BLINDED BY THE LIGHT

The seventies were pretty bland. Homogenized media, self indulgent behaviour and a raft of new responsibilities for those newly minted university graduates with nowhere to go.

Like our contemporaries, we slugged it out at entry level jobs to get us going and move us into rarified workplaces as professionals.

The time ticked on. One day, I visited my friends who were a bunch of existentialists who lived in a nice suburban home which was their cooperative. We all cooked dinner together, we practiced some music which we were going to record and then sat down for tea and a break. Someone turned on the radio and the song playing was “Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen. I had never heard anything like it. It was reminiscent of early Dylan but sounded like a huge musical turbine pumping a million watts of energy through that little stereo.

The words were as eccentric as the sound. The wall of sound made popular by Phil Spector had nothing on this storm. I became a fan and was amazed at the power of even the simplest of his compositions, like, Because the Night. Bruce,like the rest of us was a victim of ennui and produced the utterly tacky “Born in the USA” after such really excellent records as The River and other thematic Opus’.

Bruce suffered as all of us did, through the mediocrity of the eighties. Bad perms, big shoulders and an alarmingly desolate cultural landscape had periodic bright spots like the Eurythmics, David Bowie, some good Nicholson movies, and a hopeful free trade agreement with the USA and Mexico.

Last week, Bruce Springsteen came to town. He was a new man – or shall we say the man we knew and loved in the past. He is taking another stab at breathing life into his repertoire. The concert he gave us was a force of nature. He is back and we are right there with him. This is probably our time to shine too. Self-doubt, subjective recrimination for qualitative misjudgement. The time for all of these mitred challenges is over. We have had enough of what we have done to date and now is the moment when we put on the new, walk with purpose and see this twenty first century as the bullet train. We have not jumped off at the crossroads, but we have survived toils, failure and success, lost and successful relationships and sense that in this new space and time, we will have our rewards. In the French language “Prise de parôle” or the rewards of faith are not only divine, but based on our tenacity, strength and sense of destiny. We shall expect that our cumulative action and our new amalgam as creatures who have collected experience, bonded with our peers and embraced our communities can only open the door to our best achievements and our best “selves”. Bruce came back after twenty lost years of mediocrity, and we lived our twenty years similarly. Not taking chances, raising our families, completing our educations, wading through the mid-points of our careers. The drawbridge is down and we can span the moat. One, two, three……….jump!!!!