Many Bruce Springsteen fans don’t understand why he’s playing at the Super Bowl
Springsteen never liked playing stadiums because he couldn’t connect with fans
Maybe it’s ego, pride or an opportunity to reach more fans. Who really knows?
I have friends, close friends, who are having a hard time with this, really struggling with it. They don’t understand why Bruce Springsteen is playing halftime of the Super Bowl. One friend calls it “a soul-crushing betrayal.” Another calls it “the ultimate sellout.” It should be added that these friends are all football fans as well as Bruce Springsteen fans — well, aren’t all football fans Springsteen fans? They simply aren’t feeling it.
Normally, I have no use for people who cry sellout; they tend be the same people who want their artists starving, their actors doing Shakespeare in the Park, their favorite athletes signing for less than market value. But my friends have a point. For 20 years, maybe longer, Bruce Springsteen flatly turned down the Super Bowl. They asked him to perform at halftime every year. Every year he said no. It became a fun little joke for members of his E Street Band.
“Hey Bruce, we doing the Super Bowl this year?”
“Nah, not this year.”
True, Springsteen made concessions with his music over the last 40 years. He always said he would never play big arenas, but then he sold lots of records, and people couldn’t squeeze into the union halls anymore, it had to be Madison Square Garden. He always insisted that he would never play the football stadiums, no, he could not connect with an audience that large. Then he became world famous.
“Bruce really struggled with stadiums,” says Nils Lofgren, who plays guitar in the E-Street Band. “He wanted to maintain the same intimacy he had with 20,000 people in an arena, and it isn’t easy to do in a stadium. He really had a problem with it. But then he decided you make music to share, and all of a sudden millions and tens of millions of people wanted to share in the music. That’s the whole point. Share the music.”
So, Springsteen gave in. We all give in sometimes. But Bruce also held on, he made his honest stand, he didn’t do the late night talk shows, he spoke out for what he believed in, and he played his heart out night after night after night, didn’t matter if it was Greensboro or L.A., St. Louis or London, he gave it all. I saw him in Charlotte, not long after his organist Danny Federici died, and it was at the end of a long tour, and it was in one of those new arenas that have all the amenities and none of the soul. It was another night in another town, only I watched Bruce when he played “Born to Run.” He wrote that song some 35 years ago, and he has probably performed it live, what, five thousand times? Ten thousand? It’s a song with words that meant everything to him when he was 25 years old, but what can words like “I wanna die with you Wendy on the streets tonight/in an everlasting kiss,” mean to a man who is almost 60, a husband, a father, an icon, a friend, an American, a millionaire. The Boss.
Only he played it that night like it was new, like he was hearing the music for the first time, and as he sweated and wailed and reached, and you don’t play music like that for money or cheers or fame or to push a new record.
So, of course Bruce Springsteen kept saying no to the Super Bowl.
Only this year, suddenly, unexpectedly, Springsteen said yes. He did not say why. He still has not said why. Perhaps he will explain at his press conference in Tampa on Thursday. Like I said, I have friends who are having a hard time with it. And I didn’t know it until this very second. But I guess I’m having a hard time with it too.
*****
Liz Clarke is one of those haunted friends. Liz is a sportswriter at the Washington Post, and she is so bothered by Bruce playing the Super Bowl that she found herself writing a very personal story about her relationship with Bruce and his music for the Washington Post Magazine. It will run Super Bowl Sunday.
Liz began following Springsteen around in the late 1970s, and she has seen him perform more than 100 times. In so many ways, Liz is a perfectly sensible soul, someone who would never get caught up in hero worship. “I wasn’t looking for a hero,” she says. “I had no need for a hero, until I heard his music.”
Bruce Springsteen cut his first record, with a band called the Castiles about six months before the Kansas City Chiefs and Green Bay Packers played in Super Bowl I. It wasn’t officially called the Super Bowl then, though Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt had already suggested the name (based, famously, on his daughter’s red, white and blue super ball). NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle did not like the name “Super Bowl” — even Hunt saw it as a weak idea — and so for a while the league officially went with the catchy “AFL-NFL Championship Game.”
While the AFL-NFL Championship Game was becoming the Super Bowl, Springsteen played the bars and clubs and union halls. From the start, his best music was always live. There was something transcendent in performance that did not necessarily translate to his records, some sort of energy that he could only create live. He was like football in that way: Everyone knows how well the NFL translates on television because you get replays and analysis and different camera angles and high definition. But on television you never appreciate how hard they are hitting.
“The thing about Bruce is that he was not some Rock God playing above the audience,” Liz says. “He was playing with the audience. There was interplay, we were together, it was dynamic. He would give so much and you would feel like he would have to be taken off in a stretcher if you didn’t yell, if you weren’t with him. He wasn’t playing music. He was MAKING music.”
