Walking the boardwalk at Asbury Park is, for anybody raised in the home of a man who regularly busted out the Springsteen and the E-Street Band live boxed set (which, in the era of vinyl, was about the size and weight of a pizza box made of Italian marble), is kind of like climbing Blueberry Hill or actually checking into Heartbreak Hotel. One approaches it super-saturated with mythology. On some level, it is difficult to believe that it is a real place. Imagine the sort of vertigo one would feel if you, for example, actually found a ticket stub to a performance by the actual Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. That's the weird feeling one gets standing on the boardwalk of Asbury Park. The real is constantly measured against a musical, imagined place. It is impossible to see one with out the other.

    Asbury Park, for those neither versed in the history of New Jersey or the musical output of Bruce Springsteen, is a shore-side town in Jersey. Asbury Park was founded in 1871 by a New York brush-maker named James A. Bradley. Bradley named the township after Francis Asbury, first American bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The idea was to create a sort of Christian Coney Island. For those interested in perspective, the "current" trend in strangely separatist Christian cultural enterprises – Jesus camps, Left Behind books, the Intelligent Design Museum, and the like – which the media continues to throw at you as if it was breaking news, is more than a century old.
    Bradley was a Methodist Barnum by way of Robert Moses. Not only did he regularly do things like purchase and then beach massive cargo ships on the shore in the hopes of attracting rubes who thought they were witnessing some historical wreck or newsworthy event, he also developed the town around the boardwalk. He oversaw the wiring of the city for electricity, despite his preference for gas lighting, which he thought was considerably more pleasant (and, in this, he was economically and aesthetically correct: electricity is the money choice, but the first world's loss of artistic sensibility can be laid at the feet of the Jersey Central Power & Light Company).
    By the 1920s, Asbury Park had, perhaps at the cost of the Christian ideals that were supposed to inform the locale, become a major summer destination spot. Vacation money spurred the construction of major boardwalk pavilions and first class hotels. The pavilions, which still - more or less - stand, are four or five blocks apart. Facing the ocean, the pavilion on your left is the auditorium. Bands still play there. To your right is the former casino, later (from the 50s to the 80s) the arcade. Now it is in a perpetual state of renovation and little more then a decaying place to hide from the sun for a few moments.
    The Depression and WWII hit Asbury Park hard. The city collapsed under a double whammy of race/class tension and unchecked civil corruption. This death spiral of near-terminal economic decline and social disharmony reached its peak on the 4th of July – Independence Day – 1970. Race riots. There are three major avenues through Asbury. Springwood Ave is one of them. As of my visit last weekend, Springwood is still not entirely rebuilt.

    Which brings us to Bruce.
    Unlike the heavy, seemingly monumental boxed set of my youth, the boxed CD set the size of an old Atari cartridge and weighs almost nothing. It seems, to be honest, kind of like a mockery of the psychological importance of the music. As if "Thunder Road" should weigh nothing. As if it is disposable. Still, it is what it is, so we use it as our reference.
    The fourth track of the first disk – after the sublime "Thunder Road," the house shaker "Adam Raised a Cain," and the roughneck Cavalier existentialism of "Spirits in the Night" – is "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)."
    The title stands out. It seems like it was built piece-meal. Though the music makes no allusion to the infamous race riots, the wedding the date to the location makes the allusion impossible to ignore (and, in fact, in another song in the same multi-album set, Springsteen explicitly references the infamous race riots). Then, the name: Sandy. This is, like all matters of the heart, open to interpretation, but I've always felt this was a weird instance of the Boss's tendency towards sentimentality. Another artist, somebody more cynical, somebody more typical, would tie a woman's name to the date of a famous riot to suggest hat she was a heartbreaking bitch. Especially if the woman discussed was just another bit of boardwalk trash. But Springsteen, I feel, meant it in the other direction. He holds up Sandy against all the bad that has been done.
    Why?
    Because that will be all the redemption that you get. You have to hold all the clumsy fumblings with bra-straps, all the bad kisses back with earnest emotion, all the promises that neither of you meant to keep, all the times you – for just a second, in your dumb, wonderful, innocent stupidity - thought it would last forever, against all the horror of the modern world.
    And, dig this:
    This is why so many serious critics, why so many kids raised on thinking rock should be art, why entire continents on the other side of the Atlantic, which laps against the nearly one-mile shoreline of Asbury, don’t get Springsteen.
    Bruce freakin' means it.
    He genuinely can hold every school boy crush, every time a young girl wrote her first name with some kid in Chem's last name in her diary, every time to young people missed their lips and ended up passionately kissing one another's cheeks, against all the evil of the world and find the good winning.
    Keats called it negative capability. In the vernacular, it's called empathy. Outside of Springsteen's records, it is pretty much an endangered species. You could be forgiven if you mistook it for something else. Or simply assumed it was dead.

