Bruce Springsteen Forum

“Eight minutes. That song is almost eight minutes long. And that’s how long it took George Floyd to die, with a Minneapolis officer’s knee buried into his neck. That’s a long time. That’s how long he begged for help and said he couldn’t breathe; the arresting officer’s response was nothing but silence and weight. Then, he had no pulse. And still it went on.

That goes out to Seattle, to New York, to Miami, to Atlanta, to Chicago, to Dallas, to Philadelphia, to Washington, to Los Angeles, to Asbury Park, to Minneapolis, and to the memory of George Floyd. May he rest in peace.

As we speak, 40 million people are unemployed. 100,000-plus citzens have died from COVID-19, with only the most tepid and unfeeling response from our White House. As of today, our black citizens continue to be killed unnecessarily by our police on the streets of America. And as of this broadcast, the country was on fire and in chaos.”

One of the darkest songs in the American canon.
The video of the death of George Floyd is a 21st cnetury visual lynching. And “Strange Fruit” was written on the lynchings of black Americans that took place after the Reconstruction and into the 20th century. It was recorded in 1939 by Ms. Holiday, and written by Abel Meeropol in 1937. It’s just an incredible work. We remain haunted, generation after generation, by our original sin of slavery. It remains the great unresolved issue of American society. The weight of its baggage gets heavier with each passing generation, and as of this violent, chaotic week on the streets of America, there is no end in sight.

We need systemic changes in our law enforcement departments, and in the political will of our national citizenry, to once again move forward the kind of changes that will bring the ideals of the Civil Rights movement once again to life and into this moment.

We have a choice, between chaos or community. A spiritual, moral, and democratic awakening, or becoming a nation fallen to history, with critical issues we refuse to or couldn’t address. Is our American system flexible enough to make — without violence — the humane, fundamental changes necessary for a just society? The American story, our story, is in our hands. And may God bless us all.

Stay safe. Stay well, stay strong, until we meet again, stay involved. And… go in peace.

“I’m going to start out by sending one to the man behind the Resolute desk. With all respect, sir: show some consideration and care for your countrymen and your country. Put on a fucking mask.”

“It is the responsibility of those who lead us to inhabit the nexus where our national, political, and spiritual lives meet.

The United States of America is ultimately a nation of souls. In times of historic calamity, and tragedy, it is necessary for our leaders to administer not only to our social needs, but to the union of souls that is our common citizenry. To tend to our wounds, both physical and psychic, and speak to the strength and fears of our national family.

May you lay your personal burdens down for a moment and join us in the next hour for some music that I hope will lighten those burdens as well as administer, ever so slightly, to your good soul.

Now, I had another show prepared for broadcast this week, on this strange and eventful summer. But with 100,000-plus Americans dying over the last few months, and the empty, shamed response from our leaders, I’ve been simply pissed off. Those lives deserve better than just being inconvenient statistics for our president’s reelection efforts. It’s a national disgrace.

So instead of celebrating the joys of summer, we will be contemplating our current circumstances with the coronavirus, and the cost that it has drawn from our nation. We will be calculating what we’ve lost, sending prayers for the deceased and the families they’ve left behind.”

“One of the most heart-rending aspects of these deaths is that the virus has stolen from us our rituals. Our funerals, our wakes, our house meetings with family after the burial. Our ability to stand by our loved ones, to touch them, to kiss them as they pass, to look into their eyes and let them physically know how we loved them — this is the cruelty of this disease. To say our last goodbyes to our loved ones by phone, and then to return home, alone, to an empty house.

It is a heartbreaking and lonely death, for those afflicted and for those left behind to pick up the pieces.

Now, when my father died, my close friends and my brother-in-law, we stood in the graveyard, in the midst of our large family, and we took shovels and we buried my father ourselves. It meant a great, great, great deal to me. And it’s a memory I’ll cherish as long as I live. The importance of that ritual. And to stand with my loved ones on the burying ground.”

“He is warning us that Judgement Day is coming. The election is only months away. VOTE! God help us all — vote, before it’s too late … American citizens, unite. Your country needs you, your countrymen need your care and compassion. And this is our moment. Until we meet again, stay safe, stay strong, mask up! And go in peace.”

“We got something special for you tonight. We’re gonna try something out, first time. A buddy of mine has a new album out called ‘Western Stars’. And the movie’s gonna come out, I believe it’s Oct. 25. Ya gotta see this movie. It’s one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen in my life. We’re gonna give you a little recycled version of the trailer to the movie. Audio trailer, anyway. This is something called ‘Tucson Train'”

I loved and love summer. As a child I became summer. I melted into the hot tarmac, I rolled myself into a sand ball at the beach. I slid beneath the murky water, ducking summer dragonflies at the Freehold pond. I sat in the tops of trees, feeling the summer breeze prickle over my freshly cut Saturday-afternoon flat-top.

I’d stand with my bike ‘neath the August sun by the roadside, watching the locals on the road crew lay down the steaming blacktop, that beneath their rakes and shovels and heavy equipment curled and flattened like hot licorice. And when the big men and the machinery moved away, I waited, and I wanted my wheels to be the first to touch that steaming, virgin roadway.

In the evening twilight, I sat glued to the curb with a Pinky rubber ball in my hand, waiting for my best friend Bobby Duncan to finish his dinner so we could engage in epic gutterball tournaments into the night. And then later with scissors we’d poke holes into the lids of glass mason jars and invade the vacant lot across from my grandmother’s front porch to capture our nightly quota of the evening’s fireflies, just to leave them twinkling til dawn on our night tables. May they rest in peace.

