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'Walk Like a Man'

In his darkest mid-life days, author Robert J. Wiersema rediscovered Bruce Springsteen, and found rapture. Saturday, a special Tyee event.

Adrian Mack 29 Sep 2011TheTyee.ca

Adrian Mack contributes a regular music column to The Tyee and frequently sits behind Rich Hope.

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Does Bruce Springsteen worship at the church of Bruce Springsteen? Creative Commons photo by: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1988-0719-38 / Uhlemann, Thomas / CC-BY-SA [CC-BY-SA-3.0-de], via Wikimedia Commons.

It was a rough summer for Springsteen fans. June 18 was the day sax man Clarence Clemons passed away, leaving the E Street Band in a still unresolved limbo. As the legend goes, the Big Man had been at Springsteen's side since that blustery night in 1971 when he approached the shrimpy white rocker and told him, "I want to play with your band." Springsteen, all 5' 10" of him, looked up and replied, "Sure, you do anything you want."

Losing keyboard player Danny Federici to cancer in 2008 was bad enough, but Clemons was the most indelible part of the E Street Band after Scooter himself, from the sound he made down to his monolithic physical presence. "In a way I think the E Street Band probably died with Clarence. He was the soul of it," author Robert J. Wiersema tells The Tyee from his home in Victoria.

Clemons' death gutted a lot of people, but it probably knocked Wiersema a little harder than most since he was sitting in a hotel room in Vancouver when the news came in, poring over the first proofs of his book, Walk Like a Man: Coming of Age with the Music of Bruce Springsteen, and realizing that it suddenly wasn't finished anymore. "On a personal level it hit me really acutely," he says. "I was in touch with Bruce Springsteen fans around the world. We were all listening to the same songs, and we were all mourning together."

Wiersema has some unconventional thoughts on the Boss, and well he should. His book, described by publisher Greystone as "a frank, funny, and inventive blend of biography, music criticism, and memoir," was originally called Human Touch. Right there, if you happen to care about these things, Wiersema is cluing you in to the idiosyncratic nature of his enterprise.

'I'm on my own, I'm all alone'

Which brings us back to that sad night in June, when the author gradually found himself listening repeatedly to a solo performance of "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out" from a 1990 bootleg, recorded not long after Springsteen gave everybody in the band their walking papers. Ironically, the funky, number from Born to Run mythologized the origins of E Street itself. But at this point, as Wiersema notes, "He hit those lines, 'I'm on my own, I'm all alone,' and it just broke me. He'd fired the band and he was going it alone. He was in mourning for his old life in those lines, and it resonated, to say the least."

Springsteen's next move was to hire some session players and quickly record the two most maligned albums of his career, Lucky Town and Human Touch, both released simultaneously in 1992. After Bob Dylan and the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen is the most written about musician on the planet, but Bob Wiersema is the only author out there who's going to bat for those two records. Frankly, since every conceivable angle has already been covered more than twice, it makes a delicious prospect out of Walk Like a Man.

"I'll get pilloried for this," he chuckles, "but I think his most important albums are the ones nobody likes. The draw for me is how personal they are. And those two albums, Human Touch and Lucky Town, there are some unfortunate songs on them, but the cornerstones are about a man coming to terms with who he is, and who he wants to be. They're very honest, very intimate, and in a way, that's what the book is for me."

Actually, it's a lot more besides that. Walk Like a Man is a "mix-tape" of a book, divided into 13 parts, with chapters from Wiersema's life married to the Springsteen song that provided the soundtrack at the time, from his days as a misfit graduating from Sabbath and Iron Maiden in Agassiz and on through literary success and parenthood.

Scanning the titles, the author comes off like a fan's fan, and not just some provocateur bent on bashing you over the head with an unlikely opinion. Pretty much all versions of Bruce make an appearance; the street rat ("Rosalita," the swaggering 1973 outtake "Thundercrack," "Born to Run"), the late '70s proto-punk ("Badlands"), and, of course, the over-played, heartland-issue Boss with the "Nautilus physique," as Wiersema memorably puts it, who first made an impression on him 1984 ("Dancing in the Dark," "My Hometown").

The reunited E Street Band is also there ("The Rising"), alongside "Living Proof" from Lucky Town and a potent track from Springsteen's underrated acoustic effort Devils and Dust called "Jesus Was an Only Son." Perhaps most interesting of all, however, is the last chapter, which Wiersema builds around "Atlantic City," from the bleak, 4-track masterpiece Nebraska. "But here's the thing," he says. "It's not Springsteen’s version -- it's the cover the Hold Steady did a couple years ago."

Wiersema goes on to relate a story that should lend hope to anyone who thinks there's no reprieve from the passionless condition of middle age. Standing outside a hotel in Seattle recently, smoking a cigarette, and idly listening to the Brooklyn power-roots combo turning Springsteen's monochromatic folk song into a thumping, technicolour rocker, Wiersema found himself in the unexpected throes of some sort of tactile adolescent flashback.

"It just hit me," he says, with a faint trace of giddiness in his voice. "I had that feeling in my chest, like it was just opening up, and I wanted to laugh, and shout, and cry all at the same time. It was an overwhelming physical response." It's a feeling he hadn't had for 20 years, and it came right at the end of what Wiersema describes as a "dark, depressed period in my life."

He now considers himself a "worshipper at the church of the Hold Steady," and it's nice to consider that the very act of remembering, listening, and writing is what likely propelled Wiersema's book towards such an unexpectedly happy ending. It's also good to know that walking like a man doesn't always preclude feeling like a kid.

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