Walk like a Man Read online

  3. An effect that has been replicated live over the last decade’s worth of tours to considerably less positive effect. Seriously—how many guitarists does a band need? Surely the four or five of Springsteen’s recent tours are excessive?

  4. His distaste for the hype was so intense that, upon arriving in London prior to his first English shows—one of which is documented on the Hammersmith Odeon dvd— Springsteen grew enraged at the billboards announcing “At last, London is ready for Bruce Springsteen!” and the leaflets on every seat at the concert hall. He famously tore down every poster with his picture on it he encountered. He has, since then, gotten considerably more comfortable with hype.

  5. I suppose it depends on how you feel about heavily orchestrated, wall of sound studio products versus live from the floor recordings.

  6. If you ever happen to be at a Springsteen show, clinging to the lip of the stage, you should spend at least part of “Born to Run” with your back to the band, facing out into the audience. The crowd seems to become a living, unified organism, and to witness that while being a part of it is an experience almost religious in its intensity.

  7. Springsteen has, in recent years, tried to replicate that moment with the mass sing-along, houselights on, to “Badlands.” It’s a similar moment, but nowhere near as powerful: for many fans, “Born to Run” is the song, and that moment of a concert is singular and unmatched.

  8. I asked my mother this very question a few weeks ago. I assumed she would say something along the lines of, “Well, you were very mature for your age, and I knew if there were any problems you’d be able to think your way out of them and act responsibly.” Well, she sort of said that. What she really said was “Actually you’ve been pretty self-sufficient since birth and you did whine and cajole a lot!! I just inherently felt that it would be okay and you were capable of looking out for yourself. However, there may have been difficulties that I’m not aware of, and even now, I’m not sure I want to know!” Mom, you might want to skip this chapter.

  9. The t-shirts were captioned “This is not a dark ride”—the t-shirts lied.

  10. I have no idea if “Dan” is his actual name, but I need to use something, right?

  11. The fan in me says, of course, “Cool.” My parental side, though, keeps repeating something along the lines of “Are you kidding me?”

  12. In retrospect, of course, Dan was just a young guy, probably only a couple of years older than we were, working a shitty retail job, with a shitty car that was only barely going to make it to Tacoma, with a girlfriend who was . . . well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

  13. The apartment was a lot like the one I lived in my first year out of student housing in Victoria.

  14. Let’s call her, in the absence of any memory of her real name, Dana.

  15. Especially if you’re a music fan, with a habit of going to shows. On my first date with Shawna, my high school girlfriend, we went to a Bob Dylan/Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers show in 1986. When I was recounting this story to some friends years later, everyone nodded. “Oh, right. 1986. Summer of the Great Pot Drought.” That’s how deeply it runs in the culture: they remembered the Great Pot Drought before they remembered Expo 86.

  16. One of my fondest memories is of being part of such a circle with a group of biker-stoners, watching a pbs special about nasa. But that’s not my story to tell.

  17. Or, if you were one of my friends, you adulterated your homemade cigarettes with weed, and took great delight in toking up in the smoking area between the main school and the industrial ed shops.

  18. This was brought crashingly home to me a year or so ago. I was downtown, catching a bus back to work after a radio appearance. I was smoking a cigarette a good twenty feet from the nearest bus shelter. An elderly woman pushing a wire cart gave me the stink-eye all the way down the sidewalk and all the way into the shelter, where she sat down on the bench next to two nouveaux punks who were passing a joint back and forth. She smiled and talked to them for the several minutes before her bus arrived. I can only assume she came downtown that day to pick up some glaucoma medication. Nudge nudge, wink wink.

  19. This statement is only true, however, if you are not high yourself. Speaking as someone who has flushed more than a couple of grams of weed down a toilet in his life, when you’re high, there is nothing funny about this. Not a goddamn thing.

