Considering The Inevitable

 by whiteray

Death has been on my mind lately. 

Not mine, although as I circle the sun for the 69th time, I’m aware that there are many more sunrises behind me than ahead of me. Rather, it’s the confluence of two books I’m reading and a conversation that took place on Facebook a month or two ago. 

(“Two books I’m reading”? Yes, two. I generally read two – sometimes three – at one time, switching between them like a basketball coach switches his team from a zone defense to man-to-man.) 

The books are Dead Lines: Slices of Life From the Obit Beat by George Hesselberg, a collection of obituaries and feature stories about the departed that Hesselberg wrote during his decades as a reporter at the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, and The Dead Beat by Marilyn Johnson, an examination of the art and wonder of obituaries. 

As someone who cobbled together probably more than a thousand obituaries during my career – including one for my own father – I read Hesselberg’s work with envy, wishing I could have done as well, and I pore over the examples Johnson quotes, knowing I never wrote an obituary as pithy or odd as the ones she provides. I heartily recommend both books. 

And the Facebook conversation? It took place, as I said, about a month or two ago among the members – if I recall things accurately – of a group devoted to the appreciation of Bruce Springsteen. One of the members noted that Bruce and many other performers in all areas of entertainment are at the age where death, well, let’s say it would not be surprising. And the questioner asked other members of the group whose deaths would hit them hard among television performers, film performers, and musicians. 

I answered, of course. I kind of punted on television performers, not being able to think of any whose departures would have a heavy impact. Maybe Alan Alda, I said. As to films, I said that I doubted that the deaths of anyone still living would have the impact on me as did the deaths of Sean Connery in 2020 and John Barry in 2011, actor and soundtrack composer, respectively, in the early James Bond films. 

As to music, I had to think. With the question coming in the framework of a group devoted to Springsteen, he came first to mind. And then I thought about Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the surviving Beatles. Bob Dylan came to mind, as did Robbie Robertson and Garth Brooks, the two surviving members of The Band. And I began to winnow as I pondered the question of whose death would grieve me the most. 

First to be taken from the list was Dylan. I admire and enjoy his work and readily admit his influence on my own long-ago songwriting. But there’s little in his work or his persona to elicit affection. When the Texas Gal and I saw him in St. Paul a few years ago, she was dismayed that he never seemed to respond to his audience. The only words he spoke were to introduce his backing musicians. I shrugged. “That’s Dylan,” I told her. “He’s not there to make friends. He’s there to sing.” 

And though I will be sad when he inevitably leaves this life, that distance will keep me from being heartbroken. 

The same holds true for Hudson and Robertson, the remaining two of the original five members of The Band. Spectacular musicians both (and Robertson, especially during the 1960s and 1970s, was one of the greatest writers in rock), they’ve never seemed to put themselves forward emotionally as did – by performative necessity – singers (and instrumentalists) Richard Manuel, Rick Danko and Levon Helm. Manuel’s death in 1986 kind of slipped past me, as I was in a poor place, but both Danko’s death in 1999 and Helm’s passing in 2012 hurt me in ways I had not anticipated. 

Which left, on that short list as I was thinking this out, Springsteen, Starr and McCartney. I pondered the fact that the 2011 death of Clarence Clemons, the saxophone player in Springsteen’s E Street Band, had hit me hard. But then, so had the death in 1980 of John Lennon and – to a lesser degree – the passing in 2001 of George Harrison. 

And I realized something: The Beatles, as much as I still love their music, were the band of my youth. I discovered them much later than did most of my peers: I was sixteen in 1969 when Abbey Road – the last album they recorded – caught my ear. And for the next three-plus years, the Beatles were the main course among the music I listened to in our basement rec room (complemented by more and more different musicians and groups as the years went on, of course). 

The Beatles, then, provided much of the soundtrack for my later adolescence, and to get back to the point of this excursion, yes, I will grieve when Ringo and Paul depart, as a huge portion of my youth will go with them. 

But Springsteen . . . well, I came to Bruce late, too. I was aware of him, of course, in 1975, when the release of Born To Run and the attendant publicity brought him onto the covers of both Time and Newsweek during the last week of October of that year. I thought about buying the album at the time, but my list of albums to buy was long, and I was, I admit, a bit skeptical. I’d not heard anything from his previous two albums, as far as I knew, so I held back. 

And though I heard 1978’s “Badlands” and 1980’s “Hungry Heart” on the radio as well as the string of seven Top Ten singles from his 1984 album Born in the U.S.A., I still did not explore his music. Then, in 1987, my life changed: A marriage dissolved, a new relationship began, and I opened myself to new music, including Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love, a 1987 album written chiefly about the terrors and joys of adult relationships. 

I was in my mid-thirties and dealing with those same things, and Tunnel of Love was the right album at the right time. And within a few years, I had every album Springsteen had ever released on my shelves, and I’ve kept pace with him over the thirty-plus years since. And his work speaks to me still. 

So, the conclusion is what I thought it might be: Bruce Springsteen is the central artist of my adult life, and his departure will wound me in ways that the death of no other artist ever could. And to close this, here’s the joyous “All That Heaven Will Allow” from Tunnel of Love, the album that made me a fan back in 1987.