This gets to the heart of why Liz feels betrayed, because the Super Bowl is not a place to make music. It is the great American Hailstorm. There are more parties on Super Bowl Sunday than New Year’s Eve. There are fewer weddings in America on Super Bowl weekend than any other weekend and yet, according to various sources, more strippers make house calls. Every year, Super Bowl officials proudly trot out mind-bending statistics about how many people will watch the game, how many toilets will flush at halftime (90 million last year according to some sources, though nobody really knows), how much commercials cost ($3 million per 30 seconds this year), how much money will be gambled (incalculable), how much food will be consumed (15,000 tons of chips, 4,000 tons of popcorn, 12 million pounds of avocado, etc). The Super Bowl, like World Wars and Rocky movies, charts time in Roman Numerals.
“I’m taking it very hard,” Liz says. “I know people will think I’m being silly. If you asked 10 people why this upsets me, all 10 would get it wrong. It’s hard for me to put into words. But if Bruce personally came to my door and said he wanted to explain why, well, I don’t think there’s anything he could say that would really change my mind.”
She pauses for a moment.
“And,” Liz says, “Bruce doesn’t even LIKE football.”
*****
Nils Lofgren has a rarity. He has a Bruce Springsteen football story. As Liz rightly points out, Springsteen is not a football fan. Baseball is his thing, even if he made that regrettable “speedball” word choice in his song “Glory Days.” Lofgren, though, remembers watching Super Bowl XXII with Bruce. They were at some party, Lofgren doesn’t even remember who hosted it. What he does remember is that it was Washington playing Denver, and everyone in the room except Nils was rooting for the Broncos. Nils grew up in Washington, and he remains a fanatical Redskins fan. He’s such a big football fan that, for years, he played the music for John Madden’s “All-Madden Team” show.
Well, you might remember, Denver led that Super Bowl 10-0 after the first quarter. Everyone was ripping Lofgren. They were all trying to get him to make bets. And then, all of a sudden, Bruce spoke up.
“Bruce was on the fence, you know?” Lofgren says. “He was just there for the party, he’s a nosh and beer guy. But everyone was destroying me, they all wanted to make a bet. And Bruce watches all this, and all of a sudden he says, ‘I’ll tell you what, I’m with Nils. We’ll take the bet.’”
Washington scored 35 points in the second quarter and went on to destroy Denver.
“It’s Bruce,” Lofgren says gratefully. “Anything he touches …”
So yes, Lofgren is thrilled to be playing the Super Bowl. He is thrilled that Springsteen, after all these years, finally decided to take on that challenge.
“I guess it was last year,” he says, “and we were rehearsing for the Magic tour. And I remember we were all standing on stage together, and we were talking about what a great job Tom Petty did at the Super Bowl.
“Listen, we’re all pros. I’ve been on the road for 40 years. Clarence [Clemons, the Big Man] has got even more time. We’re grizzled veterans. And the unsaid elephant in the room was, hey … you know, we’ve got the best band, and we could have played for 150 million people, and we didn’t. Just by all of us talking about that, talking about how well Tom Petty came across, I think that might have helped Bruce come to this.”
Lofgren appreciates why Springsteen had never played the Super Bowl before. Let’s be honest: Super Bowl halftime used to represent something horrifying. You have Janet Jackson’s clothing malfunction, and Paul McCartney implausibly shouting out “Hello Super Bowl!” and 88 Grand Pianos around Chubby Checker and the Rockettes and the “It’s a Small World” Disney thing. And Up With People. Three times.
My personal favorite halftime show — one of my favorite Super Bowl moments, period — was the 1989 halftime show, called “Be Bop Bamboozled.” The show, in keeping with the 80s, was a mishmash of about 50 different things that had nothing to do with each other. Dancers. Doo wop. Primitive computer graphics. OF COURSE, there was an Elvis impersonator, “Elvis Presto,” who, in a rather bold break from the genre, did not actually sing. He performed magic. He tried to pull off the world’s biggest card stunt.
But, this being the Super Bowl, all of that was a prelude … to a commercial. Coca Cola was featuring a 3-D commercial — they had been handing out glasses for weeks — and this led to the moment when Bob Costas, who in my opinion is the most thoughtful and honest sports broadcaster ever, had to introduce the commercial by putting on the glasses.
He looked at the camera and said, deadpan: “I want you to do know this is the single proudest moment of my life.”
“Thank you SO much for reminding me of that,” Costas says now, deadpan.
That was the Super Bowl. In so many ways, that IS the Super Bowl.
“I know all the things Bruce doesn’t like about it,” Lofgren says. “There’s the corporate thing, and you only get 12 minutes, you have chop up the songs, it’s made for TV and all that. But, hey, if you’re good at what you do, you want to do it. And God Bless Bruce, we have a new album coming out, so at this point, why don’t we just go and do that, turn on some existing fans and find a few new ones?”
*****
Steve Sabol thinks the match — Springsteen and the Super Bowl — is perfect. Sabol is president of NFL Films and he has been there since the beginning, since the first NFL Championship in 1962. He has a great eye, of course, and a great sense of what makes football dramatic. He also has a connection to Springsteen, as you will see.
