The Boss, My Father and Myself

"Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere" was another chapter in the long history where my relationship with my father was indelibly intertwined with Bruce Springsteen.

I couldn’t quite tell you when the first time I heard Bruce Springsteen on the radio. I do know, that as a child of the 1980s, Born in the USA was inescapable, and if anyone asked me as a kid who I listened to, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and Van Halen were the answers. Now, when I say listened to, that means about a half dozen songs total between the three, because I didn’t pay close attention to music outside of that until middle school.

As I grew older, that would change. MJ would fade from my scene, but Springsteen grew larger within it. A football teammate, Pat Macek, created our highlight video in 1997, and he put the classic Glory Days on there for our homecoming game. The match was lit. I suddenly realized I wanted to listen to so much more from the man who I’d only known for three songs up until that point: Born in the USA, Streets of Philadelphia, and Secret Garden (from the Jerry Maguire soundtrack). I began buying his cassettes (playing CDs in your car in the 90s was a nightmare) and listening often enough that I started wearing some of them out.

In 1999, the E Street Band reunion tour with Bruce was announced, and tickets went on sale the morning of my high school graduation party. We had to go around and pick up catering and balloons, but my dad said he’d get the tickets if I ran the errands. DEAL. I drove to all the different places, and then came back and picked him up from Harmony House. Kids, once upon a time, we had to stand in line at record stores to purchase tickets to concerts. Shocking, I know! About two weeks before the show, we were having dinner at the kitchen table with a little TV in the corner that had the local news on, as always, and they said the show was postponed from its original date on August 17th to September 8th. That change, disappointing at the time because it meant that I’d be attending after I started college and had to worry about classes in the morning, took on a whole different meaning soon thereafter.

My father died on August 17th, 1999.

Three weeks later, on September 9th, I was at the Palace of Auburn Hills with one of my best friends, Jeff, instead of my father. It was both the first time I’d gotten to do something that made me smile since my dad had passed, and yet, when Bruce was singing Factory, I burst into tears. My dad had worked the factory life, all the way until the end, and Bruce’s lyrics, about his own father, resonated so deeply with me.

Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain
I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain
Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life
The working, the working, just the working life

End of the day, factory whistle cries
Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes
And you just better believe, boy, somebody’s gonna get hurt tonight
It’s the working, the working, just the working life

I recovered afterwards, but that was an emotional gut punch. Since that night, I’ve always declared that it was the best concert I’d ever attended, but I’ve never had just one reason I’ve stuck with. Was it because they played for three-and-a-half hours without an opening act and tore the house down? Was it because it was my father’s final gift to me? Was it the emotional connection with the lyrics of one of the songs and my life? I still can’t answer that question.

Since that night, a lot has transpired, including the release of Bruce’s memoir, Born to Run. He spent seven years writing it himself, determined to tell his story his way. By that point I had religiously listened to the music of Bruce Springsteen for a quarter century, and I still was amazed at how much I did not know. The lyrics to Independence Day made it clear that Bruce’s relationship with his father was rocky, but the memoir filled in the lines with a depth that we did not know. It was extraordinarily brave of him to commit that to paper.

I don’t claim to have any special relationship with any artist, but after finishing Born to Run, it felt clear to me that there was some sort of cosmic link between our lives—fathers who weren’t able to express their love in a healthy way when we were young, who worked in factories to try to ensure a good life for their children, depression and anxiety that really grabbed ahold of us when we were young adults—and I could not fail to note that Bruce’s struggles, the ones that also birthed Nebraska, happened right as I came into the world. It was at that same time, months after I was born, that right after having a baby boy, my father was laid off from his factory job during the 1982 recession, a job he would not regain for close to three years. Looking back with the perspective of history, I think it was just a dark time for many people, in so many different ways, and that darkness was represented in fashion (dark brown had a far too lengthy moment), in world affairs (resumption of Cold War violence and arms buildups), and, more directly, in Springsteen’s music. From 1978 through 1982, his songs took on a moroseness both direct (Darkness On The Edge Of Town, Drive All Night, Open All Night) and indirect (lyrics for The River, Johnny 99, Reason to Believe, Highway Patrolman, Nebraska, Atlantic City, Downbound Train, and more). They are haunting, gripping, incredible art. I wish I could say that my belief in a cosmic connection meant I’d contributed the level of art to humanity as Bruce Springsteen has, but I never reached the same levels of creative brilliance.

That was an admittedly long prologue to set up Tuesday, my 44th birthday, when my wife Andrea and I went to see Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere at the theatre. I’d been very excited to see the film because it starred the two Jeremys, Strong and Allen White, and Stephen Graham, all of whom are fantastic actors. Moreover, it had the blessing of Bruce himself, who was out promoting the film everywhere, it seemed. I expected a great film. What I did not expect was how deeply director/screenwriter Scott Cooper would delve into Springsteen’s soul, the depression that overwhelmed him because of his inability to form good relationships, the anxiety he felt about making the leap into superstardom, the hurt that unresolved issues with his father from when he was a child left him with. It’s one thing to read about the alcoholic, mentally unstable father, and quite another to watch Stephen Graham bring those dark forces inside of Douglas Springsteen to life.

