Night Beat Part 9

dreams and wars.

bruce springsteen's america.

On the night of November 5, 1980, Bruce Springsteen stood onstage in Tempe, Arizona, and began a fierce fight for the meaning of America. The previous day, the nation had turned a fateful corner: With a stunning majority, Ronald Reagan-who had campaigned to end the progressive dream in America-was elected president of the United States. It was hardly an unexpected victory. In the aftermath of Vietnam, Watergate, the hostage crisis in Iran, and an ongoing economic recession, America had developed serious doubts about its purpose and its future, and to many observers, Reagan seemed an inspiring and easy response to those hards.h.i.+ps. But when all was said and done, the election felt stunning and brutal, a harbinger for the years of mean-spiritedness to come.

The singer was up late the night before, watching the election returns, and stayed in his hotel room the whole day, brooding over whether he should make a comment on the turn of events. Finally, onstage that night at Arizona State University, Springsteen stood silently for a moment, fingering his guitar nervously, and then told his audience: "I don't know what you guys think about what happened last night, but I think it was pretty frightening." Then he vaulted into an enraged version of his most defiant song, "Badlands."

On that occasion, "Badlands" stood for everything it had always stood for-a refusal to accept life's meanest fates or most painful limitations-but it also became something more: a warning about the spitefulness that was about to visit our land, as the social and political horizon turned dark and frightening. "I want to spit in the face of these badlands," Springsteen sang with an unprecedented fury on that night, and it was perhaps in that instant that he reconceived his role in rock & roll.

In a way, his action foreshadowed the political activism and social controversy that would transform rock & roll during the 1980s. As the decade wore on, Springsteen would become one of the most outspoken figures in pop music, though that future probably wasn't what he had in mind when he vaulted into "Badlands" on that late autumn night. Instead, Springsteen was simply focusing on a question that, in one form or another, his music had been asking all along. In a way it was a simple and time-old question: Namely, what does it mean to be born an American?

WELL, WHAT DOES IT mean to be born in America? Does it mean being born to birthrights of freedom, opportunity, equity, and bounty? If so, then what does it mean that so many of the country's citizens never truly connect with or receive those blessings? And what does it mean that, in a land of such matchless vision and hope, the acrid realities of fear, repression, hatred, deprivation, racism, and s.e.xism also hold sway? Does it mean, indeed, that we are living in badlands?

Questions of this sort-about America's nature and purpose, about the distance between its ideals and its truths-are, of course, as old as the nation itself, and finding revealing or liberating answers to those questions is a venture that has obsessed (and eluded) many of the country's worthiest artists, from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Norman Mailer, from D. W. Griffith to Francis Coppola. Rock & roll-an art form born of a provocative mix of American myths, impulses, and guilts-has also aimed, from time to time, to pursue those questions, to mixed effect. In the 1960s, in a period of intense generational division and political rancor, Bob Dylan and the Band explored the idea of America as a wounded family in works like The Bas.e.m.e.nt Tapes, John Wesley Harding, and The Band; in the end, though, the artists s.h.i.+ed from the subject, as if something about the American family's complex, troubled blood ties proved too formidable. Years later, Neil Young (like the Band's Robbie Robertson, a Canadian with a fixation on American myths) confronted the specter of forsworn history in works like American Stars 'n' Bars, Hawks and Doves, and Freedom. Yet, like too many artists or politicians who come face to face with how America has recanted its own best promises, Young finally didn't seem to know what to say about such losses. When all is said and done, it is chiefly pre-rock singers (most notably, Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Charley Patton, and a few other early blues and country singers) and a handful of early rock & roll figures-Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis-who have come closest to personifying the meaning of America in their music. In particular, Presley (a seminal influence on Springsteen) tried to seize the nation's dream of fortune and make himself a symbol of it. But once Presley and those others had seized that dream, the dream found a way of undoing them-leading them to heartbreak, decline, death. American callings, American fates.

Bruce Springsteen followed his own version of the fleeting American Dream. He had grown up in the suburban town of Freehold, New Jersey, feeling estranged from his family and community, and his refusal to accept the limitations of that life fueled the songwriting in his early, largely autobiographical alb.u.ms. Records like Greetings from Asbury Park; The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle; and Born to Run were works about flight from dead-end small-town life and thankless familial obligations, and they accomplished for Springsteen the very dream that he was writing about: That is, those records lifted him from a life of mundane reality and delivered him to a place of bracing purpose. From the outset, Springsteen was heralded by critics as one of the brightest hopes in rock & roll-a consummate songwriter and live performer, who was as alluring and provoking as Presley, and as imaginative and expressive as Dylan. And Springsteen lived up to the hoopla: With his 1975 alb.u.m Born to Run, Springsteen fas.h.i.+oned pop's most form-stretching and eventful major work since the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. But for all the praise and fame the alb.u.m won him, it couldn't rid Springsteen of his fears of solitude, and it couldn't erase his memory of the lives of his family and friends. Consequently, his next work, Darkness on the Edge of Town, was a stark and often bitter reflection on how a person could win his dreams and yet still find himself dwelling in a dark and lonely place-a story of ambition and loss as ill-starred (and deeply American) as Citizen Kane.

With The River, released in 1980, Springsteen was still writing about characters straining against the restrictions of their world, but he was also starting to look at the social conditions that bred lives split between dilemmas of flight and ruin. In Springsteen's emerging mythos, people still had big hopes, but often settled for deluded loves and fated families, in which their hopes quickly turned ugly and caustic. In the alb.u.m's haunting t.i.tle song, the youthful narrator gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then enters a joyless marriage and a toilsome job in order to meet his obligations. Eventually, all the emotional and economic realities close in, and the singer's marriage turns into a living, grievous metaphor for lost idealism. "Now, all them things that seemed so important," sings Springsteen, in a rueful voice, "Well, mister, they vanished right into the air/Now I just act like I don't remember/Mary acts like she don't care." In The River's murky and desultory world-the world of post-Vietnam, post-industrial America-people long for fulfillment and connection, but often as not, they end up driving empty mean streets in after-midnight funks, fleeing from a painful nothingness into a more deadening nothingness. It's as if some dire force beyond their own temperaments was drawing them into inescapable ends.

The River was Springsteen's pivotal statement. Up to this point, Springsteen had told his tales in florid language, in musical settings that were occasionally operatic and showy. Now he was streamlining both the lyrics and the music into simpler, more colloquial structures, as if the realities he was trying to dissect were too bleak to bear up under his earlier expansiveness. The River was also the record with which Springsteen began wielding rock & roll less as a tool of personal mythology-that is, as a way of making or entering history for personal validation. Instead, he began using it as a means of looking at history, as a way of understanding how the lives of the people in his songs had been shaped by the conditions surrounding them, and by forces beyond their control.

