This is a prompt that I considered for a few minutes, because it made me think two things in response:
A) What kind of sad? I mean, you can talk to me about the holocaust, or suicide, or hunger and malnourishment, and I become extremely sad about our world. But I can shake that off if need be. I can paste a smile over it, and it goes away by sheer force of will.
B) This prompt very quickly becomes a literary trope. I’ll explain momentarily.
When it comes to “sad,” which is a very basic explanation and definition of sorrow, or melancholy, or depression, I get sad when I watch commercials of Iraq War veterans coming home, being greeted by their families on the tarmac, because I cry. But, to me, this prompt means more than just “momentarily overwhelmed by my emotions.” To me, this “sad” is the deep and pervasive sadness that exists from a sense of unhappiness borne from conflict and the inability to reconcile your feelings with your reality.
The conflict I mean kind of falls under the literary definition of conflict we all learned in the 2nd or 3rd grade: man vs. man, man vs. nature, or man vs. himself. That discussion was always fun, because there were two overriding thoughts that came out immediately from that discussion:
A) “Man means human, NOT ‘Men.’ Women can have conflict, too.”
and
B) “How does a man fight himself?”
If only I knew that man could very easily fight himself. I spent the better part of my college years, all the way until basically graduate school, fighting with myself. This, of course, brings me to the song that makes me “sad.” I was introduced to this song, not through Bruce, but through a country artist who covered the song, which actually works quite well, because this is a far “twangier” album than Bruce’s previous studio release: “Born in the USA”. I read the liner notes, and saw that it was a Bruce song. I chuckled, because a friend of mine is a Bruce fan. I mentioned the song to him, and he said he’d heard it before, but it wasn’t a favorite. The song of which I speak is “One Step Up” from the “Tunnel of Love” album. The artist who introduced me to “One Step Up,” by the way, is Kenny Chesney.
(Semi-interesting sidebar: in a later album’s liner notes, Kenny name-checks Bruce again. The album was Kenny Chesney’s solo, acoustic album featuring entirely self-written songs called “Be As You Are: Songs from an Old Blue Chair.” He said he got the courage to make the album, and to not tour in support of it from Bruce. This is his “Nebraska.” It’s also my favorite album of his, and the most authentic album he’s released.)
The entire “Tunnel of Love” album is Bruce’s sadness about the dissolution of his marriage to Julianne Phillips. At the Time Bruce and Julianne got married, they did so in secret, and Bruce was such an international megastar and sex symbol that he broke a lot of hearts with the announcement that Ms. Phillips was now his bride. As I said in a previous post, it didn’t take. When it fell apart, Bruce produced an entire album of lovelorn music about his “sadness” over its failure. One Step Up is the lynchpin of that album, in my opinion. As an eerie parallel, Kenny Chesney would later surprise-marry Renee Zellweger in 2005; the marriage would dissolve into annulment a few months later.
The song starts in the mood of a hangover – not necessarily alcohol-based, but based on the feeling of a memory, drink or love or a fight, that no longer remains, but is still ringing through the narrator’s brain. Things aren’t working – the furnace, his truck’s engine… …their marriage… there’s no heat, no drive, no love. The song progresses past a bride, presumably waiting at the altar (was that the path Bruce was supposed to take? Would it have been better to end it before they swore an oath before God and their loved ones?) and off to a bar to consider the lay of the land. There’s another option there – another girl. What does he do? The part of the song that gets me each time I listen to it is the following lyric:
“It’s the same thing, night on night. Who’s wrong? Baby, who’s right? Another fight that I slam the door on, another battle in our dirty little war. When I look at myself I don’t see the man I wanted to be. Somewhere along the line, I slipped off track.”
I used that lyric for a long time as an “away message” on AOL Instant Messenger. Yes, that’s correct. American Online’s Instant Messaging service. I used to stay continuously logged in for months at a time. I won’t defend that. It happened. Let’s move on.
The reason this resonates so much with me is that I went through a stage, mentioned before, where I was unhappy with who I was, not only my persona to the world, but inwardly. Everything seemed tonally deaf. I wasn’t “depressed” – I just was unsettled and upset at the lack of congruity between who I wanted to be, and who I was. That feeling is perfectly encapsulated in the above lyric.
Bruce has gone on record as saying he spent some time just being angry, and fighting with his own image and persona as a human being. The next lyric is “I’m caught… movin’ one step up, and two steps back” only, the “I’m caught” is barely audible. It’s half whispered in a defeated utterance. It’s like Bruce has given up on trying to figure out who’s wrong, and who’s right – he’s just beaten by the notion that the marriage isn’t working. That part always gets me. It’s clear that he wasn’t happy, despite being a sex symbol, despite being a multimillionaire, and despite being name checked by the President of the United States (even if he didn’t agree with the President.)
As I worked to make myself into a confident person who has reconciled the public perception and the private construct of who he is, I learned something about that whole “literary conflict” trinity: It’s bullshit.
Man vs. Man, Man Vs. Nature, and Man Vs. Himself is complete crap. If you want to write something meaningful, the stranger is always a foil of your hero. Nature always tests the mettle of a man at his weakest point, not his strongest. And thus, a man fighting against another becomes a man fighting with his foibles. That’s part of what I realized in my battle to become more than the man I was. My fights, disagreements, and friendship or relationship squabbles always seemed to come from a place where I was seeing something in someone that I either couldn’t be myself at the time, or was a perfect representation of myself at the time, and didn’t want to be, and thus rejected it. There’s another lyric from this album, “God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of” (From “Brilliant Disguise”) which is a great way to place what I am trying to say into as few poetic words as possible. I doubted my every action during that time period. That’s a difficult place to be.
For me now, this becomes like a phantom limb – something that has long since been excised, but still the memory of it remains. I’m happy with who I am, and my life today. But I can still remember the inner doubt and anger I had with myself for not being where I am today during undergrad and the very early part of grad school.
(Side note: I realize this is all coming off like Bruce’s “Lucky Town” album, which he described as an album full of happy songs, and something the public didn’t like. I, for one, love “Lucky Town,” – it’s apropos that I bought it after hearing/owning “Tunnel of Love,” and had set it as a goal to be the man that Bruce became. “Tunnel of Love” was a 1987 release, and “Lucky Town” was a 1992 release. In 2007 I was at the end of my fight with myself and my unhappiness, and now it’s 2012, and I’m happily married. I guess this makes Bruce and me cousins. I’ll add him to the Christmas Card list – we both live in New Jersey, after all. But I digress.)
But how can you fight against your own happiness for the sake of preserving the unnerving moodiness of your inner angst and self-doubt, just because it may seem more authentic to someone else? This is why I like “Lucky Town” – it’s the next logical step for Bruce, once he met Patti Scialfa, found true love, and started the family he was meant to have. Artistically, it’s as genuine as can be. When life improves, why fight it? After all, these are better days, baby…
Tomorrow’s prompt: A Bruce Song that Cheers You Up.
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