Roll Yer Tapes: Veterans Night, 8/20/1981

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDPGiyvfZ44]

It’s possible to argue that Bruce Springsteen’s performance on August 20, 1981 — a benefit at the LA Sports Arena for the Vietnam Veterans Of America — is the most important show he ever played.

That runs contrary to popular thinking, I’m sure. The incendiary music of the 1978 tour has made those shows loom large in the legend of the Boss. Looking at the arc of his career, you could probably make a case for the 1990 Christic Benefit shows, the 1975 stand at New York’s Bottom Line, or even the final night of the 1999–2000 Reunion Tour as defining moments.

To me, the August 20th show suprasses all of those nights, because it represents the first time Bruce Springsteen played for something bigger than himself.

On the 1978 tour, you hear Springsteen chasing his own rage, his own joy, his own fear across the American landscape. They’re undeniably intense shows, and that’s because he was in search of something beyond the music — a form of fulfillment that you could say he didn’t find until he married and had his first child. He was filling a vacant space in his soul with rock ’n’ roll.

On the night of August 20, 1981, he sings to benefit a charitable group, but more than that, he sings toward an understanding of what the Vietnam War meant for himself, for the veterans in attendance, and for America. Springsteen himself supposedly dodged the draft through a motorcycle injury and through behaving crazy in the draft process. The entire band is a gang of shaggy rock musicians, all of whom were probably trying to avoid the draft at its height.

They’re brought in front of a group of people who risked their lives to fight in a war without any real direction or ending in sight. By the early eighties, Vietnam and its veterans existed in an uneasy silence with the greater part of American society — unappreciated by those who protested the conflict, and abandoned by those who supported it. It would take another few decades for this period of American history — and its victims, both living and dead — to even begin to become absorbed into the fabric of history.

In spite of those complex emotional undercurrents, Springsteen and the E Street Band took a stand in that echoing “dump that jumps.” It represents the first awakening of Springsteen’s political awareness.

You could say he’s just playing a benefit, that he and the E Street Band are just helping out a group in need with a night of rock ’n’ roll, and that’s true. But listen to the words Springsteen speaks — “Vietnam turned this whole country into that dark street, and unless we’re able to walk down those dark alleys, and look into the eyes of the men and women that are down there, and the things that happened — we’re never gonna be able to get back home, and then it’s only a chance.” Hear the level of emotion that the singer and his band bring to this music — moments of fun and escape, for sure, but also moments that seem to channel a cleansing fire of truth, one that needs to burn across the landscape of our country and clear away history’s ugly tangle.

There’s surging emotional crests on this night that stand apart from even the most searing 1978 shows. (Listen to the vocal on the second verse in “Prove It All Night,” as though Springsteen’s delivering an indictment directly to those who would just as soon leave the detritus of Vietnam, and the price paid by its veterans, in the country’s rear view mirror.) As he sings, it sounds like he’s recognizing the real impact his music can have — not just to uplift or inspire his audience, but to bring truth to power. It informs all of the music he’d make from that moment onward, from Nebraska and Born in the USA to The Ghost of Tom Joad and Magic.

It’s an unparalleled night, and the band and Springsteen seem to know it even as it’s happening. It’s as though they finally see the path before them, clearer than ever before, a road that will lead them deep into the black emptiness lurking within failed American dreams. All they have to do is follow that road, and bring an electric guitar.