He was sprung from a cage out on Highway 9. Quiet kid from Jersey.
Just trying to make sense of the temples of dreams and the mystery that dotted
his hometown. Pool halls. Bars. Girls and cars. Altars and assembly lines. And
for decades Bruce Springsteen has brought us all along on a journey consumed
with the bargains between ambition and injustice and pleasure and pain. The
simple glories and scattered heartbreak of everyday life in America. To create
one of his biggest hits, he once said “I wanted to craft a record that sounded
like the last record on Earth - the last one you’d ever need to hear - one
glorious noise - then the Apocalypse. Every restless kid in America was given a
story - Born to Run. He didn’t stop
there. Once he told us about himself, he told us about everybody else. Steelworker
in Youngstown. The Vietnam vet in Born in the USA. The sick and marginalized on
the Streets of Philadelphia. The firefighter carrying the weight of a reeling,
but resilient nation on The Rising. The young soldier reckoning with Devils and
Dust in Iraq. The communities knocked
down by recklessness and greed in The Wrecking Ball. All of us with our faults and
our failings - every color and class and creed - bound together by one defiant
restless train rolling toward the Land of Hope and Dreams. These are all anthems of our America - the
reality of who we are and the reverie of who we want to be. The hallmark of a
rock and roll band, Bruce Springsteen once said, is that the narrative you tell
together is bigger than anyone could have told on your own and, for decades,
alongside the Big Man, Little Steven, a Jersey girl named Patti and all the men
and women of The E Street Band, Bruce Springsteen has been carrying the rest of
us on his journey asking us all what is the work for us to do in our short time
here. I am the President - he is the Boss. And pushing 70, he’s still laying
down 4 hour live sets - if you have not been at them, he is working. Fire breathing
rock and roll. So I thought twice about giving him a medal named for freedom
because we hope he remains in his words a prisoner of rock and roll for years to
come.
BRUCE
BILL
BOB