This drive to comprehend history came to the fore during the singer's remarkable 1980-81 tour in support of The River. Springsteen had never viewed himself as a political-minded performer, but a series of events and influences-including the near-disaster at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor, and his subsequent partic.i.p.ation in the No Nukes benefit, at New York City's Madison Square Garden in September 1979-began to alter that perception. Springsteen had also read Joe Klein's biography of folk singer Woody Guthrie and was impressed with the way popular songs could work as a powerful and binding force for social consciousness and political action. In addition, he read Ron Kovic's harrowing personal account of the Vietnam War, Born on the Fourth of July. Inspired by the candor of Kovic's anguish-and by the bravery and dignity of numerous other Vietnam veterans he had met-Springsteen staged a benefit at the L.A. Sports Arena in August 1981, to raise funds and attention for the Vietnam Veterans of America (a group whose causes and rights the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars had steadfastly refused to embrace). On one night of the Los Angeles engagement, Springsteen told his audience that he had recently read Henry Steele Commager and Allen Nevins' Short History of the United States and that he was profoundly affected by what he found in the book. A month earlier, speaking of the same book, he had told a New Jersey audience: "The idea [of America] was that there'd be a place for everybody, no matter where you came from . . . you could help make a life that had some decency and dignity to it. But like all ideals, that idea got real corrupted. . . . I didn't know what the government I lived under was doing. It's important to know . . . about the things around you." Now, onstage in Los Angeles, getting ready to sing Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," Springsteen spoke in a soft, almost bashful voice, and told his largely well-off audience: "There's a lot in [the history of the United States] . . . that you're proud of, and then there's a lot of things in it that you're ashamed of. And that burden, that burden of shame, falls down. Falls down on everybody."

IN 1982, AFTER the tour ended, Springsteen was poised for the sort of ma.s.sive breakthrough that people had been predicting for nearly a decade. The River had gone to the top of Billboard's alb.u.ms chart, and "Hungry Hearts" was a Top 10 single; it seemed that Springsteen was finally overcoming much of the popular backlash that had set in several years earlier, after numerous critics hailed him as rock & roll's imminent crown prince. But after the tour, the singer was unsure about what direction he wanted to take in his songwriting. He spent some time driving around the country, brooding, reading, thinking about the realities of his own emotional life and the social conditions around him, and then settled down and wrote a body of songs about his ruminations. On January 3, 1982, Springsteen sat in his home and recorded a four-track demo ca.s.sette of the new songs, accompanied for the most part only by his ghostly sounding acoustic guitar. He later presented the songs to producer Jon Landau and the E Street Band, but neither Landau nor the musicians could find the right way to flesh out the doleful, spare-sounding new material. Finally, at Landau's behest, Springsteen released the original demo versions of the songs as a solo effort, ent.i.tled Nebraska. It was a work like very few in pop music history: a politically piercing statement that was utterly free of a single instance of didactic sloganeering or ideological proclamation. Rather than preach to or berate his listeners, Springsteen created a vivid cast of characters-people who had been shattered by bad fortune, by limitations, by mounting debts and losses-and then he let those characters tell the stories of how their pain spilled over into despair and, sometimes, violence. In "Johnny 99," he told the story of a working man who is pressed beyond his resources and in desperation, commits robbery and impulsive murder. Johnny doesn't seek absolution for what he's done-he even requests his own execution, though more as an end than a payment-but he does earn our compa.s.sion. Just before sentence is pa.s.sed, Johnny says: "Now judge I got debts no honest man could pay/The bank was holdin' my mortgage and they was takin' my house away/Now I ain't sayin' that makes me an innocent man/But it was more'n all this that put that gun in my hand." In "Highway Patrolman," Springsteen related the tale of an idealistic cop who allows his brother to escape the law, recognizing that the brother has already suffered pain from the country he once served.

There was a timeless, folkish feel to Nebraska's music, but the themes and events it related were as dangerous and timely as the daily headlines of the 1980s-or of the 1990s, for that matter. It was a record about what can occur when normal people are forced to endure what cannot be endured. Springsteen's point was that, until we understood how these people arrived at their places of ruin, until we accepted our connection to those who had been hurt or excluded beyond repair, then America could not be free of such fates or such crimes. "The idea of America as a family is naive, maybe sentimental or simplistic," he told me in a 1987 interview, "but it's a good idea. And if people are sick and hurting and lost, I guess it falls on everybody to address those problems in some fas.h.i.+on. Because injustice, and the price of that injustice, falls on everyone's heads. The economic injustice falls on everybody's head and steals everyone's freedom. Your wife can't walk down the street at night. People keep guns in their homes. They live with a greater sense of apprehension, anxiety, and fear than they would in a more just and open society. It's not an accident, and it's not simply that there are "bad' people out there. It's an inbred part of the way that we are all living: It's a product of what we have accepted, what we have acceded to. And whether we mean it or not, our silence has spoken for us in some fas.h.i.+on."

NEBRASKA ATTEMPTED TO make a substantial statement about the modern American sensibility in a stark and austere style that demanded close involvement. That is, the songs required that you settle into their mournful textures and racking tales and then apply the hard facts of their meaning to the social reality around you. In contrast to Springsteen's earlier bravado, there was nothing eager or indomitable about Nebraska. Instead, it was a record that worked at the opposite end of those conditions, a record about people walking the rim of desolation, who sometimes transform their despair into the irrevocable action of murder. It was not exulting or uplifting, and for that reason, it was a record that many listeners respected more than they "enjoyed." Certainly, it was not a record by which an artist might expand his audience in the fun-minded world of pop.

But with his next record, Born in the U.S.A., in 1984, Springsteen set out to find what it might mean to bring his message to the largest possible audience. Like Nebraska, Born in the U.S.A. was about people who come to realize that life turns out harder, more hurtful, more close-fisted than they might have expected. But in contrast to Nebraska's killers and losers, Born in the U.S.A.'s characters hold back the night as best they can, whether it's by singing, laughing, dancing, yearning, reminiscing, or entering into desperate love affairs. There was something celebratory about how these people faced their hards.h.i.+ps. It's as if Springsteen were saying that life is made to endure and that we all make peace with private suffering and shared sorrow as best we can.