We’d play Home Free, running from pool of light to pool of light from our neighborhood street lamps, until we were called in, as the neighborhood’s porch lights went dark, by my grandmother’s voice. And there, my sister and I would sleep on opposite sides of the bed, wrapped between hot, sticky sheets, on pre-air-conditioning, humid, Jersey summer nights.

There were evenings that, if it got hot enough, my Dad showed mercy on us, and he’d pack us into the Olds and set off in the darkness on Route 33 for the 20-mile ride to Manasquan, where on those nights the heat and the humidity of inland Freehold became too much to bear. We’d sleep in our pajamas, our bed blankets stretched out on the cool sand, enjoying the ocean air of the Manasquan Inlet.

Then at early light, like magic, we’d be carried back into the house, into our bedrooms, sandy-haired from our beach sleep, and I’d watch the sun splash its morning gold over the western wall of my room. And soon I’d smell my mother’s coffee drifting up through the floor grate that opened to my room. I’d lie awake and listen to my parents leave for work.

As a teenager, I would stay up all night — as a crucible to pass for three or four nights of the summer, as the house sank into a midsummer-evening silence. I’d be camping out in my room. I’d have my flashlight, I’d have my Japanese transistor AM radio that I was listening to. I would take 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. walks around the town of Freehold, when the streets were mine!

At night and only at night was I king of the streets of Freehold, New Jersey, unhassled by the day’s rednecks. Any time they’d see some longhair pass the barbershop they’d come running out, shaving cream half on their face: “Hey! Are you a girl?”

That was bullshit I didn’t need in those days.

So in the middle of the evening, I’d return home — 3:30 a.m., I’d arrive into the kitchen, I would build myself an almighty peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich, pouring it on. I would then retire to my room to wait for my favorite song to be broadcast by the WMCA Good Guys. One summer, my favorite song was Lonnie Donegan’s “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (on the Bedpost Overnight?)”!

In my bed, in the summer I’d be reading all my old copies of Surfer magazine. Did I surf? No. But the magazine held two very essential elements, surf or not. I was deeply interested in the perfectly tanned surfer girls in bikinis, and in the advertisements for Fender guitars.

There they were, in the fresh ads, the true objects of my desire: three white Fenders — a bass, a Stratocaster, and a Jaguar, each as white as the Hawaiian sand, lined up next to one another, each more desirable than the next… but taken as a group? My god. The perfect trifecta.

Now, I spent relatively short quality time with the pictures of the surfer girls. But I spent hours in my bunk, in my room, salivating over those guitars. I’d drift off to sleep with the magazine open on my chest, and then riding the summer breeze from the west came slipping through my open bedroom window, a sound I swear that was coming from some perfect beach thousands of miles away …

There is nothing like the sea at night. When the water is slightly warmer than the air, even though the air is humid after a 95-degree day. God, I love swimming at night. It is all darkness and mystery. It is the void.

And it must be done naked. Clothes at the waterline, please. Do this, and my pilgrim, you will become cleansed. Never will the evening air, or a kiss on the beach, or a dry towel ever feel so good again. The walk to the car will be filled with starlit grace, and you will never forget it.

And once you hit the water, you will be covered in the blossoming beauty of your youth, no matter how old you are. And whoever you’re with, you will always remember them.

Bruce Springsteen:
“Today we will be featuring the music of my red-headed Jersey girl, and her great albums – ‘Rumble Doll’, ’23rd Street Lullaby’, ‘Play It As It Lays’, and whaddya say we get started?”

Patti Scialfa:
“We recorded on analog in his garage, and I felt we had a really organic approach to the record — which I think was really fitting for the material. Mike Campbell was very sensitive to how I wrote the songs — I would always play him the song on the instrument I wrote it on, and he basically copied that muted triplet on the guitar”

Bruce Springsteen:
“So Patti made this album while pregnant, while rushing home to cook some asshole musician dinner”

Patti Scialfa:
“I will never do that again!. while he sat his fat ass on the couch and watched television all night”

Bruce Springsteen:
“I can hear her voice in your beautiful song, ‘Young in the City’. That is just some incredible lyric-writing and a beautiful classic New York City urban arrangement. Those city songs of yours remind me of who you were when we first met. You were a stone cold city girl, nineteen years living in the city!”

Patti Scialfa:
“I loved New York City, I had a massive love affair with the city”

Bruce Springsteen:
“I used to steal up there and sit on a park bench, waiting for my gal to meet me with a six-pack of beer”

Patti Scialfa:
“This is true. We got engaged on that park bench”

Bruce Springsteen:
“We’ve been concentrating mostly on Rumble Doll; for your next two records you took a bit of a turn. You embraced more southern soul and R&B influences, even some blues. You had a new producer”.

Patti Scialfa:
“23rd St. Lullaby was Steve Jordan”.

Bruce Springsteen:
“Let’s move to ‘Valerie’. This is a very heavy song in our history, because my recollection was, I was visiting you in your apartment in New York, probably when I shouldn’t have been visiting you in your apartment in New York”

Patti Scialfa:
“We were actually rehearsing…”

Bruce Springsteen:
“Under the guise of rehearsing for Tunnel of Love, and teaching you the guitar parts. But anyway, somehow you got around to playing me this next song, and I remember thinking, this woman can write, and it totally made me twice as scared as I was anyway.”

Patti Scialfa:
“That’s so sweet!”

Bruce Springsteen:
“It was like, Whoa. I think I saw your talent for the first time outside of your voice”

Patti Scialfa:
“I remember that very … explicitly”

Bruce Springsteen:
“And these were all written for you at the time when love feels very dangerous. Yes it did. Yes, it did. So — let’s play it. When I pass away, just take these [‘Spanish Dancer’] lyrics and slap ’em up on my headstone! That’s all they need to know about me”