Re: What Hooked You On Springsteen?



Arcade Pepper wrote:

Childhood.

Ages 11-13. Springtime & summer. Hanging out in the schoolyard, playing corkball, lineball, pinners and Murder Dodge. A transistor radio off to the side, resting on a stone ledge, blasting Smokey Robinson, the Temptations and Little Stevie Wonder. Watching the greasers on pull up in their cars along Albany Avenue, styling baggies and Dago-T's, strutting for the girls, showing off the cars they'd worked on all winter and spring in their garages. In the fall, busting outta class at 3:15pm, to go play tackle football at the Neighborhood Boys Club. Cutting school to play poker and smoke big cigars at one of the houses where both parents worked. Forging notes from our parents. Six kids, all friends, all sick on the same day, all with scribbled notes from mom. No one ever called us on anything. Once wintertime finally arrived, going out after supper to run the nighttime streets. Bombing cars with snowballs; skitching rides through the 'hood (ice & snow packed streets, gloves wrapped around back bumpers or rear side-door handles, combat boots sliding over frozen asphalt). Hopping busses & El trains to the shopping intersections; shoplifting in the big department stores and blasting through the revolving doors with our loot (I loved getting fishing lures). Rigging M-80's to cigarette wicks and walking casually away, waiting on the explosions; putting out the arc lamps with Roman Candles (you shoot one lamp with a fireball, that triggers the "daytime" sensor and they all go out). In short, causing all sorts of pre-teen trouble and then running into the darkness, tipping garbage cans as we went, laughing like the pack of wild hyenas that we were.

Ages 14-16. Hanging out under the river bridges, along the railroad tracks, in back of the freight yards, behind the factories & warehouses. Robbing the beer trains at night. Trading beer for dope. Everyone piling into someone's car and heading off to make trouble. Cruising other neighborhoods, stopping to pull some kinda prank (like making an assembly line at a watermelon display outside a grocery store and filing up your car with watermelons, then diving back in and driving away laughing). Trading those watermelons for two stag movies (the old reel to reel kind) from the local connected guy who owned a store (next morning he had himself a very nice, big watermelon sale). Charging the neighborhood kids a buck each to watch the movies while you sat in the other room smoking. Rumbles and rumors of rumbles between neighborhood gangs. Our first night moves, those clumsy yet eager expressions of romance.

Ages 17-19. Stakes getting higher, people starting to learn the consequences of their actions. Kids you grew up with OD-ing, getting killed in Nam, getting into fights that they couldn't win and ending up hospitalized, being shot by clerks during robberies, getting beaten and/or shot by the cops, or sent away for long prison terms. You had to make new, better, decisions if you wanted to stick around. First Bruce song I ever heard was Incident. He sounded like someone I'd grown up with. I was hooked upon the first notes & lyrics of Incident, which I heard on the radio. They were like a chronicle of my life up until then. Born To Run came out and I bought it. Backstreets was like Incident, like something ripped right off the pages of our lives. But it was "Born To Run" that expressed our current emotions & frustrations most accurately. We were older now (22). It was time to do something. Something big. Something that MATTERED. Born To Run drove home the idea that time was finite, the clock always ticking.

After that it was Darkness (as it was for most of us). Bruce had grown, matured. He was now describing our current lives as young adults, not our past lives or childhoods.

And he was doing it perfectly.

Darkness summed up the power & frustration of being 25 and wanting more.

=======================================
Better bring your own redemption when you come
To the barricades of heaven, where I'm from
Jackson Browne




Nice story... And does The Seeger Sessions perfectly describe your life now? ;)

Laurie

--
DISCLAIMER: The above is my opinion, not fact, unless a link is provided. Any insult to your masculinity/femininity or religion is unintentional.

.

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