At the same time, a listener didn't have to dwell on these truths to appreciate the record. Indeed, Springsteen and Landau had designed the alb.u.m with contemporary pop style in mind-which is to say, it had been designed with as much meticulous attention to its captivating and lively surfaces as to its deeper and darker meanings. Consequently, a track like "Dancing in the Dark"-perhaps the most pointed and personal song Springsteen has ever written about isolation-came off as a rousing dance tune that had the effect of working against isolation by pulling an audience together in a physical celebration. Similarly, "Cover Me," "Downbound Train," and "I'm on Fire"-songs about erotic fear and paralyzing loneliness-came off as s.e.xy, intimate, and irresistible.

But it was the terrifying and commanding t.i.tle song-about a Vietnam veteran who has lost his brother, his hope, and his faith in his country-that did the most to secure Springsteen's new image as pop hero and that also turned his fame into something complex and troubling. Scan the song for its lyrics alone, and you find a tale of outright devastation: a tale of an American whose birthrights have been torn from his grasp, and paid off with indelible memories of violence and ruin. But listen to the song merely for its fusillade of drums and its firestorm of guitar, or for the singer's roaring proclamation, "BORN in the U.S.A./I was BORN in the U.S.A.," and it's possible to hear it as a fierce patriotic a.s.sertion-especially in a political climate in which simpleminded patriotic fervor had attained a new and startling credibility. Watching Springsteen unfurl the song in concert-slamming it across with palpable rage as his audience waved flags of all sizes in response-it was possible to read the song in both directions at once. "Clearly the key to the enormous explosion of Bruce's popularity is the misunderstanding [of the song 'Born in the U.S.A.']," wrote critic Greil Marcus during the peak of Springsteen's popularity. "He is a tribute to the fact that people hear what they want."

One listener who was quite happy to hear only what he wanted was syndicated conservative columnist George Will, who in the middle of the 1984 campaign that pitted Walter Mondale against Ronald Reagan attended a Springsteen show, and liked what he saw. In a September 14, 1984, column that was read by millions, Will commended Springsteen for his "elemental American values" and, predictably, heard the cry of "Born in the U.S.A." as an exultation rather than as pained fury. "I have not got a clue about Springsteen's politics, if any," Will wrote, "but flags get waved at his concerts while he sings about hard times. He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seem punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: 'Born in the U.S.A.!' "

Apparently, Reagan's advisors gave a cursory listening to Springsteen's music and agreed with Will. A few days later, in a campaign stop in New Jersey, President Ronald Reagan declared: "America's future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts. It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey's Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about."

It was an amazing-even brain-boggling-a.s.sertion. Reagan's tribute to Springsteen seemed about as stupefying as if Lyndon Johnson, during the awful uproar over Vietnam, had cited Bob Dylan for his n.o.ble influence on America's youth politics, or as unnerving as if Richard Nixon, with his strong disregard for black social realities, had honored Sly Stone for the cutting commentary of his 1971 cla.s.sic, There's a Riot Goin' On. Clearly, to anybody paying attention, the fierce, hard-bitten vision of America that Springsteen sang of in "Born in the U.S.A." was a far cry from the much-touted "new patriotism" that Reagan and many of his fellow conservatives claimed as their private dominion. And yet there was also something d.a.m.nably brilliant in the way the president sought to attach his purposes to Springsteen's views. It was the art of political syllogism, taken to its most arrogant extreme. Reagan saw himself as a definitional emblem of America; Bruce Springsteen was a singer who, apparently, extolled America in his work; therefore, Springsteen must be exalting Reagan as well-which would imply that, if one valued the music of Springsteen, then one should value (and support) Reagan as well. Reagan was manipulating Springsteen's fame as an affirmation of his own ends.

The president's gambit left Springsteen with a knotty challenge: Could he afford to refute Reagan's praise without also alienating his newly acquired ma.s.s audience? Or should he use the occasion to challenge the beliefs of that audience-maybe, in the process, helping to reshape those beliefs? Or should he simply ignore the hubbub, and a.s.sume that his true fans understood his viewpoint?

A few nights later, Springsteen stood before a predominantly blue-collar audience in Pittsburgh and, following a rousing performance of "Atlantic City" (a song about American decay), decided to respond to the president's statement. "The president was mentioning my name the other day," he said with a bemused laugh, "and I kinda got to wondering what his favorite alb.u.m might have been. I don't think it was the Nebraska alb.u.m. I don't think it was this one." Springsteen then played a pa.s.sionate, acoustic-backed version of "Johnny 99"-the song about a man who commits impulsive murder as a way of striking back against the meanness of the society around him-a song he wrote, along with other Nebraska tunes, in response to the malignant public and political atmosphere that had been fostered by Reagan's social policies.

Springsteen's comments were well-placed: Was this the America Ronald Reagan heard clearly when he claimed to listen to Springsteen's music? An America where dreams of well-being had increasingly become the province of the privileged, and in which jingoistic partisans determined the nation's health by a standard of self-advantage? When Reagan heard a song like "My Hometown," did he understand his own role in promoting the disenfranchis.e.m.e.nt the song described? If Reagan truly understood that the enlivening patriotism of "Born in the U.S.A." was a patriotism rooted in pain, discontent, and fury, perhaps he would have been either a better president or an angrier man. More likely, of course, he probably would have dismissed any such notions with his characteristic shrug of contempt-which is no doubt what he did when he finally heard of Springsteen's response.

But Reagan's attempt to co-opt Springsteen's message also had some positive side effects. For one thing, it made plain that Springsteen now commanded a large and vital audience of young Americans who cared deeply about their families, their futures, and their country, and that Springsteen spoke to-and perhaps for-that audience's values in ways that could not be ignored. The imbroglio also forced Springsteen to become more politically explicit and resourceful at his performances. After Pittsburgh, he began meeting with labor and civil rights activists in most of the cities that he played, and he made statements at his shows, asking his audience to lend their support to the work of such activists. He also spoke out more and more plainly about where he saw America headed, and how he thought rock & roll could play a part in effecting that destiny. One evening in Oakland, when introducing "This Land Is Your Land," he said: "If you talk to the steelworkers out there who have lost their jobs, I don't know if they'd believe this song is what we're about anymore. And maybe we're not. As we sit here, [this song's promise] is eroding every day. And with countries, as with people, it's easy to let the best of yourself slip away. Too many people today feel as if America has slipped away, and left them standing behind." Then he sang the best song written about America, in as pa.s.sionate a voice as it had ever been sung.

