we knew, firsthand, most of the places they described. Some of them practically were in our parents' backyards. We were living in New York, just over the New Jersey border in the tiny towns that dot the bottom of the state map like scattered flecks of black pepper, a county filled with minor suburbs most frequently described by their relative position to somewhere else: thirty-three miles northwest of Manhattan, less than a one-hour drive from two international airports, and a half tank of gas north of the Jersey shore. Springsteen Country, our bumper stickers read, though most of us took thick black magic markers and crossed out the second R. Springsteen County