I was 12 years old in the Philly suburbs when Bruce Springsteen dropped Dancing In The Dark. It was the first single from his upcoming album Born In The U.S.A., which would be released about a month later. All of it just in time for summer. The summer of ‘84. The summer of Burger King air-conditioning after a long bike ride across dangerous ground. Google Maps tells me it was 1.6 miles on a bike and took nine minutes. That is utter bullshit. That ride took a lot longer than that. It took hours. It was miles and miles from home.
The song from Springsteen kicked off what probably amounted to the most important season of music I have ever lived through. My entire system was primed for the touch of the raw sizzling wire that hit me that summer. Everyone has a season like that and for a lot of people I imagine it happens across a summer way more than it happens across a spring or fall or winter. It was as if I had been waiting for the moment all my life and never even knew it. The radio. MTV. Sam Goody and Wee-Three Records at the mall. Born In The U.S.A. didn’t land gracefully like some lost little private plane outside my house on the sticky icky tar of early summer Forrest Street. It came down like a Russian 747, starting a half mile away, touching down up around Bishop Kenrick High School and bouncing down, violently, with all the pure Hollywood rapscallionism of a drunken lovable pilot smoking cigarettes as he lands Indiana Jones style in the middle of the goddamn jungle. Trees got decimated and all the power lines were raked down. Everybody’s parents big battleship cars and pick-ups were bashed and crushed and set ablaze by the sheer immensity of the presence of this thing. The world/ MY WORLD/ was scorched Earth after I heard that first song that first time. It was probably on WMMR. Or maybe I saw the video first. The world premiere. Sitting there with my brother and my friend John, after-school Big Gulps trickling sweat down into our crotches/ we would have been enraptured by this thing/ this new Bruce Springsteen song/ this first time for us to really be dialed in to a Bruce Springsteen just for us.
I suppose that how we first encounter a thing can have great effect on where the thing continues to sit with us for the rest of our lives. Sense of place and specific circumstances meld. No two moments have ever matched in the history of life and that alone is beyond all comprehension. Whoever else might have been tuned in to the very first airing of Dancing In The Dark at the exact same moment as me and my gang, they might have had similar feelings/ similar surroundings/ and all that as we were having right there in real time Conshohocken on that Wednesday in May when the song first went from being something extremely private passed around between Columbia Records and the Springsteen camp to a bird uncaged/ a window opened/ and off you go forever and ever. Anyone else listening right when we were listening for the first time would have been experiencing a unique, and possibly intense, memory imprint being formed in their own cellar. And then years later, even if they forgot where they were or who they were with when they first heard it, they still could not (and would not want to) shake the sense that for the rest of their lives: that one song smelled like sunblock. Or late lunch hoagie. Or the balmy pleasant air of Bridgeport or Manayunk or Plymouth Meeting gushing hard through the rolled down window of a car they were riding in under a once-in-a-lifetime sky that was breaking apart even as the first synth notes rolled out of the radio and into their bones and tendons and veins with all the savage wonder of a massive jet coming to a stop right out front the house.
Back when school first let out, my kids went down the shore and it was just me and Arle and her kids. Milla is 12, and Piper is 9, and they are also my kids now too, I’m proud to say. But they are my step-kids and so it means that sometimes I feel their vibes coming at me like I feel the vibes off my own bio crew, but then sometimes I don’t. It isn’t anything I am or am not doing, I don’t think. It’s just science. It’s humanity at its core. We can love all kids we come across, and maybe they might even love you back, but the love isn’t guaranteed. It is earned through a real show of strength and humility and patience and confusion on your part. It is hard, hard work, step-parenting, and few ever get it right.
But this one evening, just the four of us in the yard, I think I was messing with the fire pit when I saw that Arle was putting up the Wal-Mart tents. We’d bought them back during Covid: Cheap gear but very usable in the yard. It had been some time since I saw them but immediately I understood. We were trying to give Milla and Piper a couple staycation days while my kids were on a legit shore trip.
