MY LIFE IN HORROR: I HAD A JOB, I HAD A GIRL

My Life In Horror
 
Every month, I will write about a film, album, book or event that I consider horror, and that had a warping effect on my young mind. You will discover my definition of what constitutes horror is both eclectic and elastic. Don’t write in. Also, of necessity, much of this will be bullshit – as in, my best recollection of things that happened anywhere from 15 – 40 years ago. Sometimes I will revisit the source material contemporaneously, further compounding the potential bullshit factor. Finally, intimate familiarity with the text is assumed – to put it bluntly, here be gigantic and comprehensive spoilers. Though in the vast majority of cases, I’d recommend doing yourself a favour and checking out the original material first anyway.
 
This is not history. This is not journalism. This is not a review.
 
This is my life in horror.

​I Had A Job, I Had A Girl

The album came out in June of ‘84, about a week before the birthday I share with my father. I don’t know when he got it, just that it appeared on cassette at some point, and made heavy rotation as part of the frequent long car journeys that seemed to take up so much of our time together.
 
I was five years old when my parents split up, and I have no concrete memory of them living together. What I do remember is the subsequent geographical distance between them, my mother living first in rural County Durham, then rural North Devon with my sister and I, dad living in London. The immediate impact of this was that we only saw him at half term and school holidays, and one of the further consequences was that those holidays seemed to consist to a quite unreasonable degree of eleventy billion hour long car journeys, sat on the back seat across from my highly irritating sister, while my dad and stepmum sat up front, having conversations from which all I could make out were tones of voice.
 
The journeys out weren't as bad, of course - lots to look forward to, cinema trips, McDonalds, my beloved ZX Spectrum, video rentals. Good times. And we had the cassette tapes to keep us company; Bonnie Tyler’s Faster Than The Speed Of Night, a AOR compilation called American Heartbeat, Now That’s What I Call Music 1, and the BBC adaptation of Genesis Of The Daleks, which ended up being rationed to one listen per trip, so total was my addiction to that narrative.
 
Them, and one other.
 
The journey home, though. Man, that sucked. Hours of boredom and/or agitation, with the pain of parting at the end, weeks of school stretching ahead before we’d see him again. It was wretched, and worse, a lot of those same albums that’d seemed so full of sunlight and joy, promising easy good times and fun, turned suddenly, became cold and melancholic; to this day, Bonnie Tyler’s Take Me Back will raise a lump in my throat, as I’m suddenly a child again, seatbelt resting on my cheek, the grey motorway streaming past my window, the sentiment of the song perfectly matching the bitter tears on my cheeks.
 
And this album. Man, this album.
 
Before the big Guns N Roses revolution of ‘89, I was already casting about for new music, trying to find something that spoke to me on a level more substantial than the pop music I’d hear on the school bus radio. I’m pretty sure Dad made me a copy of the American Heartbeat compilation, and I know for sure he ran me off copies of what was then the entire Dire Straits back catalogue. I loved the shit out of that, too; especially the Money For Nothing greatest hits compilation. I was obsessed with the storytelling noir of Private Investigations, the sheer scope of Telegraph Road, and the doomed romanticism of Romeo and Juliet and Tunnel Of Love. I very self consciously disowned Dire Straits when I entered my teenage metal phase, and just as self consciously got back into them in my 30’s, picking up the back catalogue on vinyl, eBay sale by eBay sale. It’s too bland for the missus, which is fair; they are unapologetic dad rock, by far the least cool band I’m in to. But they will still get a spin, on the rare occasions I have the house to myself.

And then, there was Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA.

Dad for-sure made me a copy of this. I remember, because he also photocopied the inner sleeve of the cassette, cutting it out to fit the jewel case of the C60 he’d copied it on to. It was a staple of the long journeys, and perfectly captured that duel emotional state, dependant on the direction of travel; on the way out, the sha-na-nas of Darlington County and swagger of Glory Days sang in sympatico with the rhythms of my soaring heart, the almost uncontainable excitement of by-God going-to-Dads; and, of course, when it was time for that long, crawling, miserable journey home, Bobby Jean and Downbound Train were right there to wrap me up in sweet misery.
 
I swear, this fucking album.
 
