Speak, Memory

Bruce Springsteen at the Pechanga Arena, March 25, 2024

When I was a child, I spake as a child, and one of the things I spake about constantly was the greatness of Bruce Springsteen. My beloved cousin Jeff, then newly arrived from New Jersey, had brought the glad tidings about Bruce’s existence to California with him when he moved into my family’s home, and he also had the grace to take me, his tiny cousin, to see him at the Berkeley Community Theater that summer, and from that moment on I was gone…real real gone.

And so I spake, blah blah blah, and for some reason Bruce spake back to me, despite that fact that his songs about cars and boys and petty crime and so on had less than nothing in common with my life. I made it my mission to see him as many times as possible and to proselytize about him when I could, until one day the world woke up to my genius opinions and I, unaccountably, lost interest.

So. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, and then it became time to put away childish things. For a brief period there, I like to think, both Bruce and I became as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal, we spake with the tongues of men and angels. But then we drifted apart, Bruce and I, and he became, like Winnie the Pooh and Catcher in the Rye, beloved but more or less unnecessary. And then, like the dream that’s a lie that he spake of in “The River,” he may have become something worse. That is to say, as he became bigger, I grew smaller, until I was just like a speck on a dandelion and he was the entire sun – and it turns out I don’t like being just a speck.

Anyway, I became a professional music writer and it was my job to explore other worlds, other communities, other chords and other artistic visions…indeed, the last time I saw Bruce was back in the 20^th century, just a few days after seeing Nirvana kill the entire world dead with Smells Like Teen Spirit. At the time, I wrote the following sentence: “It was like they’d just poured pure goddamned gold down my throat.”

And then a lot of time passed, and many things happened, including the unexpected death of my cousin Jeff, in 2011, such that when I watched a bit of Bruce’s performance on a Hurricane Sandy telethon on television, I wept so hard I broke a blood vessel in my eyeball. Because of that, I thought Bruce was off the table for me for life. But then just last week my friend Ann asked me if I would come down to San Diego to see Bruce with her again – the first time having been when we were toddlers (lol). That was forty-three years ago – the exact same amount of time, it turns out, since Bruce himself had played San Diego, and at the same arena; a fact that truly gives one pause, for surely the only other work of artistry that people will return to over the years like that is the Nutcracker Suite.

In the interim, there has been so many loves loved, so many jobs lost, so many degrees earned, so many kids raised, books written, and thoughts thoughten…not to mention so many books read, movies seen, and French deconstructionist philosophy ingested and internalized, all of which might change one’s way of thinking about anything. But most of all, there have been so many new inventions! When Ann and I last saw Bruce at the San Diego Sports Arena, there were no smart phones and no internet. Ann told me that on our way to that concert we got in a fender bender that she got in big heck over later, but this is an event I have no memory of. And since we didn't have cell phones, I wonder how we dealt with it? I can’t imagine how we even bought the tickets: presumably we stood in line at one of those BASS outlets or something.

Also? There was also no email, no Instagram, no streaming services, no Spotify, no giant screens broadcasting LED-videos behind acts...probably (though I'm not sure about this) not even any cordless microphones.

But here's the thing. At the show this week at the San Diego Sports -- I mean the Pechanga – Arena, Bruce didn't utilize those things. He played his show just like the shows of old, i.e. with a 17 piece band augmented at times by some flashing lights coming out of the overhead fixtures, and with amplifiers, of course, and a teleprompter, but otherwise, the effects were exactly the same ones he used at the Berkeley Community theater, i.e. sitting down on the stage and throwing his arm over Clarence's son's shoulders, pointing at the drummer Max to making him hit the drum dramatically...and by strategically turning up the house lights, so everyone could see each other shriek.

That was it...and it was more effective than the floor-to-ceiling graphic blanket one is enveloped by at the Sphere in Vegas, than Taylor's update on tableaux vivant, than the visual pageantry one is confronted and surrounded by at most arena rock concerts. There was one song I especially liked, "Death to My Hometown" during which the band marched up front with a cavalcade of acoustic percussion instruments – it was very Arcade Fire, I thought, but then I thought, wait a sec: Arcade Fire got this from HIM, not the other way around.