    Before we get too serious, I should point out that her name is also one of the clumsiest puns in contemporary rock. Shore. Beach. Sandy. We don't need to follow this line of thought further. The Boss is like that. He's actually funny in a sort of goofy way.
    Once, the Boss was being interviewed by this reporter who took him to task for the wealth he's earned from his music.
    "You sing about the working class, but you live in this big house on the hill."
    The Boss smiled.
    "Yeah. It's a really nice house."

    This is a tangent, but the reporter's question reminds me . . . .
    In 1999, at 1157 Wheeler Avenue in the Soundview section of The Bronx, four members of the Street Crimes Unit fired 41 shots at an immigrant worker named Diallo. They believed he matched the description of a serial rapist. The impact of the cops' bullets actually held the body of Diallo up, causing the cops to think he was, somehow, still standing. Their shots actually fed their fear and made them shoot more shots.
    The Boss, a hero of the (literally) blue-collar workers on the NYPD, responded to the incident with a song called "American Skin (41 Shots)". This was around the time that Bruce was touring, reunited with the E Street Band – the backing band that's supported the Boss (and, at various times Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Sting, Ian Hunter, Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, and Aretha Franklin) on and off since his first album Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J..
    This reunion tour ended with ten sold-out nights at Madison Square Garden. Normally, security at the Garden is provided by off-duty cops. They get a little extra cheddar and get to pretend that they hobnob with the band. It isn't a bad deal. Dates with bands the NYPD – who, currently, are disproportionately staffed by guys who grew up in the mid- to late-70s – knows and loves are especially coveted. Which makes it note worthy that no NYPD officers offered to pull security detail for Bruce. Having grown up with him, the men and women of the NYPD felt betrayed.
    It was, in fact, part of an on-going trend. The Boss's politics – which had been inching ever left-ward – increasingly put him at odds with his fan-base. He spoke to the working class in a rock style that they identified as their musical vernacular, but ultimately he didn't share their often conservative social values. This schism was at the base of the Reagan/"Born in the USA" dust-up. Republicans attempted to co-opt Springsteen's anthem "Born in the USA" as Reagan's '84 campaign theme song, apparently unconcerned that the song was primarily a grim meditation on the psychological fallout of the Vietnam War. Springsteen forbade Reagan's campaign from using it. These days, in order to emphasize the content of "Born" at the cost of losing its style (which, in music as in all arts, is the primary layer of content), he tends to only play the song acoustically.
    After '99, Bruce kinda vanished. For almost three years, Bruce made no albums, did no significant touring. He dropped out of the public eye.
    Then, in 2002, Springsteen released The Rising, an explicit answer to 9/11 attacks. He ended the tour for that album with 3 nights at Shea Stadium. The NYPD, as they did before "American Skin," offered to do guard duty. Springsteen took up their offer, but still played "American Skin." Only now, after all that had happened, the political division seemed less important. There was a weird sense that Bruce was there for the cops and the cops were there for Bruce and that this basic level of friendship was more important than any arguments about politics.
    That's the answer to the reporter's pointed question about Springsteen's relationship with the working class. Springsteen doesn't pretend to be of the working class. His popularity with the blue-collar crowd rests on unique sense that he's simply their buddy. It is a pre-political emotional response that comes before the intellectualizing impulse takes control. This reaction is solely a property of Springsteen's music; it is, I think, one of the keys to popular music's hold on the imagination. This is why it is embarrassing when a musician appears on television or radio and is asked to explain their own art. Or, worse, when a song-writer puts out a novel or book of poems. Suddenly this brilliant person, this philosopher-king whose art exerts a magical pull on you, becomes this plodding, pedestrian lummox full of half-baked ideas and lame stock responses: "I don't like to interpret my lyrics" or "I'm trying to say what we all feel sometimes." We love the music we love and create reasons and justifications for it later.

