John Brown's Body, Bruce Springsteen's Revival, Steve Wilson's Epiphany

I started out from Lawrence. I live there. But I had to get out. I decided along the way that I’d head to Osawatomie, Kansas, about an hour away. Headed for the spot where, arguably, the American Civil War began. Nary a Biden/Harris sign did I see along my two-lane ride. The landed gentry love their tax cuts and they’re generous with their Trump/Pence placards. True love may travel on a gravel road, but apparently evangelical white supremacy does too. 

Yup, for this John Brown’s body lies a moldering in the grave, I suppose. Osawatomie is where Brown’s fight against slavery began in earnest. He arrived in 1855 from rural New York and was executed by hanging Dec. 2, 1859, after his thwarted heist from the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. John got around but he will forever be associated with ‘Bleeding Kansas’ and the four years he spent here. 

I grew up with tales of John Brown. Sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in elementary school. I was steeped in the history of my hometown, Lawrence, Kansas, and in the horrors of Quantrill’s Raid. I was awed by the enormous John Stuart Curry mural of John Brown in the rotunda of the Kansas State Capitol. The abolitionist tradition of my roots was something I took seriously; you could even say it was part of me. 

Little by little, life experience stripped away any notions I had of the absolute quality of my home state’s virtue. Still, I find it a nobly flawed history. And I hold it dear as a foundation of respect for our failed brotherhood and for life itself. 

John Brown’s father held anti-slavery views. As a child, these were reinforced by witnessing a black boy, whom he had befriended, being beaten by a white master. The impression was indelible, and Brown was committed thenceforth to the elimination of slavery. Persuaded that reliance on “moral suasion was hopeless.” JB was convinced that slavery would not be ended without violence. He advocated the sword and lived by the sword. His commitment to the end of slavery left blood on his hands. 

As a modern devotee of Gandhian nonviolence, as exemplified by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I shared the belief that violence was wrong and counterproductive. But as I stood inside the Adair cabin where Brown oft resided and sometimes brought escaped slaves for sanctuary, I had my doubts about my nonviolent faith. Would emancipation ever have happened without war? I guess that’s the essay question, kids. Discuss in seven-hundred and fifty words, justify your position with historical detail and analysis. In 2020, after four years of a #president nakedly nurturing white supremacy and division along all lines – racial, class, gender, you name it – I think a lot of people are asking similar questions about what it’s going to take for our lives (especially black ones) to matter. I hope it’s not violence. But like Lou Reed - I guess, but I just don’t know. 

The John Brown Memorial Park in Osawatomie is on the west end of Main Street, a pretty spot atop a grassy knoll.

It’s surrounded by what passes for elegant housing in a down at heel American small town. The rest of the town is a testament to the resident’s belief in education and religion. The schools and churches are the best kempt properties in town. Most of the rest of the town is somewhere between worn and shabby. Downtown looks like most small American downtowns – a bakery, a café, a Mexican restaurant, some financial and insurance offices, a hardware store, a flower shop, and lots of vacant storefronts. In town, a slight improvement on the countryside, the Trump to Biden sign ratio is about 2:1. 

I’m not sure what JB would think of modern electoral politics. Well, yes, I am. I’m pretty sure he’d find it dismal and absurd. But that aside, I can’t imagine he would much appreciate having given his life so that the residents of his former home could vote for an asshole who wishes the South won the Civil War. 

And here we are on the eve of an election that’s laid bare the inequities and divisions between Americans that the Civil War was fought to address. Sometimes being the child of America is a lot to bear; and that’s from my own distinct white privilege. I’m lucky and I know it but I ain’t gonna clap my hands. Trump represents the white (lumpen) proletariat not because he cares for their health and security but because he aggravates their grievances. 

In a divided America, all politics has become politics of grievance. Because everyone has them. That’s what happens when a government is so corrupted by corporate and oligarchic greed that it erodes the government’s ability to provide services and ultimately undermines citizen confidence in what should be their government. 

None of this was happenstance. For fifty years the Republican party has tried not to govern, save for interference in liberties, the right to vote, and other trivialities, but to prove that government doesn’t work. If you keep pouring sand into the gas tank, for sure the car won’t start. Transfer the treasury from the people to the plutocrats through tax policy, play zero-sum games with the public welfare, invoke scarcity, and deficit mania somewhere down the line from paying off your benefactors, especially since the court’s legitimation of Citizens United. 

And while they screw you over, they give you “Morning in America” and “Make America Great Again.” I love a parade.

As ever, consolation and redemption come to me through music. Sometimes I’m so disconsolate these days that I don’t feel like listening. But I keep re-committing; and thank God I do. While taking the winding road out of the heart of bleeding Kansas, I plugged in the iPhone, went to 'library' (recent playlists), and picked out Letter to You, the new Springsteen release, Bruce’s twentieth. At fifty-eight minutes it would take me all the way home to Lawrence.

It took me home in more ways than one. 

Springsteen is 71 now. I’d say that makes me feel old. The truth is, though, I already am old. When I was playing the hell out of The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle I was 19 or 20. And 68 sounded like another dimension. But here we are, me and Bruce. Like a big bro, he was among my inspirations to start a band. Some of his records are among my favorites, others I respect but haven’t much passion for. Such is the long arc of both an artist’s career and that of a life-long listener. 

Letter to You is Springsteen’s best record since 2006’s underrated Magic and beyond that perhaps his best since The River. It’s comfortable in its own skin. Springsteen lets the E Street Band be the E Street Band; these recordings were done pretty much live over the course of three days. If there’s anything that sometimes stifles Springsteen’s records, it’s an overweening perfectionism. Too much sheen can be the enemy of rock ‘n’ roll. Here, rather than asking the band to recreate demos, Springsteen played the songs on acoustic guitar and let his accomplished colleagues play; after all, they know how things fit together. The result is unalloyed, unreconstructed E Street Band. If that sounds good to you, you will love this record. 

These songs are hard-edged and open-hearted, equal parts polish and rough edges. All the great bands are sui generis. The E Street Band is a titanic rock ‘n’ roll force that scarcely evokes the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. To my ears, in full swing, they are something like Arthur Alexander fronting the Who produced by Phil Spector. In any event, Springsteen is rarely as good without this band, his band. They are Springsteen’s musical home. 

In the new Apple TV documentary that accompanies this release, Letter to You, Springsteen, the sole narrator, gives voice to that recognition. The recent death of his friend George Theiss, frontman for Bruce’s teenage band, the Castiles, sent Springsteen into deep reflection on mortality, friendship, and the enduring qualities of love. An always restless spirit, I think he came face to face with what a lucky man he is. At the end of the film, he extols the artistry and loyalty of his band and exhorts them, proclaiming, “We’re taking this thing ’til we’re all in the box, boys.”

Under the soft, bright October sun, rolling in my ancient Honda I was touched, remembering the gone ones, lost ones, and the beloved souls I miss badly, by way of time and geography, every day - dead and alive. And I realized that this was why I had to bust out of the house, out of my Covid-coma to find the history, signs, and sounds, to remind me that I’m alive and I, too, am a lucky son of a bitch because my life has been touched by music. And by love.