("You know what this song needs?" I said to Ann, and she nodded: "Yes. Bagpipes." We'd just been watching a video of her step-grandchild's band, Ally and Mia, which features that instrument.)

By this juncture, of course, Ann and I were in something of a trance. When I walked in that arena, I was very daunted by the prospect of 3 hours-worth of songs, most of which at this point, I don't even know.  I had thought that I might be bored by Bruce, or saddened by him, or, the worst prospect of all, horrified by all those aspects of his show which might now seem contrived and artificial to someone of my age: that it would be so cringe, as the kids say.  But I wasn't any of those things. The new songs engaged me, and although I was aware the entire time of the artifice, the corn-factor, that had so wowed me as a child, even that had somehow managed to gain in intensity until it became something else entirely. And though I did get sad, at one point, it was only because he deliberately asked us to be sad, by invoking our deceased loved ones. He might as well have just said the name aloud: Jeffrey Irwin Kaye.

And so I cried, but only for a short while, maybe less than a minute, and everyone else did too, because we are all old and therefore all perpetually in mourning for something. So briefly, we wallowed, and then we stopped, in order to be able to make new memories to access in the future. I originally didn’t think that a nostalgia-drenched show would make for a good memory, but then I remembered the Nutcracker Suite again, and how it hits different when you go as a child and when you go as a parent or grandparent with your child, and how all of those ways are excellent.

Later, Ann said she just liked watching everyone around us lose their shit for so long, and she is right: it is impossible, I think, to be unhappy when you are surrounded by pure, wet, actual, tangible, joy. This is true, but mostly I was just in a trance of remembrance, and what I was remembering wasn't Bruce, or even Jeff, it was things that had gone down for me in this exact arena, back when I was a rock critic who covered San Diego: when I was, as George Orwell once put it, "hated by large numbers of people, the only time in my life when I was important enough for this to happen to me." God, they hated me here, they hated me so much that someone down here once wrote a song making fun of me, it was called "Aroma of Gina Arnold." One time I was in this same arena, at a Guns n’ Roses concert, awaiting the headliners who were notorious for two-plus hour waits, and to keep people excited the camera people would pan the crowd and get girls to lift their tops. (Supposedly this would earn these women better seats, or even backstage passes, but I doubt this ever actually occurred except to actual porn star plants.) Anyway, when the camera got to me, I lifted my middle finger and the whole entire crowd booed me.

Even outside the arena, the old worlde encroaches…

Oh my god, did that really happen? I honestly think it did. But the thing is, at the time I was mortified but now I am proud. And like I said: it was pre-cell phone, pre-Only Fans, pre-Cam Girls, pre-everything...it was a simpler time, and the San Diego Sports excuse me Pechanga Arena still reeks of it. Literally: it smells the same, and not in a bad way, in a good one. The unreconstructed nature of the building itself, from the wretchedly laid out parking lot to the incredibly narrow aisle that circles the floor and that you have to sort of shove through to buy a t shirt or a hot dog, from the bathrooms to the seats to the sight lines, it is all absolutely old fashioned and all the better for it, in the same way that an airplane from 1966 -- the year that this arena was built – would have more legroom than one built today. It is smaller, and rounder, and shallower and more comfortable. And it is so, so, evocative. At the time I used to review things here, we thought of it as a big old dump, but by comparison to the shining and cliff-like tiers of the Chase Center and its ilk, it is, I am not even kidding you, paradise.

Anyway, all I can say now is that going to see Bruce Springsteen was honestly the first time for a long time that I loved my past, that I felt happy about that era, that my youth didn’t feel toxic and wasteful. Instead it felt funny and cool again, and as if I had lived a life worth living. All those ephemeral moments I spent at concerts, all my goddamned opinions…yeah, so maybe in the end, they weren’t of any real import, but as I watched the audience glugging down Springsteen’s wares, I saw – finally – something else of value contained in the experience, in those experiences, of which my life has so many. Those moments of ecstasy that we all experience at such concerts, they aren’t just nothing, because – and here’s the thing - they don’t ever really go away. They color every part of us, they inform our dreams and our future. Maybe the even make us into better people.