    But, back to Sandy . . .

    The title is typically Springsteenian in that the Boss has this thing about specifying the names and characteristics of the female characters in his songs.
    Popular music is full of immediately recognizable female characters. Soul music has given us the less-than-loyal Long Tall Sally and the self-explanatory Run-Around Sue. We've got Buddy Holly's Peggy Sue, Richie Valens's Donna, and Elvis Costello's Alison, and Rod Stewart's Maggie Mae. Barbara Ann is possibly pop's most famous rebound thanks to the Beach Boys. We've got Carrie Ann, Mandy, Layla, Sweet Caroline, Cecilia (sans Ann for Simon and Garfunkel, Ann enabled for Pixies fans), and Eileen. Janie's armed, Irene says goodnight, Judy wouldn't be caught dead listening to Top 40, while Little Ramona's letting her Ramones albums gather dust. One could form an army out of the number of Mary's, proud and otherwise, that appear in pop.
    Still, despite this extremely partial litany of names, pop's usually very evasive when it comes to directly addressing The Girl. "Baby" is the address of choice. When writing a pop tune, a certain level of abstraction makes sense. Identification is a significant portion of the game fans play with the music they love. But identification can be a tricky little game. Are you the singer of the song, are you the person being sung to, or is the whole thing a sort of elevation map to a particular emotional landscape you recognize to be true even if you've never been there yourself? For the semiotically inclined, it is called the problem of statement or énoncé. At its most extreme, the game of identification can be made nearly impossible. Think about just who is supposed to be speaking in the Sex Pistol's "Bodies." Sometimes the singing voice is that of Rotten (himself a semi-fictionalized character) as disgusted on-looker. At other times he seems to be speaking for the crazed Polly. He also seems to take on the character of Polly's aborted un-child. Finally, it sometimes seems that he's putting words into the mouth of the ex-fetus's father. To complicate matters, none of these shifts are clearly marked within the song. This is an extreme case, though. Usually we get a simple three-way choice: to identify with the singer, the subject, or with the statement itself.

    Creating a specific character within your song makes the identification a little hinky. Can't "take" that character's place so easily. They aren't some placeholder waiting for your projection to fill it out. You, instead, are being invited to build a sustained other and hold it in your mind for the extent of the song.
    Bruce does this all the time. Bruce populates his songs with specific female characters. You couldn't say they're fully realized. Instead, they are built up out of small, disjointed details. As if you've just stumbled into a conversation where Bruce and the woman know what's going on, but you are playing catch-up, and they don't have any particular interest in letting you in on what you've missed. For example, we know that the girl in "Thunder Road" is named Mary. We know she lives near the shore, we know her house has a front porch, we know she went to the prom, and we know she "ain't a beauty," Bruce tells us, but she's "alright." References to her making crosses out of roses and praying suggest, maybe, lapsed faith.
    You can play this game with any number of Springsteen's songs. In fact, he relies on this descriptive pointillism so often that it can be a bit of a joke. Playboy magazine once ran a grid that broke down the data Bruce provides for some six of seven different women into physical descriptions, emotional characteristics, and so on.

