SALON

Tuesday, Sep 25, 2007 4:24 PM UTC

Greetings from Asbury Park

With a new musical indictment of the president, Bruce Springsteen is back in the fight.

By

Topics: 2008 Elections, War Room, John F. Kerry, D-Mass., Bruce Springsteen,

Greetings from Asbury Park

ASBURY PARK, N.J. — Late into the first set of a concert tour that began Monday night and will stretch well into election season, Bruce Springsteen tore through his 9/11 anthem, “The Rising.” Three or four years ago, that might have been the rollicking end to things. Now it’s just the beginning. Before the last “li, li, li” of Springsteen’s paean to the NYFD echoed down the Asbury Park boardwalk, the E Street Band had rumbled into one of Springsteen’s newest songs: a full frontal attack on the Iraq war built around John Kerry’s 1971 testimony on Vietnam.

The kids asleep in the backseat
We’re just countin’ the miles you and me
We don’t measure the blood we’ve drawn anymore
We just stack the bodies outside the door.

Who’ll be the last to die for our mistake
The last to die for our mistake
Whose blood will spill, whose heart will break
Who’ll be the last to die for our mistake?

In the summer of 2004, Springsteen toured swing states with the “Vote for Change” tour, then followed it up with appearances alongside John Kerry in Wisconsin and Ohio. The change Springsteen wanted didn’t come, of course, and his new album — the not-yet-released “Magic” — focuses on what we’ve lost as a result.

In “Long Walk Home,” a father tells his son that the flag flying over the local courthouse means that “certain things are set in stone: who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t.” But introducing “Magic’s” “Livin’ in the Future” Monday night — “Woke up election day, sky gunpowder and shades of gray” — Springsteen said that some of those things we’d never do are the ones we’re doing already: illegal rendition, voter suppression, the torture of people in the custody of our government.

Springsteen’s list drifted off as the band started to play; at this, the first “rehearsal concert” for a tour that will last months, Springsteen’s indictment of the current administration hadn’t yet developed into the full poetic bill of particulars he delivered during the Vote for Change tour in 2004. But it’s there nonetheless, fleshed out in the songs Springsteen sang and the way he put them together. Early on Monday night, he played “No Surrender,” the hold-your-dreams-tight rocker Kerry chose for his campaign theme, then followed it with the mournful, Iraq-tinged “Gypsy Biker”: “To the dead, well it don’t matter much ’bout who’s wrong or right … To him that threw you away, you ain’t nothing but gone.”

On those autumn nights three years ago, Springsteen told us that the “country we carry in our hearts” was waiting for us. His show Monday night was a reminder that it’s still there but only there, and that the long walk back to it hasn’t even yet begun.

Tim Grieve is a senior writer and the author of Salon's War Room blog. More Tim Grieve.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 14 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
238 points239 points | 8 comments
vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the persecuted late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
174 points175 points | 1 comment
vote
Loaded terminology like "entitlements" and "welfare" skews the debate and alters America. How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government.
169 points170 points | 43 comments
vote
Obstruction will ruin the GOP: Playing politics and abusing the system can excite the extremes, but it's a recipe for long-term political disaster
53 points54 points | 8 comments
vote
How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government -- "...much of the U.S. economic security support system consists of subsidies for the affluent in the form of tax breaks, like those for private retirement savings plans such as 401(k)s and private employer-provided health insurance."
34 points35 points | 3 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations