More Than An Obligatory Springsteen Post

The Boss is a core memory.

I have very few memories from 1985. I remember being on a Big Wheels tricycle in the alley behind our house in Baltimore. I remember the day I couldn’t play outside because of a downed power line. And I remember Bruce Springsteen.

More specifically, I remember waking early & making my way to my dad’s stereo, where I cranked the volume knob all the way up, and dropped the needle on Side 1, Track 1, of Springsteen’s blockbuster record, Born in the USA. I was four.

I know it was early, because I remember my father careening into the living room to stop the record before it woke my baby sister. He was livid. My mom laughed it off. They’d be divorced two years later.

As a little kid, I loved the bigness of that record. The songs were full of bombast and shimmer, catchy as all hell, and the sheer volume of sound on that album matched the vibrating energy of an over-sugared afternoon. Even the lusty, crooning “I’m On Fire” has a feverish guitar line that doesn’t let up.

I got more familiar with Springsteen’s catalog in high school & college. For a while I was all about the earnestness in Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ. I’ve commiserated with the heartache and listlessness in Tunnel of Love and Human Touch (the latter of which doesn’t get enough attention). Born to Run is full of reckless nostalgia, and though the songs remain unmatched, they don’t hit the way they did when I was in my 20s.

But I keep coming back to USA. It hit my consciousness at a time where I was all about the loud, and it allowed me to grow into its depth. Behind all that bravado, behind the searing guitar solos and the synths that shine like stadium lights, Born in the USA is a collection of pain. The record’s inhabitants are marked by shame, fear, lust, regret. And unfortunately those 1980s characters have a lot in common with folks today. They are not OK, but they are doing their damnedest not to show it.