Have you ever been wrong about someone?
It has happened to me more times than I can count. I’ve gotten better about it as I’ve gotten older, but I still tend to make an immediate judgement call on someone and then stick to it until they prove me wrong. Perhaps that’s just human nature; maybe it’s a self-preservation technique.
For years, I had hard-nosed opinions about things and was a snob to anyone who attempted to challenge them. A therapist might have (correctly) deduced that I was overcompensating, but I just thought I was smarter than everyone and right about everything. I wasn’t, and I’m not. Thankfully, the real world has many methods of humbling you, and I developed quite the appetite for crow.
The journey towards humility is long and arduous, especially if you’re as stubborn and bull-headed as I am. One of the first steps to getting better happened in my high school auditorium in 2005. It was a night when I witnessed a bone-chilling act of pure bravery.
Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, what’s coming is a tale about a time when I challenged some’s integrity, only to find myself wanting in comparison.
But first, let’s talk about a record I was wrong about.
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The Review
Bruce Springsteen
Darkness on the Edge of Town
1978
Darkness on the Edge of Town is a work of stark brilliance.
Saying that I was wrong about that record is sort of true, but it is also admittedly a bit of a misnomer. Before I bothered listening to Bruce Springsteen, I formed the uneducated opinion that he was an overly patriotic blowhard spewing a hurricane of blue-collar bullshit. When I got around to cracking open his catalogue, probably with an eye roll, I became hooked on the Boss in short order.
Darkness on the Edge of Town is the record that made me fall in love with Bruce Springsteen.
Every track is a deeply cinematic short story told exclusively from the perspective of the have-nots. It’s like if Johnny Cade had grown up and started writing songs about the plight of his fellow Outsiders, instead of stabbing that Soc. Yet, somehow, nothing feels phony or pandering. The characters are mesmerizingly real, deeply flawed human beings, just like the rest of us.
The album was written during a period of true uncertainty in Springsteen’s career.
His first two releases, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (1973) and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle (also 1973), hadn’t done much business. Critics compared him (sometimes favorably, sometimes not) to Bob Dylan. His only demonstrable success from those records came from British band Manfred Man releasing a cover of “Blinded By The Light” as a single.
Springsteen’s third album, Born to Run (1975) was a rollicking Phil Spectoresque wall-of-sound that landed him his first top 5 spot on the Billboard Charts. He was on the cover of both Newsweek and Time simultaneously. A skyrocketing popstar, blowing up so fast and bright that the internet trolls of today would label him an industry plant, earning a firm foothold in a lasting career would hinge on his next record.
In 1976 and again in 1977, Bruce Springsteen followed up Born to Run with … nothing.
Following the cosmic level of success generated from Born to Run, Springsteen’s management wanted to gain on the momentum by quickly releasing a live record. Springsteen, on the other hand, wanted to get back into the studio. During the dispute, questions over the initial recording contract would arise. Springsteen and the E Street Band were not allowed to release a single note of music until the resulting lawsuit was settled. Dismayed and living on the road to feed himself, Bruce Springsteen wrote over 50 new songs, with some reports putting it as high as 100.
This was a time in music where a promising career could begin and end within the blink of an eye. Even with a smash hit record barely in the rearview, a young band couldn’t afford even six months of radio silence. For Springsteen, it was three years.
Springsteen was awarded the rights to his songs in May of 1977. In June, he was in the studio. One year later, after recording and rejecting several albums worth of material, he had a record.
Darkness on the Edge of Town feels like stepping out from the bitter cold of an ocean side New England night in the 1970s and stepping into a warm bar where every patron wants to tell their story. Springsteen knew Darkness on the Edge of Town could very well be the last album he ever made, so he swung for the fences and made a statement with something pissed off and lean. He called it his punk record, spiritually, and I think he’s right.
Springsteen proved he wasn’t a flash-in-the-pan popstar. Indeed, he was a proper songwriter and storyteller who had been baptized in the rivers of Stax and Sun. He could deliver something palpable yet subdued, sparse yet layered. When he needed to make a statement, Springsteen followed up the best album of his career with the next best album of his career.
From Jersey parables like “Racing in the Street” and “Factory” to autobiographical commentaries like “Adam Raised a Cain” and something quietly hopeful and contemplative like “The Promised Land,” the listener will consistently find light in the dark. “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” the title track, might well have been the single shiniest moment of Springsteen’s career up to that point. The whole package is beautifully crafted artistic statement that remains easily accessible to even the casual listener, right down to the album cover.
I started a heretic and wound up the loudest member of the congregation. Which leads us to today’s tale …
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The Tale
This is the closest my life ever got to Chicken Soup for the Soul.
Every year, there was a senior talent show at our high school. This one took place in the spring of 2005, when I was a freshman. I was chubby as a cherub and all in on punk rock. I kept my hair long, my pants tight, and my attitude edgy. I started hearing about this kid named Johnny, a senior, who was apparently a phenomenon in the theater department.
