backstreets - bruce springsteen

I am really glad I grew up in Southern California. There's something incredibly mythological about it, and it's great to have ready emotional access for nostalgic transport via song. I can't think of the Pacific Ocean without conjuring a playlist in my head. However, in a few emails I've had this past week with my buddy KayBee, he made me realize that if I had a second choice, I'd have chosen New Jersey.

I've always felt this incredible affinity for Jersey kids. Much more so than New Englanders, Southerners, or Midwesterners. Part of it, I think, is that I find some similarities between California and New Jersey: beaches, industrial wastelands, lush suburbia. Also similarities of personality. Whereas New Englanders and Southerners have struck me as mainly having deep, entrenched, usually privileged familial roots in their surroundings, I've found lots of Californians/West Coasters and Jersey kids to be a little more wild, reckless, unburdened by the history or tradition of their surroundings, having a sense of adventure for the unknown and creating their own passionate ideas of iconography. I mean, Los Angeles is fake paradise, all stolen water and imported palm trees that are dead inside. And New Jersey has had to deal with its proximity to New York.

Still, I don't think California has ever had a musical poet laureate on the level of Jersey's Bruce Springsteen (Tom Waits was close, I guess, until he went off into barking Germanic weirdness). Except Springsteen is more of a narrative prose writer, thank God. "Backstreets" is part of the great nostalgic mythic American tradition of forbidden, uncontrollable lust (why is it forbidden? It it a Romeo & Juliet thing? Is Terry a man?) leading you to hit the road. With it's plonking piano, crashing drums, yearning organ, and Springsteen's roar (especially following "I hated him and I hated you when you went away"), "Backstreets" creates this sweaty-fisted anthem for adolescence, where your emotions and behavior are too much to control or properly deal with. What do you do with all these hormones? Go to the backstreets.

What's most heroic about the song is the understanding of its lack of heroics, of its failures and self-delusions. It does seem grand to just head out into the night with your girl/guy on your arm, forgetting about your surroundings but soon enough the dream ends and reality does you in. As if speaking from a wiser place, Springsteen asks Terry to remember those old movies that informed them of "how to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be," only to bitterly realize "we're just like all the rest/Stranded in the park/And forced to confess to/Hiding on the backstreets." Yes, it would be more heroic to parade it in the daylight, for all to see (again, I don't know what accounts for the forbiddenness of this love but I suppose in adolescence we all feel our hormones and lust to be somewhat despicable or something They Won't Understand). But "Backstreets" is the sound of taking pride in what you've created for yourself, despite its imperfection.

Eh, just watch this.

Also, can any Jersey kids tell me what Stockton's Wing and Duke Street Kings are?

 

Comments

[Frank]

Hmm, I feel like a bad cousin, but I don't know what the Duke Street Kings or Stockton's Wing refer to.

I'd never thought of Terry as a guy, but that makes a lot of sense. I have a ton of other stupid things to say about the song, but whatevs, I might as well cut it short.

[will]

terry is obvs not a guy, but it's nice of bruce to allow the possibility of gender neutrality

[Kevin]

Will- thanks for the sprignsteen post. i could be wrong but i think "on the beach at Stockton's wing" may refer to the beach located near the campus of Stockton College, in south jersey. i'll be in ny next week, just think, i can bore you with stories of being " Sprung from cages out on highway 9".

[Frank]

Actually, looking at the lyrics and listening, I am 100% sure Terry is a guy. The literal type of the song describes innocent "dude-ing" about on the shore, but there are some serious mo undertones. The songs about girls on that album are more about running wild and free and lettign everyone know you're good enough. There's not much "hiding on the" anywhere...

That's my take.

[Neil]

Springsteen being Springsteen, I think he just made up Duke Street Kings because it sounds very Wild Ones/Brando-esque. There's no Duke Street in any of the towns between Point Pleasant and Long Branch. As for Stockton's Wing, he was probably referring to the Sea Girt Army camp. The town of Sea Girt was built on a farm that was onced owned by a Commodore Stockton and the beach in front of what is now the New Jersey National Guard training camp (right next to Stockton Lake) remains a popular and secluded hangout for teenagers who don't have driver's licenses and who want to get drunk, make out or do other things without the cops bothering them.

Here's a history of the Army Camp and how it was annexed from the Stockton tract (making it Stockton's "wing"?)

http://www.seagirtnews.com/armycamp.htm

[RD]

I've always thought Stockton's Wing referred to Stockton Ave. (one block long and located by the beach), between 1st and 2nd Aves. in the north part of Manasquan, NJ (adjacent to the Sea Girt Armory mentioned in Frank's posting previous to this one). I have no way to know if it's true, but it works for me.

[will]

here is a very good post vis a vis springsteen and masculinity that also mentions the gender ambiguity of "backstreets"

http://neilshyminsky.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html

[Eddie]

I enjoyed the comments. I love Bruce but I had taken at least a 5 year break from hearing Backstreets. I felt today like I heard it for the first time again! My emotions were flowing back to summers "down the Jersey shore". I think either you get Bruce or you don't.
The whole idea of Terry being a guy...blew my mind! Still not sure.

Since the last time I heard the song I have had a son. His name is Valentino. Forgot all about Valentino drag. Anybody have any idea?

[will]

about "valentino drag"? i assume he means rudolph valentino, which to my mind only supports the gender ambiguity

[Terry]

This is one of several Springsteen songs featuring the first name of a girl who is not a specific real person. Besides Terry, Springsteen has also sung about Mary, Wendy, Sandy and Rosie.

[kel]

Not sure how often anyone checks this anymore... but for what it's worth... my dad grew up around Freehold and the Jersey Shore in the 70s and he claims the Duke Street Kings were a street gang and that everyone up there knew it... not like the bloods and crips, but a gang, nonetheless. I didn't ask him about Stockton's Wing, but he said he knew what Bruce was talking about.

[kel]

one more thing... http://www.brucespringsteen.it/DB/sd3.aspx?sid=45 Bruce has always written and re-written songs. Check out that link, there's a few different lines and verses in different versions of the song... it might explain the gender ambiguity theory a little more... IMO he didn't include everything he originally wrote in the song that we all know, so from the album version you kinda won't get the whole story... I think it's about a couple of young kids running on the fringes of a rough scene, seeing things they're a little too young to see... trying so hard to be like the wilder, cooler, tough guys... and I think the "he" that took Terry away was his father. They're running from fathers that they don't get along with, who wouldn't want them out "running on the backstreets".... just my interpretation. :)

[a]

their's a bootleg version of a demo version of backstreets i've heard (it's easily available on the internet. the boot's called born with nothing in your hands, if i'm not mistaken) and the lyrics to backstreets are diffrent. their's also a part where he says something like "washing their hair in the fountains, ripping off all the fags".

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