It was cool, I thought. Seeing Arle diligently make the tents come alive was calming somehow. And seeing how excited Piper seemed to be about the whole possibility was exhilarating. There was this weird and rare committed energy about him that isn’t always easy to detect with kids. He was dragging his shit from the house the moment tent No. 1 was ready for habitation. And by the time tent No. 2 was up, he’d made several trips in and out of the house already. He had a sleeping bag and a pillow and his big Jack Skellington plushie and an extra blanket. He emerged from one trip back to the house in Minecraft pajamas and that’s when I knew that something was unfolding here right before my eyes.
Some people don’t like Dancing In The Dark. They say they hate the ’80s synths and the dance-y aura of the whole thing. Of course, I know the lay of the land here. There are always going to be people who want what they want, not what creators necessarily create. Entitlement runs rampant through America’s bloodstream. Many people have become convinced that their minds are the word of God/ that their likes and desires and viewpoints are the right ones.
Lucky for me, I figured that out about a couple years ago and ever since then, I have felt very, very comfortable in my unabashed love of DITD. For me, it isn’t purely a nostalgia thing, although as you can tell: there is that too. Instead, I just have to tell you that I think the tune is one of Bruce’s best because I think it might be one of the most honest things he ever wrote. This isn’t to say I believe he was bullshitting us a lot when he wrote his other stuff. I don’t think that at all. However, there were a lot of times when he was walking out towards the fence lines of what he actually knew. There, like most prolific writers, he mined the visual and presented it as experience. Within the imaginations of certain types, there are crossover galaxies where the mind, I believe, can actually dream so hard and deep that it can time travel your ass. Or drag you into the skull of another for just a few moments, so that you can close your eyes and smell the flame-broiled burgers in the air-conditioned blast and be transported into my head even if you have never been me in your life.
Does that ring true with you? It’s okay if it doesn’t. Not everyone sees stuff like me.
Either way though, this first single off of the album that would catapult Springsteen and his band into the furthest stratosphere available to 20th century entertainers, it has always stood out to me as being special. Maybe it’s the timbre of the singer’s voice: Although I can’t really pinpoint any specific differences therein. He sounds like Bruce on the track. He doesn’t try to stray his voice too far from the well-worn road he’d been on for a long time at that point. So maybe it’s the lyrics… the way the narrator is telling you how he feels in the the first person. Again, not a thing Bruce hadn’t done many times before, and many would say he’d done it better then.
What the fuck is it then?
I’m frustrated sitting here at this old MacBook. My screen is dirty from sneezes and coffee and the letters on a lot of my keyboard have smudged away to nothing. I feel at home here though. As home as any home I’ve ever known. Why then can’t I understand my desire to hold DITD up to the communal light of public opinion? Why do I love the song so much more than so many other hardcore Springsteen fans? It isn’t to be different. I don’t give a shit about that at this age.
I just want to hear it over and over again. His version, not somebody’s dumb hushed cover of it. I just want to feel like I felt when I was a kid, alone in a crowd. Husky, horny, headed for the dugout after striking out.
Everything was impossible to understand when I was young. But everything was also pretty easy to just live through.
I saw Piper looking out of his tent at me.
He did this thing he does sometimes/ catches me looking at him/ me smiling at him like I’m thinking of fucking with him. He held his one hand up and moved his trigger finger west and east/ east and west/ like Dikembe Mutombo’s brilliant Geico commercial ‘No No No’s’.
His eyes lock with mine then and he is a young man shot up with the kind of confidence he doesn’t always exhibit. I love him so much in the throes of that moment. He looks like his mom, who I think he stole it from.
“No, no, no. You can’t come into my tent. Stay out there in your old man world.”
There’s something happening somewhere.
Right now: it’s right here.
But I can’t find the words!
I punch this fucking keyboard!
Two tents.
One holds a boy. The other: his sister.
I am in an Adirondack chair twenty feet away.
