http://tinyurl.com/2hmdy
Geoff Pevere
The Toronto Star
"This is 1984 and people seem to be searchin' for something."
-Bruce Springsteen
One spring evening 20 years ago, Bruce Springsteen showed up at Annie
Leibovitz's studio with a huge American flag. He wanted to try something.
It was a couple of months before the scheduled release of the 34-year-old
Freehold, N.J. native's fifth album, and the much-loved musician and the
famous rock 'n' roll photographer were trying to find some way of
capturing
the project's title, Born In The U.S.A., without seeming to give in to the
swelling tide of jingoism attending the impending Olympics in Los Angeles
and the juggernaut re-election campaign of Ronald Reagan.
It was a delicate business. As Springsteen later told Rolling Stone's Kurt
Loder: "The flag is a powerful image, and when you set that stuff loose,
you
don't know what's gonna be done with it."
Taking time to find precisely the right image, Leibovitz arranged her
unfussily dressed subject against the flag in various ways over the course
of several sessions. Her inclination was to go heroic: Springsteen full
figure in front of the red-white-and-blue, sometimes standing in serious,
contemplative repose, sometimes leaping like a guitar-slinging icon of
working-class Americana.
Springsteen, an intensely careful manager of his own image, didn't like
the
heroic stuff. He thought it would be too easy to take the image literally
-
that he'd look like the Reagan of rock. And he worried that the themes of
the album would be lost in the blinding blaze of Old Glory. He wrote the
song "Born In The U.S.A." as a way of expressing a Vietnam veteran's
disillusionment with the country he'd come home to. "Down in the shadow of
the penitentiary," Springsteen sings, "Out by the gas fires of the
refinery/I'm ten years burning down the road/Nowhere to run, ain't got
nowhere to go." The title was ironic, and Springsteen wanted the picture
to
be too.
Leibovitz took hundreds of shots: some carefully posed, some more candidly
apprehended. These she called "grab shots" and it was one of these that
caught Springsteen's eye.
It was a shot Leibovitz had taken of Springsteen from behind. He was
facing
the flag, hips slung, his left hand hung loosely at his side, his right
held
invisibly in front of him. He wore faded Levi's, a white T-****rt and had a
red baseball cap crammed in one back pocket. Springsteen thought that had
the detachment he wanted. Leibovitz disagreed, but Bruce was the Boss.
When the album was released in June of 1984, it was a blockbuster. Its
sales
totals outstripped all his previous albums combined; it launched one of
the
most successful rock tours in history; and it made Springsteen a
full-fledged pop icon. And that ass was everywhere.
A rumour spread that Springsteen was actually urinating on the flag as the
photo was taken. It would be the first time that the ambiguities of Born
In
The U.S.A. would generate controversial misunderstanding. It would not be
the last.
Prior to the aftermath of 9/11, the early to mid-1980s were the most
belligerently patriotic period in recent American history. Ronald Reagan
had
risen to power by offering the conquest of external menaces like Iran and
the "Evil Empire" of the Soviet Union. The issue of rescuing American POWs
still held in Vietnam - a myth that generated Sylvester Stallone's John
"Can
we win it this time?" Rambo, - became a national obsession. It was not a
season for ambiguity, and a climate that doomed Born In The U.S.A. to
misinterpretation.
Then there was the unprecedented scale of its reception. Although he'd
been
plugging away for over a decade, Springsteen pre-1984 had been a cult item
-
a major cult item, but strictly arena-scale. Born, which had been recorded
in a booming, pop-oriented commercial style strikingly different from his
previous recordings, exploded his fan base to full-blown phenomenon
pro****tions.
Now filling stadiums, Springsteen suddenly found himself playing in front
of
countless people for whom the meaning of his music - which was frequently
about being down, out, desperate and working-class - was lost in its newly
anthemic arrangements.
A few months after the album was released and the tour juggernaut was
rumbling across North America, Becky Weinberg, the spouse of Springsteen's
drummer Max Weinberg, thought it might be a neat idea to sent a concert
ticket to the stuffy, snobby and perpetually bow-tied conservative
columnist
George Will. She figured it might be interesting to hear what someone on
the
right thought of Springsteen's big, blue-collar rock operatics.
Will accepted the invitation. And, for better or worse, he enjoyed
himself.
In September 1984, Will's column was published. It was titled "A Yankee
Doodle Springsteen" and it read, in part: "There is not a smidgen of
androgyny in Springsteen, who, rocketing around the stage in a T-****rt and
headband, resembles Robert De Niro in the combat scenes of The Deer
Hunter.
This is rock for the United Steelworkers."
After evoking, aptly or not, a movie about emotionally devastated Vietnam
War veterans, Will went on: "Springsteen, a product of industrial New
Jersey, is called the `blue-collar troubadour.' But if this is the class
struggle, its anthem - its `Internationale' - is the song that provides
the
title for his 18-month tour: `Born In The U.S.A.'"