But none of this action was enough. In November 1984, Ronald Reagan was reelected president by an even more stunning mandate than the first time. It seemed plausible that many (if not most) of the millions of fans of voting age who had made Born in the U.S.A. the year's biggest success had cast their votes for the man to whom Springsteen so obviously stood in opposition. Perhaps it nettled him, but Springsteen was finally facing the answer to the question he had been asking during the length of the decade: To be born in America, to be pa.s.sionate about the nation's best ideals and to be concerned over the betrayal of those ideals, meant being part of a nation that would only believe about itself what it wanted to believe. It also meant that one still had to find a way to keep faith with the dream of that nation, despite the awful realities that take shape when that dream is denied.

IN 1984, AMERICA had not had enough of Ronald Reagan, or it would not have reelected him. It had also not had enough of Bruce Springsteen: After an international tour, he returned to the States a bigger, more popular artist than ever. It may seem like a contradiction that a nation can embrace two icons who differed so dramatically, but the truth is, Reagan and Springsteen shared an unusual bond: Each seemed to stand for America, and yet each also was largely misunderstood by his const.i.tuency. Reagan seemed to stand for the values of family and improved opportunity for the working cla.s.s at the same time that he enacted policies that undermined those values. Springsteen seemed to stand for brazen patriotism when he believed in holding the government responsible for how it had corrupted the nation's best ideals and promises.

To his credit, Springsteen did his best to make his true values known. In the autumn of 1985, he embarked on the final leg of his Born in the U.S.A. tour, this time playing outdoor stadium-sized venues that held up to 100,000 spectators. Playing such vast settings was simply a way of keeping faith with the ambition he had settled on a year or two earlier: to see what it could mean to reach the biggest audience he could reach. It was also an attempt to speak seriously to as many of his fans as possible, to see if something like a genuine consensus could be forged from the ideals of a rock & roll community. And of course, the gesture also entailed a certain risk: If Springsteen's audience could not-or would not-accept him for what he truly stood for, then in the end, he could be reduced by that audience.

In some surprising respects, Springsteen's ambition succeeded. At the beginning of the stadium swing, many fans and critics worried that he would lose much of his force-and his gifts for intimacy and daring-by moving his music to such large stages. But if anything, Springsteen used the enlarged settings as an opportunity to rethink many of his musical arrangements, transforming the harder songs into something more fervid, more moving, more aggressive than before, and yet still putting across the more rueful songs from The River and Nebraska with an uncompromised sensitivity. If anything, he made the new shows count for more than the election-year shows, if only because he recognized that addressing a larger audience necessarily entailed some greater responsibilities. In Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., on the opening night of the stadium shows, Springsteen told a story about a musician friend from his youth who was drafted and who, because he did not enjoy the privilege of a deferment, was sent to Vietnam and wound up missing in action. "If the time comes when there's another war, in some place like Central America," Springsteen told his audience of 56,000, "then you're going to be the ones called on to fight it, and you're going to have to decide for yourselves what that means. . . . But if you want to know where we're headed for [as a country], then someday take that long walk from the Lincoln Memorial to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where the names of all those dead men are written on the walls, and you'll see what the stakes are when you're born in the U.S.A. in 1985." By the last few nights of the tour, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, he had added Edwin Starr's 1970 hit "War" to the show, coming down hard on the line, "Induction, destruction/Who wants to die-in a war?" There was something heartening about watching a man who gazed into his audience and who-in defiance of the country's political mood and perhaps even the beliefs of that audience-cared enough about them to hope they would not die in a futile or demoralizing military action.

But for all his intensified fervor, Springsteen was gracious at the end of the tour. At the end of "Dancing in the Dark," in that moment when he generally pulled a female fan from the audience to dance with, Springsteen brought out his new wife, Julianne Phillips, danced with her sweetly, then took her in his arms and gave her a long kiss. Maybe it was his way of saying that this new relations.h.i.+p was where he would live, now that his tour was ending; or perhaps that his marriage was a way of attempting to live up to the best ideals of his own music. Later, at evening's end, Springsteen stood before his band, his friends, and his audience and said: "This has been the greatest year of my life. I want to thank you for making me feel like the luckiest man in the world." Indeed, Springsteen had begun the tour as a ma.s.s cult figure; he was leaving it as a full-fledged pop hero-a voice of egalitarian conscience unlike any rock had yielded before, with a remarkable capacity for growth and endurance.

In short, Springsteen seemed to emerge from the tour occupying the center of rock & roll, in the way that Presley, or the Beatles and Dylan and the Rolling Stones had once commanded the center. And yet the truth was, in 1980s pop, there was no center left to occupy. Rock was a field of mutually exclusive options, divided along racial, stylistic, and ideological lines, and each option amounted to its own valid mainstream. In fact, by the decade's end, even the American and British fields of rock-which had dominated the pop world thoroughly for a quarter-century-were gradually losing their purism and dominance, as more and more young and adventurous musicians and fans began bringing African, Jamaican, Brazilian, Asian, and other musical forms into interaction with pop's various vernaculars. In modern pop, as in the modern globe, America no longer overwhelmed the international sensibility.

In any event, Springsteen seemed to step back from rock & roll's center at the same moment that he won it. In 1986, he a.s.sembled a multidisc package of some of his best performances from the previous ten years of live shows-a box set intended as a summation of his artistic growth and his range as a showman. In a sense, it was the most ambitious effort of his career, but also the least satisfying and least consequential. It didn't play with the sort of revelatory effect of his best shows or earlier alb.u.ms, and it didn't captivate a ma.s.s audience in the same way either. Then, the following year, Springsteen released Tunnel of Love. Like Nebraska, the work with which he had begun the decade, Tunnel of Love was a more intimate, less epic statement than its predecessor-a heartbreaking but affirming suite of songs about the hard realities of romantic love. Maybe the record was intended to remind both Springsteen and his audience that what ultimately mattered was how one applied one's ideals to one's own world-or maybe the songs were simply about the concerns that obsessed Springsteen most at that time. In any event, Tunnel of Love was one of Springsteen's most affecting works, and it fit into his life with painfully ironic timing. A few months later, Springsteen separated from his wife of three years, Julianne Phillips, and was rumored to be seeing the backing vocalist in his band, Patti Scialfa. Eventually, Springsteen divorced Phillips and married Scialfa. In life, as in music, sometimes one's best hopes take unexpected, somewhat hurtful turns.

