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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
My parents got divorced. I was high on mushrooms. My country was attacked. Bruce was there.
Jul 31, 2002 |
April 5, 1978
Joey Sweeney is 6 years old. His parents are divorced. This is the '70s, so lots of people's parents are getting divorced. For some people, this will mean that they go through the rest of their lives pushing and pulling with those they can find that will love them; for others, it will make them hypersensitive to the complex web of human relations that result after one person stops loving another. And it's no secret: These people will inevitably be drawn in by the emotional movie montages that are the stuff of pop and rock music.
Even at 6 years old, Joey Sweeney sees the power in this: You can use music in your brain to make all the awful things that are happening to you somehow romantic and character-building and, better than all of this, cool in a way that will, one day at least, show up all the kids who, even this early on, are calling you a faggot and a sissy. Through this rock music, thinks Sweeney, you will show them. It will add a romantic dimension to your life by making it explode with light and music; it will add layers to what is now bare. It will cover things up. It will make boo-boo better.
In the service of this, while his mother is working as a nurse assistant and his father is off God knows where, he spends his time in his grandmother's musty basement where his two aunts -- 14 and 16, respectively, and really young enough to be his sisters -- have been equipped with a cheap record player, hand-me-down hippie tapestry and all kinds of girly stuff that is still a crazy mystery to him. (Such a wacky age range of aunts, moms and grandmoms, he will find out later, is a strange blessing when compared to the rest of middle-class America, but for now, Sweeney doesn't know that, having landed from space in the white ghetto of Philadelphia where he is 6 and his mother is 22.)
Among the records that get played down there as a soundtrack to the girls' primping and strange, codified innuendo that is totally over his head, sometimes even now, is "Born to Run," the breakthrough 1975 album by Bruce Springsteen. And though Sweeney doesn't realize it now, "Born to Run" is as much a part of the aunts as the aunts are a part of "Born to Run": Sandra and Lisa Tuno hang out on the same corner every night. They wear white high-top Converse, make out with boys and get in fistfights with other girls. It is only a matter of months -- 18, 36, whatever -- before one of them has a child of her own.
Whether they know this or not, they've taken Joey under their wing, letting him fall asleep at their secret beer parties, sing with them into a hairbrush and say funny things for them in his pipsqueak voice that will not be going anywhere, up or down, for quite a while. In return, he is allowed to wear Lisa's black-and-white baseball jersey that is silk-screened with the cover art for Springsteen's first album, "Greetings From Asbury Park."
Feb. 25, 1981
Monica from Salmon Street is my babysitter, and although I do not have the words for it in the winter of 1981, I am in love with her. She talks to me like a human being, allows me to curse mildly and watch television right up until I fall asleep. She has also introduced me to the college radio station that plays music that I do not exactly understand. Monica has noticed early on that I am almost helplessly drawn to pop music and as it turns out, she is too. Together, we watch "Solid Gold" and regale each other with stories about this new thing called MTV, which we have seen in glimpses at distant relatives' homes but will not really be able to watch for at least seven more years. For this is Philadelphia in the early '80s, and a deadlocked, lazy union and a string of ever more ineffectual mayors has prevented the entire city from getting cable TV -- a cultural shortcoming that will dog us as a city for most of the decade and arguably even beyond.
With cable -- and the electric music it transports -- an ever-more distant hope, our only contact with the rock 'n' roll world is through magazines (which, as a 9-year-old, I can neither afford nor find) and the rock radio monster that is WMMR. In the pallid wasteland of early '80s mainstream rock, there are few choices -- especially in a working-class town like Philly that, in a very self-conscious way, almost immediately (and wrongly) associated punk and new wave with clueless rich kids, homosexuals and college students, three species of people who could not possibly be farther away from the intellectual and spiritual short-stack world view of Fishtown.
All of this is to say that, in 1981, Bruce Springsteen still reigns supreme as the past, present and future of rock 'n' roll to all Philadelphians who fall under his stoned and beautiful FM gaze. To so many of us, the man is rock 'n' roll, and the local media make no secret about desperately wanting to claim him as our own; for every time he brought the house down at the Stone Pony in Jersey, the next night, he was probably playing some place down here in Philly, where everyone knows at least someone who saw him play for five hours straight before sending the crowd home in ecstatic exhaustion, each adrenal gland drained of its last ampoule of sick rock throttle.
Springsteen is a local shaman -- even Monica tells a story of her girlfriend driving up I-95 one day, only to be accosted by a van containing Bruce (bearded, rasta-cap era) and his boys, asking her if she'd like to pull over and take some "tea" with them. From Monica, I infer that "tea" is some sort of drug, although it feels lame to ask what exactly it is, and instead I concoct in my head some substance that falls somewhere among pot, hash, heroin and red wine. By the time I reach my 20s, I subconsciously will try to uncover this mystery drug every weekend, always falling short of the sweet, languid high I can only imagine Monica's friend enjoying before committing to a lifetime of servitude to the memory of that very thing.
