Sailing from Plymouth

A Day Short of Thirty-Two:
Back to the Boss, Belatedly
By Tom Bartlett

When I hit 17, things my parents did and said started to make sense. Those early teenage years had been blurred by misunderstandings, silences, and distances, but when I was just on the cusp of going off to college, things started to click.

Take music, for example. The performing and listening of it has always been a bond between my mom and me, but the piano lessons I had to endure as an adolescent and early teen were by and large a frustrating litany of tangled fingerwork and temporary memory loss. We drifted apart, somewhat, the piano and me; mom and me.

When I started to get serious, in high school, about singing, I came to appreciate how the discipline of the piano had planted in me an appreciation of melody, harmony and rhythm. I think mom, with her long history of playing the violin, might have envisioned this sort of crossover.

I doubt she could have foreseen how Led Zeppelin would affect my future involvement in music, however. For my fourteenth birthday, she had bought me Led Zeppelin 2 on cassette, mistakenly thinking it was a recording of war stories. The grainy picture of a crashing dirigible on the cover was no doubt a giveaway. At the time, I was heavily into stories of World War II escapes and feats of daring (subliminal messages there, I believe), but I was soon to trade these in for hours spent listening to Plant/Page collaborations on a tiny cassette player and on the family stereo, simultaneously playing air guitar and humming along to the riffs. A different type of escape.

I was transfixed by this new music; not so much by the songs themselves, their content, but by the musicianship and teamwork of the band members… how the four parts – vocals, guitar, bass, drums – fit together to make a seamless performance. I also found fascinating the production elements of the album: the sound effects of “Whole Lotta Love”, and the quick transitions from one song to the next, as from “Heartbreaker” into “Living Loving Maid.”

As the years went by, the 70s drifting into the 80s, I started to enjoy a wider range of music, and scored concert tickets with my friends whenever possible. Highlights included (in no particular order) Jethro Tull, ELO, J. Geils, Peter Frampton, Santana, Robert Palmer, Frank Zappa, Boston, and Seals and Crofts. This latter duo were consummate musicians; at times during the show, I found myself marveling at how they were playing and singing at opposite ends of the stage, in perfect sync with each other.

My biggest musical influences during this time were – an odd combination – Steely Dan and the Beach Boys, the former for their albums and the latter for the “live” experience. I never saw the Dan in concert; Becker and Fagan weren’t much into touring in those days… but I caught the Boys in Boston on three separate occasions. I enjoyed all three shows, but by the third I was starting to realize that I was witnessing an oldies act in the making. The defining moment for me came when Mike Love attempted to execute a rock god leap from the drum kit platformonto the stage, only to tumble awkwardly into a heap. Wipe Out; Boys no more.

By 1975 I was turning cynical and jaded towards all things musical – hell, towards life in general, to be honest. I was annoyed with the onset and onslaught of disco, and rock seemed to be getting repetitious and tired. I was 17, and on December 5th was first in my class to be accepted into college, “early decision.” I would be going to the family seat of higher education, Dartmouth College, following four previous generations of males in my family to that most northerly of Ivies. My consequent sense of entitlement and even arrogance (“Who said ‘legacy’?) must have been grating to family and friends, not to mention classmates.

My father was a career diplomat, and with my mother and two sisters had made a mid-70s relocation to Ottawa from DC, while I remained at boarding school outside Boston. I came up to the frozen Canadian capital by bus that Christmas of ‘75, smug in the knowledge that the next four years of my life were settled, to the approval of parents and grandparents, and that I had nothing more to prove as a lowly high schooler. Senior Slump would be a six-month snoozer.

My only plan in visiting a city where I knew nobody apart from my immediate family was to ski, drink perilous volumes of Molson, and hang out in the basement guest room listening to the Dan. On arrival, my parents expressed knowing tolerance of this schedule of activities, with my mother adding only one extra commitment: she had bought me a ticket to see Springsteen.

The Boss had booked a date at the Ottawa Arts Centre on Dec. 20, and my mom had teamed up with another lady at the Embassy whose two sons would be coming along as well. I had never met the guys, but while my previous concert companions had been good friends or potential girlfriends (with the emphasis, always, on “potential”), I figured it’d be better to at least attend with someone else, as opposed to the nerdiness of a solo ticket.