Without giving away too much, there’s a scene where Bruce is very vividly reliving all of these feelings, flashing through different sequences, and then Cooper slows to a shot where the adult Bruce gazes upon his father from twenty-five years ago, and the younger Douglas turns to him from his bottle at the table. Their eyes lock, and Bruce says, “I just wanted to hear your voice again,” before walking down a hallway, and I lost it. I stifled the sobs that were pushing against my chest because I didn’t want to disturb anyone else in the theatre. Instead, tears flowed down my cheeks and I shook in my seat as I held back the urge to completely fall apart. For anyone who has lost a parent or both of them, as I have, there’s things that you hold on to as long as you can, so the loss does not feel so permanent, so final. You don’t want the hole inside of your heart to be so vast, and you cling to whatever you can to avoid it growing. And yet, because time and memory are fickle, you can’t keep them, especially if the memories are not preserved on some sort of physical media. They slip away to a buried subconscious.

Over twenty-six years have passed since my father left this Earth, long enough now that I do not remember the sound of his voice. When White, as Springsteen, uttered those six words, the emotional force was so violent that any time I’ve thought about it since has brought me to tears all over again. I struggled so long and so hard as a child to feel my father’s love, and it wasn’t that he didn’t have it inside of him, but he didn’t know how to demonstrate that love. He wasn’t a bad person, he didn’t drink or smoke or hit my mother or any of those things—he was just incapable for well over a decade of being able to process his emotions in a healthy fashion. That meant that he set goals that I could not possibly meet, and my failure to meet them led to punishments that a child could not comprehend the reason for. His mother, my grandmother, who spent a lot of time watching me as a child since both my parents worked, frequently intervened to tell him he was being unreasonable, but it didn’t stick beyond that moment. The cycle repeated itself often, leaving both of us unhappy and me avoiding him as often as possible.

This was all compounded by the fact that I was a very high IQ child who was experiencing developmental issues—ADHD that wasn’t diagnosed because it wasn’t recognized by the psychiatric world at the time, a speech impediment that kept me from saying my own name correctly, and bouts of anger or depression, which a child shouldn’t have the way I did. We know now that anger and depression are often tied to ADHD and other conditions, but again, the diagnostics for these problems were in their infancy when I was showing the symptoms. I was simply considered willful, which amplified all of the issues my father had in how to communicate with me, or set realistic rules and goals. Sprinkle in some of the horrible advice proffered by people like James Dobson¹ and instead of being treated for my issues, I was disciplined repeatedly. It took years of counseling together and a full year he had to spend at home from two hip replacements for us to finally bridge that chasm between us, for him to see that I wasn’t a rebellious child and for me to see that he did love me quite a lot.

I’m so grateful that the final five years of his life were ones where I could look back not in anger, or fear, or disappointment, but with happiness. All I ever wanted growing up was his love and for him to be proud of me. When he died, I knew he was proud of me, because he was beaming after my senior awards night right before graduation and told me how thrilled he was. He volunteered to work the all-night senior party after graduation, too, which was the sort of school event he usually had not volunteered for. It meant so much to me how many of my friends and classmates came up to me during that night to say how nice my dad was. When he died later that summer, the support I received was incredible. And in the aftermath of it, for a large part of the subsequent year, it was Bruce Springsteen’s music of that time period, written in his own depression, struggling with the memories of his father, that I turned to so I could grieve properly.

The feelings of loss never disappear. I’ve cried more about my father in the last forty-eight hours than I have in years. Deliver Me From Nowhere hit something deep in my heart, reopening all of the complex emotions that marked our relationship, and adding yet more threads to the connection between he, I, and Bruce Springsteen.

1. Dobson’s Dare to Discipline was released in 1970, and The Strong-Willed Child in 1978, three years before I was born, and circulated throughout churchgoing families in America, of which we were one. While I cannot ask my parents if they read it, my father’s methods of discipline were far more severe than his mother said he’d ever grown up with.

Some examples from Dobson’s writings include:

• Spankings should be anticipated as important events, because they provide the opportunity to say something to the child that cannot be said at other times. It is not necessary to beat the child into submission; a little bit of pain goes a long way for a young child. However, the spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely. After the emotional ventilation, the child will often want to crumple to the breast of his parent, and he should be welcomed with open, warm, loving arms. At that moment you can talk heart to heart. You can tell him how much you love him, and how important he is to you.

• Children are naturally inclined to rebellion, selfishness, dishonesty and greed.

• From about [the] age [of] fifteen months, they begin to engage in “willful defiance”. The toddler, “in his own innocent way” is vicious, selfish, demanding, cunning and destructive.

• Children have a raw desire for power and control. They begin power games in earnest between 12 and 15 months of age.

• Challenges to parental authority must always result in punishment; in young children, physical punishment.

• Mild spankings can begin around 15 months. They should be administered by a neutral object, a small switch, paddle or belt; rarely with the hand, which is an object of love.

• If a child cries for more than five minutes after corporal punishment, he or she should be given more of the same punishment.

• Corporal punishment is not a last resort. No other from of discipline is as effective as spanking. Pain is a marvelous purifier.