Out In The Street

I put Springsteen's The River into the car's CD changer a couple of weeks back (along with other goodies) and found myself listening to Out In The Street just before arriving at work a couple of mornings ago. I've always liked the song, tuneful & cheerful as it is, but didn't relate to any great degree with the lyric when I first played the album back in the last century. It's very much blue collar territory - unloading crates down on the dock - and there seemed to me then traces of the early Springsteen's attitudinizing as urban hero - fun, but not something I could take all that seriously, except as a kind of inspired performance. Like playing at being Brando.

It was only when I saw a live performance on DVD (the one in New York), by a distinctly elderly E Street Band, that I twigged what the song was really about and how wrong I'd been. Or perhaps the song has necessarily changed as we've all aged. It's essentially a celebration of the joy of being outside the grinding systems we inhabit; a metaphor for the desire to escape, rather than the escape, impossible, in itself. But this is an escape into the life of the city - the creativity of those who take the trouble to put their hair up right. So it is a performance, finally, but a willed performance becomes the reality of the escape.

Am I reading too much into a simple song (and it is, lyrically, gloriously simple.) Yes, of course, because the song doesn't need explaining. It just is. And it made me curiously cheerful going to work that morning.