They zip up and disappear into a world I am not invited to.
I drink a slug of wine from my jelly jar.
Our beat-up cars are behind me past the fire wood.
Life comes pummeling down on us. It’s the smashing and the shrapnel bursts. It’s the thunderstorm of a century but the birds are singing in the fading sky. Lightning bugs begin to flash and the vultures are coming back over the town/ easy high circles and floating together. I wonder who I am. How I got here. If I matter much at all.
*****
“You sit around gettin’ older
There’s a joke here somewhere and it’s on me
I’ll shake this world off my shoulders
Come on, baby, the laugh’s on me.”
*****
Once again, I see the witch heading for its roost.
She is many but casts only one shadow.
Look at her, I mumble to myself.
Look at her as she flies over me all slow like, menacing me, cackling down, barely blowing along towards the towering hemlocks up by the township building where I think she fucking sleeps.
A part of me had suspected that Arle’s 1990’s kid notions would be wasted (again) on our modern young. To me, the outdoors often seemed more and more distant from their collective consciousness. Last year the two with iPhones had separated themselves from the creek and the trampoline and rarely left the confines of the house itself to venture out into the so-called real world. But the youngest three, without the cell phones strapped around their necks like battleship anchors, they continued to move freely in and out of the house. Yes they laid on the couch watching YouTube or One Piece for hours on end, but you could always count on them asking for permission to go use the rope swing/ swim in Elk Creek. They still liked to run around the yard screaming and laughing. In the back of my mind though, I knew it wouldn’t last.
Scratching and saving every penny we could, we made their Christmas wishes come true at the holidays by being able to give the phoneless each an iPad. It was all they had asked for, but we knew the price to pay. And sure enough: this spring rolled around and there was little interest in a sunny day/ practically no pleading with us to let them head to the creek.
So we both take delight in this unfolding here in the yard. It’s all Arle’s idea and it fits her quiet love strength to a T. She doesn’t talk about a campsite for the kids/ she doesn’t bullshit about it from a bar stool or on a group chat or whatever. She just heads up to the attic with the hornets and the bats and she drags down the tents and off she goes. Making something out of almost nothing, seeing if it just might stick.
Piper’s excitement seems to carry over to Milla and they both spend that first night with tents up, camping out back under the endless stars that scream to be noticed from behind the obscene street light that ruins everything in the church parking lot.
I have these streaky days, just like anyone else who digs music a lot, where I’ll play one song in my car over and over again like 20 or 30 times. These are odd times, but probably necessary for certain kinds of minds. The immersion of a song into our total existence happened more long ago than it does these days for most people around my age. And that alone, the connection between a living human body and a song heard for the first time in life: It’s both fascinating and kind of inexplicable (as I’ve struggled to exhibit to you here today).
Where does that magic go? Is it a reflection of our controllable selves that we age and are hit less and less by the impact of hearing something we fall in love with?
If I heard Dancing In The Dark later this afternoon for the first time… as in… it had never existed before and no one had ever heard it before today… would it capture my spirit like it did way back then?
Or would I shrug it off more or less? Would I critique it a little/ run it down through my experienced semi-jaded antique hipster machine in order to unconsciously annihilate all possibilities of further connection between it and me? Is there some kind of hidden emotional agenda living down in the crevices of our grown-up cultural tastes?
I don’t know. I have no clue. I only know that most of us love what we loved long ago. And we kind of like just tolerate what came after.
Sometimes I wonder: if you are one of those people who is super caught up on all kinds of new artists and new music and you are in your ’50s and you relish in unheard-of bands even now, many moons past when you first entered the clubs in the cities and were filled with unstoppable lust and hope and hunger: Is that good or bad?
And why? Or how? Or like, does it even matter to wonder that shit. Or am I simply trying to understand the tragedy of time, lovely as she is?
Afternoon school bus disappearing down the street.
3pm kids, raising happy hell, disappearing down the street.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
