Springsteen on Broadway - Appearances Are Deceiving

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, BROADWAY, PSYCHOANALYSIS, PSYCHOLOGY, AUTHENTICITY, SELF PRESENTATION, ROCK AND ROLL, FOLK, PERFORMANCE ART

First a disclaimer.  I am not now nor have I ever been a true Bruce Springsteen fan.  That said, while Springsteen’s music has not hung in the place of honor, it has been the wallpaper in more than one room of my musical life’s home.  His reputation as putting on the best live show of any rock and roller of his generation has also made me feel guilty about never having scored a ticket.  The friend from whom I cribbed the disclaimer at the opening of this post is a fan, and he is convinced that in one of the shows Springsteen picked him out as one of the people that he was singing the show to – and – whether that was true or not – I think it speaks to a particular connection that audiences have felt to Springsteen in his performances – they have felt a particularly close bond to him as a performer and as a person.

The recording of the Broadway show, recently released on Netflix, which follows on the heels of and apparently plays with themes from Springsteen’s autobiography, itself starts with a disclaimer.  Springsteen claims that he is a fraud.  He has written lyrics about things – like being a factory worker – that he has never been.  He presents himself as a Carney – telling the people what they want to hear - and says that this is a magic trick, but then he proceeds to put the songs that he has written into the context of the life that he has lived in a way that allows us to glimpse their integrity, honesty and genuineness – or he is one hell of a liar.  And it is hard to imagine that he is not also that – he notes that in coming to the theater every day for this show is the first time in his life that he has worked a steady job and he acknowledges that he doesn’t like it.  And being as bare and raw and intimately connected as he is with the audience in this performance night after night, working from a script, is he talking to us?  Is he performing for us?  Or is he playing a part?  Of course, he is doing a bit of all three – and he is convincing in each role as he plays the parts.

The songs that he performs are acoustic versions mostly of his standards that are sometimes hard to recognize because of the arrangements.  He uses an acoustic guitar or a piano to accompany himself and, on two songs, he and his wife Pattie Scialfa.   There is no band and no screaming from the audience – they don’t even sing along.  His music struck my ear, in this setting, as folk or maybe blues based, and the reluctant wife heard the tunes as sounding more like spirituals.  The music though, is largely secondary.  What is primary is the talking – the storytelling.  In his autobiography, Springsteen reveals that he has been working with a psychoanalyst for the past twenty five years.  This performance does not feel like psychoanalytic free association – but it does feel free – the words trip off his tongue effortlessly and you would think that he would take more pleasure in the poetic turns of phrase that he includes, but his mood is somber.  Indeed, his bearing is very much like what I would expect from his father – a hardworking and hard-drinking Irish Catholic man from small town southern New Jersey – at the end of his life. 

It felt like a completely different guy that we found on a Youtube rendition of his “Dancing in the Dark” video where as a young cute guy with a cute curl over his forehead, he pulls a starry eyed  Courtney Cox (before she was on Friends) out of the crowd to dance with him.  He is now old, tired and somber.  He still takes great joy in life, but it is circumspect joy.  He weighs the joys of life against the difficulties that come with it.  He acknowledges how hard it was to be his father – and to be raised by him.  But he is also able to share something of his mother’s joy – her pride in her work as a legal secretary and walking buoyantly home with her – head held high – after a day at work.  And he remembers her dancing - something she does even now that she is 93 and stricken with Alzheimer’s.  Her presence is an energizing counterpoint to his father’s gloom.

In another special we watched recently, Ellen DeGeneres’ Relatable, DeGeneres begins by noting the concern that viewers will not relate to her stand-up routine because her net worth is so much different than ours.  Well, both she and Bruce are estimated to be in the 450 million dollar range – and Bruce does not talk about raising kids with all of that wealth – and all of the complications of being a father with whom many millions of people feel like they have a personal relationship.  Instead he relates to us as if we do, indeed have a personal relationship with him – and talks about something that we can relate to – the years when he was growing up and then, once he was grown, how hard it is to love and be loved.

Like seemingly all modern pop singers, love is at the heart of Springsteen’s songs and his rendition of his life, but Springsteen’s love is not the light and seemingly effortless love of someone like DeGeneres – and perhaps his mother.  Springsteen’s position in the show and in his music is that letting someone else have access to the parts of oneself that one doesn’t even like about one’s self is, to say the least, difficult.  So instead, we present brilliant disguises to each other and hope that the other sees through them but simultaneously fear that they will.  In order to love each other – as he and Scialfa have done – we need to be tougher than the rest.  And the love that they portray, as they sing the duets together – is one that has some rough edges.  There is affection – and wariness – and even a little awkwardness.  I found myself thinking of the relationship between Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash as portrayed in the biopic I walked the Line.