It became totemic, to me; a connection to a man I loved so much, missed so deeply and totally; hearing it would put me back into those car journeys, both trips; the joy and the pain, the anticipation and the loss, an inseparable mixture; I’d hear it, and imagine he was listening too, knowing he was, somewhere, taking the trip with me through these stories of love and loss and melancholy and depression and goofy joy. It hurt. It helped. I’d often cry, and it felt good, cleansing, and after I’d feel hollowed out, the pain purged, ready to fill up on something else, something better.
 
It also taught me so much; made me feel so many things that an eight year old kid had no business knowing and feeling. In it’s own way, Born In The USA was as explosive a work in my life as King’s IT - every bit as transgressive, as transformative - and several years before that particular gang of Losers would march into my imagination and take up residence in my heart. And because it was, ostensibly, just a slice of pop rock - just some big 80’s megahit record from Bruce frikkin’ Springsteen, for crying out loud - I was left alone with it, to marinade in it, playing it over and over and over. I remember having a pair of speakers that worked off a headphone jack, meaning you could turn your Walkman into a pretty crappy but functional stereo, and doing that, turning the volume up to maximum, and clamping the speakers to my ears. I wanted to feel like I was inside the sound, inside the album. Part of it.
 
For those of you not familiar, Born In The USA is one of the finest short story collections in American literature. It is one of the very, very few musical cultural artifacts of the 80’s that manages to be both unapologetically of that era and still unambiguously brilliant; seering, insightful, heartfelt and afraid. The collection of tales are as varied as the characters that populate them; road tripping New Yorkers, depressed divorcees, lonely storytellers, young parents, broken-down war veterans - oh, yes, and at least one convicted pederast, just to make sure you’re still awake at the back. Yes, you read that correctly. No, it’s not a joke - though it is, implausibly, the punchline to one of the songs.
 
The album opens with the title track, Born In The USA, a song infamously adopted by Regean on his first campaign trail, and still thought of as a chest-beating patriotic anthem by anybody who hasn’t sat still for long enough to hear a single word of the song outside of the chorus. Now to be fair to those people, Springsteen sings with an unapologetic New Jersey accent and a voice not short of bark or gravel; my missus can’t make out a word of it, and she’s far from alone. The cassette came with a folded up lyric sheet, which I remember studying at Dad’s house, and I either stole it at some point, or he made me a copy; either way, a lot of those early listens were with the sheet across my lap, absorbing the words, integrating them into my understanding of the songs.
 
And once you did that, everything about the song changed.

 “Born down in a dead man’s town,
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground,
You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much,
Till you spend half your life just coverin’ up.”

I’m eight years old.
 
I picture it. A dust and cinder parking lot. The impact of a fist on my face, then the jolt up my spine as I fall on my arse, kicking up a cloud of pale dust. Over and over. Till it becomes a way of life, just part of the day. You get hit. You fall. Over and over. Dead man’s town - friends and neighbours, even at eight years old, I was living in a population 450 village in North Devon, and I got that just fine.
 
Dead men. Dead ends. No way out. No escape. And sure, as part of the wider Springsteen canon, you can see how some of this juxtaposes with the earlier optimism and fire of Born To Run, or even the more equivocal but still ultimately absolving resolution of Racing In The Streets, but that’s context that’s decades in the coming; for now, there is only this album, that opens with these words, this image.

“Got in a little hometown jam,
So they put a rifle in my hand,
Sent me off to a foriegn land,
To go and kill the yellow man.”

See, here’s the thing. To this point in my education, I know about, at most, three wars, full stop. The English Civil War, where the Goodies Won And We Got Democracy (and was Long Ago), World War One (which was against the Germans and Was Just Generally Bad) and World War Two (which was also against the Germans, who were definitely The Baddies this time, and which We, The Goodies, Won). War is a conflict of values, in other words. And while the silence on the relative merits of WWI might have given a more curious mind pause, my own thoughts skated clear over that with nary a skip. War was a clash of Values. War was about Goodies and Baddies. If We were in a War, We were the Goodies. Clearly. And the Goodies always won.
 
And then there’s this verse.
 
Twenty eight words, and my entire conception of armed conflict is upended forever, cast asunder, and the world that flows in to fill the space is infinitely murkier and scarier that that which it replaced. No Goodies here - even at eight, a ‘hometown jam’ is ominous, evocative of trouble, maybe even violence. ‘Put a rifle in my hand’ felt dangerously perfunctory, if not outright sociopathic; and then there’s the absolute gut-punch of a final line, rendering the subtext text, surfacing the ugly truth with a brutal, casual racism that rings with an awful resonance.
 
