Rockin’ with the Boss

By ART CULLEN

“So what are you doing in Chicago?” the young lady smoking behind the bar asked Saturday night.

We were there to see Bruce Springsteen at Wrigley Field.

“Are you in an alternate reality?” she asked. “Really? Springsteen? Is he still alive?”

In the flesh, age 73. Me and the boys, old roomies from college days, rolled up our sleeves and gathered to take in the spectacle of 40,000 aging White mainly working-class folks who grew up in places like Downers Grove dancing around the Friendly Confines.

Our band has been together 46 years playing air guitar. We try to reconnoiter every summer and act like we’re 19. Good thing they had seats for our bad hips and lower backs. It was hot on the concrete at Addison and Clark. Wrigleyville was packed with the mature in Harley boots, cuffed jeans and trucker’s wallets.

The Boss was furiously at work, a little speck on the stage for those of us in the upper decks of right field. It looked on the big screen like they dumped a bucket of water on his shirt, he was rocking it so hard. They all sweated and sang along with him.

From the bathroom you could hear the crowd above the E Street Band chanting:

“Oh, baby this town rips the bones from your back

It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap

We gotta get out while we’re young.”

You blast out for freedom on the road, in a Cadillac, with nocturnal love that can deliver you to some alternate reality.

So yeah, I guess that’s where we were, where a Coke and a bottle of water cost $16. It sort of goes with the narrative of a corporate system chewing people up in wars and fleecing them at home. The irony was inescapable.

The White working class gave up on Barack Obama as “Born in the USA” backed him up. It could have been the same crowd crushing in on Donald Trump at the Iowa State Fair. You should listen to the interviews that my younger pal John Russell conducted at a Trump rally in Erie, Pa., which can be found at The Holler online. They vote against endless wars and a steady decline from good union jobs to barely making rent. If you listen carefully and disregard the T-shirts, you can hear riffs from Asbury Park in the echoes.

There’s a disconnect going on, where we play the same song but hear it two different ways. War mongers tried to say that Born in the USA justified the horror of Vietnam. So he doesn’t play it anymore because people just can’t hear him through the din.

We laid the rails and broke the sod and fought your wars, and this is what we get for it? Nowhere to go and nowhere to run.

You can escape for an evening under the lights and sing right along to anthems of aspirations or dreams. You’re with old friends who understand your language like few others can. That’s real. We’re the last of the Boomers, babe. It is difficult getting up from the lawn chair by the bucket of cigarette butts, but we can still remember how rock and roll was supposed to change things. Sentimental fool.

When you see things as they are, as they believe they do (and they are not all wrong) in Erie and Ottumwa and other forgotten places, you can come to believe that you might as well just tear it down or drain it. That appears to be where we have arrived. That’s not what the Viagra rockers were singing along to word-for-word. They came together around a distinctly American message of freedom and denial all mixed up. There are common themes to hang onto if we go fast and don’t get waylaid.

She complained that she couldn’t get in the bar down the street where she said all sorts of degenerate things happen. Sure we wanted to check it out. It was nearly 11 p.m. so we kept on moving down the back streets trying to find home. We took a wrong turn but we got there. There’s strength in numbers when you bring people together. That’s what happened. That’s why we were there.

Art Cullen, managing editor of The Progressive Populist, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in his day job as editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa. His book, “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper,” was recently released in paperback.

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2023

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