  20. The plan for our return to Agassiz was so convoluted I can’t actually piece it together. As best as I can recall, Dan was supposed to drop us off at Sue’s parents’ (my step-grandparents’) place in Surrey where we were going to crash for a few hours before getting a ride to the Skytrain to take it to go catch a bus from downtown Vancouver. Though I could be making all that up. I honestly have no idea.

  4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)

  Album:The Wild, the Innocen t & the E Street Shuffle

  Released: September 11, 1973

  Recorded: June–August 1973

  NOSTALGIA IS, by its very nature, bittersweet, the happiest memories laced with melancholy. It’s that combination, that opposition of forces, that makes it so compelling. People, places, events, times: we miss them, and there’s a pleasure in the missing and a sadness in the love.

  The feeling is most acute, sometimes cripplingly so, when we find ourselves longing for the moment we’re in, the people we’re actually with.1

  That nameless feeling, that sense of excruciating beauty, of pained happiness, is at the core of “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy).”

  As a song, it’s an impressionistic wonder, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the carnival life of the Asbury Park pier and beach in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The people in the song are as varied, and bizarre, as some of Dylan’s characters, with the significant difference that some of these people are real: the Latin lovers and bikers and factory girls are types, but Madam Marie, for example, opened her fortune-telling parlor on the boardwalk in 1932 and didn’t close it until 2008.

  The narrator is keenly aware of his time, their time, perhaps an epoch, passing, and he balances a wise acceptance with one last night of desperate resistance. He’s lost his job, and his days of hanging on the boardwalk are coming to an end, but he’s going to go down fighting. He also uses that sense of transience to make one last play for Sandy. You have to admire his moxie.

  This is one of Springsteen’s most gorgeous songs, and it captures that heady combination of joy and yearning. The arrangement is lush and romantic, both a complement and a counterpoint to the longing expressed in the lyrics.

  The song, like the whole of The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, is firmly rooted in both personal experience and the changes in Springsteen’s life. Recording once again at the miserable 914 Sound Studios, Springsteen’s days of sleeping on the Asbury Park beaches by day and playing at night were behind him. He had a band to support, and a career to build: his carefree days were a thing of the past, and it’s difficult not to hear that loss in “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy).”

  Stepping back, it’s also a powerful song on the social level. In 1970, part of downtown Asbury Park was destroyed by fires and race riots. This, after years of slow decline for the once-thriving beach destination. As Springsteen was writing the song, the town itself was dying.

  My one reservation? This is going to sound persnickety, but I don’t think it should be set on the Fourth of July. I understand the richness of context the date provides: the significance of the holiday, the fireworks, the crowds. But it doesn’t work thematically or fit the narrative. The Fourth of July is almost the beginning of the summer. There are weeks of sun and sand and factory girls taking off their pants to come.

  Surely the elegiac feeling of the song is more suited to Labor Day?

  . . .

  I HAVE A PROBLEM with people who can say, with a straight face, that their high school years were the best years of their lives. I have issues with high school being remembered as anything other than a trial by fire, but the assertion also makes me
feel sad, in a strange way. Pitying, even. I want to ask, “If high school was the best part of your life, what have the last twenty years been? How does it feel to live like that, in a perpetual state of disappointment?” But I don’t. I’m too polite.2

  Greg and I have this conversation fairly often. He doesn’t buy into the “high school as the best years” mindset, but he is a guy, it must be said, who left his small town to go to school in Vancouver, who moved to a different small town in the hinterland to get some seniority and experience, and then moved back to Agassiz at the earliest opportunity. He lives there still: as a homeowner, a doting father, and an administrator-teacher at the high school we attended.3

  I can’t wrap myself around spending much more than a weekend in Agassiz, let alone moving back there, but his experience of the town while growing up was vastly different from mine. He was an athlete, a star basketball player on the team that, in our senior year, won the Provincial Boys aa championship. He had an easy, casual way of being that seemed to allow any digs or teenage cruelty (usually directed at his height) to roll off him.

  A lot of what makes his memories of high school so positive, though, are his friends. And on this I agree.

