Let’s address the kiss first, shall we? What WAS with that anyway? There is something undeniably homoerotic about the image of a well built white man sliding beneath an even more well built black man to receive a smooch right on the lips. It’s conceivable that there was tongue involved. Devoid of context, there is really only one explanation.
Even within context, Occam’s razor would tell us that these guys are expressing the love which dare not speak its name. As a more or less normal 13 year old boy, I couldn’t do much to defend against that notion. And as a more or less normal 13 year old boy, I did not think it really mattered but I also thought it was an expression of something else. It was the union of two ends of a musical spectrum that encompassed country music to jazz and everything in between.
The jazz came from Clarence Clemmon’s uncle, who play him King Curtis albums and got him interested in playing saxophone. He could have played anything he wanted because who is going to tell a man that big no? Clarence did play football and would have had the opportunity to turn pro if it weren’t for an automobile accident. Instead he became a musician.
Bruce Springsteen had already committed to being a musician by the time he had his motorcycle accident. Although he was not at fault, he took the blame. It may have been due to his long hair or his defiant attitude, but Bruce never stood a chance. Whether it was this experience or a life growing up in the decaying factory towns of New Jersey, Springsteen understood the plight of the poor, downtrodden, and broken hearted people in songs by the likes of Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash.
The two found each other in Asbury Park and found in each other musical partners. Around themselves, they formed a band of outstanding musicians and a community of devoted fans. And it is clear that this group of devotees are a community that one can join simply by immersing oneself in the music. For a more or less normal kid in the suburbs of the 1980’s, the sense of belonging to a community, any community, was a precious experience.
I first heard Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in 1984, the year “Born In the USA” came out. Of course there is no way that I could understand the lament of a Vietnam Veteran unable to make it in the world, but I could understand feeling isolated and alone. I was, after all, a pubescent boy. I could also understand that these guys rocked when everyone else synthesized. It was a liberation.
Years later, I stood on a stage and lead a hundred and twenty guys in singing “Cadillac Ranch.” That was a camp song where I went to camp, and I think that says something extremely positive about the place. The 120 voices swelled around me, and I understood how Bruce could go flying and jumping all over the stage for two or three hours at a time, night after night. If there had been an extraordinarily large black man there, I would definitely have laid one square on his mouth.