"We're riding out tonight to case the promised land
Oh-oh Thunder Road oh Thunder Road
Lying out there like a killer in the sun
Hey I know it's late we can make it if we run
Oh Thunder Road sit tight take hold
Thunder Road..."
"Thunder Road", Bruce Springsteen
downloading Bruce by the bucket-full tonight...
and writing emails left, right, and center...
connecting and re-connecting,
to those who sit by idling,
waiting with their own aching hearts,
for some reason to think i might start thinking
i might start driving myself somewhere else...
late in my high school years and then early on
into college, i pledged allegiance to the church of bruce...
but then i discovered other songs,
my heroes of rock of the late '80's and early '90's,
i found paul westerberg and the replacements,
the pixies,
the pogues, to name a few,
and in all those loud, angry, frustrated, shambolic, clever songs
i kinda gave up on bruce for awhile,
i began to see him as a relic,
of my early years,
i began to see him as a relic,
of my dirty old hometown,
just one more thing past its expiration date.
but the past only gets further away,
it never disappears from the rear view, and tonight,
in the midst of my seemingly bottomless heartache
just four and a half months after losing my wife,
the very center of my life,
i search through my collection for some small comfort,
and out of nowhere,
i find myself searching for none other than bruce.
i may have turned away from him, many years ago,
in supposed wisdom, but
there he was all the time,
waiting for me, for a night like this one.
i play songs from across the spectrum of his catalogue,
and some hit harder than others...the saxophone solo and the
long moans at the end of "jungleland" hit the spot, as does the
bitterness and regret of "darkness on the edge of town"...but
nothing hit the spot tonight like the live version of "thunder road"
from the "live 1975-1985" collection.
there is such a crushing, bittersweet glory in this performance of this song..."so you’re scared and you’re thinking that maybe we ain’t that young anymore," shit yeah...i listen and think, yeah, it's one thing to listen to those words as a smart-assed eighteen year old, another thing entirely to listen to them as a forty-one year old widowed father of three children...
"show a little faith there’s magic in the night"...i showed a little faith many years ago and found magic in an early winter’s night,
and for fifteen years i lived a life i couldn’t have even dreamed of,
i flew so high i would have laughed at the thought of it
had you told me of it beforehand.
well the dream died and there's just no denying the fact that i have many long, lonely, dark and heartbroken nights ahead of me,
but tonight, for the first time since this rain started falling down upon me,
listening to my old friend bruce,
i not only think, but believe,
in my heart,
that even in this late hour,
it’s not too late...
tonight, in this late and drunken hour, i believe,
in my heart, that someday i will make it through to the other side,
that somewhere, on the other side of all this sorrow and torture,
there’s another night in some distant future lying in wait,
and i will once again manage to show a little faith,
and i will once again be rewarded
with some form of magic that i cannot even envision tonight
i face a long and difficult journey, no doubt,
and i have accepted the fact that i will never again be the same:
i sat by helplessly and watched as my dream come true died in a hospital bed, and after living through that,
my innocence died, too,
but yeah, for real, i believe,
that i’m gonna make it.
maybe i never will, but why not believe,
because i see now that there’s magic in the night,
in this very night,
i see magic, now, in front of my eyes, tonight!
i’ll get there, yes i will, yes i will.