    Unfortunately, Sandy is actually a bit of a bust, as far as Springsteen's female characters go. Other than her name, and the fact that she hangs out on the Asbury Park boardwalk, we don't get much of anything about her. Instead, Bruce turns his scattershot observations to constructing an image of life as it is lived on the boardwalk. And it is here that we meet the second woman in Bruce's song, and the point of my pilgrimage to Asbury Park.

    After a bitterly nostalgic description of the work-class stiffs and fun-time freaks who populate the boardwalk at night, Bruce kicks into this weirdly Blake-by-way-of-Kenneth Anger riff:

Sandy, the angels have lost our desire for us
I spoke to 'em just last night and they said they won't set themselves on fire for us anymore
Every summer when the weather gets hot they ride that road down from heaven on their Harleys they come and they go
And you can see 'em dressed like stars in all the cheap little seashore bars parked making love with their babies out on the Kokomo

    Then, with three lines left before the final chorus, he introduces her.

Well the cops finally busted Madame Marie for tellin' fortunes better than they do
This boardwalk life for me is through
You know you ought to quit this scene too

    I don't know if Sandy is a real person of not. I suspect she's not. I've always assumed Bruce's women are composites. There may have been a Rosalita, but she gets bits of Sarah, Isabel, and Denise mixed in, with, perhaps, a few original details need to fill out the song's purpose. I have no proof of this. In fact, I admit this is a blatant case of project. When I write, I work almost completely of composites: I stitch together sets, people, and plots like an amateur Frankenstein. For some reason, Springsteen's women have the same cobbled together feel. But, again, that's just me talking. And, in the case of Sandy, it hardly matters. There's so little Sandy that the question is academic.

    But Madam Marie is real.

    Madam Marie's office, as it were, is a tiny shack made of poured concrete located halfway between the boardwalk oyster bar and the sales offices for the new dee-lux high rise condos being built just off the main drag. Behind her little structure is an undeveloped lot. Aside from small clusters of beach grass and a bizarre three-foot tall stalagmite of shell-studded concrete that resembles the stump of some long cut down alien tree, it is empty.
    Her office is almost cube-shaped, about 12 feet by 12. Around the roof is a bit of white trim. Her front door, all glass with a silver metal frame, faces the boardwalk. On either side of the door is a large window. Each window has a blind the color of faded paper, and Madam Marie keeps them pulled down all day long. This is less about creating an aura of mystery than it is a practically consideration. Madam Marie spends most of her time in a concrete sweatbox with two big ol' windows facing the open beach. You don't need Madam Marie's mystical insights into the occulted workings of the universe to know that it's going to get mighty hot in there.
    The sides and back of Madam Marie's cube are painted a light turquoise color – the sort of color people paint the bottom of swimming pools. On the right side of her shack, her name appears in two-foot tall black letters with dark blue outlines. Under "Marie" there appears the following in thin, red, all caps: READINGS TAROT CARD CRYSTAL BALL. In roughly the center of the wall, there appears a single eye. It is a right eye. It is almond shaped and has long, feminine lashes. The iris is about the same color as the background, a light blue. Five yellow five-pointed stars form something like the Little Dipper. Just below the eye and a little to the left is a fuse box and a meter.
    A sign on Madam Marie's door informs you that knowledge of the future won't cost you but five dollars. I'm at a loss as to whether this is a reasonable price for a look into the future. Demand for such knowledge must be astronomical, and genuine insight into what's to come has to, I imagine, be in short supply. Five Washingtons seems like an almost absurdly low fee. But, then, perhaps fortune tellers are like economists – their wealth of knowledge is rarely transmuted into plain old wealth and it shouldn't surprise us to meet fortune tellers who are no more prepared for the future than it should to meet economists who are not rich as Croesus.