Something about a white t-shirt and tight blue jeans

We really did learn more from a three minute record* sometimes

“I ain't nothin' but tired

Man, I'm just tired and bored with myself

Hey there, baby, I could use just a little help”

Forty years ago last month (June 4, 2024) Bruce Springsteen’s blue-jeaned ass, and the album cover it was attached to, hit the shelves at the neighbourhood record store. We’d been Dancing in the Dark for a month, though Courtney Cox hadn’t been “randomly” plucked from the audience and hopped on stage with The Boss yet. The video, and the six other Top 10 singles from the album would come later, sprinkled thoughtfully into the zeitgeist over the course of the next year.

Springsteen does not stand out for me that summer, not in the way other things do. It’s 1984, and when you’re 12-almost-13, there’s not a lot to do. Cable TV hasn’t arrived yet, which doesn’t matter because MuchMusic hasn’t either. You go to the mall and you go to the movies, which both provide you with the chart-toppers that summer: Footloose, Purple Rain, Ghostbusters.

“Messages keeps gettin' clearer

Radio's on and I'm movin' 'round my place

I check my look in the mirror

Wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face”

If you’re me, you read a lot too - Sweet Dreams romances and Sweet Valley High. You have the hubris to borrow both Forever AND Wifey by Judy Blume, and you look the librarian straight in the eye while you do it. But you hide them under the bed when you get home, where they stack neatly with Smart Women, which you stole from your stepmother’s bedside table.

Because your grandparents “watch” you during the day, you develop a lifelong appreciation for the Guiding Light.

During that time, the Jersey boy would tour the world, and land in Metro Detroit again in the fall of 1985, just in time for me to start high school. While not Born in the USA, I’d come pretty damn close - only a few hundred yards and an international border lay between me and the Motor City. I’d spent the last school year in Northern Ontario, where no one, it seemed, knew anything about “the States” or even cared very much. They played ringette for God’s sake.

“There's somethin' happenin' somewhere

Baby, I just know that there is”

So I was back in the border town I’d been raised in, reclaiming my di-troyt accent and feeling like the main character in my own misunderstood-teen-tries-to-fit-in novels. Starting high school. By this time, my musical appreciation had expanded; I was a wanna-be Madonna, a Durannie, a true Top 40 fan. (though oddly enough, I missed Kate Bush, that time around)

Concerts, big concerts like the Born in the USA tour, were often as inaccessible as they are now. Living next door to Detroit only meant the big names were geographically close; you had to afford tickets, get tickets, figure out how to get there. Sometimes it was easy to forget Detroit was a whole other country; wanting to go to concerts as a kid wasn’t one of them.

Someone had to take you. Lacking older siblings (or boyfriends), that meant a parent. And at $85 a ticket, someone had to pay. Again, a parent. And for a superstar like Springsteen, someone had to get the tickets in the first place.

So my mom, who I was usually convinced did not understand me at all, surprised me and let me camp out on the sidewalk 8 hours before tickets went on sale. And later that month, she drove my brother and I 45 minutes outside of Detroit to sit with us in the nosebleed seats of a football stadium for a 3 ½ hour concert. It was awesome.

In There Was Nothing You Could Do, released in May, Stephen Hyden braids his own memories of The Boss and and Born In… with a deep dive into what the album meant, then and now, for music, for America, and for Springsteen himself. So far, it’s a pleasant romp down memory lane for me, but it gets me wandering through the four decades between then and now. 

“You sit around gettin' older

There's a joke here somewhere and it's on me

I'll shake this world off my shoulders

Come on, baby, the laugh's on me”

Ten years later, I’m back at the Pontiac Silverdome, again with my mom, but with slightly better seats. It shouldn’t have been easier to get tickets to Paul McCartney than to Springsteen, but it was - no lining up required. Same overpriced soft drinks, different pop “icon hopping around on stage. Another t-shirt.

Fun fact: there are only 7 years in age between Sir Paul and The Boss. I don’t know if Hyden gets to that in his book - the early pages focus on contrasting Bruce and Dylan (Bob, not Thomas). One’s a Boomer, one a little older, both multi-talented musicians who’ve captivated multiple generations. One sang of peace, the other of War. Both stadium superstars, capable of bringing down the house well into their golden years.

And both, if you can believe it, are touring in 2024. No, really. Careers spanning six decades is the way writers describe it.

“You can't start a fire

Worryin' about your little world fallin' apart

This gun's for hire

Even if we're just dancin' in the dark”

The Pontiac Silverdome, that stadium where I saw both those musical giants is gone now. For a while in the early 2000s, it was the kind of place Springsteen himself might have written about - a broken-down once-was, relegated to hosting BMX rallies and parking lot swap meets. You can imagine the video, an older Bruce, still in a white t-shirt and faded Levis, sitting in the empty stands, the sun streaming through the holes in the roof as he ponders his past and peers toward the future.

Walking away in disgust when he returns once more to find an Amazon fulfillment centre has taken its place. Sometimes irony is painful.

It’s hard to resist feeling perpetually adolescent when our childhood heroes are still out there, hero-ing. And others are being decidedly un-hero-like. Too old to be young, too young to be old. When do we get to be the grown ups in the room? Do we even want to? Sometimes it’s just easier to sit back and enjoy the show.

*No Surrender, Bruce Springsteen LIVE album, 1986

Embedded lyrics from Dancing in the Dark, Bruce Springsteen Born In The USA, 1984