Thanks to all who came to The Fillmore Silver Spring!
Storyteller walks into a bar.
By Desson Thomson
Okay, a musician, and a soon-to-be rock star called Bruce Springsteen. This particular bar – in May of 1973 – is the Childe Harold and the three nights he plays there are his first appearances in Washington DC. On those nights, as he will do everywhere for the rest of his storied career, he shows Washington that he’s not just a great musician, he’s fundamentally a storyteller. Just like the raconteurs of old who from the dawn of time entranced listeners around fires on the African savannah or huddled in animal furs in caves or igloos.
With a voice resonating with gravelly conviction, and backed by a band seasoned with more than a decade of bar gigs, this charming native son of Freehold, New Jersey, with a lower lip that extends out like a bottom desk drawer, doesn’t just tell a story; he voice-paints a vivid canvas. It’s a quintessentially American boardwalk universe of bars, dance halls, amusement parks, and busy streets. And he fills it with characters based on real ones he’s seen around town, or shot pool with, or loved or hated, or laughed with; characters like Jack the Rabbit, Weak Knee Willie, Sloppy Sue and Big Bone Billy. And with a whispery empathy that can induce tears, and a performative energy that never flags, he seems to sing from deep within the soul of all of them.
He plays a song called “Wild Billy’s Circus Story,” and it’s a masterpiece of scene detail. A big mama called Missy Bimbo who sits in her chair and yawns, while a man-beast lies in his cage sniffing pop-corn … A strong man Sampson ….
And the song just gets better by the verse.
And circus boy dances like a monkey on barbed wire
And the barker romances with a junkie, she's got a flat tire
And now the elephants dance real funky
And the band plays like a jungle fire
Circus town's on the live wire.
He plays three 40-minute sets each night at the Childe Harold, for which he and his band will make the princely sum of $750.
Of course, as we all know, that’s just the beginning. Lauded by Rolling Stone as “the embodiment of rock & roll,” with more than 140 million records sold around the globe and more than 70 million in the United States, Bruce Springsteen is now one of the world’s best-selling artists. He has won 20 Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, two Golden Globes, and a Special Tony Award. With the exception of a 10-year absence, Springsteen and the E Street Band have toured consistently ever since, with global tours that have been the highest-grossing of their respective years. Backed by the E Street Horns and the E Street Choir, Springsteen and the E Street Band's 2023 European dates alone sold more than 1.6 million tickets — and earned widespread acclaim as some of the best shows of the band's career, receiving praise from Billboard as “the greatest show on earth.”
Looking back at his life, with the help of his autobiography, ‘Born to Run,’ and amazing biographies like ‘Bruce’ by Peter Ames Carlin, not to mention stories he shared on his ‘Springsteen on Broadway’ show, it’s clear that Springsteen was always going to be a storyteller. How could he not, growing up in a home with one kerosene stove to warm the whole house, and a former pool hustler for a father, who worked the line at a Ford factory in Edison? He so disliked life with his parents, and the exigencies of school, he spent much of his childhood living with his grandparents who let him have the run of his own life – and his imagination.
His grandfather often asked young Bruce to help him pick through trash cans for the throwaway parts of radios that he’d piece together and sell for five bucks to migrant workers in Monmouth County. And if home – or quasi-home life – wasn’t fuel enough, he also had to contend with Catholic life. He lived in close proximity to St. Rose of Lima’s where he had to make up acceptable sins at confessional that he “spouted on command … bad enough to be believable …. But not too bad.” And he served as an altar boy who “sucked in incense while assisting our grumpy 80-year-old monsignor before a captive audience of relatives, nuns and early rising sinners.”
By the time he turned 20, he was a guitar player on the streets of Asbury Park and, as he wrote in his autobiography, “I held four clean aces. I had youth, almost a decade of hard-core bar band experience, a good group of homegrown musicians who were attuned to my performance style and a story to tell.”
Boy, did he ever.
He shared even more of those stories in Springsteen on Broadway, his one man show, ranging from the two slain veterans who inspired “Born in the USA,” to his mother's battle with Alzheimer's, to his heartbreak over the cutting down of the copper beech tree that was such a totemic part of his childhood.
I came to DC, fresh from the UK in 1975. I didn’t know a thing about Springsteen until I fell in with a circle of fans at American University. With the first three albums on perpetual rotation – and God, wasn’t it great when records went round and round, and the music filled rooms, instead of bip-bipping digitally in your ear? – I hooked into the magic. And although, technically, I never did meet any girl combing her hair in a rear-view mirror, or sitting barefoot on the hood of Dodge, I would have sworn on a bible that I did.
I loved how those college kids, all from Jersey suburbs and Long Island, listened to “Thunder Road” or “Badlands” or any song of his, and threw their heads back and sang along. It was preacher and choir. Okay, preacher with a bandana hanging from his jeans. But he sang their lives for them and in fact, he sang for the lives of anyone who had a crush unrequited, who partied too hard, who should have studied harder in school, who wished they had that souped up car that just roared by – you know the deep desires and disappointment embedded in every rock and roll song.
Tonight, a big throng of musicians from this musical DMV neighborhood will do our best to revisit, and light performative fire under, those stories. And the stories we already carry inside us will hum along, too – and that’s not just for us onstage; it’s you in the audience too. So, wrap your legs 'round these velvet rims, and strap your hands 'cross our engines, and let’s run together for one glorious night.