  We were close, all of us. Kevin and Victor from the team. John, almost as big a Springsteen fan as Greg and I were. Brendan, a year younger than me but smarter and cooler and more confident and creative. The girls. Roseanne and Deanna and Karen. Nicole, who was at once my nemesis and competitor and a dear friend: we bickered like a couple from a 1940s romantic comedy. And Jennifer, with whom I was madly in love: a condition I never did anything about, not wanting to risk one of my great friendships.4

  I had two girlfriends in the last few years of high school. Sisters, in fact.5 I dated Andrea for a few months in the spring of 1986. We slow-danced to The Hooters in my family room while the opening ceremonies of Expo 86, the world’s fair in Vancouver, played on the TV behind us.

  At the time, Andrea’s younger sister Shawna was one of my confidantes. She was pretty and sweet with a caustic sense of humor and a slight, charming insanity. I developed a huge crush on her, even as I was making out with her sister at any given opportunity.

  When Andrea dumped me, I invited Shawna to the Bob Dylan/Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers show in Vancouver. It was my second date ever. We kissed for the first time on the beach, a day or two later.6 We were together for two years. And we spent a lot of that time at the beach.

  The beach at Harrison was the focal point of my last few years in Agassiz. Beach-wise, it’s nothing much—just a strip of sand and a man-made lagoon (which locals refer to as “the spit”7), with the miles of Harrison Lake stretching out postcard-perfect to the horizon. The main drag runs along the beach, and across the road is a string of hotels and motels and restaurants, anchored at one end by the “world-famous” Harrison Hotel (locals just call it The Hotel). Also on the main drag was the Memorial Hall, an auditorium the size of a high school gym used for weddings, readings, concerts, and plays. Up a rickety set of stairs, well hidden save for a tiny window, was a room reserved for a couple of summers as the office for the Harrison Beach Patrol.

  Greg and Shawna both worked for the Harrison Beach Patrol.

  And they hated each other.

  Greg thought Shawna was insane, and Shawna thought Greg was . . . well, Greg. I tried not to get in the middle, or to let it bother me.

  The two of them working for the patrol wasn’t the reason the beach became our main hangout, but it was a handy justification. We would spend whole days in the sand, lying on blankets, drinking beer or—more typically—wine coolers, which we could always get someone to bootleg for us from a bar near The Hotel. We’d hide the bottles from the police and the patrol under our blankets, unless the patrol was Greg, who kept his own bottle at the ready for his periodic stops.

  When he wasn’t working, Greg would bring his ghetto blaster, and we’d play Springsteen bootlegs or Tom Petty albums. Some of the stuff we played we called “woman-hating music,” caught as we were in the throes of perpetual teenage heartbreak. We’d watch the city girls walking by in their bathing suits and t-shirts as we sipped our lukewarm booze. We’d walk around the spit, or swim across. We’d sleep in the sun.

  Our gang was a loose, ever-changing constellation. People would come before work or after (or, in Greg and Shawna’s cases, during). We’d sit for hours shooting the shit, making plans, making promises.

  In the evenings we would convene at the home of whoever’s parents were out or, failing that, whoever’s basement rec room was the farthest from where their parents were.

  We had what we thought were epic parties, complete with bootlegged booze and clandestine making out and, later, vomiting in flower beds. In retrospect, these parties were so innocent as to be adorable: an occasional joint might be smoked,8 but there were no other drugs. No sex. No drinking and driving. No fistfights. We were practically wholesome, despite the images of ourselves that we had in our heads.

  It was paradise, really. Every kid should have a summer or two like that.

  And then it came to an end, like the credits rolling on a movie before it was really done. There was no gradual dissolution, not for me. For me, it stopped sharply on the Sunday of the Labor Day weekend, 1988.

  Peter and Shawna had already left town before people started gathering at my house; they were headed—separately—for Edmonton: Peter to university, Shawna to stay with relatives while she did her grade twelve.

