Can Bruce and "The Boys" Push Off the Despair?
Someday we may look back on the depredations committed by one callous, horrible man and thank those who stood against him
The public figures who have stood up to resist Trumpism carry heavier risks than those of us marching in the streets. They are the ones who push to assert their stage where Trump would rather stand alone. And we know the fix he craves most is attention. (Even he can't cite the real and likely stupider reason he would start an ineffectual and ruinous global conflagration. with recession also on deck.)
On their respective platforms of arena rock (Bruce) and zanily entertaining streaming fare (Amazon Prime’s “The Boys,” ) the nation's rock star and TV's most fired-up series are united in one aim: undercutting the marathon of badness from democracy's confounder-in-chief interloper.
Calling him out, as Springsteen has, and mocking his deadly conceits, as “The Boys” does, has only expanded their respective cultural brands.
I’ll drop in another mention of “The Boys” below, along with a pic; consider this just a tip of the hat to the series as this Wednesday 4/15 brings the third of Season 5 's eight episodes. Ace show runner Eric Kripke will need to figure out to do with that dangerously damaged kingpin Homelander in the May 20 finale, even as we’re still saddled with our own real-life cosplay patriot.
Has their pushback been successful? Would that we could say, “of course,” but there’s no ready metric to measure that. (Yes, a percentage hovering around the mid 60’s has told pollsters that the nation under Trump is “on the wrong track,” but for all the talk of midterms taking down various bootlicking Congressional Republicans, he’s still in charge and in a position to infarct under some emotional trigger and blow up the world.
For my part, the quest was seeking some respite, if not a cure, in this past Week from Global and Homeland Hell. Thus the test cases became the first L.A. date of Bruce Springsteen’s abruptly mounted twenty-city arena tour, but also and the fifth-season debut of the increasingly– not to say ferociously relevant --TV of “The Boys.”
To see Springsteen, I can say as a message to those seeking seats down the road, in the fifteen remaining dates of twenty, was easier than I might have guessed. Yes, the ticket sales burst out of the Ticketmaster gate with certain angering absurdities. (And yep, I saw a high-water mark in down-front places going for $2900 late on the very day of the first L.A. show). But the bargain seat I found online for the second Kia Forum show on the 9th. offered a side view ticket for $130. Done.
Ah, but. With a chance to take advantage of some friends’ invite to ride down with them on the 7th, I found myself that evening with minutes to a 7:30 showtime, at the lightly trafficked walk-up ticket window zapping me a code for a seat with a better angle for $110, plus fees. (Decent parking would have added about half that much.)
Thus I found myself well up in the nosebleed—or is it merely headache? —zone. From there you’re watching the screens (see photo at top), generally of Bruce but at times annotating various solos. (Notably, guest Tom Morello’s avid shredding, a nice balance between exhibitionistic and tautly churning.) The camerawork also beckons us to watch the backup singers, the horn players, and the main squad., each in turn.
With folks jumping up often—or, like the teenage boys blocking my distant view, standing throughout, it's a tough stake-out in the cheap seats. The spectacle of a mass gathering with your 18,000 new best friends coheres in your head only with diligent effort.
As a seasoned Bruce fan boy, I recall being twenty feet away at the legendary 1975 Bottom Line gig., sitting randomly at a table with Southside Johnny, as it happened. And when the band and Boss-to-be started moving air like crazy with a hurtling cover of The Searchers' cover of Jackie DeShannon's 1963 “When You Walk In the Room,” I suppose I did plunge to the floor all agape, hands in the air. (Those were the days of free beer at press-papered showcases.)
Due credit will come below for the tough political speeches, but may a longtime Boss sojourner check off personal hits heard from the slate of 29 songs and where they sit in the set list of 29? Namely, “Born in the U.S.A” (2), Darkness On the Edge of Town” (6), Because the Night (17), Badlands (21), and “Born To Run” 23).
I know, strictly old school. And banger-centric.
Let he or she who is without um…stan, cast the first stone.
That said, one must award points to such moments as “No Surrender” (a gotta-have, band-origin flex), “Streets of Minneapolis” (preach, my brother) “Long Walk Home” (a poetic and haunting interlude), “My City in Ruins” ( a healing exorcism), “The Ghost of Tom Joad” (jacked-up, rocking edition) and finally “Dylan's "Chimes of Freedom” (game recognizes …yeah.)
Here it was in Manchester, May 2025,on the English leg of what's become the intercontinental Land of Hope & Dreams tour.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK1WMIHRsQM
Oh, and ah yes, full applause for the throttled, steady anger that brought Bruce out on the road with Rage Against the Machine leader--but current temporary E Street Band recruit--Tom Morello, and their passionately-shared cover of “Clampdown” by The Clash (from 1979’s London Calling double-LP).
As with the original, first came the righteous venom:
Kick over the wall 'cause government's to fall
How can you refuse it?
Let fury have the hour, anger can be power
Do you know that you can use it?