I remember little of the gig, try as I might, apart from first being impressed by the comfort and relative intimacy of the several-thousand seat Arts Centre. I had become accustomed to cavernous, greasy echo chambers like the old Boston Garden, the Cape Cod Colliseum, and Schaefer Stadium in Foxboro, and I was pleasantly surprised to be able to sit in a padded seat, facing the stage (no seats behind the stage!), able to see objects onstage as more than mere specks.

At some point, I must have met up with the two brothers; I won’t pretend to recall how or where. I do remember one having a scraggly beard, and as we settled into our seats, he explained that he had come to Ottawa to “veg out.” This struck me as a reasonable conversational opener, so I responded with something sympathetic but vapid like, “Hey, whaddya know: so am I!”

“No” he replied morosely. “I’m back here for good. To veg out.”

“Oh.” There was not much more to be said. I later learned from my mother that one or both of the brothers were suffering from depression, dementia, or something equally debilitating – this being in the days before such conditions became cocktail party conversation. But sitting between them in those plush seats, waiting for the show to begin, I was nonplussed; after all, I was going to school with lots of guys who seemed to be inhabiting parallel universes… some stoned, some troubled in other ways, maybe because of parents less tolerant than mine.

I also remember little of the actual concert, apart from the typical sledgehammer Brucian start and, halfway through, a magical “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”, with an athletic, leaping St. Nick bounding all over the stage, while Bruce chuckled and sang. At one point I was temporarily blinded by a spotlight reflected off of the Big Man’s sax, and throughout the show felt almost physically pinned to my seat by the sonic onslaught of melodic songs, most about small-town Jersey life.

This was shortly after “Born to Run” had exploded onto the scene, and Bruce also had songs from “Asbury Park” and “E Street Shuffle” to draw from… all very regional, very evocative of small-town teenage agonies and triumphs, yet universal in scope. In my arrogant, I’m-going-to-an-Ivy frame of mind, I thought of Joyce’s Dublin in “Ulysses.”

The umpteenth encore ended more than three hours after we’d taken our seats, and the brothers (how could they ‘veg out’ after that? I thought) and I filed silently out of the auditorium and off on our separate ways. I also walked out on the Boss that night, as it was to be many years before I would be in possession of another Springsteen album or concert ticket.

I can’t fully explain the gap in my Springsteen experiences, but I do know that when I headed back to Dow’s Lake on that freezing Ontarian night I was convinced that I had just seen the greatest concert I would ever see in my life: tops for energy and audience engagement, for variety, for longevity, and for any number of other markers. Going back to see the Boss would probably fail to measure up, so why do it? Something in those flawed, striving Jersey characters spoke to me, and spoke loudly. There was redemption, broken but also requited love, hope, promise… and the open road lying ahead, for those, like Kerouac had before, who would make the effort to get out and get on.

Here was I, standing under a ladder of education and expectation, preparing to climb; to move upward through a process laid out for me and paid for dearly, feeling smug and glum at the same time. To escape the prep school insularity and conformity which I, at the time, felt caused these feelings, I would often drive down to Plymouth, south of Boston, where we had a summer home. There I would meet up with my friends from the town, and at night we would cruise the streets and hang out on the beach. There was no boardwalk or carnival, but I suppose in some ways it was a bit like Asbury Park: an empty winter beach, kids pursuing dreams, love, breaking away and breaking down.

But the romanticism and lyricism of Springsteen’s songs did not always protect our situation. My friend Peter crashed his Corolla into a tree one night and died; another night, I was standing next to a car talking with a girl who was standing up through the sunroof. I left, and half an hour later she too was killed in a horrific crash against a tree. Bruce had sung of “suicide machines”, but this was something far worse.

As the Me Decade began, I was observing Bruce from the sidelines, hearing the unending string of Top 40 hits with polite interest, but somehow not becoming an uberfan. I preferred to stay on the boardwalk, E Street, 10th Avenue… with familiar characters like Rosailta, Sandy, the Rat. This dwelling in the past no doubt reflected my lack of confidence and direction at the end of my Dartmouth days. It seems that just getting into and getting through the place had used up all of my initiative, and it would be a long time before I got it back. Songs like “Hungry Heart” and “Dancing in the Dark” and “Born in the USA” did nothing for me; nor did much else. But like a Springsteen character, I kept moving on, persevering, seeking.