At the end of the decade, Springsteen was on tour again. Reluctant to continue playing oversized venues, he returned to the arena halls where he had done some of his most satisfying work in the years before, and restored a more human scale to his production. It was another election year, and while he still spoke out about issues from time to time, Springsteen seemed wary of being cast as merely a rock politician or statesman. Perhaps he realized that America's political choices just couldn't be affected very tellingly from a rock & roll stage, or maybe he was simply discouraged by what he saw around him. To be sure, there was plenty to be disheartened about: It was a season when Oliver North enjoyed status as a cultural hero, and when George Bush turned patriotism and flag-waving into brutal, vicious, and effective campaign issues. (Though one night in New Jersey, in a burst of inspiring temper, Springsteen went on record with an electoral choice of sorts. "Don't vote for that f.u.c.king Bush," he told his audience, "no matter what!") At the same time, Springsteen remained committed to the idea of turning the rock & roll audience into an enlightened and active community. After the Tunnel of Love tour, he headlined Amnesty International's Human Rights Now! world tour in the fall of 1988. Along with Live Aid, the Amnesty tour was one of the most ambitious political campaigns in rock's history. And the fact that it could occur at all and could reach an audience that was both ma.s.sive and ready was in some ways a testament to the sort of idealism for which Springsteen had fought throughout the 1980s.

WITH HIS FIRST records in the 1990s, Springsteen retreated further from his role as an icon and spokesperson, and attempted to redefine the scope of his songwriting. Human Touch and Lucky Town (the double offering from 1992), worked on smaller scales: They were dark and complex works about personal risks, and as such, they seemed to say much about the internal realities of Springsteen's own life, as he went from a highly publicized failed marriage to an apparently sounder second one, in which he became the father of three children. It was as if, in both his art and his life, Springsteen was attempting to say that to make your best hopes and ideals count for anything real, you have to bring them into your own home and heart, and see if you can live up to them.

Meantime, though, much changed about the larger family that Springsteen and the rest of us live in-that tormented home we still call America-and too little of it for the better. Back in the 1980s there was a vital argument to be waged about what it meant to be an American, and which visions and dreams best delineated our collective soul and destiny. In the 1990s, that argument hasn't been settled so much as it's been shunted to the side, or compromised between the maleficence of a Republican Congress and the artful ambitions of Bill Clinton's presidency. Some of our most valuable and necessary instruments of economic opportunity and social justice have been curtailed or ended-tools such as affirmative action, immigration rights, and welfare protection for children and families in poverty conditions-and our criminal justice system is imprisoning poor and young people at increasing rates (indeed, no other democracy in the world locks up as many of its citizens as America). The message is clear: No more help for people on the fringe, no more chances for the losers. These are pitiless times, and there have been too few voices in either our arts or our politics who dare to tell us that the America we are making will be a more perilous, bloodier place than we might ever have imagined.

The 1995 alb.u.m The Ghost of Tom Joad was Bruce Springsteen's response to this state of affairs-you could even call it his return to arms. In any event, it was his first overtly social-minded statement since Born in the U.S.A., eleven years earlier. Joad isn't an easy record to like immediately. Its music is often sorrowful and samely, its words soft-spoken, sometimes slurred. In addition, it creates an atmosphere as merciless in its own way as the world it talks about. That is, it is a record about people who do not abide life's ruins-a collection of dark tales about dark men who are cut off from the purposes of their own hearts and the prospects of their own lives. In this alb.u.m, almost none of the characters get out with both their beings and spirits intact, and the few who do are usually left with only frightful and desolate prayers as their solace. "My Jesus," Springsteen intones at one song's end, "your gracious love and mercy/Tonight I'm sorry could not fill my heart/Like one good rifle/And the name of who I ought to kill." At the end of another song, a man prays: "When I die I don't want no part of heaven/I would not do heaven's work well/I pray the devil comes and takes me/To stand in the fiery furnaces of h.e.l.l." Plaintive, bitter epiphanies like these are far removed from the sort of anthemic cries that once filled Springsteen's music, but then, these are times for lamentations, not anthems.

On the surface, Tom Joad bears obvious kins.h.i.+p to Nebraska. Like that alb.u.m, Joad's musical backings are largely acoustic, and its sense of language and storytelling owes much to the Depression-era sensibility of Guthrie and such authors as John Steinbeck, James M. Cain, John Fante, and Eric Knight (the author of You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up). The stories are told bluntly and spa.r.s.ely, and the poetry is broken and colloquial, like the speech of a man telling the stories he feels compelled to tell, if only to try and be free of them. That's where the similarities end. In Nebraska, Springsteen wrote about people living their lives at the edges of hopelessness and suppression-people whose lives could turn dangerous and explode-and the music conveyed not just their melancholy but, at moments, also their escape into rage. In Tom Joad, there are few such escapes and almost no musical relief from the numbing circ.u.mstances of the characters' lives. You could almost say that the music gets caught in meandering motions, or drifts into circles that never break. The effect is brilliant and lovely-there's something almost lulling in the music's blend of acoustic arpeggios and moody keyboard textures, something that lures you into the melodies' dark dreaminess and loose mellifluence. But make no mistake: what you are being drawn into are scenarios of h.e.l.l. American h.e.l.l.

Many of Tom Joad's characters are caught in this place, waiting for some event to make sense of their existence, or to explain to them their fates. You get the picture right at the start, in the broken cadences of the t.i.tle track. A man sits by a campfire under a bridge, not far from endless railroad tracks. He is waiting on the ghost of Tom Joad, the hero of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, who at the end of John Ford's 1940 film version of the novel, says: " 'Wherever there's somebody fightin' for a place to stand/Or decent job or a helpin' hand/Wherever somebody's strugglin' to be free/Look in their eyes . . . you'll see me.' " But such hopes of salvation in the mid-1990s aren't really much more palpable than ghosts, and the man sitting, praying by the fire, will wait a long time before his deliverance comes. In "Straight Time," an ex-con takes a job and marries, and tries to live the sanctioned life. But the world's judgments are never far off-even his wife watches him carefully with their children-and he waits for the time when he will slip back into the deadly breach that he sees as his destiny. In "Highway 29," a lonesome shoe clerk surrenders to a deadly s.e.xual fever that leads him into an adventure of robbery and murder and ruin, and he realizes that it is this-this dead-ended flight of rage and self-obliteration-that his heart has always been headed for.

