When Bruce Springsteen played at Slane Castle in 1985 he was already beginning to wonder if it had all gone too far. The word on that gloriously sunny day was that The Boss was "freaked" by the scale of his welcome - 75,000 people on the grassy banks of the Boyne and most of them wearing bandanas. The album Born in the USA was in the process of selling 20 million copies and Springsteen was beginning to realise that, for the songs themselves, there was a definite downside to major arena success.
In some bizarre twist, he had become an icon of Reagan's America and furthermore, nobody on the planet seemed to have any idea what Born in the USA was actually about. The Boss, understandably, wasn't happy about any of it.
Certainly he had set out to reach as large an audience as possible and had done precisely that. And for Springsteen and the E-Street Band the scale of the crowd wasn't the problem - they were the very men to entertain any size of an audience for hours on end. But there was a catch. Just about everything was getting lost under the surface of the sort of pop necessary to work on this level. In reaching this global audience, the blue collar hero had become a hyped-up representative of an America that he genuinely didn't represent and it was more than a little frustrating.
In the book Songs, Springsteen revisits that two-year world tour, "Born in the USA changed my life," he says, "and gave me my largest audience. It forced me to question the way I presented my music and made me think harder about what I was doing." Artists with the ability to engage a mass audience are always involved in an inner debate as to whether it's worth it, whether the rewards compensate for the single-mindedness, energy and exposure necessary to meet the demands of the crowd. If you depend on it too much, it may distort what you do and who you are. It can blind you to the deeper resonances of your work and the importance of your most committed listeners."
And so, artist that he is, Springsteen followed Born in the USA with Tunnel of Love, clearly out to remind people that he was a songwriter, and whether you liked him or not, one of America's most important. Everything took a quieter turn and having written for 20 years about the man on the road, the 37-year-old Springsteen began to write about the man in the house. The bombast was over and Springsteen, for the first time, got deeply into the muddy waters of adult relationships.
And here is the real value of this large and very glossy book. It puts a clear shape on Springsteen's preoccupations and career using only the very basic ingredients - the complete lyrics, a selection of photographs and a few brief remarks from the man itself. There's not much else to it, in fact, and the lavish production seems a serious extravagance given that song lyrics are rarely a good read. But that said, the book certainly gives a clear and concise account of Springsteen's artistic route from the Ashbury Park to The Ghost of Tom Joad. That persistent movement back and forward between Springsteen the Folk Singer and Springsteen the King of the BarBands is clearly outlined and provides a very useful reference for fans and sceptics alike. It's even more interesting if you happen to be a sceptical fan.
Born in Freehold New Jersey in 1949, Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen took his first shots both in the New York folk scene and back in New Jersey with a string of rocking bar bands. Eventually signed by the legendary Columbia A&R man John Hammond, both musical strands were combined when Springsteen and the E-Street Band released Greetings from Ashbury Park in 1973. The songs were what he calls "twisted autobiographies" and their wordy weakness is immediately evident. "I never wrote in that style again," says Springsteen. "Once the record was released, I heard all the `new Dylan' comparisons, so I steered away from it. But the lyrics and spirit of Greet- ings came from a very unselfconscious place. Your early songs come out of a moment when you're writing with no sure prospect of ever being heard. Up until then, it's just you and your music. That happens only once."
And so the book takes us, album by album, through Springsteen's career as the voice of white, blue collar America. The first major hit came with Born to Run in 1975 and here Springsteen maintains he drew a line. This, he says, was the point where he left behind his adolescent definitions of love and freedom. Three years later, Darkness On The Edge of Town finally appeared after legal troubles and so began a trilogy of dark, thoughtful records in which Springsteen worked his way through small town life in songs reeking of overalls and gasoline. The second of the three was the double album The River (1980), the title track of which is Springsteen at his best - the classic folk narrative telling a realist tale of hard times, economics and love. Nebraska (1982), a four-track home recording concluded, for the time being, that folk-influenced spell which had seen Springsteen achieve near heroic status with all its cliches and genius thrown in.
The criticism long levelled at Springsteen, however, is one of political vagueness. Certainly his image is of the blue collar rebel, but the fact that his heroes all seem to accept their condition "on account of the economy" is sometimes seen as a political cop-out. Robin Denselow in his book When The Music's Over - the Story of Political Pop, argues "what Springsteen didn't do was scream, yell, go out on a limb, or get angry at what was going on. He acted like a character from his songs. Springsteen's heroes are noble, hopeless victims of forces that are beyond their control. It is this attitude, surely, that explains why the Boss's stirring rock songs that honour the American working man have appealed to the Right as much as the Left."
And that confusion was a real one. In 1984 both Reagan and Mondale attempted to attach themselves to the notion of Springsteen as they courted votes.
The Boss immediately distanced himself from Reagan and didn't much approve of the Mondale endorsement either. Much like Bob Dylan perhaps, always wary of being used, Springsteen has never made the obvious political moves and seems much more comfortable with the local rather than the global cause. Though not part of Live Aid for instance, Springsteen gave money to the striking miners in Britain and back home, donated large amounts of money to various unions and food programmes. Perhaps in these circumstances, the political uncertainty his critics speak of, is entirely his own business.
Tunnel of Love (1987) is seen by many as his finest work. It was a consciously low-key follow up to Born in the USA and both the title track and Brilliant Disguise made number one in the US charts. The songs, cut live to a rhythm track, had a fragile feel and were populated with worried grown-up characters. "There was the possibility of life passing them by," says Springsteen, "of the things they needed - love, a home - rushing out the open window of all those cars I had placed them in."
There were two albums, Human Touch and Lucky Town, released in 1992 and here again Springsteen displayed the dual nature of his work. The first was more of a pop record, the second more of the singer-songwriter album. Again that "ebb and flow" was evident. In 1993, the song Streets of Philadelphia pulled in Grammys and an Academy Award and in 1995 The Ghost of Tom Joad took Springsteen back to his folk roots with a Guthrie/Dylan approach that reminded even the sceptics that The Boss had much to give. Here once again the emphasis was on story-telling emotion that could not be misconstrued. He also toured, alone with a guitar, and performed songs like Born in the USA in their raw and much more meaningful state.
"I knew that the Ghost of Tom Joad wouldn't attract my largest audience. But I was sure the songs on it added up to a reaffirmation of the best of what I do. The record was something new, but it was also a reference point to the things I tried to stand for and be about as a songwriter."
The most recent release was a four CD box set simply called Tracks - a selection of 66 songs, 56 of them previously unissued. Included is a "proper" version of Born in the USA - a song which in recent years Springsteen has been very consciously reinterpreting on stage." Those interpretations always stood in relief to the original," he says "and gained some new power from the audience's previous experience with the original version. On the album, Born in the USA was in its most powerful presentation. If I tried to undercut or change the music, I believe I would have had a record that might have been more easily understood, but not as good."
Just over a week ago in Barcelona, Springsteen was back on stage with the EStreet Band. Despite not playing together for 14 years, they clicked into gear immediately and performed one of their endless sets full of all the theatrical bar-band dynamics that makes them such a major draw.
This current tour brings them to Dublin in May and it will, as ever, be a pleasure to experience this most energetic and hardworking outfit. Perhaps too, the ebbing and flowing Springsteen will treat us to something of his folkier side and maybe perform a version of Born in the USA which cannot be misconstrued.
Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band play the RDS Dublin on May 25th. Songs by Bruce Springsteen is published by Virgin.