Unbest

Brian Collins on Bruce Springsteen’s “Candy’s Room” (from Darkness on the Edge of Town, 1978)
(iTunes, Rdio, Spotify) 

Lately, I like to pretend that Bruce Springsteen hails from my hometown of Riverdale, Ga., and that we are contemporaries, and that he made music in the seventies for me. If you’re my age (34), this is probably a Weird Thing to do. Let’s be honest: he belongs to the generation before mine, so the thing you have to do is to pretend that you are a person of that generation, which is weird (especially if the people you pretend to be are your parents, and ESPECIALLY if you enjoy the pretending).

The way I get there is that I have this vivid memory of hearing the song “Candy’s Room” from Darkness on the Edge of Town sometime in the early/mid 80’s, in my parents’ Caprice Classic on the way home from dinner at the El Ranchero on Old National Highway. The El Ranchero was a building out in the parking lot of a strip mall with a ridiculously pitched roof. We’d gone there one night after my little league baseball practice, and I feel like I can remember the ride home so well—the color and texture of the Caprice’s cloth backseats, the way the seatbelt straps lay unbuckled at my side. I’m sure I had on baseball cleats and felt awkward about wearing them inside a “sit-down” restaurant.

The southern crescent of the Atlanta metro in the early-1980’s that I remember—with so many young adults having babies, and blue collar jobs at the airport and at the Ford and GM plants, and driving Camaros to cheap houses on the outskirts of the city—feels interchangeable with my idea of Springsteen’s New Jersey in the late 1970s. There’s nothing particularly poetic about a routine of a working blue collar job all day and then going to the baseball field straight from work to watch your kid practice, and then driving to a Mexican restaurant to cap off the day with a few pitchers of watery domestic as my parents did from time to time. Making that sort of routine poetic was pretty much The Boss’s job.

When Clarence Clemons passed away in June 2011, I felt inclined revisit Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town. And maybe one night that led to opening a bottle of Jameson, which maybe led to watching an old Springsteen performance on YouTube and lots of use of the “repeat one” function in iTunes, and realizing that Bruce and Clarence, like my parents, were also young once.

In the latter half of 2011, I spent some time in my own head putting myself in my parents’ shoes in that Caprice on a night when they were younger than I am now. I thought about what they knew then that I still have yet to learn, and what I may know now that they didn’t know then. I’ve wondered about the differences in day-to-day life between being 30-something in 1983 and being 30-something in 2011. I’m sure there were similarities—they worked, had dinners together and had friends and weekends off for haircuts and car and lawn maintenance just like me, but there are plenty of differences (like how my dad made cars for a living and I make “marketing”).

As I listened to those albums, I kept coming back to “Candy’s Room.” There’s a quick build-and-release to it that I’m always a sucker for, plus it isn’t quite so embedded in the so-called “American Experience” as “Born to Run” or “Thunder Road.” I think it still has some shine to it. Sometimes, I like to pretend that I have musical talent and picture myself in a band covering the song (but only rarely for super-special events like the homecoming gig of our world tour). Anyway, as I listened, I kept going back to that car ride home from the restaurant and Max playing the intro on the cymbals, the lyrics starting (“In Candy’s room, there are pictures of her heroes on the wall…”) and picturing dad getting quiet as he drove, thumbing the steering wheel along with the beat, and thinking there was this unspoken understanding between him and mom that he was thinking about her because she was Candy, in that literal mix-tape sense. Meanwhile, she’s sitting in the passenger seat and thinking/knowing the same thing, and when the song explodes, she sings “BABY IF YOU WANNA BE WILD…”, and then they fist-pump quietly to themselves for the rest of the song…

The thing is, Bruce isn’t from Riverdale, and it’s just as likely that my dad was only absent-mindedly tapping to the beat while looking forward to getting home and going to sleep. Mom was probably thinking about whether or not she needed to go to Richway that weekend. But they were young once, like I am now (ish), so what should I take away from that? Music nostalgia (or using music as a vehicle to being nostalgic) can be a helluva drug, but the thing is, my own life with its own little moments is happening all the while. Rather than being nostalgic about other people’s nostalgia, I think I’ll re-double my efforts to be more “of my own time” in 2012. RIP Big Man.

Brian Collins lives in Atlanta.