On Monday afternoon, I finished 33 Miles Around New York City, a memoir about my eccentric, fumbling, bumbling journey into a modern Mystery School, and sent it off to three editors. Within the hour, I had a warm and enthusiastic reply from an editor at Rutgers University Press, where, 40 years ago, I sent my first book manuscript. It had been 20 years since my third book with RUP had been published, but having spent the previous three weeks conjuring memories of my boyhood and young adulthood in New Jersey, I felt an almost magnetic pull to send the manuscript like an arrow to New Brunswick, which strangely and wonderfully had been my “portal” to that Mystery School.
The second story that I had told in my memoir was of a warm July night in 1973, when I had gotten myself into a classic 17-year-old drunken misdemeanor. My memory of that evening opened with me flying no-handed down Main Street of my northern NJ town on my emerald green Schwinn 10-speed, singing Bruce Springsteen’s wildly ecstatic anthem, “For You,” whose Whitmanesque refrain ends: “And your cloud line urges me/And my electric surges free.”
The song was fresh in my head because just a week before that bike ride, my friend Dennis Barone had taken me to see Bruce at Max’s Kansas City in Greenwich Village. Sitting in the dark little (nearly empty – there were about 30 people in the whole club) upstairs room of Max’s, we had no idea how historic that show would come to be. It was Bob Marley’s first American appearance and arguably the last Springsteen show that would be poorly attended, for in November, with the release of The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, the world began to take notice of the kid from Freehold and his incredible E Street Band.
In 33 Miles Around NYC, I also tell how in 1982, I had mailed Bruce a copy of my first book, 25 Walks in New Jersey, with an inscription thanking him for his inspiring storytelling in song. I had a half dozen other Springsteen stories left untold, one of which was when Dennis and I, a little over a year after that Max’s show, ran into Bruce in a rehearsal room at Dartmouth College, playing Dueling Banjos on a baby grand piano with his keyboard player Roy Bittan.
Coming home from a bike tour yesterday afternoon, I had an email from Spotify inviting me to listen to Renegades: Born in the USA:
Two dreamers, born in the USA. One friendship, made in America. Join President Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen as they share a conversation for all America. Listen to Renegades: Born in the USA right now.
I was very keen to listen, for another celebrity about whom I told stories of crossing paths with was “the One” – Barack Obama. Having moved to NYC just two months after Obama assumed office, and living (in Prospect Heights) and working (in Red Hook) directly under the flight path of Marine One, the President’s helicopter that made frequent touch downs at Pier 11 at Wall Street, I had a feeling that this guy was following me. That was only reinforced when twice, out with bike tours in Manhattan, I rode right into the middle of the Presidential motorcade.
In my memoir, I reflect on what led me in November 2016 to publish a book entitled Masquerade: Barack Obama and American Destiny. I would love to think that I told that story as Bruce Springsteen would tell it – with passion, with idealistic fervor about my subject, and with a very fundamental intuition born of experience about the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Ever since 1973, when I sat in a Greenwich Village club but six feet away from that sweating, gyrating, grinning, wild rock ‘n roller from Freehold, I had been listening to, loving, learning to play and sing his Jersey-and-America-born anthems of freedom, of commitment, of redemption. You might say that Bruce Springsteen was this Jersey boy’s hero.
Though I fronted lots of bands – unplugged string bands, not Fender Telecaster-driven powerhouses like the E Street Band – and wrote 100s of songs – mostly anthems – I chose a meek and unglamorous path of scholarship and teaching, rather than rock and roll celebrity. I stopped listening to Springsteen or at least buying his records sometime in the late 90s, but a snapshot of any year of my life would surely include me with my sonorous old (1972) Yamaha FG-170 acoustic guitar, belting out “Thunder Road” or “Born to Run.” The last Springsteen shows I attended were with my daughter Jordan and then girlfriend (now wife!) Cathline at MetLife Stadium in 2016 (I think there were 55,000 people in the stadium; we sat in the third to last row) and Springsteen on Broadway in 2018.
Heroes inevitably disappoint us. The golden images we build up of them are equal parts real aspiration and inspiration and illusory fantasies. With his tin-eared Jeep commercial and just the inevitable impossibility of being a demi-billionnaire global celebrity, the Boss has taken some rare (and perhaps unfair) hits of late, but Bruce had my faithful allegiance. . . until yesterday, listening to the first episode of Renegades.
Barack Obama is no Bruce Springsteen. In fact, he is the very antithesis of Bruce Springsteen. He radiates no authenticity, no grit, no genuine warmth and empathy and easy good humor and generosity – all of which are the bedrock upon which Bruce’s mega-success as both a bandmate and a performer rests. Lacking anything but the most carefully crafted coiffured and cultivated faux charisma, Obama has throughout his political career cynically traded on the aura of true greats – Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis – to steal some of their genuine charisma. His Higher Ground Productions media company trades exclusively in this strategy; Renegades is just the latest and most ludicrous performance of what for Obama has been a lifelong masquerade of hollow, feigned “greatness.”
I don’t wish to spoil any delight you might have listening to Renegades, so I will offer just this one observation, as something to bear in mind should you listen. Notice the quality of the storytelling, the vocabulary of memory – places, people, events, feelings – employed by these two “friends.” You will have to get past your first impression that this is a narcissistic pageant of male posturing, softened with the warm patina of the Boss’s fingerpicking major chords and the clink of glasses filled with single malt Scotch. You will no doubt wonder about the actual depth of so fleeting and convenient a “friendship,” and why it is that Springsteen does 90% of the talking, except when Obama is reading long excerpts of manipulative soul-stirring speeches that were written for him, not by him. You will perhaps find yourself a little uneasy every single time that our former President says “folks,” while Springsteen never once uses that telling generic, instead, lacing his free and easy conversation with the same salty and sweaty and tragic and glorious reverent image-making that makes him the greatest troubadour of our era.
“Born in the USA” is this Higher Ground Productions subtitle, a phrase that grates on my Jersey-bred bullshit detecting sense as surely as does “A Promised Land.” Obama ain’t no Lincoln, he ain’t no Springsteen, and he sure as the New Jersey Turnpike ain’t no Moses. If you want to see behind the masquerade that is “the One,” drop me a note in the comments section below, and I will email you a PDF of my Masquerade book. It’s a little outdated now, but it still gives what I believe to be a reliable map to the soul of this man whose masquerade heroism was always a carefully stage-managed sleight-of-hand.
Bruce, I don’t know if you ever got that copy of 25 Walks that I sent to you care of Columbia Records 40 years ago. Today, in 2021, as Spotify prepares to drop the next Renegades podcast, I am sending you this blog post, to say God bless you for your truthfulness, your democratic spirit, and your extraordinary songsmithing. But please, my fellow Jersey boy, read my Masquerade and see how you have been hoodwinked by a smooth poser in chameleon costume. Maybe then, you could write an anthem that would call his mendacious, masquerading bluff.
Hi Dr Dann, I'd appreciate that pdf of Masquerade: Brarack Obama. Grateful indeed. Thanks for this great post!