Sunday , January 24, 2010
The Most Romantic Summer Song (Or: Why Bedroom Dancing Is Better Than Time Machines)
I've never not known "Spirit in the Night," the third track on side two of Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. I was born three days after Christmas sometime in the late 1970s, and then my parents brought me home from the hospital and started playing Bruce Springsteen records over and over and over till I grew up and moved out and had to go buy all my own copies of Bruce Springsteen records - kind of like having to buy your own frying pan or bath mat for the first time, except that Bruce Springsteen records are so much better than frying pans and bath mats. This is the song:
When I was a little girl, I was always scared of "Spirit in the Night." Mostly it had to do with the part when it slows down toward the end and it's just piano and Bruce singing: "Hazy Davey got really hurt, he ran into the lake in just his socks and a shirt. Me and Crazy Janey was makin' love in the dirt, singin' our birthday songs." That first part creeped me out like nothing else - like, why was Davey wearing just socks and a shirt? He must've been insane, or on drugs - probably drugs, and really bad ones too. Drugs terrified me when I was a kid; they still do now. I didn't know what kind of stuff the "Spirit in the Night" kids would be into, but it had to be something evil as whatever it was in Go Ask Alice that made the narrator-girl think she was being eaten alive by worms. (Listening today, I guess "Spirit in the Night" is about angel dust. I will probably never understand anything about angel dust, or why anyone would ever want to do it. This is narrow-minded of me, possibly.)
But the "makin' love in the dirt" lyric got to me more than the drugs - something about how Bruce's voice was so tired and heartsick, or the fact that they were in the dirt, singing, sounded so much more like real sex than any of sex I'd ever seen on cable TV or read about in my mom's issues of Cosmo. More than anything it sounded desperate, and that's what I couldn't understand at all: You don't know what "desperate" means when you're a kid, and you certainly don't know how it figures into sex.
"Spirit in the Night" didn't stop being scary to me until a few years after I was done being a teenager, when I started listening to Bruce Springsteen records on my own and could nearly hear them as something not belonging entirely to my parents. I used to write made-up stories a lot then, and there was always some gold-hearted, down-on-his-luck boy and some super-tuff but virtuous girl, and they were always riding around in hot junky cars and illegally swimming in lakes after dark in the summertime, getting drunk and getting stoned and tongue-kissing and everything else (desperately, maybe?). I didn't realize till now that I was mostly just trying to rewrite "Spirit in the Night" using my own vocabulary and my own geography, that those boys were mostly built from some very-long-ago-formed idea of what boys are supposed to be like. Because even though I was so scared of Davey and his drugs when I heard "Spirit in the Night" for the 200th time on the radio in my dad's kitchen in 1984, that was maybe the moment when I started to get real excited that I'd be around some crazy boys someday too.
But the truth about life is that most boys are not like boys in Bruce Springsteen songs, which is one of the greatest disappointments I've ever known. Most boys are not terminally wild and blindly valiant and beautifully desperate all at once; most boys don't walk around looking just like Bruce Springsteen on the cover of The River. That's partly because life is not a record, and it's certainly not a record made in 1973. And so while there've been at least a few nights of illegal swimming after dark, there've also been a few nights (three, to be exact) when I'm driving around with someone I'm head-over-boots for, and "Born to Run" comes on the radio, and the boy starts singing along passionately - but fake-passionately, or quasi-fake-passionately, because boys born after 1973 aren't allowed to passionately sing along to Bruce Springsteen songs without making it kind of a joke. This is my least favorite thing about my generation, by a very long shot.
Another part of the problem is I'm nothing like a girl in a Bruce Springsteen song, and I could never even try to be; it would never not ring false. I could buy myself a plaid flannel like Bruce Springsteen on the cover of The River, but I'll probably never be terminally wild and blindly valiant and beautifully desperate all at once. It might just be that I was born at the wrong time and in an intractably nonfictional universe, and what can I do about that?
The only thing I've come up with so far is to turn off all the lights, maybe leave one candle burning, and play "Spirit in the Night" really loud in my earbuds or on my stereo while dancing all around the house/bedroom. The formula's easy to remember because you can make it into a rhyme: Shut out the lights/Dance to "Spirit in the Night." As far as simple-things-you-can-do-to-make-life-seem-like-it's-exactly-how-you-want-it-to-be go, this one's pretty perfect and weirdly effective. I figured it out a couple winters ago when I couldn't stop being sad about a certain stupid thing and spent a lot of time listening to a radio station out of Martha's Vineyard in some ultimately valid attempt to align the adulthood I wanted when I was 10 with the adulthood I'd recently begun to shape for myself. "Spirit in the Night" came on real late, and I killed all the lights save for one little rose-colored candle, and danced like I maybe would always dance if I'd been born 20 years earlier.
