Sprung From Cages On Highway 9

A Springsteen-centric guest post from Chris Dalla Riva

Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers!

As I’m once again slammed with various deadlines and obligations this week,

Chris Dalla Riva

has kindly agreed to pinch-hit for me, stepping in to serve up something fun to tide you over until the next episode of the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast drops later this week.

I’ve been a fan of Chris’s Substack Can’t Get Much Higher since first discovering it last year, and I highly recommend that you check it out. Chris writes a lot about the business of music, but he’s also very much an ardent music fan — and when he told me this amusing story about his unexpected brush with Boss-ness, I thought it would fit right in with what I’ve been doing here at JTL. Take it away, Chris!

I had the weird situation growing up where getting a cavity wasn’t that bad. Sure, nobody wants a cavity. And getting one filled isn’t pleasant. But my dental visits were usually coupled with a trip to the beach. 

Though I lived in a northern New Jersey suburb with many pediatric dental care options in close proximity, my sisters and I went to a dentist just over an hour-and-a-half away from our house. While these trips were of course for the benefit of our teeth, they were also for the benefit of our mom. One of her best friends was a pediatric dentist on the Jersey Shore. In short, we’d make the long trip to get our teeth cleaned so my mom could see her friend. Then as a reward, we’d drive a bit further to either go to a beach or a boardwalk arcade.

We made one of these trips in August 2010. It was a sweltering summer day, and I needed to get three cavities filled. “We’ll go to the dentist,” my mom told me, “and then we’ll go to Manasquan to pick up your sister.” My little sister had been down in Manasquan – a tiny seaside town – spending the week with her friend’s family. The plan was to go to the dentist, spend the day on the beach, and then drive home with my sister in tow.

After the uneventful cavity-filling, my mom and I got to the beach around 12:30. I was happy to see that my friend Mike was there. He was my sister’s friend’s brother. After swimming for a bit, I decided to relax among the circle of mothers while Mike went to surf near the inlet.

His mother quickly began to bug me. “Chris,” she began, “go get Michael James out of the water.” She always referred to him by his full name. “He’s been in there for too long. I don’t want him to leave you here by yourself.”

To be clear, I did not care that my friend was surfing. But I knew his mother would keep pestering me until I went to retrieve him. So, I got up and headed toward the surf. Nameless faces passed me by as I mozied along. But one caught my eye. “That looks like Bruce Springsteen,” I thought to myself.

I had heard Springsteen’s music for years, but I’d only been fanatical about it since my dad had shown me an acoustic version of “Growin’ Up” a year prior. And when I say fanatical, I really mean it. Overnight I went from having a passing interest in The Boss’s music to needing to hear every note he’d ever recorded. That fanaticism led to me seeing Springsteen and his mythology in everything. In fact, just a few months before, my friend and were convinced we saw Springsteen’s guitarist Nils Lofgren walking out of a Goodyear Tire near where we lived despite the fact that Lofgren did not reside in The Garden State. In other words, thinking that some middle-aged man walking down the beach was Bruce Springsteen was par for the course. Plus, why would a multimillionaire rockstar be on the public beach?

Then I walked ten feet further. “Did you see Bruce?” a random man stopped to ask me. I didn’t answer. I turned around and ran back to the circle of mothers. “Mom,” I shouted as I approached, “Bruce is on the beach!” My mom flew out of her beach chair with the same fervor that I’d approached. We went bounding down the sand to find The Boss talking to a few fans. After they shook hands and parted, we stepped up.

“Bruce,” my mom started, “my son is such a big fan. He wants to be a musician.” I was awestruck. “Thank you for the music,” I croaked. “No problem,” he responded with a chuckle.

My mom, a woman who has never been at a loss for words, continued on: “While we were driving down here, we were listening to ‘Born to Run’, and my son asked if we could drive down Highway 9 because you mention it in the song.” She wasn’t lying. I was a born-to-run-a-holic at the time. And I loved seeing the local sites that Bruce mentioned in his songs. 

He chuckled again. “If you look, you’ll find it,” he intoned in a rasp that felt all too familiar. 

And that was it. Bruce shook my hand and walked into the water. My mom and I headed back to our spot in the sand in a daze. I’d just met my hero. And he was so normal. And he’d given me some mysterious piece of advice: “If you look, you’ll find it.”

Those words banged around inside my head. Bruce was often searching for something in his music. What was he telling me to look for? My teenage brain couldn’t stop thinking about it as the sun crawled across the sky. And any chance there was of getting my mind off of the six-word statement was stymied by the fact that Bruce was sitting nearby.

What I was witnessing was the paradox of Bruce Springsteen. Though you knew that selling millions of records and touring the world made him fabulously wealthy, you still sort of believed that when he got offstage, he clocked in at the local steel mill. And he’s well aware of this perception. In fact, he acknowledged it near the beginning of his one man show, Springsteen on Broadway:

I've never held an honest job in my entire life. I've never done any hard labor. I've never worked nine to five. I've never worked five days a week until right now. I don't like it. I've never seen the inside of a factory and yet it's all I've ever written about. Standing before you is a man who has become wildly and absurdly successful writing about something of which he has had absolutely no personal experience. I made it all up.

As I watched Bruce and his kids drive off in a pickup truck later that day, this Springsteenian deception was on full display. “There goes a normal guy,” I thought to myself, despite the fact that he was likely headed back to a mansion paid for by songs about things he’d never experienced firsthand. 

And there’s not really anything wrong with that. Art doesn’t have to be autobiographical. I don’t think you’d enjoy reading Shakespeare any more or less if you found out that The Bard didn’t experience Hamlet’s existential dread and Macbeth’s lust for power. It is fascinating that we can hold these contradictory images of Springsteen — the world famous rock n’ roll shaman and anonymous, working class everyman — in our head at once, but it shouldn’t affect how we perceive his art.

A few days later, I was recounting all of this to my friend Tom. Like me, he was intrigued by Bruce’s seaside directive: “If you look, you’ll find it.” We pondered the short statement for a bit and then parted ways. Later that night, I got a text from Tom. “We’re so dumb,” the text said. “I think all he meant was that if you look on a map you’ll see the road is there.”

I walked to the family computer and punched “route 9 nj” into the search bar. It indeed was there. All 167 miles of coastal roadway. Sure, Bruce Springsteen might be some irresolvable musical contradiction. But he also might be something much simpler: a rock n’ roller singing about the people he met and the places he saw.

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