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Let's admit it to one another--there are several things we don't like so much about Bruce Springsteen. We're not crazy, for instance, about his music (not in the grand, but in the nuts and bolts sense--you know, the notes and stuff) being entirely predictable, based on riffs and changes that were already generic before Little Richard bought his first tube of eyeliner. We're not crazy about his having virtually no melodic flair. In all candor, we find a fair percentage of his music pretty tedious.

We're not crazy about the way he dresses, or, frankly, that he has bald people in his band, for we've always believed that it's the rock 'n' roll performer's sacred duty to try to delight the eye as well as the ear. Truth be told, we would love to see the Boss dash on stage in a pink leopard-skin zoot suit, let's say, rather than in duds one might wear to scour the restrooms of service stations.

We don't share his apparent belief in the innate nobility of the blue collar worker. While lots of blue collar workers had no choice in the matter, lots of others could have been white collar--if not surgeons, attorneys, or even chiefs on Indian tribes--if they hadn't been so eager to quit school and start earning wages so that they could lord it over the rest of us. In adulthood, a disproportionate percentage of blue collar workers become loutish redneck assholes.

Having noted that, since the ‘50s, the best rock 'n' roll has been made by geezers who seem to disappear when they turn sidewise, we're not very comfortable with The Boss's great big bulging muscles. And, conceding as we do so that it's hardly our business, we must admit that we'd have preferred to see him marry a plain girl form Bayonne--a waitress, let's say, or a nurse at a convalescent hospital--rather than an actress/model who used to be paid more for an hour of standing around looking ravishing than most blue collar workers make in a month.

So there are several things that we don't like about Bruce Springsteen, and we consider him not only to the ‘80s what Elvis was to the ‘50s and Dylan was to the ‘60s, but the greatest of the three. And thus the pre-eminent figure in the history of American rock 'n' roll. (We adjudge him greater than Elvis, obviously, because he's been utterly brilliant on stage and at least consistently interesting on record for about a dozen years now, whereas, after maybe three years of incandescent brilliance, Elvis became an insufferable cornball. Credit Dylan, on the other hand, with maybe five years on incandescent brilliance, but expect at least a little argument from me, who thinks the period between Bringing It All Back Home and Blonde On Blonde more than covers it.)

For everything about him that makes us uneasy or even blue, there are four or five more to adore about Bruce Springsteen. His songs bulge with heart and soul. Utterly predictable though his music may be, he can make the simplest chord change imaginable seen absolutely thrilling, as witness the halfway point of the verses of "Dancing In The Dark." By turns thrilling, touching, and hilarious, he puts on the best live show in rock 'n' roll (And what sound! In the 20 years I've been going to rock 'n' roll shows, I've heard a grand total of one act--Cliff Richard--sound as good indoors, where it's much easier, as The Boss and his boys did at the Oakland Coliseum last autumn. And what exquisite lights!) He's not only compassionate and generous himself, but encourages his audiences to be likewise.

In this age of W.A.S.P. and MTV, of brazen sham, arrogant artifice and shameless pandering, he can single-handedly make you proud to still love rock 'n' roll.

That that was only marginally more true last year than in several of the previous 10 since Born To Run made him a star leads us to ask, "Why was it in 1985 that Bruce Springsteen ceased to be just enormously popular and influential, and became a full-fledged Cultural Phenomenon?"

In "Dancing In The Dark" and "Bobby Jean," did Born In The U.S.A. contain a couple of perfectly marvelous tracks that rank just below the quintessential "Born To Run" with the Boss's second best work? Bet the farm on it. Did it bulge with heart and soul, with humor and passion? Bet the form on it. Mustn't it have been substantially superior, then, to The River, say, which it outsold by--what, ten to one or something? Only in the sense of its having a more bombastic drum sound and pleasingly deployed synthesizers. And, in the grindingly tedious title track, it contained the most unlistenable track of The Boss's whole recording career.

Well, then, we say, grasping at straws, was it because the addition of Nils Lofgren and the subtraction of Steve Van Zandt--apparently a chum of the first water, but a musician of no particular distinction--the 1985 E Street Band was stronger than earlier versions? (Oh, hardly, we answer ourselves, even before noting, though it pains us to do so, that the E Street Band was slightly less torrid for the presence of backing singer Patty Scialfa, who, at least in Oakland, sang mostly in keys other than those in which the band was playing.)

So why, already, was 1985 The Year of The Boss, as few previous years have so dramatically been his or others'? Mostly, methinks, for the wrong reasons.

In an era of raging mindlessness, countless millions of Americans who'd heretofore ignored him got a load of The Boss's bulging biceps, another at his headband, another at the title and cover of his latest album, and a fourth at the gigantic American flag that hung behind him at the beginning of his stadium concerts, and seemed to surmise that we was the rock 'n' roll personification of the mythic hero of the year, Sylvester Stallone's John Rambo, prolific waster of gook commies and singlehanded restorer of the national pride.

In other words, buying a Bruce Springsteen album or concert ticket came to be perceived in 1985 as evidence of one's Feeling Good About America. The hilarious (or, if you prefer to be gloomy about it, terrifying) thing about which is that "Born In The U.S.A."--in reference to which the gigantic flags were draped behind the stadium stages--was an unambiguous expression of pained disillusionment. Did none of the new patriots who embraced The Boss as their fave musical rave in '85 not notice that, immediately after The Boss's invariably anguished, show-opening performance of the song, the flag was unceremoniously dropped from view?

Was there a way not to collapse chortling to the floor on hearing the imitation of him Chrysler commissioned for its big "The Pride Is Back" ad campaign after The Boss spurned its offer of a jillion dollars for the rights to ‘Born In The U.S.A.'?

We pause to try to imagine the new lyrics Lee lacocca's boys might have come up with:

They offer real good fuel economy, Mister, how about this warranty?

But the very bossest thing about these is that they're ‘mer'can-made, not Japanese

Chrysler was hardly alone, of course, in trying to exploit the Boss's elevation to the status of True Cultural Icon in 1985. As witness Casio's use of a denim-clad, headbanded Boss lookalike, alongside a clipboard-toting Japanese posing as an electronics engineer, in its advertisements for its dinky CZ-101 synthesizer.

There are those who perceived John Cougar Mellencamp's sudden preoccupation with the agrarian blue collar worker--that is, the farmer--as another manifestation of Bossmania. I can't really comment--agreeing with the Los Angeles Herald's assessment of Mellencamp as "Bruce Springsteen for the hearing impaired," I scurry in the other direction at the sound of his voice. (Which isn't to suggest that we're undelighted that hundreds of thousands of young Americans who might otherwise have bought, say, Ratt's latest collection of songs of machismo and misogyny bought Scarecrow. And while we're here, let me note that the sight of vast number of kids in Iron Maiden and Ozzy and like T-shirts at the first Springsteen's two Oakland Coliseum performances--kids exposing themselves to real rock 'n' roll, the celebrating, inspiring kind, rather than the mocking, degrading--was one of the pleasantest surprises of an altogether wonderful concert-going experience.)

My own favorite manifestation of Bossmania, though, was a radio spot for a singles bar up in that part of the Northern California wine country that I call home, one that featured two young women on the make comparing their impressions of an available-looking bachelor at the bar. "Well, he isn't exactly Bruce Springsteen," one of them lamented. Forget Rob Lowe, Tom Selleck, or Vince Ferragamo, in other words--in 1985, it was that shy guy from the New Jersey outback with an overbite and a service station restroom-scourers wardrobe to whom studs in singles bars were compared!

More power to him, say I. As though he needs it.

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