There is a level on which this performance feels very real and a level on which it also is very much a play – a construction that we are witnessing.  It is both an intimate view of the most private parts of the artist – and there is a ton of who we know that he must be that is not included.  We don’t hear about the glitzy parties and hanging with other celebrities – we hear about growing up one hour from New York, but it might as well be on the other side of the moon from it – no one would think of going there.  We learn about all the uncles and aunts that lived within a two block radius – but we don’t hear – as we do with Ellen – what it is like to skooch across a thirty foot bathroom on the bathmat because the marble floors are too cold to walk on…  We also see someone acting and being (in some odd combination of both) sincere.

And there are also moments where we don’t have access to important – even critical - pieces of the narrative – moments when Springsteen hides in plain sight with a brilliant disguise.  He is clear, for instance, in his description of writing “Born in the USA” that this is not his song – he puts to music the experience of others – in ways that are, I think, deeply satisfying to them – to him – and to us.  But as he is talking about Vietnam – and losing friends who died there – he is also talking about being drafted and going with two of his friends to the draft board and they all did what they had to do to avoid being inducted.  He shifts from this quickly into a description honoring our veterans so that we almost don’t see the sleight of hand where we don’t know what he did to avoid serving.  Now, to be clear, I am not trying to judge him, but I do think he is avoiding the potential judgement of his audience through a finesse.  He keeps parts of himself hidden – parts that he might not like – and that he fears we might not like as well.

And yet this show is deeply satisfying.  The person that is revealed to us – certainly not the whole person – is a person that has a certain kind of integrity.  It is a version of the person that we know this man to be and a credible one.  He tells a narrative that hangs together.  In a text that I am teaching psychoanalysis from, Morris Eagle is talking about “narrative creation” as one of the ways that some have come to characterize the goal of psychoanalysis.  And creating a narrative description of our lives that holds together is, indeed, useful – but also, I think, a useful fiction.  A grander, more romantic integrity – one in which this man who looks like an aging steel worker but who is also an aging rock star and is also a caring and devoted (or intermittently so) husband and father and is also a ne’er do well (I am making this up) and a poet who is proud of his poetry – and is whatever else he might be – is a kind of integrity that analysis – in Freud’s mind before he invented it – might have afforded.  But in the modern and post-modern world, such an integrity is harder – perhaps impossible to achieve.  Indeed, Freud himself came to think of himself in a much less romantic – much less grandiose way – after writing what, ironically, he thought of as his greatest work – The Interpretation of Dreams.  There he proposed that we are inevitably and inexorably internally inconsistent.  We are neither simply heroes nor villains but both and so much more – and while Springsteen tells us that he lies to us – that he portrays people he is not – we also see that he has lent himself – or part of himself – to the portrayal of these people – including the person that he is portraying onstage – and that this is part of what makes his songs, his concerts, and this stage performance compelling.  He lets us in on the joke, but tells it none the less – and can’t not tell it.  No matter how he portrays himself it will not be who he is.  And we walk away humming the tunes of our life, enjoying a well told tale – with just a few whiffs of Sulphur to interrupt the pleasure that we feel in having gotten to know someone so intimately – and so partially.

As I reflect on this piece, which emerged in a way that is different than I expected it to, I think that what kept me from thinking about the piece in the way that I have written it while watching it is Springsteen’s sincerity.  He really wants to be who he is portraying himself to be – and he really wants you to connect with that person and there is actually a deeply winsome quality to the way that he performs.  He wants us to take him at face value despite his warning that we should not do that.  The lyrics to his songs – and the closed captioning helps me hear them – sometimes for the first time – tell a story of duplicity and complexity – while his talking, singing and, in his concerts, dancing and performing, tell a much simpler story – of a person who values connection – and values being loved by you and will do just about anything to get that love from you and to connect with you so that you will give it freely.  And I think we really want to give it to him, even though we all know that on some level it isn’t quite what it appears to be because he is not, and we are not, quite what we appear to be – despite our best efforts.

Addendum:  So, a friend read this post and let me know that the memoir addresses many of the aspects that I have noted are left out of the performance - including the details of draft dodging and the raising of kids - including hiding their parents fame from the kids for as long as they could!  Tough job, that.  While I may get to the memoir at some point (my friend highly recommended it), I think the points that he makes about what is included there that is not included here actually underscores the challenges of a performance piece - including the need to connect with an audience on a different level - one that requires certain sleights of hand that aren't necessary in a written piece.  There is room, in a written piece, to operate inside the mind of the reader - within limits - to create psychological and emotional space.  When performing, the performer (same person, in theory, as the memoirist) is experienced as an other - as a separate person - not as the narrator within the mind of the reader.  And the savvy performer - which Mr. Springsteen certainly is - takes this into account in the way that he crafts the presentation - there is a need to be winsome in a different way - not through appealing to rational/cognitive empathy, as one can do in writing - something that is analogous to the way we engage with our own thoughts, but by appealing to the desire to connect with another, the way that we do with our children when we know that they have done something bad but we continue to love them in spite of that. 

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