Yeah, Reagan really used this song on his campaign. And he really won. Twice.
 
Fuck the 80’s.
 
Anyway. The song goes on, as our returning vet discovers no work, no help from the VA. The war’s taken his brother - “They’re still there, he’s all gone.” - and that final verse, man:

“Down in the shadow of the penitentiary,
Out by the gas fires of the refinery,
I’m ten years burning down the road,
Nowhere to run, ain't got nowhere to go.”

I didn't know what either a pentiantary or refinery were, not for sure, but I knew about fires and shadows, and the invocation of Hell felt real enough, as did the desolation of ‘nowhere to run’, even without having the Born To Run connection to draw on.
 
So, one song in, at eight years old, my dreams of the land of bubble gum and movies and dollars and apple pie has to deal with racist wars, mistreated soldiers, devastated small town economics, and an American Dream that crushes lives rather than elevating them, leading to an ending where the anthem becomes a cacophony, a dirge, a cry of rage at stillborn hope in a land of hypocrisy and lies.
 
Nice one, dad. Nice one, Bruce. What you got next?
 
Well, as it happens, you’ve got Cover Me, a song about the other side of that coin; a song about love as isolation, a small bubble of light in an increasingly scary world. Cover Me takes the romantic notion of ‘you and me against the world’ and turns it into a desperate prayer - ‘promise me baby, you won’t let them find us’ - and a willful closing off from any wider sense of community - ‘hold me in your arms, let’s let our love blind us’. It’s chilling, the minor key and razor wire blues guitar lick sending goosebumps rippling down my young arms. The paranoia and inarticulate fear that would curdle throughout the Reagan era (and, arguably, reach in apotheosis in the seemingly bottomless rage of the Trump juggernaut) is given powerful voice here, and if Springsteen doesn’t celebrate, nor does he judge. And here, I learn about love as an act of desperation and need, a claustrophobic and ultimately futile bulwark against the uncaring and frozen void of the outside world.
 
Two songs in.
 
Next up is Darlington County, austensibly a cheerier tune about two New York boys (or New Jersey, claiming New York, more likely) taking a road trip to South Carolina in search of union work, pretty girls, and good times (“We got two hundred dollars/ We wanna rock all night!”). As a young kid, my nearest local town was Darllington, so you can bet my imagination scrambled this one pretty good. For all that, though, it’s still a song that captures a mood and vibe, namely the indestructibility of youth and youthful optimism, damn near flawlessly, before slipping a stiletto blade between the ribs on the final line of the song with a punchline so smooth you’d be forgiven for not even realising you’ve been cut.
 
Working On The Highway is a masterclass in short story telling. The set up is simple; men cleaning up after a week of work (on, you’ll be shocked to learn, the highway), ‘some heading home to their families, some are looking to get hurt’. Our narrator works the red flag on the Highway 9 detail, but he assures us that ‘In my head I hold a picture of a pretty little miss/Someday, mister, I’m gonna lead a better life than this’.
 
After the chorus, we learn more about this particular ‘pretty little miss’ - how the narrator met her at a union hall, her brothers watching on, and how one day, he ‘looked straight at her, and she looked straight back’.
 
The middle eight has our man putting his money away, and having an unsuccessful interview with the girl’s father (‘son, can’t you see that she’s just a little girl? She don’t know nothin’ ‘bout this cruel, cruel world?’)
 
Springsteen is such a sincere, earnest narrator, we’re right here with our man and his doomed romance, the dash to Florida… right up to the moment when we realise he’s been prosecuted for crossing state lines for immoral perposes, and he’s Workin’ On The Highway as a convicted sex offender in a chain gang. The smile in Sptengsteen’s voice as he sings the final line of the last verse (‘Me and the warden go a-swingin’ on the Charlotte county road gang’) has to be heard to be believed. Gotcha! It’s all going on here, man; unreliable narrator, a story that plays a straight bat, but pulls you down the wrong path with a sympathetic voice and a misleading setup, and then pow! Right in the kisser with that suckerpunch last line. Mugged.
 
Comedy. Horror. Con artistry. It’s all setup and punchline. Biff, bang, wallop.
 
And then, holy fuck, for our considerable sins, we have Downbound Train.
 
