I Have Seen The Future Of Public Discourse...

There'sJustAMeaness
InThisWorldVille

.....And Its Name Is Bruce Springsteen.

Two of the greatest bands/musicians that I have ever known came to me by way of covers in bars.

And in both cases the year was 1978, a time on the Westcoast of Canuckistan when the musical pickings for a late adolescent from almost suburbia were pretty darned Slim Whitman indeed.

The first was played by a bunch of guys who moved in lockstep, from right foot to left foot, and sometimes wore televisions on their heads. I saw them at a place called the Surfside in Victoria, a not-quite, but almost, biker bar where you could get in if you were underage so that you could subject yourself, on 9 nights out of 10, to Jimmy Page and/or Journey wannabes. But these weird guys, the TV Heads, they played stuff I had never even conceived of before; super fast, super loud with slurred vaguely English-accent laden lyrics, and every song was over and done in less than 2 minutes. Can't even remember the name of the TV Heads now - but the stuff they were playing, it was the real thing.

The Ramones.

And by the end of that summer my friends and I had dropped the Zepplin and we were thrashing around, ripping out Blitzkrieg Bop and I Wanna Be Sedated in an egg carton-lined basement rec-room driving the Big W's parents crazy.

The second coming took longer to light.

The spark came from a weird, hold-over hippy collective that played up the hill in a place called Mother's Disco on lower Johnson St. They even had bongoes and a saxophone player for chrissakes, who was - get this - a girl. And the song I remember most was one about a kid who pines for another girl. A girl named Sandy who hangs around on a boardwalk late at night.

What you have to understand is that, at that point in my life at least, the only boardwalk I'd ever seen was made from rough hewn chunks of red cedar slapped down on a moss bog somewhere in the middle of the treacherous southern half of the Westcoast trail, back in the days when it really was treacherous and still open to all comers.

In other words, before I walked into that bar I had no inkling of the spirits in the night that roamed Bruce Springsteen's New Jersey shore.

But when I walked out I sure did.

****

Now, I never bought into that crap from Dave Marsh about the 'Future of Rock and Roll' and all that because nobody, not even Marsh, can possibly know when or where the next Kurt Cobain or even the next Sek Loso will pop up.

But the thing about Springsteen is that once he gives you that inkling, or more precisely that tingling (of the spine), he never lets you down.

Even when he speaks.

Now many a good hearted artist will inevitably sound like they have marbles in their mouth and/or rocks in their head when they try and articulate why they have taken a particular political stand on something.

But not Springsteen. Here is what he told the Globe's Robert Everett-Green about why he publicly opposed George Bush and why he went on to play for John Kerry last fall:

"When your elected officials are consciously lying to you, as I do believe happened, they're supposed to lose their jobs.........

........At the same time, they played on people's cultural fears very well, whether it was abortion, or evolution. You had people writing that the Bible would be outlawed if John Kerry won. You had Cheney saying that if the Democrats got in, there would probably be another terrorist attack. The pure audacity and shamelessness of it was sort of disgustingly admirable. What balls, you know? But the sad thing about it is that it's based on divisiveness, not on the idea of an inclusive country where people of a variety of philosophies and religious ideas make things work."

The thing about Springsteen is that he one of those troubadours who is capable of making his songs all things to all people. But unlike so many of that ilk, and Mr. Zimmerman comes to mind here, Springsteen is also someone who does seem to truly know, and see, America for what it really is.

Take this lyrical snippet for example.

"Show a little faith there's magic in the night.
You ain't a beauty, but hey you're alright....... and that's alright, with me."

Now, the first time I heard that I really did conjure up a girl named Wendy. And the weird thing is that she was both real and imagined. She had come to my highschool from Edmonton with a Chevrolet that was definitely not her Dad's. I rode in that car once or twice and I would have done pretty much anything to ride in it again, back then and maybe even right now.

As for Bruce?

Well, who knew that the not-quite-but-almost beauty he wrote about so long ago, and who he still sings about today, would turn out to be his country.

___
Apologies for stealing a little from Heather Mallick, sort of. I must confess that, while I rush out to the corner store every Saturday morning so that I can rip open the Globe to page F2, I rarely read her bit in the Style section. But this week, even there, she made my heart sigh.

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