The most affecting stories on Joad, though, are the ones that Springsteen tells about a handful of undoc.u.mented immigrants, and their pa.s.sage into Southern California's promised land. Some of these tales are drawn from real-life instances, as reported in the Los Angeles Times. In "The Line"-an achingly beautiful song, with a melody reminiscent of Bob Dylan's "Love Minus Zero/No Limit"-a border patrol cop falls in love with an immigrant woman, Louisa, and he helps her and her child and younger brother sneak into the States. But in a confrontation with another officer, he loses track of her, and never again finds her. In "Sinaloa Cowboys," two young brothers, Miguel and Louis, come from north Mexico to the San Joaquin Valley orchards to make money for their hungry families, and get involved in dangerous and illegal drug manufacturing. One night there is an explosion in the shack where they work; one brother is killed, and the other is left to bury him and tell their family. And in "Balboa Park," an undoc.u.mented teenage immigrant called Spider gets caught up working in San Diego as a s.e.x hustler and drug smuggler, until one night, during a border patrol, he becomes victim of a hit-and-run. These people come to their fates quickly-much like that doomed planeload in Woody Guthrie's "Deportees"-one of the first songs that awakened Springsteen's political awareness. In one moment, these characters' "undoc.u.mented" lives are over, and the world takes no note of their pa.s.sing or shot hopes.

People like Spider, Louisa, Miguel, and Louis are not people we hear much about in the popular music and literature of our time. In fact, they are the people that politicians like California governor Pete Wilson and Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan tell us are part of our national problem: folks who do not speak our language or share our birthrights. It is a testament to Bruce Springsteen's continuing vitality as one of our greatest writers that he has found the stories of these people-and the stories of the other characters caught in Tom Joad's lower depths-worthy of being comprehended and told. By climbing into these people's hearts and minds, Springsteen has given voice to people who rarely have one in this culture-and that has always been one of rock & roll's most important virtues: giving voice to people who are typically denied expression in our other arts and media. In the midst of confusing and complex times, Bruce Springsteen has written more honestly, more intelligently, and more compa.s.sionately about America than any other writer of the last generation. As we move into the rough times and badlands that lie ahead, such acts might count for more than ever before.

the problem of michael jackson.

In the 1980s, when I was pop music critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, I wrote about Michael Jackson more than almost any other single pop figure of the time. I almost wish I hadn't. In the pages that follow, I'll try to trace and explain some of what it was that caught me about Jackson, and what it was that eventually left me feeling disillusioned and saddened about him.

THIS FIRST PIECE ran in the Herald on April 11, 1983. It appears here with only slight editing: Everywhere this last season I've heard this animating sound. It begins with taut, maddened, funk-infused guitar lines that scramble against the upsweeping curve of a string section in a heady depiction of emotional panic. Then a high-end, sensually imploring voice enters the fray and imposes elegance and resolution upon the panic: What does it mean, the singer seems to ask in a breathtaking voice, that he is the one who is appointed to dance alone, for our pleasure, and attention? The song is Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean," and it has suddenly, surely, become one of the most ubiquitous-and exciting-breakthrough singles in recent pop history.

Whenever a song becomes as madly popular as "Billie Jean," it can be fun to examine the reasons why: Is it simply the appeal of the music's exacting but impelling sound? The fine phrasing and tremulous emotion at play against one another in the singer's voice? The allure of the artist's personality or celebrity?

In the case of "Billie Jean," it is a bit of all of these things. Clearly, since a string of brilliant childhood triumphs with the Jackson 5 (the last great 1960s-style Motown group), the now-twenty-two-year-old Michael Jackson has long been one of soul and rock's most stirring singers. But it wasn't until 1979's Off the Wall that he stood out as a mature, stylish vocal force in his own right. For that reason, as much as for the memorable songwriting of Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, and Rod Temperton, or the ravis.h.i.+ng production of Quincy Jones, the record proved one of the most consistently exuberant (and popular) black pop works of the last ten years.

It came as a surprise, then, that at first few listenings, Jackson's long-awaited follow-up, Thriller, seemed somewhat disappointing. Quincy Jones-whose elegant but edgy arrangements on Off the Wall exalted Jackson's evocative vocalizing in much the same manner Nelson Riddle's graceful, rousing work once enlivened Frank Sinatra-had taken to displaying both dominating and overprudent instincts in his recent work. As a result, he seemed to restrict Jackson on much of Thriller to a catchy but somewhat tame brand of dance-floor romanticism.

Indeed, the boldest sounding tracks on the alb.u.m were the ones Jackson himself had the strongest hand in writing, producing, and arranging: "Wanna be Startin' Somethin'," "Beat It," and "Billie Jean." After hearing these songs find their natural life on radio, it became evident that they were something more than exceptional highlights. They were in fact the heart of the matter: a well-conceived body of pa.s.sion, rhythm, and structure that defined the sensibility-if not the inner life-of the artist behind them.

These were instantly compelling songs about emotional and s.e.xual claustrophobia, about hard-earned adulthood, and about a newfound brand of resolution that seeks to work as an arbiter between the artist's fears and the inescapable fact of his celebrity. "Wanna be Startin' Somethin' " had the sense of a vitalizing nightmare in its best lines. (Especially in the lines in which he describes himself as a sort of vegetable, being devoured for his fame and oddness.) "Billie Jean," meantime, exposed the ways in which the interaction between the artist's fame and the outside world might invoke soul-killing dishonor ("People always told me . . . be careful of what you do 'cause the lie becomes the truth," Jackson sings, possibly thinking of a debilitating paternity charge from a while back). And "Beat It," in many ways the alb.u.m's toughest song, was pure anger: In its relentless depiction of violence as an enforced social style, it conveyed terror and invincibility almost as effectively as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message."

But the ultimate excitement here is that "Billie Jean" is merely a first step. When Michael Jackson performed the show a couple of weeks ago at Motown's twenty-fifth anniversary bash (in what was one of his first public acts as a star outside and beyond the Jacksons), it was startlingly clear that he is not only one of the most thrilling live performers in pop music, but that he is perhaps more capable of inspiring an audience's physical and emotional imagination than any single pop artist since Elvis Presley-and I don't know anyone who came away from that occasion with a differing view.

There are simply times when you know you are hearing or seeing something extraordinarily fine and exciting, something that simply captures all the private hopes and dreams that you have ever wanted your favorite art form to aspire to, and that might unite and inflame a new audience. That time came for those of us who saw Jackson onstage that night, and now every time I hear "Billie Jean," I have a vivid image of one of rock & roll's brightest hopes. "Billie Jean" is the sound of a young man staking out his territory-a young man who is just starting to lay claim to his rightful pop legend.

FROM THERE, things went up-far up-and then far down. Thriller went on to place an unprecedented seven singles in Billboard's Top 10, and also became the biggest-selling alb.u.m in pop history (over 35 million copies, or something like that), and at the 1984 Grammy Awards Show, Michael Jackson captured eight awards, including Best Alb.u.m and Best Record of the year. Then, a few months later, it was announced that Michael would be setting out on a nationwide tour with his brothers, the Jacksons. By that time, the ma.s.siveness of Jackson's fame was already starting to work against him-and the controversies that started surrounding the Jacksons' Victory tour (as it was billed) only made matters far worse. For one thing, there were fears that Jackson's popularity would attract such large crowds that something horrible might result-something like the crowd rush that occurred at a 1979 Who show in Cincinnati, where eleven young people were trampled to death or smothered. Also, there were charges of greed: The Jacksons were charging as much as thirty dollars a ticket, and had also accepted the multimillion-dollar sponsors.h.i.+p of the Pepsi company.