This song guts me and leaves me out to dry every damn time, without fail. The desolation of a failed marriage, the cold, monotonous depression of a day to day existence with this gaping, bleeding hole in it’s centre. The storytelling is so simple, and matter-of-fact - ‘She just said “Joe, I gotta go, we had it once, we ain’t got it any more”’ - no judgement, no recrimination, but also no understanding, just a gulf opening up in the world our man thought he knew. I think - I think - it’s just possible this one lays it on a little thick, if you weren't 8 years old the first time you heard it; certainly I’ve never met another Springsteen fan who considers it a top 10 like I do. ‘Now I work down at the carwash/ Where all it ever does is rain’ - is that too on the nose? Maybe, but I gotta tell you, friends, it cuts right the hell through me. And that’s before you get to the extended middle, where the instruments drop right back and we get an long riff about a nightmare leading the narrator out on a futile nighttime run to the ‘wedding house’. The passage begins ‘Well last night, I heard your voice/ You were cryin’, cryin’, you were so alone’, and honestly, I know every word, but I’ve never gotten through singing it without cracking up.  The inevitable crashing reaffirmation of loneliness is devastating. It’s the hope that kills you. Every time.
 
Side one (!!!) closes out with I’m On Fire, almost certainly not a second song about a pederast, though the opening lines of the song are ‘Hey little girl, is your Daddy home?/ Did he go and leave you all alone?/ I got a bad desire/ Oh, I’m on fire’, so, you know, there’s that. It’s slight, ethereal, but haunting, and also contains the line ‘sometimes it’s like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull/ and cut a six inch valley through the middle of my soul’, which is another authentic goosebump moment for me.
 
And yes, correct; we’re only halfway through.
 
Side 2 opens with one of my anthems, a song on the shortlist for either the funeral or the wake. It’s a song that almost guarantees I’ll be putting another band together at some point, just so I can sing this on stage (The Gonzos covered Thunder Road and Born To Run, and at my wedding we played a storming version of Two Hearts, but never this, and I can’t die having not done it).
 
No, I’m not fucking kidding.
 
No Surrender is just The One. In an album full of heartache, melancholy, conflicted emotions, alienation, longing, loss, Springsteen kicks off side two with four minutes of pure, life affirming love; a statement of intent, a tempestuous raging against the dying of the light, a refutation of death, a glorious insistence in the power of passion to conquer the very process and notion of aging, to deny it, defy it; to not just be born again, but to live forever, within the bars of a song and the grooves of a record. ‘We learned more from a three minute record, baby/ than we ever learned in school’ - brother, sister, neither and both, I am here to tell you that no truer words have been sung in the entire history of rock and roll. I was eight years old, and it’d be about four or five years before I tasted the bitter truth of this one for myself; still, Bruce had given me fair warning, and at least when the realisation bit, I had the cushion of it being a moment of realisation rather than shock: The Boss had called it, right enough. It’s a trick he pulls on Thunder Road, and later on this record in Glory Days, but I think never with more power than here: when he sings the line ‘Now young faces grow sad and old/ And hearts of fire grow cold/ We swore blood brothers against the wind/ I’m ready to grow young again’ I just lose it. It’s a meditation on aging that ripples and resonates down the timeline, ringing truer and rawer every year. I saw Springsteen on The River anniversary tour a few years back, and I was both longing and dreading hearing Independence Day, because I knew it’d make me sob my guts out. Well, he took pity on me and called an audible right before it. Instead, I got No Surrender, and I cried through that instead. He sings it like he means it, like it’s the most important thing he’ll ever tell you. And it just might be; it just might.
 
Man, I miss my band.
 
And then comes Bobby Jean, a song that broke my heart clean in two at eight years old, years before even the first stirring of pre-puberty introduced me to the crushes King captures so perfectly in Ben’s love for Bev in IT. I’m not kidding about that, either; this song would make me cry every time I heard it (and I heard it a lot) and my heart ached for the singer, as though his pain was my own. It’s all there in the opening verse, pure and clean as the pain of loss can be:

“Well I came by your house the other day,
Your mother said you went away,
She said there was nothing that I could have done,
There was nothin’ nobody could say.”

And if that doesn’t carve its own little valley in your heart, dig the plaintive acceptance of the refrain

 “I wish I would have known,
I wish I could have called you,
Just to say goodbye…”

Ah, fuck me, he’s crying agian.
 
