2006-06-05
Le Boss
Okay.
So you're not a Springsteen fan.
That's fine, I understand that there's kind of the idea that when you look at him, you can smell his breath and I get that maybe isn't for everyone.
After all, how many people can say that they have a ferocious crush on a sweaty Coffee Man?
While being a Bruce Loyalist is by no means being in a minority, there is a certain amount of privacy that I need to truly explain how much I love The Boss.
My love deepened exponentially when I went to see him this weekend.
He had 18 people on the stage. 18. Eighteen. There was an upright piano, an accordion AND a squeezebox, a full horn section, a tambourine section, I think like four guitars, and adorable Jewish banjo player. The only thing I didn't see on that stage was a harmonica and I am sure that there WAS one, I just must have been looking at the steel guitar player while it was being played.
Knowing how much work it is just to set up one person at a coffee shop, with a very small board, a couple of lights, and a guitar.....
I have an appreciation for a traveling show like I never had before Girl's Gotta Eat Records got more ambitious.
The other thing is that he looked different. I've seen Bruce before. He's crusty and a rock star and stuff.
Not this time.
He was a Show Man, in the most classic sense. He was so powerful that he was conducting the audience throughout the show and I'm not talkin' about leading people through Thunder Road or whatever. He did this call and response thing with songs like Eyes on the Prize, John Henry, and We Shall Overcome that I have never seen outside of maybe the theater.
But this is a major American rock star, right?
This is Bruce.
The taciturn Boss.
Quiet and romantic and .....
crusty.
If Bruce Springsteen found Jesus, I don't need to know about it.
If he started doing drugs, I don't need to know about it.
If he was deep in the closet and finally decided to act on those feelings that he's had for Clarence Clemons for so long, I do not need to KNOW. Because he was in a way that I have never, ever seen in my life. He was a Hero.
Even the stuff he said about Katrina... he is the first famous person I have heard and not felt was being patronizing. I felt like he understood the gravity and wasn't taking advantage of something shitty to get more famous. He was just saying that it was really, really shitty.
But whatever it is that's driving him right now, and from what I took away, the elusive "it" is, is his Calling to make a Call. It's him embracing his incredible gift as a musician and a song-writer and a star and reaching back through time to find the things that pulled us to our consciousness. He's unearthed several movements and rolled them up into a great big box, the kind that every single person would see wrapped up and waiting to be opened and that every person would run to, tear off the paper, and find exactly what they wanted for the last year or so.
This is not the best time in American history, you know? Les bon temps, n'est pas roulez. People in my income and age bracket can't buy houses as comfortably as our parents did when they were our age - when they maybe were not as educated or employed as we are now. People think there is some Civil Rights movement regarding the US-Mexico border... wake up!
The border?
It's something that the current, flailing administration thinks it can effectuate in order to have SOMETHING that can be pointed to when these god-forsaken terms of office are over - it can be pointed to and someone down the line can say, "At least he got the border cleaned up. No more illegals draining The System. It's an issue that's only alive so that it can be killed and crossed off the list to show citizens that he can "git 'r done".
Liberals and Mexicans feed right into it. "Cultural depth, doing the jobs Americans won't do, we're all immigrants..." I can't listen to this debate. I'm down with humanitarian aid but liberals are NOT thinking about the cost that illegal immigration has to things like the morgue in my county or the ranchers South of me who lose livestock and who are constantly repairing property damage and girding against thievery. Americans will do the landscaping but they will want to be paid a FAIR WAGE to do it.
Go ahead and make immigration tougher. Make it harder for your buddies who got rich on cheap labor to get richer. Make it harder to get Wetbacks. I swear to god, if any of my liberal-idiot friends try to argue with me I am going to go volunteer as a Minuteman.
Liberals don't understand that to give the administration what it wants on this issue to give ourselves the greatest gift of all: Self-righteous satisfaction in a year or so. We can back away with our hands in the air and a smug smirk, knowing that increased security is going to result in more hardened people taking bigger risks and fucking up my part of the country even more, giving me a real reason to harmonize with the employers who are currently reliant upon cheap, illegal labor to make the money they need to fill up their great, big SUVs each week. They're not gonna like this policy at all.
The War?
Springsteen sang Bring Them Home and you better believe I was crying my eyes out. Earlier in the day, I'd gotten stabbed in the eye with a plant because the foliage out here is seriously dangerous. My eye was already in throbbing pain and looking tired because of not having make-up. The tears? They almost felt good... like I was doing some kind of penance for being a white girl in a skybox watching her favorite rock star of ALL TIME while other people were watching busloads of Iraqis get blown up. Bring Them Home, They Never Should Have Gone - Are You Happy Now? Is more like it. Bring home the guy who lost both his legs and whose wife had to sell their nice house in Texas and leave their toddler with her best friend so she could be closer to him while he recovers to a life he didn't really think would ever happen to him. Are those legs really gone in the name of Democracy?
Or are they gone in the name of oil?
In the name of an autocratic and egomaniacal monkey who believes the god - GOD - is guiding him. GOD made you lose your legs, soldier. He sends His deepest sympathies.
At this point, what the else are you supposed to believe? That your legs are gone for Freedom? That we are such a marionette for countries who need military control that we will sacrifice legs all over the world and it will be the honorable thing to do? I dare you to say that in 50 years when you are writing a check in Euros or in Yuan instead of in dollars. Take a walk into your imagination - all we have is a powerful army, who incidentally can't seem to negotiate what we've been led to believe is an minor insurgency. Four years of minor is probably not so much "minor" as it is Very Fucking Strong. Whose Freedom are we defending then?
All of these songs that he is exploring are the songs that have, in the past, been the battle cries that have united us into solitary movements - labor, civil rights, whatever. What are they trying to do?
They are calling us to remember who we are, to remember that he have a rich history of not allowing the elitists in power tell us what we can and can't believe. We are supposed to remember that we do stand for a seperation of Church and State and that a Constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage is allowing Church to ride State hard and put it up wet.
We are supposed to remember that WE have to take responsibility to KNOW what is happening and to lock arms against it.
arizonasarah at 8:24 a.m.