  Despite the fact that my goodbye with Shawna had been considerably more intimate,9 it was something that had happened with Peter a week or so prior that really stuck with me.

  That last summer, Peter and I drove a lot. Well, he drove, commandeering his mother’s car for things like Friday night trips into Vancouver for midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Some nights, late, after Shawna had gone home, we’d meet up and just drive. We’d often end up past Harrison, out of town, up the winding road to the provincial park at Green Point,10 or farther, into the hills.

  This was one of those nights. It was a Saturday, or early on a Sunday morning, and we were listening to the radio, not really talking, as we rattled along a logging road. Van Morrison came on, singing “Moondance,” and it was perfect: it was a cloudless night, the moon almost full, the air silver and end-of-summer cool. I turned up the music.

  As we rounded the corner toward the wharf at Hicks Lake I think we both stopped breathing.

  A low mist was clinging to the lake, and when the headlights hit it, it seemed solid, impenetrable.

  We left the lights on as we got out of the car and walked down to the wharf.

  I don’t know what it was—maybe nothing more than angles and physics11—but the lights fell along the wharf with the brightness of daylight until they reached the last wooden slat. Beyond that, there was nothing but grey. Once we were down on the dock, there was nothing in the world but us, the short path ahead of us, and a swirling, silver-grey mystery beyond.

  Everything I had been feeling since that spring, since hearing Springsteen sing “Born to Run” as that broken, melancholy ballad, came to a head. This was the end of things. Nothing in our lives would ever be the same. It was inevitable: within days, we were each going to be stepping off the end of that dock into the grey mystery, with no notion of whether we were going to drown or rise into the clouds.

  I was shaking when we got back to the car.

  We didn’t talk about it, that night or ever. But it was clear, I think, that we had said goodbye not only to each other but to something inside ourselves.

  That awareness made the party I hosted on the Sunday night of the Labor Day weekend both celebratory and sad.

  It was great having (almost) everyone together, but our hedonistic enjoyment of the vodka and lemonade was undercut by the knowledge that this was the last time our group would ever be together in the same way.

  I wish I remembered more of that night; I got fairly drunk fairly early. I remember that Jennif
er was beautiful in a pink summer dress. I remember all of us sitting in a circle on the carpet, drinking and telling stories. I remember Greg passing out on the couch, and Jennifer taking care of him.

  I was sadder than I had ever been in my life to that point. And so happy I felt like I might just explode, fireworks over the town, over the lake, over my life.

  I kissed Jennifer as she was leaving, and I remember the look she gave me, the sadness in her eyes, the love. It wasn’t the first time we had kissed; it was the last time, though.

  Sandy the aurora is risin’ behind us

  The pier lights our carnival life forever

  Love me tonight for I may never see you again

  Hey Sandy girl

  1. There should to be an English word for this feeling, but I haven’t been able to find it. The Japanese call it mono no aware, “the pathos of things.” Which, now that I think about it, would make a great tattoo.

  2. I’m not actually that polite. I just figure, why add to their pain?

  3. That same high school now features a poster of me on their Wall of Fame. It was the first such poster, actually. I’m still working through the levels of irony and mental discord that fact creates in me. I should probably talk to someone. Perhaps on a couch.

  4. If I could give my sixteen-year-old self some advice, it would be this: make your move. Because that friendship you’re trying so hard not to endanger? It doesn’t turn out the way you think it will.

  5. No, not at the same time.

  6. The kiss probably wouldn’t have happened were it not for a friend of my dad’s named Larry. Upon seeing me mooning about the day after the show, he asked what was going on. When I told him the situation, how confused I was, how I didn’t know if she even liked me, he shook his head. “Just kiss her,” he said. “That’s the only way you’ll know for sure.”

  7. Given the temperatures the water reaches in summer (stagnant and cut off from the glacial chill of the lake) and the number of people in it, calling it “the spit” is more polite—though probably less accurate—than calling it “the lukewarm piss.”