Flipping through channels not long ago, I came upon a PBS pledge drive playing one of those
aging-rock-star concerts the network uses to cater to baby boomers. It was a little startling that
this time the star was Bruce Springsteen. I still struggle with the idea that Big Bird had conferred
Old Fogy status on the Boss.
The "Live in New York City" concert originally aired in 2001 and also was released as a
CD. Its release reminded me of the first time I ever saw Bruce in concert: January 26, 1981, at
Notre Dame's Joyce Center at the beginning of my sophomore second semester. I know the date
exactly because for years the ticket stub was stuck in the mirror of my dresser in my family
home. I remember sometime around Finals Week a month earlier sitting with friends on the floor
of Stepan Center during the concert-ticket lottery waiting for our number to be called. It took
hours, but the anticipation and the conversation were worth it even if the seats weren't
spectacular.
Because I was converted to Springsteen at Notre Dame, his music has always taken me
back to college. I resisted Bruce at first. I couldn't remember his music from high school -- and,
like other troglodytes, originally I thought they meant Rick Springfield. But by the end of
freshman year, I'd come around and when I went home for the summer I packed my newly
purchased Springsteen albums. Some might say it was the beginning of an obsession. I prefer to
believe it launched a symbiotic relationship between ND and the Boss. When I think of one, the
other often reflexively comes to mind.
Bruce was the soundtrack of my Notre Dame, and not mine alone. I often wonder how
that could be. Springsteen sings about street kids, blue-collar workers, low-level hoodlums and
their small victories, romances, desperation and lost dreams. How could such music possibly
resonate with middle- and upper-middle-class ND students living out one of their own dreams?
Somehow it connected with us.
One might propose that Springsteen's Catholic upbringing, common with most of us,
could explain the connection. Sometime after Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. came out, I saw a
side-by-side comparison of him and Michael Jackson, whose Thriller album had been released,
in a Springsteen fan magazine. The only thing I remember about the comparison was the
description of Bruce's religion as "reformed Catholic." The term suggests that his childhood
faith isn't active anymore, but one could speculate that Springsteen's Catholic roots had some
impact on a body of work about original sin and faith, failure and redemption, frailty and dignity,
and ultimately hope and love. If that's not evidence of his Catholic influences, consider that on
his Devils & Dust tour, Springsteen reminisced about his Catholic youth, speaking of the Church
as a place of "great beauty, poetry and hideous terror."
There's another dimension to the Springsteen-ND connection. Since the Hesburgh era
began in the 1950s, Notre Dame has been coming onto the national and international stage as a
world-class university. For a century prior, it seemed to have more modest aspirations, simply
aiming to provide Catholic men with a safely Catholic place to go to college. These ND students
of generations past -- and the subway alumni who aspired to be -- are, I think, the fathers of
many of the heroes of Springsteen's music, and as history and the music played out, their values
often clashed with their children's. While we Reagan-era ND students didn't live the lives of
soulful desperation of Bruce's music, by the nature of the place we attended and the heritage we
brought to it, we had a kind of filial connection to what he sang.
Springsteen was everywhere at Notre Dame, at least if Zahm Hall was any indication.
Every party included a healthy dose of his music. You always heard "Rosalita (Come Out
Tonight)" and "Born to Run," and the dance floor always filled when they came on the party
tape. Frequently Springsteen blared onto the quad from dorm windows like a call to prayer, and
it wasn't uncommon to hear his music waft into the chapel during Sunday night Mass. Someone,
somewhere always seemed to be playing Bruce in a form of perpetual adoration.
Most rock music is fun, of course, but not much engages and activates your head, heart
and feet like Springsteen's. The poetry, the imagery and the intimate detail of the lyrics take you
deep inside the lives of unforgettable characters. While their occasional despair can drive you to
that darkness on the edge, the music on which the lyrics ride saves you. The soaring guitars, the
wailing sax, the pounding piano, the driving drums energize and restore hope. The studio albums
are great, but the live Bruce -- in concert and even bootlegged -- is another experience
altogether. The go-for-broke, one-take-only approach of the band, the energy of the audience,
and Bruce's freelance philosophizing and standups mingle the intellectual, emotional, sensual,
physical, even the spiritual, turning the sensation into something more -- something not unlike
the average Domer's connection to Notre Dame.
I like to unpack those memories of Bruce and Notre Dame from time to time. It's fun to
peel away the layers of experience, feeling, image and sound. Even with all the pieces laid out
before me, the glue still seems invisible. Just what is it that holds the parts together and
integrates the whole? In the end, it's simple. The glue is the love for the place, the music and the
people. It's the conversations and flirtations, the disappointments and successes, the celebrations
and stumbles -- sitting on a floor for hours waiting for tickets -- all of which seemed to occur
with the same background score, music whose magic mixed with the mystique of the place.
Although I know it can't be true, my heart tells me anyway that my epiphany of 25 years
ago is still current and that somehow, ineffably, Bruce's music is and always will be a fixture at
Notre Dame.
Springsteen's music still takes me back to Zahm Hall and some of the best times of my
life; I won't call them "glory days." I remember the party we had in my room before that January
26, 1981, concert. Seeing my excitement, one of my friends joked that it was the "pinnacle" of
my life. Not exactly, but it was the start of something.
Patrick Gallagher lives in Aberdeen, South Dakota, with his wife and four children and works
for the Catholic school system.
(January 2007)