The tour began in Kansas City, Missouri, in July 1984, and days before the group ever hit a stage, things had gone weird and awry. At times-what with the tireless histrionics of promoter Don King (who said that anybody who saw the Jacksons' show "will be a better person for years to come") and the manner in which local politicians and sports officials ingratiated themselves with the Jacksons' organization-it was easy to forget that this was primarily to be a musical event, featuring one of the more popular and captivating performing groups in pop's recent history.

Unfortunately, that fact seemed lost even on the Jacksons. When the group finally took the stage at Kansas City's Arrowhead stadium, amid curls of purple smoke and crimson laser beams, some of the reporters were eyeing the crowd for signs of the much-predicted hysteria. We never found them. Instead, what we saw was an overwhelmingly white, affluent-looking audience of forty-five thousand fans-largely parents and children-exhibiting a kind of polite exhilaration at the vision of Jackson going through his trademark, impossibly adept maneuvers. It was good, of course, that there was no mob hysteria (in fact, I doubt if there was so much as a scratch in the audience that night), but it also would have been nice had there been something of real excitement taking place onstage. But on this night, Michael and his brothers-Marlon, Jermaine, t.i.to, and Randy-didn't work as effectively as a cooperative unit as they did on their 1981 tour. For that matter, the best collaboration I saw that whole night came from a clique of about five black and white tots standing in the aisle near my seat, dancing in joyful abandon with one another, trading quick, sharp, fancy moves in a fun and funky exchange, mimicking the action they saw onstage (or rather, on the large screen above the stage). When I looked closer I realized they were all wearing the souvenir Michael-style sungla.s.ses that were being sold at the arena, and then I realized that for these kids this was truly a transfixing dream that no amount of critical scrutiny might ever obscure or alter.

Well, good for them, because for some of the rest of us, the whole thing really wasn't that much fun. Much of the press that came to Kansas City wanted something to be critical of, and the Jacksons had unwittingly served that interest with the displays of apparent greed and incompetence that preceded the tour. Worse, they delivered a show that didn't work-a show that proved too susceptible to the allure of spectacle, as if an epic display of technology and stagecraft might also count as substance and excitement. Simply, the group was overwhelmed by its own trappings-forced into a position in which it attempted to connect with the audience through predictable displays of pyrotechnics and flashy mechanics rather than by force of their own performing matter. (The audience, it must be said, seemed to enjoy it all: Musical art and physical mastery be d.a.m.ned, give us the BOMB!) It was frustrating to watch a performer as resourceful as Michael Jackson succ.u.mb to such a grandiose and ultimately unimaginative interpretation of his art.

The problem was, Michael Jackson should never have done the 1984 tour in this way. He was unquestionably beyond the Jacksons by this time, and he seemed constrained in his role as a frontman for a group he truly no longer felt a part of. By all rights and reason, Michael should have been working a stage alone. After all, his best performances worked as public declarations of intensely private fears; that's the quality that gave his art whatever anxious depth it possessed at that time. The 1984 tour was to be Jackson's way of paying off-and breaking off-family ties, but what it would cost him, in a way, was that moment he had finally captured, after a lifetime of waiting.

A MONTH LATER I was in New York City to attend the New Music Seminar, during the same week in which the Jacksons were playing several dates at the city's Madison Square Garden. By this time, the skepticism and suspicion that had greeted the tour's start in Kansas City had turned into outright hostility in some quarters-most of it directed at Michael Jackson himself. On more than one occasion, when Jackson's name would be cited during panels at the New Music Seminar as somebody who had helped dispel some of the racial barriers in the 1980s pop scene, the notion was met with jeers.

This is what is called "backlash," and in the case of Michael Jackson it was not a simple or pretty matter. To be honest, some of the anger directed at Jackson had to do with the press's notion that somehow Michael and his brothers were simply the latest case of pop-cultural hype-a charge that was also frequently leveled at Elvis Presley and the Beatles in the early stages of their ma.s.s fame. Clearly, there is a big difference between what Michael Jackson represented to his audience (an instinctual physical and emotional savvy meant to turn personal fear into public celebration) and what Presley and the Beatles represented to theirs (good, old-fas.h.i.+oned youth-cultural disruption). Yet all these artists shared one thing: They bound together millions of otherwise dissimilar people in not just a quirk of shared taste, but also a forceful, heartfelt consensus that spoke to common dreams and era-rooted values. In 1984, it wasn't yet clear whether Jackson would go on to have the continuing momentum or epic sweep of Presley and the Beatles, but at the time I thought it likely that his ma.s.s popularity represented something more significant than the incidental ma.s.s appeal of such artists as Peter Frampton or the Bee Gees. Looking back, I think I was both right and wrong-and I'm not sure which likelihood today disturbs me more.

I remember a friend telling me, during that New York visit, "If Jackson had never gone out on this tour, I would still resent him, and so would other people. The awful thing is, Jackson consciously wanted the biggest audience in the world, but he didn't want to give them anything too revealing or risky."

This was true: Michael Jackson wanted it all, and got it. It is obvious, in retrospect, that Thriller was designed with ma.s.s crossover audiences in mind. Jackson put out "Billie Jean" for the dance crowd, "Beat It" for the white rockers, and then followed each crossover with crafty videos designed to enhance both his intense allure and his intense inaccessibility. But as a ploy, was that really such a bad thing? Was it, for that matter, any different than what Elvis Presley did with his hillbilly/blues/rock & roll crossover music, and what he accomplished in his Dorsey Brothers and Ed Sullivan TV appearances? In fact, wasn't Presley initially a song and dance act, somebody who captured the moment of a transition in pop culture, somebody who took his personal fearfulness and made a public pa.s.sion out of it, and won intense ma.s.s affection as a result? Didn't Presley, too, set out to capture the biggest audience in the world-and isn't that still (at least for some people) one of the most evident dreams pop can aspire to? Why, then, did we need to condemn Michael Jackson for his popularity?

