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
Linear Mode