I think I got that right, having asked Joe Strunmer about it across a table full of fallen soldiers (er, drained bottles of Victoria beer) at a poolside hotel bar in Managua in 1986, when Joe was acting in Alex Cox’s Walker.
The early verses are of course a nod to Strummer’s thinking-man’s-punk audience. Then it inhabits the core of the message Trump has blared forth through two destructive administrations and scads of right-wing rallies:
We will teach our twisted speech
To the young believers
We will train our blue-eyed men
To be young believers
To revisit Bruce’s landmark tour without acknowledging its spirit, and spirituality, would be remiss. His speeches are delivered with an honest folksiness that invokes the ghost not just of Steinbeck’s Tom Joad but the irreducible legend that is Woody Guthrie.
As I was dog-trotting my way alongside the shadowy aisles of Kia Forum as the house lights dimmed, a sole spotlight fixed Bruce at stage front. Before any music, before a glimpse of the band, came his deeply felt incantation of sorts: :“I want to begin the night with a prayer for our men and women in service overseas — we pray for their safe return. The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock ‘n’ roll in dangerous times. We are here in celebration and defense of our American ideals, democracy, our Constitution, and our sacred American promise. The America I love, the America that I’ve written about for 50 years that’s been a beacon of hope and liberty around the world, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless and treasonous administration. Tonight, we ask all of you to join with us in choosing hope over fear, democracy over authoritarianism, the rule of law over lawlessness, ethics over unbridled corruption, resistance over complacency, unity over division, and peace over…”
It wasn’t much of a secret that said that mighty band was about to lauch into the concussive downbeat kicking off Edwin Starr’s “War”.
And of course, very few of America’s global miscues have had so little to offer in answer to the shouted question: “What is it good for?”
Around the midpoint of the set, in a moment that let the band go catch their breath and marked a thoughtful stretch to come, Bruce perched on the stage steps to make further remarks, of which the.particulars are mostly the same regardless of the venue. (It was heard in last year's European run, where he’s still being embraced as always, and in warm ways we as tourists from Helltown may never know again):
Now, there's some very weird, strange and dangerous shit going on out there right now.
In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now.
In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world's poorest children to sickness and death. This is happening now.
The America that I've sung to you about for 50 years is real, and regardless of its faults, is a great country with a great people.
So we'll survive this moment.
In the present national raddlement there can hardly be enough of blows against the executive branch and Cabinet malfeasance, as we miserably abide the moral insult and ritualized bloodshed enforced by an administration that might sooner be called a regime.
Some in my boomer generation, as we experience our own malaise over what a shitty world we have bequeathed to a new generation, may remember the teachings of the 1969 Theodore Roszak study, The Making of the Counter Culture. He appended a big chaw of subtitle: “Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition".
He invented the titular, alliterative name for the hard-to define movement, and it still reverberates as descriptive of the book's optimistically drawn moving target--a collection of “perversely ectoplasmic Zeitgeists.” (Yes, ectoplasmic is an adjective only a professor could love, more or less imagining the emanations "from a medium's body during trances to facilitate spirit materialization.”)
Any jokes about Eric Swallwell here just may be “too soon". But burble all you like about Greasy Pete Hegseth’s marital slip-ups. He departed humanity some time ago. . (Btw, just asking—did Stephen Miller coach Trump as to what “civilization” means—other than that which must be destroyed, because--Epstein”?
Equally defining of what Professor Roszak aimed to communicate—and what he aimed to stir up—was the book’s opening epigrammatic declaration quoting poet William Blake, circa 1810:
“Rouze up, O Young Men of the New Age! Set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings!
For we have Hireling in the Camp, the Court & the University, who would if they could, forever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War.
Though Blake wrote that blurt partly as part of a messy professorial slap fight with other savants, the declaration echoes as effectively now as it ever has. Or did we really take for granted that Trump’s insistence that Iran “open the fuckin Strait” was solely targeting their civilization. Is he so desperately unhappy in his skin that he is ready to take us all out with him in a frantic spate of—"frankly, power”?
A striking amount of Roszak’s predictions now seem to have gown into verities.
Mar-a-Lago world has always existed for the plutocrats, it seems: “The strategy chosen,” writes Roszak in assessing how morals can decay, “is not harsh repression, but rather the Playboy version of total permissiveness, which now imposes its image upon us in every slick movie and posh magazine that comes along.
" In the affluent society, we have sex and sex galore, or so we are to believe. But when we look more closely, we see that this sybaritic promiscuity wears a special social coloring.
"It has been assimilated to an income level and social status available only to our well-heeled junior executives and the jet set. After all, what does it cost to rent these yachts …in which our playboys sail off for orgiastic swimming parties in the Bahamas.”
So soldier on, Bruce, we’re with you.
Might we just close with three of William Blake’s “Proverbs from Hell”? (Remember, he was prosecuted in 1803 for shouting at one of bis majesty’s solders, “Damn the King!” )
They could be warning signs, it seems, for dealing with Trump:
He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.
Expect poison from the standing water.
The weak in courage is strong in cunning.
Until next time...
Comments ()