Will's enthusiasm didn't stop there and he had access to prominent ears in
the Reagan re-election camp. Reagan had a campaign appearance looming in
the
Boss's backyard: Hammonton, N.J. (pop. 13,000), and his team started
dreaming of having Springsteen by the President's side there.
Presidential handler Michael Deaver's office made overtures, but
Springsteen's agent declined on behalf of his client, saying he was
unavailable for any outside appearances during his tour. But the
Reaganites
were undeterred.
And thus it came to pass that, on Sept. 19, 1984, Ronald Reagan
name-checked
the most popular rock star in America. After taking his position behind
the
podium in Hammonton, he looked out at the crowd and summoned the image of
the state's most famous son of the moment. "America's future rests in a
thousand dreams inside your hearts," he said. "It rests in the message of
hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey's Bruce
Springsteen."
The press demanded to know which of the Boss's songs the Chief liked best.
It took a full day for the White House to issue a response. The
President's
favourite Bruce Springsteen song was "Born to Run."
That night, on the Tonight Show, Johnny Carson remarked: "If you believe
that, I've got a couple of tickets to the Mondale-Ferraro inaugural ball
I'd
like to sell you."
It took Springsteen longer to respond. On Sept. 22, he was onstage in
Pittsburgh, a city that had been clobbered by Reagan's top-down
supply-side
economic policies. After fini****ng the chafing dustbowl ballad "Atlantic
City", a song from the bleak album Nebraska, Springsteen took a breath.
"The president was mentioning my name the other day," he said to the
crowd,
"and I kinda got to wondering what his favourite album musta been. I don't
think it was the Nebraska album. I don't think he's been listening to this
one."
Then he counted into "Johnny 99," a song about life on the unsupplied side
of Reagan's America: "Well they closed down the auto plant in Mahwah late
that month/Ralph went out lookin' for a job but he couldn't find none/He
came home drunk from mixin' Tanqueray and wine/He got a gun, shot a night
clerk now they call 'im Johnny 99."
Bruce was just warming up. Whether Reagan's attempted appropriation of his
art ignited some previously dormant spark of anti-authoritarian militancy
in
Springsteen, or whether he was simply horrified at the prospect that his
deep and bona fide working-class sympathies might be perverted into a
perceived endorsement of one of the least labour-friendly presidents of
the
century, Springsteen kept hammering back.
The next night, again in Pittsburgh, he spoke to the gathered m*****
again:
"We're slowly getting split up into two different Americas. Things are
gettin' away from people that need them and given to people that don't
need
them, and there's a promise getting broken.
"I don't think the American dream was that everybody was going to make it
or
that everybody was going to make a billion dollars, but it was that
everybody was going to have an op****tunity and the chance to live a life
with some decency and some dignity and a chance for some self-respect. So
I
know you gotta be feelin' the pinch down here where the rivers meet."
Then his band played a song called "The River."
"I got a job working construction for the Johnstown Company/But lately
there
ain't been much work on account of the economy/Now all them things that
seemed so im****tant/Well, mister they vanished into the air."
Curiously, the White House remained mute on the Springsteen affair. Reagan
didn't mention the rock star again. (Maybe someone had actually played him
"Born To Run.") But Democratic rival Walter Mondale did, and he got the
same
terse rebuff. "Bruce Springsteen may have been born to run," said Mondale
quickly, "but he wasn't born yesterday." He then claimed he'd been
officially "endorsed" by the Boss, a claim the star's office quickly and
definitively denied. Mondale, too, shut up.
In the coming weeks and months, Springsteen turned the globe-trotting Born
In The U.S.A. tour into a massive fundraising campaign. In cities where he
and his E-Street band were scheduled to play, he determined which local
charities were in most need of help, and he implored his audience to
donate
to food banks, homeless shelters, striking labour unions and other
organizations hit hard by Reaganomics. By the end of the tour, Springsteen
had helped raise millions of dollars for people who'd been spared the
sun****ne of Ronald Reagan's "morning in America."
"There was Vietnam, there was Watergate, there was Iran - we were beaten,
we
were hustled, and then we were humiliated," Springsteen told Rolling Stone
at the time. "And I think people have a need to feel good about the
country
they live in.
"But what's happening, I think, is that that need, which is a good thing,
is
gettin' manipulated and exploited. And you see the Reagan re-election ads
on
TV - you know, `It's morning in America' - and you say, well, it's not
morning in Pittsburgh ... And that's why when Reagan mentioned my name in
New Jersey, I felt it was another manipulation and I had to dissociate
myself from President's kind words."
It was Springsteen's customarily polite way of telling Reagan to kiss his
red-white-and-blue butt.
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