From what I can tell, bedroom dancing is way better than time travel, because you're simultaneously living in another generation and claiming that generation for yourself. You're stealing its soul, basically, but for pure and honorable purposes, because altering your reality for exactly five minutes maybe confuses your brain into believing that life truly is exactly how you want it to be. I suppose that's potentially troublesome, but at the end of the day I'd so much rather have a confused brain than a bored heart.
------------------------------------
My favorite part now, the bit that undoes me the most - even more than those scary lyrics about Davey and Janey and drugs and dirt did 25 years ago - is these few lines in the middle of the second verse:
By the time we made it up to Greasy Lake
I had my head out the window, and Janey's fingers were in the cake
I think I really dug her 'cause I was too loose to fake
I said, "I'm hurt," she said, "Honey, let me heal it"
I don't know if there's any other song that tells a more romantic summer story, or any other book or movie for that matter. And I guess my big silly generic wish is for life to always be the most romantic summer story, even though that's just completely impractical. About 93 percent of the time I walk around believing everything to be freakishly amazing; like, I can hardly even grasp that I've worked everything out so that, for instance, I get to live in a magic city and be in the ocean all the time and know lots of the best people on the planet and spend most of my day writing words and words and words. And it's possibly bratty to devote 1,419 of today's words to a bit of glorified bellyaching about how I wish the mood were a little different, the psychic climate a little more sweltry, but I don't care. I think it's good to get it into your cluttered head that you should always try to live real romantical, whatever that means to you. Some things that might help: wearing dramatic hair to go walking around your noisy/jasmine-smelling neighborhood with a bag of red licorice semi-late at night, listening to Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. while speeding by the seashore on a Tuesday at twilight in early spring, looking at beautiful pictures of Bruce Springsteen when he was 24, sometimes kissing inappropriate-yet-sweethearted boys/girls just because they kiss good, and - most important - drinking pink wine instead of anything else. In the fifth line of "Spirit in the Night," Bruce sings "I got a bottle of rose, so let's try it," and thus sort of reveals one of the best-kept secrets in the universe: Boys who are terminally wild and blindly valiant and beautifully desperate drink pink wine; girls who are terminally wild and blindly valiant and beautifully desperate drink pink wine too. I wanna be just like them, and I already am.
Tags: 1973, bedroom dancing, boys, Bruce Springsteen, cars, confused brain vs. bored heart, Go Ask Alice, grown-ups, illegal swimming, love, music, phenylcyclohexylpiperidine, pink wine, radio, sex, summer, time travel
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11 Comments!!
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Got something to say? We'd love to hear it! Name, email and "type in the weirdo drunken text" thingie are all required to comment; don't worry, we won't email you or anything, we just want to make sure you're not an evil spambot. Keeping in mind the good-times mentality we like to keep going here, we've worked hard to keep NOGOODFORME.COM as fun as possible. We welcome all kinds of comments, but insults/abuse/general bitchery are not tolerated. In other words, we put the smackdown on evil troll posts. If you want to be a hater, please go elsewhere. Now, as Salt 'N Pepa say, "Only the sexy people..."
This is a great post.
By Ms. Fab on June 23, 2009 2:04 PM
This is the best thing I've ever read! Well, maybe not the best, but definitely my favorite.
By Stephanie on June 23, 2009 3:10 PM
Bubbles, you're a poet.
Also, may Redwines always have confused heads over bored hearts.
By Sarah on June 23, 2009 3:35 PM
God, what a gift to this world you are, Black Eyes Barker.
We have different taste in dudes, but very similar taste in "pink wine opinions."
By Laura
on June 23, 2009 10:29 PM
Excellent
By runescape gold on June 24, 2009 4:18 AM
thanks all, so much...xo
lj: i feel the exact same way about YOU!
By Liz
on June 24, 2009 11:18 AM
don't feel close-minded. even John Waters hates angel dust.
By roslyn on June 24, 2009 7:19 PM
oh boy do i know that boys-aren't-like-bruce-said-they-would be disappointment. but palm trees and fish tacos do a lot to comfort a girl. yay for la!
By jules on June 24, 2009 11:03 PM
jules: THIS IS SO TRUE. i want a fish taco from siete mares right nowwwww..........xo
By Liz
on June 25, 2009 3:33 PM
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