Rockers and Poets

Searching...

I was idly scrolling through the streaming services looking for something to watch, when up popped a video of a Bruce Springsteen concert, Live in New York City. So I thought, Why not? I used to enjoy the early Springsteen albums, but never did see him live, and those concerts are legendary. Although "epic" might be a better description: it turned out to be a non-stop three hour and ten minute Boss-athon from 2001, no doubt with some of the more tedious bits edited out. It was exhausting just to watch, even broken over three nights. I mean, crikey, what is that man on? Perhaps they'll tell us in the biopic that's just coming out.

Anyway, Bruce Springsteen... He's everywhere at the moment, presumably because of that forthcoming film. Some love him as a blue-collar, truth-telling rock 'n' roller, others loathe him as a bombastic poseur: in his own words, he has become "a rich man in a poor man's shirt", who has never done a proper day's work in his life. I have to say I was pleased to have confirmed recently what I had always suspected (in a Q&A with Todd Rungren): that the risible "Bat Out Of Hell" by Meat Loaf (actually written by Jim Steinman) was conceived of as an affectionate parody of the early Springsteen's grandiloquent crescendos, histrionic story-telling, and dramatic changes of mood and tempo. This, Springsteen's signature style, is what we in Britain refer to as a "Marmite taste": people who are passionate about their music tend to love it or hate it with equal intensity.

There's more to Springsteen than those famously theatrical rock-outs, of course. Myself, I always admired Nebraska, his solo, Americana-flavoured acoustic album, and also the spikier of the releases of the early 90s, Lucky Town. But it is those first three albums, and in particular The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle, that I know in that intimate, deeply personal way that you absorb and embody the music of your youth. I happen to like Marmite, I suppose.

One of my college playmates, Gerry, occupied a commodious room which tended to function as our recreational space. He had a good stereo, and wide musical tastes. I was passionate about music myself in those days, but I was chauvinistically narrow in my repertoire: if it wasn't British, and ideally released on Island Records, then it was probably just foreign rubbish. It was Gerry who introduced me to the likes of Steely Dan, Little Feat, Can, and Weather Report, and who attempted but failed to turn me on to Carla Bley's Escalator Over the Hill. Also lurking in his box of LPs was an album with a silly title by some American bloke with a weird name which, for some reason, I always refused to give a hearing. Perhaps it was a case of once bitten, twice shy after the ear-bashing of Escalator. So one evening – this was probably winter 1974 – when we were all lounging around, suitably sedated, he slipped it onto the turntable. I was electrified. I may even have got up and danced, but I may be making that up. Wow! Amazing! Who is this?

Ah, youth...

Music may have been all-important to me then but today, partly due to hearing loss and tinnitus (I suppose I have to blame that early love of loud, live gigs) but also due to a general disengagement, I only very occasionally listen to music. What was an essential part of my younger life – along with thrill-seeking (by any means necessary), protesting (what have you got?), or writing essays and taking exams (my superpower) – has simply not followed me into my later decades. I still like most of the music I loved then, but have not "kept up", either with the later output of my favoured artists, or with whatever the young folk are listening to today. I have never, for example, listened to a single Rolling Stones album since the disappointment of Goats Head Soup in 1973, even though Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers are permanently engraved, note for note, word for word, somewhere on my synapses.

Of course, for anyone born in or around the 1950s (in my case '54, the year the first Fender Stratocaster guitars went on sale) proper rock 'n' roll – think Little Richard, think Chuck Berry, think Jerry Lee Lewis – occupies a level even deeper than those synapses, infused into whatever it is that constitutes a person's soul. For us, all subsequent "popular" music is an edifice built on that solid foundation, itself laid down upon the bedrock of rhythm and blues. As it turned out – and it's a curious connection to make, perhaps – those early Springsteen albums sat very comfortably on what was then a more recent archaeological layer of "my" music, the verbose lyrics and the stop-start, quiet-loud dynamics of Ian Anderson's Jethro Tull.

Yes, reader, I was a teenage Jethro Tull fan, and not ashamed to admit it. If you've never leapt around your bedroom to classic Tull workouts like "My God" or "Locomotive Breath", then you won't really know what I'm talking about. As with the Stones, though, I abandoned Jethro Tull with the release of those tedious, pretentious, prog-style "concept albums" of 1972/3, Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play. I tried to like them, but the tricksy musical formulas had grown stale, the punning wordplay seemed juvenile, and Anderson's trademark modulation from sarcasm to sincerity and back again had passed its use-by date. Above all, as with so many musicians around that time, even the sainted Joni Mitchell, it had all gone rather too "meta", as we would say now; that is, mainly concerned with the travails of success and failure within the music business, and the burdens of fame. I mean, frankly, who cares? I certainly didn't. So Springsteen arrived at just the right time to fill that musical void quite nicely.

