Long Read: ‘Wherever there’s a cop beating a guy’

This story was first published in New Frame

Last month, at the age of 71, Bruce Springsteen released his 20th studio album, Letter to You. The opening track, One Minute You’re Here, is a reckoning with mortality, with the “Big black train comin’ down the track,” a reckoning that means an affirmation of the life that remains.

Springsteen survived the extraordinary fame into which he was thrust in 1984 with the massive global success of Born in the USA. He didn’t go the way of Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Cobain. His band didn’t explode like The Clash in a brief but brilliant supernova. He didn’t end up like the Rolling Stones, with a steady supply of blues riffs but lyrics and a posture that slowly became a caricature of the vital young band that burst out of England in the 1960s. Mick Jagger might be 77, but he didn’t seem to ever move beyond being that young man, hungry for life, in tight trousers.

Springsteen’s artistic integrity survived too. Many of the characters in his best-known songs from the 1970s and 1980s were young men, often in cars, trying to get out of dead-end jobs in dead-end towns. That movement towards the future took the form of operatic bombast and the promise of some kind of redemption in the rushing, crashing wall of sound of Born to Run. But there were also more elegiac songs, like Racing in the Street or Stolen Car, in which the movement towards the future was either movement into a brief moment of exhilaration in an otherwise bleak landscape, or into uncertainty, risk and darkness.

As he aged, the characters in Springsteen’s songs moved from being young men in cars to men in the home: fathers and husbands. And now, on his recent album, they have become men approaching the end. Men who – as they outlive many of the people they have loved – only see those who have left in their dream life, and who prepare to take their own place in the dream life of the people they will leave behind.

Given the Catholic inflection that has marked all Springsteen’s work, despite his alienation from the church, it might not be too much of a stretch to suggest that, perhaps, his 20 albums can be counted out, like beads in a rosary marking the arc of life, of the moments that give it weight, consequence and meaning.

Finding Elvis and Steinbeck

In his 2016 autobiography, Born to Run, Springsteen returns to a decisive moment in his understanding of the possibilities of popular music. In 1956, at the age of six, he saw Elvis Presley’s first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. It was, he wrote, “a moment of light, blinding as a universe birthing a billion new suns, there was hope, sex, rhythm, excitement, possibility, a new way of seeing, of feeling, of thinking, of looking at your body, of combing your hair, of wearing your clothes, of moving and of living.”

But he has also often spoken about how, later on as a young man, he saw John Ford’s 1940 cinematic adaptation of John Steinbeck’s great 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath, on television. “The humanism in that,” he later recalled, “was something that touched me deeply, deeply. And I thought I want some of that in my music.” He would go on to read Steinbeck’s novel and listen to The Ballad of Tom Joad by communist folk singer Woody Guthrie, who composed the song in 1940 immediately after seeing Ford’s film in New York.

Steinbeck’s novel is about people who have been indebted, forced off their land – made poor – and are now migrants moving in their rattling cars on Route 66 from Oklahoma through Texas, across the mountains of New Mexico, down into the Arizona desert and on to California in search of work. The Joad family, and others travelling with them, suffer loss, endure indignity and encounter contempt at every turn. It’s a hard, hard road increasingly held together by women. The distance that must be traversed is marked by misfortune, hunger and corruption and violence from guards, cops and vigilantes.

Steinbeck’s novel and the same is true of Ford’s film, is not just an empathetic account of impoverishment. When the Joads finally reach California and find some work in the orchids, they are mercilessly exploited. The police support the bosses and there is violent conflict.

‘An army without no harness’

As the novel builds to its climax, Jim Casy, a preacher, concludes that there’s “an army of us without no harness” and commits to support the organisation of the workers. They make progress in organising their settlement, getting to the point at which “[f]olks is their own cops”. But then a strike is broken. “[T]hey drove us like pigs. Scattered us. Beat the hell out of fellas,” he tells Tom, the Joads’ son.

The developing unity among the migrant workers from Oklahoma is seen as a threat by the landowners in California. Two cops identify Casy as a leader. One calls him “a red son-of-a-bitch,” the other crushes his skull with a pick handle. Tom grabs the pick handle and with four blows beats the life out of the cop who has just murdered his friend. He finds refuge in a cave hidden by a mound of blackberry bushes.

In the cave, during the last conversation with his mother, Ma Joad, before he flees, Tom wonders why they can’t “[t]hrow out the cops…work together for our thing – all farm our own land”. Ma Joad asks, “What you gonna do?” Without hesitation, he answers, “What Casy done.” She replies, “But they killed him.”

“Ma,” Tom explains, “I have been thinkin’ a hell of a lot, thinkin’ about our people livin’ like pigs, an’ the good rich lan’ layin’ fallow, or maybe one fella with a million acres, while a hundred thousan’ good farmers is starvin’. An’ I been wonderin’ if all our folks got together.”

Again, Ma Joad tells her son that this is the road to death. He replies, “Well, maybe it’s like Casy says. A fellow ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one – an’ then … Then it don’t matter. I’ll be ever’where – wherever you look. Whereatever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there.”

An implicit politics

But Springsteen’s work didn’t begin with this kind of militancy. There was, of course, an implicit politics from the start in the songs about working-class men trying to move out of the life to which they had been consigned. By 1978, that had become clearer in Darkness on the Edge of Town. In Factory, a lament for lives crushed under the weight of work, he sang:

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.

The implicit critique of society continued on Nebraska, the stark acoustic album released in 1982. The characters on this album are often working-class people who have fallen on hard times and see no way out. In 2020, Springsteen said that he had drawn considerable inspiration for the album from radical historian Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which was published in 1980. But while the album certainly invokes Zinn’s respect for the people usually as invisible to art as they are to history, it has none of Zinn’s focus on organisation and struggle.