I let my political objections interfere with my honest
appraisal of him as an artist, and committed the worst sin possible in condemning
him for having an opinion that differs from mine.
While his doing the Philadelphia concert for Hillary Clinton
still irks me to no end, our position on how ICE raids are being handled is not
too different, although I do not see ICE agents as stormtroopers. I do not
believe Trump is a tyrant.
But Springsteen has every right to express his opinions in
what is still a free country.
I was most disingenuous in regard to his music, falsely
accusing him of stealing his ideas from other well-established performers such
as Van Morrison and the Beatles.
We all steal our ideas from those we admire most.
I’m a piss poor musician, but the reason I try to perform
his music as well as that of other artists is because I admire them and want to
learn how to do what they do from the inside out.
Much of my own music is influenced by Dylan, the Beatles and
Springsteen, and as John Lennon once pointed out about the silliness
surrounding the end of the Beatles, the real thing is about the music.
I come to all this after having gone through Springsteen’s albums
recently. While I still love most his first two albums with the E-Sting Band
(because they tell a tale of life at the time when they began), his other
albums still intrigue me, and I’ve come to admire the structure of his songs – Point Blank being curious in that he started
out with a typical verse and chorus, then did three straight verses to conclude
with the chorus.
I’m never going to be a great musician (which he is). The
most I can ever hope for is to learn enough from musicians like him to perform a
respectable cover.
But I was wrong in judging him for his moral stand. We all
have to do what we need to do, and I might not like it, I have to respect his
right to do what he thinks is right.
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