Bruce Springsteen: Rock Identity

[Bahaichap]

ONE CONTINUITY: SEED PLANTIN’

Columbia Records signed Bruce Springsteen to a recording contract in April of 1973.1 This could be seen as the beginning point to the royal road to success of one of the greats in the rock and roll industry in the last quarter of the twentieth century. I had just started teaching high school at the time in one of South Australia’s model schools. I, too, was finally making it after a long road in my own much smaller world. The Nine Year Plan had just ended.(April 21, 1973) and I had been living in Australia for nearly two years as an international pioneer. This poem is about Springsteen’s life from the seventies to the mid-nineties and my own during this time. One gets a sense of who one is by comparison and contrast with someone whom one is not. 1 Ron Price with thanks to Stuart Werbin, Rolling Stone, 26 April 1973.

You are free to make up the narrative of your own life. This is biographical freedom. You can not choose what life to live, but you can choose how to explain it to yourself and others. Some would argue this, too, is determined. I would argue it is at least, partly, free. -In New Scientist, 8 November 1997.

When they signed you up in ’73, Bruce,
I’d come back from a sixties collapse
and was back on top and was making it
big in my little corner of the world,
on my way to yet another burnout.
You started packing them in all over America
and winning music-awards right and left.

Your acoustic triumph Nebraska presented
a glorious portrait of America
however unglorious America had become
and I was planting seeds, still planting seeds,
north of Capricorn, Downunder.
You were consolidating your identity,
finding out who you were and where
you belonged, with Born in the USA
and I was looking like I was born in Australia
and standing tall in spite of it all.1
Your incomparable charisma and your capacity
to churn out song after song made you artist
of the year time and time again
while I was slipping those seeds onto the path
as unobtrusively as a gentle breeze
and finding one soul:
better for thee than all the riches,2
as if it was the most important thing on earth.
And it was.

I learned to take it all light, as you took your R&R
light: serious and livin’-it-easy locked together
as a survival package. With the Tunnel of Love
you knew the journey was worth it
even if there was no centre for you
in an international pop sensibility,
even if the movie was over
and you had a new identity to form
and a new place to belong. You’ll be playin’
as long as you’re livin’, Bruce,
and I’ll be writin’ my poems
‘cause I discovered them just the other day
along that lifeline of seed-plantin’,
an identity that’s here to stay. And it is.
1 Bruce Springsteen in Bruce Springsteen: The Ultimate Compendium of Interviews, Facts and Opinions from the Files of Rolling Stones, Rolling Stones editors, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1997, p. 200.
2 ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan, p.12. While living north of Capricorn from July 1982 to December 1987 I found one soul, an Aboriginal elder named Larry Ahlin.

Ron Price
16 May 1999

[Bahaichap]

Just to widen the focus a little and take a more autobiographical stance, let me add the following:
________________
EMERGING OUT OF OBSCURITY
FIFTY YEARS: 1953-2003

In my years before puberty(1944-1956), I hardly remember any musical activity in my life, although both my parents played the piano and sang in choirs, so something musical must have permeated my psycho-emotional skin. The world of popular music gradually came into my life in the years 1953-1959 and this world of sound continued to influence me for some two decades until 1973-79. This popular music had a strong autobiographical, confessional, personal, emotional, introspective quality. I found it in folk, folk-rock and the pop strands. A whole generation of popular music was found here; it was the generation I listened to as an adolescent and as a young adult. Some of it attained a level of universality which helped listeners--like me--identify with its ideas and sentiments. Artists like: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, David Crobsy, Steven Stills, Graham Nash, Neil Young, James Taylor, Tom Rush, Phil Ochs and Carly Simon, among a host of others--provided an influence, quite unconsciously, on my artistic sensibilities, my poetry and writing that emerged later and slowly in the next dozen years, 1980-1992. Those four decades, 1953-1992, provided a base for a poetic-fertilization, a poetic-crystallization that resulted in the years that followed, 1992 to 2003. -Ron Price with thanks to “Walk On By: The Story of Popular Song-After the Gold Rush,” ABC TV, 9:35-10:25 p.m., January 13th, 2005.

After fifty years of music
one can’t help but wonder
what actually produced
this prolific output of poetry,
this wanting to see the world
and see it better than ever,
concentrating all that I have
said and done since birth,
all grist for a tumultuous mill,
mildly confessional, nothing
like Lowell, Plath, Sexton
and others from those decades
when confessionalism was all
the rage in poetry and music
and seemed to insinuate itself
into my words as they arose
with all their autobiographical
candor and an unprecedented
personal aesthetic that takes
emotion and personality,
makes and escapes,
argues and embraces and tries
to tie self and world in one wide
embrace of past, present and future
in a oneness with all of life.

Ron Price
January 14 2005

[allconcert]

He is a rock singer. Its all album are great. I like its new album

[allconcert]

I saw Bruce for the first time that week, at Penn State’s Rec Hall. What a great show and what an atmosphere. I have seen him live at least 6 more times but that show will always be my favorite.

[Jim Colyer]

I never cared for Springsteen's music but think he is a good man who helps other people.