Hungry Heart vs. Thunder Road
Decoding the mixed messages of Bruce Springsteen
Despite growing up in New Jersey, my first exposure to Bruce Springsteen — back in 1981 when “Hungry Heart” was charting — put me in a decade-long state of Meh toward this rock icon and American treasure. Nevertheless, the song’s second (and most famous) couplet stuck on me:
Like a river that don’t know where it’s flowing
I took a wrong turn and I just kept going.
Otherwise, I thought Bruce sounded like a guy getting punched in the stomach. Meanwhile, Clarence Clemons’ oompah sax, and then the organ bridge, tied it all together into something that sounded to me, ironically, like old-man music.
My outlook toward New Jersey’s most famous son hardly improved in 1984 with the release of his mega LP Born in the U.S.A. After eight years of Catholic school, I had just begun eighth grade at The Montclair Kimberley Academy. While tony Montclair was just a fifteen-minute drive from rougher, urban Paterson, it felt like intergalactic travel to find myself surrounded by kids wearing navy blazers and Docksiders while twirling sticks with nets used to play a shockingly white sport called “lacrosse.” My class culture shock was further compounded by an academic unpreparedness that delivered, on my first report card, three Ds and an F. I had never gotten a D in my life, but that F just atomically leveled my self-esteem. So while hit after hit from Born in the U.S.A. owned the airwaves, my inability to grasp algebra, or digest Julius Ceaser, left me consumed with a dread that couldn’t have felt more at odds with the punch and energy of “Glory Days.” Also, I began to notice a pattern: it sure seemed like some of the biggest bullies and assholes in the state were also huge Springsteen fans. (Decades later, one would be elected governor.)
It wasn’t until 1989, hanging in a dorm room at the University of Connecticut with some decidedly non-asshole Bruce fans, that I first actively listened to Born to Run. Its lead-off track, “Thunder Road,” which opens with that faraway-sounding harmonica and piano intro, drew me right in. Also, this was right when I knew that I wanted to become a writer, and I loved how he tacked one vivid image on to another:
Screen door slams.
Mary’s dress waves.
Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays…
His opera of romantic escape just kept building in a raucous crescendo to its wildly arrogant last line. And by the time Clarence closed it all out with his barnburner of a solo, I had decided that I wanted my life to unfold like a Bruce Springsteen song. Once my graduation gown lay in rags at my feet, I moved to Paris to try to become a writer. Two years later — with a first manuscript that generated enough form-rejection letters to wallpaper a bathroom — being an undocumented worker was starting to wear on me. I tucked my tail between my legs and moved to New York City and the timing of my retreat was perfect. Because once I found a job, I felt certain that I was now living in the most exciting place in the world. During the 2000s, however, the price points began creeping up, while the edgy excitement of Dowtown started to feel, to me, increasingly commodified. That bad dynamic led me to flirt with moving back to France. But it’s a lot harder to move to another country as a full-fledged adult than when you’re twenty-two, and that’s when I began to feel needled by “Thunder Road,” particularly its most famous line:
So you’re scared and you’re thinking
that maybe we ain’t that young anymore.
Not only did my desire to escape not go away, it got so bad that I began to feel stalked by the song. Finally, at thirty-six, I went on an exploratory mission to Montpellier, an insanely old city in the South of France near the Mediterranean coast. I loved the weather and its web of squares lined with bars and cafes where I began to converse with local artists and creatives; after three weeks, I decided to make the move. It’s a much longer story how that plan collapsed, although a recovered addict pointed out that I may have been trying to “pull a geographic” — attempting to fix my problems with geography instead of making internal changes. She had my number and that’s when I first realized that “Thunder Road” doesn’t offer a single clue about what might come next. The protagonist tells the nameless girl to “climb in back Heaven’s waiting on down the tracks,” which now just sounds like a flowery way of telling a girl that you don’t have a condom. Similarly, “Born to Run” ends with this plea to Wendy:
Someday girl
I don’t know when
we’re gonna get to that place
where we really want to go
and we’ll walk in the sun.
Can an escape plan be any more vague than that? Because not only does this guy lack a five-year plan, he sounds like a guy who, six months down the line, wouldn’t be able to pay the light bill. And that’s when I finally understood “Hungry Heart” as a cautionary tale; anyone can escape, but if you’re not actively running toward something else, something specific, you might just end up like the song’s protagonist — glued to a stool in that bar down in Kingstown again. Seven years later, when I finally did move out of New York City, I felt like I was more actively running toward something else in Beacon. Then it all came full circle when I joined a “bootcamp” at The Beacon Music Factory where we played the entire Born to Run LP. (Here’s a clip.)
Lately, however, I’ve been hearing, once again, that most famous line from “Thunder Road.” Only it’s no longer nudging me toward geographic escape. Perhaps old mindsets or remnant fears about continuing to evolve are my real town full of losers. There’s nothing wrong with being like a river that don’t know where it’s flowing, BUT! If you know you’ve taken a wrong turn, and then you just keep going, well, that might be the only unpardonable sin toward yourself. Besides, I’d so prefer to take up residency in “Thunder Road’s” second-most famous line:
Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night.
All these years later, it’s still one of my favorite songs but it’s not perfect and nothing is. Because, like the cow that kicks over the bucket, that song’s very next line is deplorable. What a thoughtless and atrocious thing to say to someone, and I’ll bet Bruce himself would concede that now because he is so clearly a guy who has evolved. And that’s one of the reasons I love him.
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