There was a legend that he showed up unprepared for an inter-high school Dramatic Interpretation competition and won the whole thing by doing straight improv with a hand-puppet. Johnny was tall, thin, and handsome. He existed in that space that was pre-screamo and post-punk, where bands like Good Charlotte and Simple Plan were reigning supreme.
I took an initial dislike to him out of jealousy, I think. Physically he was my opposite, and spiritually he had a charisma that I wanted desperately to emulate. I can admit to you now that I was also intimidated by his performing ability.
What y’all don’t know about me, because I try my best to never mention it, is that I had a brief stint as a child actor. I had an agent and the whole deal. It didn’t amount to much, ultimately. I had a failed audition for an episode of The Jeff Foxworthy Show, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it background role in a made-for-tv movie about integrated basketball teams called Passing Glory, and I landed the part of Tad Lincoln in a movie that wound up losing its funding.
There, you’re all caught up.
We lived in a town in the Georgia mountains famous for its carpet production, not its theater programs. Our high school was the poorest one in the county, and it’s safe to say we all sounded more like Matthew McConaughey than Laurence Olivier. There was a dynamite drama teacher who brought the best out of everyone who came through, and even she knew Johnny had something special.
As an aside, the next fall, I performed in our high school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Instead of Shakespeare in the Park, I reckon we were doing Shakespeare in the Holler. Still, we put in the work and put up a production that I’m still proud of 20 years later. We Midsummer’d the hell out of that Night’s Dream. I shouted, stomped my feet, and stared intently at the back of the room while delivering my lines. I didn’t find out it was meant to be a comedy until years later.
That’s neither here nor there.
Johnny and I found ourselves in each other’s orbit a few times through mutual friends. Looking back, I was most definitely an annoying freshman trying to buzz around the cool seniors like a rogue fly, but a few of them were polite enough to make me feel like part of the conversation. I remember one time, we were outside the cafeteria, and Johnny was talking about how excited he was for an upcoming Sugarcult show.
I made fun of him for liking what he liked.
Can you imagine the audacity of a freshman to do that to a senior? This guy was cool enough to let me hang out in the circle, and I threw it in his face. Then I strutted away like I had dropped the mic. I don’t know what happened after I left, but here’s hoping they all tore me to shreds. Knowing Johnny the little I did, he probably just rolled his eyes and picked up right where he left off.
Like the narcissistic little turd I was, I went around telling everyone Johnny was a poser. I didn’t like his painted nails or his swoopy hair. Punk meant something to me, and I was sure he didn’t understand it and was thus making a mockery of it. I knew in my bones that he didn’t deserve to love the thing I loved.
And then the talent show happened.
Initially, I had gone to the talent show to watch my friend Ryan play. Ryan was a classic cut-up with a curly afro who could shred the guitar like he had two sets of fingers. Being around him always made me feel at least 75% cooler. It still does, if I’m being honest.
On the program, Johnny was listed as giving a solo acoustic performance. I had never heard of the song, but it didn’t matter because it wasn’t what he played anyway. He came out; I was all prepared to scoff, but then he launched into the opening notes of “Stars and Stripes” by Anti-Flag.
Let me reiterate, this was in 2005. We were in an era of post-9/11 patriotism that had just gotten Bush re-elected. Johnny, with his swoopy hair and painted fingernails, stood in front of a packed crowd of redneck dads and used those lyrics to give them all the middle finger.
By the time he finished, those dads were fit to be tied. We were seconds from a full-scale riot. Johnny ran through the side door and hopped in a car, racing away from the whole scene. Chaos reigned in his wake.
Johnny wasn’t the poser. I was the poser.
He didn’t do it because I called him a name; I was barely on his radar. He did it because he could, because he wanted to see if he could get away with it. To this day, it is the most punk rock thing I have ever seen.
I never laughed at him again.
…
The Aftermath
I rarely saw Johnny after he graduated.
Rumor is that he joined the military after high school and made a career out of it. He started a family, from what I gather, and the best I can tell is living happily ever after somewhere. I’m assuming his stance on stars and stripes has since changed.
The world is a complicated place, and ideas are constantly evolving. No one is required to hold on to the same ideals they held as a teenager, nor should they be. Maybe he didn’t even believe it at the time; maybe it was simply an act of rebellion. That only adds to it, in my estimation.
What I learned (often the hard way) leading into adulthood is that you’re almost never going to be the smartest person in the room. Even on the off chance that you are, it’s better to approach every situation assuming you know the least so that you always learn something. I long ago traded in wanting to be the smartest and the best for wanting to be as open-minded and open-hearted as I can possibly be.
I’m no saint. As our friend Bruce Springsteen says, it’s hard to be a saint in the city. I am trying to be a little better every day, though, and at least that’s something.
May we all continue searching for unlikely heroes.