The truth is, by the mid-1980s, some music partisans just weren't terribly fond of the idea of Presley- or Beatles-sized popularity anymore (and that's even more the case in the late 1990s). That, plus the notion that Jackson didn't, for some, really fit the modern definition of a pop hero: He wasn't somebody with literary or sociopolitical aspirations or dreams of s.e.xual revolution. But as another thoughtful friend pointed out to me, there was an even touchier problem about Jackson's success-one that made the temporary vexations of the Jacksons tour seem paltry. "What turned me off to him," this critic told me, "was his eagerness to trade his former black const.i.tuency for an overwhelmingly white audience. Plain and simple, he doesn't want a black ident.i.ty anymore. He records with proven white stars like Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger, and he's allowed the tickets to be priced so high for this tour as to exclude the majority of working or young black fans in this country. Just look at the makeup of these audiences-barely ten percent black. But what really drove the nail into the coffin is that Jackson appeared at the White House with Ronald Reagan. That announced to everybody that he'd divorced himself from the concerns of the black audience at large."

I couldn't argue with that one. Certainly, it would have been better if Jackson had refused the invitation to the White House, in protest of the administration's anti-black policies. It would have been even nicer if he had openly repudiated Reagan. Still, many of our best pop stars have made some unworthy choices, including Elvis Presley and James Brown aligning themselves with Richard Nixon-and don't forget, Neil Young was once an outspoken fan of Reagan (though he reportedly later switched to Jesse Jackson-weird guy, that Neil). As fans, we can boycott or condemn our pop heroes for such lapses, or mourn their tastes in politics while marveling at their artistic sensibilities. I've been doing the latter with Frank Sinatra for more years than I care to count.

Interestingly enough, about the only person I heard defend Jackson during my New York visit was James Brown, and it almost cost him the affection of a fawning music business audience. The moment came at the New Music Seminar during the artists panel that featured Brown, among others. A member of the audience asked the panel what an artist's responsibility is to his fans, given the outrageous prices the Jacksons had imposed on their following. Brown agreed that the ticket price was unrealistic, regardless of the tour's supposed overhead costs, but went on to say that he didn't think it fair to expatriate Michael Jackson or his brothers on the basis of their bad business sense. "It's a mistake, let's hope it doesn't happen again, but believe me, these are good people. Give them another chance."

Cries of angry disagreement shot up from the floor. The mood in the room became riled, like that of a piqued political caucus. But Brown stood his ground. "You don't really know what Michael had to go through to make this tour happen. I won't stay here and let you attack somebody who isn't present to defend himself."

What Brown didn't mention is that he had reportedly declined Michael Jackson's invitation to sing with the group at Madison Square Garden because he privately felt the ticket prices would exclude any real soul audience. He could have scored big and easy points with the NMS crowd by divulging that, but it was a testament to his integrity, and to his respect for the difficulty of Michael Jackson's position with the press and public, that he kept his censure measured, and made his defense sound reasoned.

Of course, it would have been even better if Jackson had expressed more concern for the audience who sustained him during his singular rise to pop stardom. But like Presley before him, Michael Jackson was now in uncharted territory, and every move he made would either map out his redemption or his ruin.

THE JACKSON'S TOUR came to its close in early December 1984, with six sold-out performances at Los Angeles' Dodger Stadium. I almost skipped the whole thing. I was weary of all the arguments and vitriol surrounding Michael Jackson by this time, plus I'd already seen the show in Kansas City and Manhattan, and the experience hadn't been worth either trip. But on the tour's last night, I went. It was my job.

As it turned out, this was the only Victory tour show I saw that had a good dose of something that the other dates had lacked: namely, Michael Jackson's unbridled pa.s.sion. Let me say it without apology: It was a h.e.l.l of a thing to see.

Pa.s.s it off, if you like, as Jackson's possible sense of relief at leaving the long debacle behind, but from his wild, impossibly liquid-looking glides and romps during "Heartbreak Hotel" (still his best song), to the deep-felt improvisational gospel break at the end of the lovely Motown ballad, "I'll Be There," and the fleet-tongued, raw-toned scat-rap exchange he shared with Jermaine at the end of "Tell Me I'm Not Dreaming (Too Good to be True)," Michael accomplished as much as was likely possible that night-short of kicking his brothers offstage and setting Don King afire. At moments, he seemed so refres.h.i.+ngly lively and acute that it almost worked against him. What I mean is, watching Jackson at this peak is a bit like watching p.o.r.nography-something so provoking it can rivet you and seem incomprehensible (maybe even unbearable) at the same time. Which means a little goes a long way, and a lot can seem plain numbing.

In any event, on that last night I thought: Maybe there's hope for the guy after all.

FOUR YEARS LATER I was on the Michael Jackson road again, writing coverage (this time for Rolling Stone) of the opening dates of his first solo tour. Jackson had a recent alb.u.m to promote, Bad, and once again he was nominated for some key Grammy Awards. But in 1988, Jackson was up against some hard compet.i.tion. Artists like U2 and Prince had fas.h.i.+oned some of the most ambitious and visionary music of their careers-music that reflected the state of pop and the world in enlivening ways. By contrast, Jackson's Bad seemed mainly a celebration of the mystique and celebrity of the artist himself.

More important, in 1988 there was suspicion among many critics and observers that Jackson's season as pop's favorite son may have pa.s.sed. When Jackson arrived in New York to attend and perform at the Grammys and to give a series of concerts at Madison Square Garden, he was met with some bitter hints of this possibility. In the 1987 Rolling Stone Readers and Critics Poll, Jackson placed first in six of the readers' "worst of the year" categories (including "worst male singer"); in addition the 1987 Village Voice Critics Poll failed to mention Jackson's Bad in its selection of 1987's forty best alb.u.ms. This was a startling turnaround from four years before, when Jackson and his work topped the same polls in both publications.

Plus, Jackson still possessed a knack for grand gestures that often seem overinflated. I remember one morning in a Manhattan disco, where Michael Jackson stood, smiling uneasily before a throng of reporters and photographers. The occasion was a large-scale press conference, convened by Jackson's tour sponsor, Pepsi, to commemorate a $600,000 contribution from the singer to the United Negro College Fund. But the philanthropy of the event was somewhat overshadowed by Pepsi's other purpose: namely to premiere Jackson's flashy new four-episode commercial for the soda company, which would make its TV debut the following night, during the broadcast of the Grammy Awards at Radio City Music Hall. All in all, it was an odd excuse for a press gathering, and Jackson looked uncomfortable with the stagy formality of the situation. Not surprisingly, he was willing to say little about the occasion, nor would he take any questions from the nearly five hundred journalists who were crowding the room. In short, like most Michael Jackson press conferences, the event proved little more than a grandiose photo opportunity-and yet it had all the drawing power of a significant political function