Come On In and Cover Me

I've been listening to Springsteen nonstop this week, in part because Born in the USA just turned 30 and I've been having fun rediscovering it. I remember my friend David Chubbuck bringing the cassette over to my house and playing it, and me unfolding the lyrics sheet and trying to grasp it. Later, I saw the video for "Glory Days" over my friend Jason's house and I - at eight years old - asked why everyone looked so happy. It was obviously a sad song. Didn't anyone see that?

When the Springsteen fever bit me for real at 18, it wasn't the first one I went to. I'd just moved into a super depressing rooming house; for the first time I was alone in the world, and I was trying to find music that could help define my experience and help me understand who I was and why. I got Nebraska based on my friend David Polselli's recommendation and fell in love with it. Stark, bleak, depressing love. That was an album I took with me on rainy nights, wandering around suburban Quincy and trying to make sense of things. After that, it was Tunnel of Love - which I felt spoke more directly to my experience: my own reticence to be in love and my complicated relationship with my then-boyfriend. After that, I stole my Mom's cassettes of Human Touch and Lucky Town, and had reactions to them. I liked Human Touch, hated Lucky Town. Those opinions have since reversed and mellowed.

It was only then I discovered I actually had the record of Born in the USA. Remember back then, classic rock radio was still playing a lot of those hits, and I thought I'd be sick of them then. But the best thing about LPs was that it was hard to skip around, so I listened to the whole thing, side A and side B ... and I realized I'd never really listened to it all. I absorbed it all in context for the first time, and removed from the Brucemania of 1984, the music was allowed to stand by itself. That old revelation, that happy-sounding songs could be sad, recurred, and "Dancing in the Dark" became sort of a mantra to me. It's all about futility and desperation but everyone saw it as being about dancing with Courtney Cox in a pixie cut. "I'm On Fire" was both grim and erotic, a melange of feelings I'd experienced but was never able to contextualize. There's such simmering menace in that song, and it was a thing I understood. The meaning of these songs keep changing and mutating for me as I grow older (and become more ready to grow young again). I remember singing "Bobby Jean" at karaoke as my friend Josh was was preparing to leave for California; that final "good luck, goodbye" is tragic when it's sung.

It's fun for hardcore Springsteen fans to dismiss Born in the USA, with its 80s synths and sudden mass audience and the easy-to-grasp distillation of themes Springsteen had cultivated for over a decade. (In a way, Springsteen would do that again with the later Magic ... but that's another story.) They hate that "Cover Me" was written with Donna Summer in mind. They hate that people who hadn't even heard of Springsteen before this album flocked to it, and the conception that it happened because Springsteen sold out. But none of that matters, not really. What matters in the end is the music, and how it hits you. How it helped me realize, in its way, who I was when I was hearing it, and how it continues to inform me about the world at large, and the one inside me.