“You can’t get anything more American than football,” Sabol says. “And as far as performers go, you can’t get anything more American than Bruce Springsteen. I think they both speak to the same thing: Being a part of something bigger than yourself, hard work, teamwork, sacrificing for what you believe in.”
Sabol is one of a handful of people who has been to every Super Bowl, and he finds himself stunned every year when he sees what it has become. His favorite halftime show was when they restaged the battle of New Orleans back in 1970. There was so much smoke, as Sabol says, “it was the first time that the British actually won.” He remembers the first Super Bowl, when the most important thing was making sure they had enough balloons. “Pete Rozelle loved balloons,” he says.
But now, it’s so big, there’s so much spectacle, there is so much surrounding the game that Sabol finds himself in awe.
“I was at one Super Bowl, it might have been in Tampa,” Sabol says. “I remember going out on the field on Saturday, to check our positions. And then I was in the tunnel, and I heard someone say something that captured the Super Bowl. The guy was saying, ‘Well, what are we going to put on the elephants’ feet so they don’t tear up the field.
“That’s what it has become. People worry about what to put on the elephants’ feet. It’s amazing.”
But Sabol also believes that underneath it all, there’s something real. That’s where the Springsteen connection comes in. About 20 years ago, Bruce hired NFL Films to film several of his videos, including his concert video for “Born to Run.”
“We covered his concerts like they were football games,” Sabol says. “We didn’t overcut, we didn’t have that frantic camera movement, we didn’t have any mindless graphics or special effects. We just sent our cameras out there, and we told our guys: OK, cover this like you would cover the Super Bowl.
“That’s what Bruce wanted. I remember he told me, each song is a story, like a football game, and he wanted to be sure we were able to capture the energy and interaction and the environment. And he said, ‘I know you can do that because you do it for football games. This is the same thing.’”
*****
Same thing? The Super Bowl? Bruce Springsteen? Well, it’s hard for many people who have followed Bruce all these years to see that.
“People are really, really upset,” says Caryn Rose, who sometimes writes for Backstreets and sometimes writes her MetsGrrl.com blog focusing on the New York Mets. “Or if they’re not upset at the Super Bowl performance, they’re upset that the NFL is promoting it or that they played a snippet of a song as a ‘World Premier’ behind the halftime report on Monday Night Football.”
Caryn is not upset about it. She figures that after Tom Petty performed at the Super Bowl, the whole idea of a Super Bowl halftime show changed. “Tom is one stubborn guy, who also is no slouch on the credibility front,” she says. “I mean, so what? It’s a football game. People watch it. People get excited about it. It’s a party. Bruce is playing the party.”
Also, Caryn says, there’s something else. Bruce Springsteen turns 60 later this year. Two of his closest friends — Federici and his longtime assistant Terry McGovern — have died in the last two years. Time chases you like a linebacker in football and in rock and roll. And sooner or later, it sacks you.
“It’s 2009 and none of us are getting any younger,” Rose says. “He doesn’t just belong to me. He belongs to everyone.”
*****
It’s funny, I wrote this essay many different ways, and always ended with this notion that I understand why Bruce Springsteen is doing the Super Bowl. He’s doing it for love. He’s doing it because he needs people and the Super Bowl has the most people. He’s doing it because he believes in his music and wants to reach the largest audience. He’s doing it because he’s getting older and there aren’t that many Super Bowls left, not for any of us. He’s doing it because it sounds fun. He’s doing it for the money, for the fame, for the attention. He’s doing it to promote a record. Is there anything wrong with that?
But, in the end I realize I don’t know. It could be any of those reasons. It could be all of them. It could be something down in his soul. He was asked about retirement when he was in London last year. He said he has no plans for it.
Springsteen said: “I’ve got a big ego and enjoy the attention. My son has a word: Attention whore. … When it comes down to it, I like the way it makes me feel. And the way that I can make you feel when I do it. … It thrills me, excites me, it gives me meaning, it gives me purpose.”
I have spent more than half of my life rooting for Bruce Springsteen. He has been like my favorite sports teams, only he has won more than he has lost, and he has given me as much as I gave him, and, well, he actually made it to the Super Bowl. I have to keep rooting for him. Sure, maybe this is a sign of his age. Maybe this is a sign of surrender.
Or maybe … two years ago, Prince performed Purple Rain in the Miami rain. Early in the week, Prince held a Super Bowl press conference.
“Contrary to what you’ve heard,” Prince told us journalists. “I’d like to take a few questions.”
Yes, it was contrary to what we had heard. A reporter raised his hand to ask a question of Prince — who was allowing people to call him Prince at that time rather than referring to him by a former name or having to draw a symbol to address him. He asked Prince the obvious question: How do you feel about playing the Super Bowl?
Prince opened his mouth, like he planned to answer it. And then, he picked up his guitar and launched into one of the most familiar openings in rock and roll history. He sang: “Way down in Louisiana, down in New Orleans, way back up in the woods among the evergreens, there stood a log cabin made of earth and wood, where lived a country boy named Johnny B. Goode.”
And that was his answer. Maybe there are no answers. Maybe it’s just rock and roll.