Later, in my brief stint as a full-time journalist I regularly scored free concert tickets in return for two- to three-hundred-word reviews for my employer, a chain of community newspapers on Boston’s South Shore. The Dead in Foxboro; the Moody Blues and the Allman Brothers at Great Woods: all remarkable shows in their own ways, but…

In ’84 my good friend Alex made it to a Springsteen show at the Worcester Centrum. He’d won the ticket in a coin toss with his then-wife, and went to the show with a guy he barely knew – shades of my Embassy brothers experience. Springsteen had, in ’84, one of his biggest hits, and one of the bestselling albums of the year, “Born in the U.S.A.”. Alex was living with his girlfriend Kim, had a seven-month old baby, and was on the road working for his father-in-law, and living with his in-laws in the South Shore town of Duxbury.

By the time of the Springsteen tour of that year, Alex and Kim were married… but there was another guy in the picture. (Why does there always have to be “another guy”? In every relationship I’ve had, there’s been “another guy”: ex-boyfriend, special “friend”, interested classmate, whoever. Complications!)

In this case, the guy showed up at Alex’s house one Thursday, expecting him to be away on business, carrying two Springsteen tickets for the sold-out show at the Centrum. Being a reasonable sort, this other guy suggested that Alex and his wife flip a coin to decide who would be accompanying ticket-bearer to the show. Alex won.

My friend Frania, who I met much later, was at the same show. Around that time, I was persuaded by a girlfriend to see Huey Lewis at the old Channel in Boston. She was an uberfan of his. I was not. If only I’d gone to Worcester with Alex…

Fast forward to 2007. I’m living in England, married to Linda, who is British, two kids with English accents, no time or money for concerts; kids annoyed by my backup singer imitations when driving. I’m looking out for trees, though. Out of the blue, Frania scores me a ticket for Springsteen at the O2 Arena in London, ex-Millenium Dome. December 19… 32 years minus a day after that Ottawa show. I’m there, nerdy solo ticket or not.

Like the Arts Centre lo those many years ago, the O2 is slick, clean, even antiseptic. The concert inner-sanctum, a 20,000 seat oval, is ringed by trendy ethnic restaurants and gift shops, all thronged by the concert-going faithful. This ain’t Jersey, I think to myself. I skip by the overpriced gifts, spring for a Murphy’s stout, enter the arena, and take my seat in Section 114, the bank of seats just off stage right, about 40 feet behind the pianist, then as now Roy Bittan.

Unlike the one in 1975, this show becomes etched in my memory, and is present with me as I write this. I mean this in a literal sense, as the bootleg CD of the show (thanks again, Frania!) is playing on my laptop as I type these words. Next to the machine is a review of the show from Backstreets.com, the text supplemented by a photo of the Boss and Miami Steve wearing frilly cowboy hats.

It is now the case, indeed, that every Springsteen show is covered from top to bottom, beginning to end; bootlegged, reviewed, photographed from every angle. Bruce has a back catalogue to match any living “artist”, and the faithful know and sing all the words on every song.

What hasn’t changed is the sheer energy and commitment of the man to the people who pay his wages. The fact that nearly every band member who was playing with him that night 32 years ago is still onstage is impressive enough.

So I sat and I stood and I clapped and I sang… and I also reflected, from my banked seat in the darkness off stage left, on the time that had passed by, and how I had changed in some ways, stayed the same in others. I thought of Peter, and of the girl in the sunroof, and of Alex and our late friend Jim. They had come to Ottawa with me during Spring Break ’76 to go skiing at Camp Fortune, a last pre-graduation fling up north in the Quebec woods. At the end of their visit they were broke and so was I, and they decided to hitchhike back to Boston – bags, ski equipment, and a hope and a prayer. Damned if they didn’t make it back home in three days.

I think the Boss would have approved. Then, as now.

c. Tom Bartlett
April 2008