I'm not going to write some sort of critique of The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle, other than to say it's one of the most perfect albums I've ever heard. If your idea of Springsteen is dominated by the overheated bluster of "Born to Run", then give "Wild Billy's Circus Story" a listen. If nothing else, it's proof that school dropouts can write poetry. I suppose "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" is the standout track for me, and not just because it arrived in my life when a girl called Sandie had put my emotional life through the wringer.

Sandy, that waitress I was seeing lost her desire for me
I spoke with her last night, she said she won't set herself on fire for me anymore
She worked that joint under the boardwalk, she was always the girl you saw bopping down the beach with the radio
The kids say last night she was dressed like a star in one of them cheap little seaside bars, and I saw her parked with lover boy out on the Kokomo
Did you hear the cops finally busted Madame Marie for telling fortunes better than they do
For me this boardwalk life is through, babe
You ought to quit this scene too...
4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)

A deeper dive...

I was reading Seamus Perry's review in the TLS of some recent books on Sylvia Plath ("Lioness of God", TLS 6389, October 3 2025). In it, he discusses the challenge of "imaginative overload" in some of Plath's poems in Ariel such as "Daddy" –  in other words, the disproportion between the nut of the subject matter and the sledgehammer poetical means deployed to open it – and he mentions Coleridge's criticism of some of Wordsworth's more overblown poems:

Such characteristic imaginative overload vividly exemplifies, in its own way, the phenomenon that Coleridge observed disapprovingly in some of the poems of Wordsworth. He referred to those passages in which Wordsworth deployed “thoughts and images too great for the subject” as “mental bombast”. It is a complaint about getting things out of proportion, not seeing things in their own right, and the moral edge to the criticism is a charge of self- absorption.

At first this struck me as a very apposite criticism of so much rock song-writing: so many power chords, so much screaming, so little to say. But then it occurred to me that you might equally well say that, unlike Sylvia Plath or Wordsworth, the more earnest rock writers are trying to crack some enormous nuts with a very small hammer. They want to tackle the Big Issues – religion, politics, the meanin' of life, an' that – but are imprisoned in a mode of expression best suited to the concerns of adolescence; excess energy, sex, lack of sex, cars, clothes, and oedipal rage, essentially. It's a stance and a style which can only be looked back on with nostalgia, if and when you have outgrown it – we were all wearing L-plates at the time, after all, just "Learning the Game" – but also with a certain bemusement. I hear the opening bars of "Gimme Shelter" or "Brown Sugar" now and a thrill runs down my ageing spine; but then I hear the lyrics, and I think, Really? Rape, murder, slave markets? What were we thinking? (They still make me want to get up and jump about, though...).

John Keats is perhaps the exemplar of adolescent poetic romanticism: what more sexy teen-dream poem is there than "The Eve of St. Agnes"? But had he lived to, say, my age – he would have been 71 in 1866 – what might he have been writing then, in the year of the completion of the first transatlantic telegraph cable? Those years were something of a turning point in Eng Lit, when morally-serious works like George Eliot's sturdy literary keystone Middlemarch were still being set into the fabric of the Victorian Cathedral of Art, [1] but that edifice was under threat of subsidence by a recent turn to "aestheticism", epitomised by the rather more naughty and indeed Keatsian Poems and Ballads (also of 1866) by the Isle of Wight's prodigal son, Algernon Swinburne. Times had changed since the Regency, and were changing again.

So perhaps Keats would have been the eternal adolescent, a Mick Jagger for his times, an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" living legend, swinging in and out of fashion with the passing years? Or maybe a Springsteen, maturing his work to match his age and the zeitgeist, but still happily confined within the limits of his chosen toolbox? Or  – just imagine – might he have produced a late style to compare with Goethe, Turner, or even Shakespeare?

We'll never know, of course. He was just 25 when he died: like Shelley, dead at 29, nearly but not quite a founder member of the 27 Club. But we do have the example of so many poets and rockers who also arrived like blazing youthful comets but then, having failed to die young, went on to leave behind them a long, dusty tail of mediocrity. So perhaps Keats was prescient: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter..."

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
       Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
               Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
       She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
               For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
from his Ode on a Grecian Urn

A bit sappy, perhaps, but not bad for a kid, really. Rock on, John.

Canned Keats

1. Or indeed Hesba Stretton's Jessica's First Prayer. I know, who?, but apparently she sold one and a half million copies of this evangelical tosh...