On the page like that, it could read angry, or passive aggressive, begging, 100 different flavours of the toxic male entitlement/pain thing and man, it’s none of that, it’s just raw vulnerability, acceptance, loss.

 
“I’m just calling, just one last time,
Not to change your mind,
But just to say that I miss you baby,
Good luck,
Goodbye.”

And the sax and slow fade carry me off. Seriously. It would be another eight years before I’d really fall in love, nine before my heart was broken for real, and I can’t say it helped, exactly, but I can tell you it was real, how this song made me feel - makes me feel - and at least when that pain settled on me as a teenager, it had a familiarity. I knew what it was. I’d been there before.
 
I’m Going Down is practically light relief after that, even as it walks you through the futility of a relationship on the slide with no clear way out. “You let out one of your bored sighs/but lately when I look into your eyes/ I’m going down” - and not in a good way. The lyrical rhythm here is exquisite, the words slotting into place like they always belonged there, and the the sax solo  before the drop out is a Big Man special - my dad always says ‘Clarence only really has the one trick; but it’s a damn good one’. Again, it’d be a number of years before I’d experience first hand this feeling of something good turned bad, with no real idea why or how, but at least when I got there, I had this wry little number to remind me it was maybe not a totally uncommon experience.
 
Back in short story land, Glory Days serves up two in two verses, with one of the greatest bitter-sweet choruses of all time (‘Glory days/ well, they’ll pass you by/ Glory days/ in the wink of a young girl’s eye/ Glory days’) followed by a self-aware peroration in the third that ties the theme together with a wry smile and a sly punchline (‘While the time slips away/ Leavin’ you with nothin’ mister/ but boring stories of/ Glory days’). I think this is how a lot of people think of Springsteen, this kind of roadhouse good time rock and roller, but scratch the surface of this one even slightly, and mortality and the stark passage of time are right there behind the smile lines.
 
Talking of, Dancing In The Dark is another apparently perfect pop song moment that’s got an ocean of emotion bubbling just underneath. Because of a peculiarity of how the two sides of the C60 lined up, I remember discovering at some point that I could turn the tape over after this, and get straight into Downbound Train on the other side. I’d often do this for hours, switching between the two songs, obsessed with the longing in both - Downbound for the crushing of hope, Dancing for the fragility, the yearning. The beating heart of Dancing In The Dark is naked vulnerability; the need for love, connection, companionship, without which even success feels empty, unsatisfying. So sure, it’s a love song, and a pop song, but we’re a long way out from Lick My Love Pump and a lot of the macho bullshit I’d later come to adore; this is a song that’s alive to the risk of love, the danger of love; it’s a song about bravery and fear. It’s beautiful. I loved it - then, and now.
 
My Hometown closes out with another story, this time of generational change, social struggle, and neighbourhood transformation. That could read like some MAGA/UKIP fever dream of awfulness, but this is Springsteen, and he knows the score; the factors that are causing the unwelcome changes are economic in nature (‘Foreman says “These jobs are going, boys/ and they ain’t coming back”’). The neoliberalism of Reagans America, Thatcher's Britain, the same shortsighted forces that still dominate our politics in 2020, even as the global temperatures rise and the rainforests burn, and we move to some awful endgame of capitalism’s blind pursuit of profit uber alles, and the seemingly inevitable environmental hollacaust already begun, are all seen here in 1984; already giving birth to devastation, chewing up small town economies and spitting out damaged people with uncertain futures and dwindling hopes. Again, you could read it as a peon to a lost 50’s era of plenty, and if you stopped at the end of the first verse, that might even be a somewhat valid criticism, but you don’t, and neither does Bruce, and by the melancholic final verse, and the father expresses by implication his fear for what world he will be leaving behind for his son… well, let’s just say this one doesn’t get any easier to listen to as the years go by.
 
So there you have it. Born In The USA, by Bruce Springsteen. One of the finest short story collections in the English language; and among those, some of the darkest horror I’ve encountered before or since. Seen through a more objective lens, in may not be Springsteen’s best horror collection - that would probably go to Devils And Dust, The Ghost Of Tom Joad, or my own personal choice, Nebraska, that demo production howl of pain that is genuinely haunting in both form and content - but I’d discover none of those records until I was much, much older.
 
Born In The USA got me at eight. And it’s never let me go.
 
KP
28/2/2020